mandag 30. november 2009
GE, Vivendi nær NBC Universal avtale
General Electric er nær å tømme et stort hinder på sin vei til å selge kontrollen over underholdning giganten NBC Universal til Comcast, ifølge publiserte rapporter mandag.
BillShrink: Nå kutter kostnader For 1 million brukere
BillShrink, det oppstart som ser ut til å hjelpe brukere med å spare penger på tvers av vertikaler, inkludert mobiltelefoner, kredittkort, og sparekontoer, har nettopp annonsert at det har vokst til 1 million medlemmer siden det ble lansert i april 2008. Ved siden av milepæl, er stedet også kunngjøre at den har funnet "$ 1 milliard i besparelser på hverdagen regninger". Det andre Statistikken er litt forvirrende. BillShrink betyr i utgangspunktet at dersom brukerne hadde meldt seg på toppen kamper generert av sine kostnadskutt verktøy, ville de ha reddet totalt 1 milliard dollar. Selvfølgelig ikke alle som bruker tjenesten bestemmer seg for å endre sin mobiltelefon bærer eller kredittkort, slik at den totale mengden penger spart er ikke så høy. Når det er sagt, dette er første gang BillShrink har avslørt størrelsen på userbase sin, og det er tydelig at området er å få noen god trekkraft.
Apps of the Month: Beste iPhone Apps av november
Siste måned vi lanserte Apps of the Month: en serie dedikert til profilering iPhone-programmer som du bør egentlig kjøpe, i stedet for de som bare fikk mest hype. Dette er en tøff oppgave, gitt 100.000 + apps på butikken og det faktum at funnet er en absurd vanskelig oppgave, selv for dem [...]
Yahoo's 2009 searches toppet av Michael Jackson og skumring, ikke Twitter
Knapt mer enn et par timer etter at Microsoft avslørte årets toppsøkene på sin nye søkemotor Bing, etterfulgt Yahoo dress med sin egen topp 10. Ikke overraskende, Michael Jackson toppet begge listene, men Twitter fans vil bli skuffet å lære microblogging tjenesten ikke bare klarte å fange nummer to spot (hvor den plasseres på Bing liste), gjorde det ikke selv gjøre de 10 beste. Kanskje det er ikke overraskende - Bing er en mye nyere tjeneste, og trolig appellerte til en mer tech-bevisst publikum. Yahoo, derimot, når flere brukere (selv om det planer om å erstatte den underliggende søketeknologi med Bing), og sin liste forskjøvet enda flere tungt mot kjendiser og pop-kultur: Michael Jackson Twilight WWE Megan Fox Britney Spears Naruto American Idol Kim Kardashian NASCAR Runescape Yahoo ga også ut en liste over de 10 beste suksess-relaterte søk og Yep, det er Twitter - og Bing! Facebook Twitter Hulu Bing iPhone LinkedIn Dollar Stores Palm Pre Rosetta Stone Kindle Mens vi på temaet "år i review" lister, vil jeg legge til at jeg er forbløffet at disse listene er på vei ut nå. Jeg forstår hvorfor enkelte publikasjoner føler seg komfortabel med å gjøre en liste over beste filmer eller bøker, eller hva (siden kritikere har ofte fått avansert kopier eller screenings av hva som kommer ut før slutten av året), men søkeord? Really? Ikke har vi enda en måned til å gå? Minst Yahoo har et år i Review nettsted som vil holde deg oppdatert med nye trender.
What’s Behind That Short Link? Bit.ly Steps Up Its Efforts To Sniff Out Spam.
With the rise of Twitter, we've also seen the rise of link shorteners (standard URLS take up too many characters). The king of the link shorteners right now is bit.ly, which is the default shortener on Twitter and accounts for more than 75 percent of all short URLs on the service. Every month, bit.ly shortens about 1 billion links. For spammers, that's one huge honey jar.
The flip side of a short link like this one—http://bit.ly/6PwhcP—is that you can't tell by looking at it what website it redirects to. It could be a TechCrunch post, or it could be a spam site. There's no way to tell the difference when you see the link in a Tweet. (Don't worry, it's a TechCrunch post).
The spam problem is getting worse, which is why bit.ly is taking more serious measures to sniff out spam behind its short links. Today it announced it is working with three new services to fight spam and malware: VeriSign’s iDefense, Websense Threatseeker Cloud, and Sophos.
The flip side of a short link like this one—http://bit.ly/6PwhcP—is that you can't tell by looking at it what website it redirects to. It could be a TechCrunch post, or it could be a spam site. There's no way to tell the difference when you see the link in a Tweet. (Don't worry, it's a TechCrunch post).
The spam problem is getting worse, which is why bit.ly is taking more serious measures to sniff out spam behind its short links. Today it announced it is working with three new services to fight spam and malware: VeriSign’s iDefense, Websense Threatseeker Cloud, and Sophos.
Facebook Bekreftet App Saga Slutter Tomorrow
For det siste halvåret, har du kanskje lagt merke til at noen av dine favoritt-programmer på Facebook Platform gjennomført et spesielt merke deeming dem å være «Facebook bekreftet". Disse apps "passerte Facebook gjennomgang for pålitelige brukeropplevelser", og fikk både større eksponering i App Directory og mindre restriktive begrensninger på antall meldinger som de kunne sende til brukerne. Og i morgen, drøyt seks måneder etter at programmet startet, er Facebook drept av Bekreftet Apps for godt. Dette burde ikke komme som en overraskelse: Facebook annonsert planer om å avslutte programmet i slutten av oktober, og har vært Emailing utviklerne om det i ukevis . Men nå er det bekreftet Apps går bort, er det en god tid å se tilbake på den lange, convoluted vei Facebook tok til et program som til slutt ble svært kortvarig.
Første døtre sier 'jeg'
Galleri: Chelsea Clinton er bare det siste presidentvalget barnet å kunngjøre sin beslutning om å gifte seg.
Tabloidene trenger nye kjendis krystallkulen
Tabloid kulturen er ganske kynisk om hele denne kjærligheten ting.
Twitter Nedetid Også Downs Downforeveryoneorjustme
Så dette er morsomt. Ja, Twitter ha nedetid problemer akkurat nå. Ja, igjen. Men det er ikke noe nytt, selvsagt. Det nye er at Twitter er nede har også tilsynelatende borked siden mange bruker for å kontrollere om Twitter er nede, downforeveryoneorjustme. Mens nettstedet, laget av Ryan King, fungerer for alle andre område på Internett, viser bildet nedenfor hva returneres når du putter i twitter.com nå. Sa jeg nevne Kong er nå en Twitter-ansatt? Beyond meta.
En annen Google Wave Bruker: Manhunt
Angivelig, som alle andre, er Seattle Times svært interessert i å prøve å finne ut hva du faktisk bruke Google Wave for. Men mens de fleste prøver å bruke det for enten gøy, realtime chat, film reenactments eller indre-business-arbeid, har Seattle Times oppgave Wave med et større mål: Å fange en morder. Dette offentlige Google Wave har blitt satt opp til å involvere samfunnet ved å tilby sanntids informasjon som noen kanskje vet om plasseringen av en mann mistenkt for å ha drept fire Seattle polititjenestemenn. Et søk på en Seattle-området hjem i morges dukket opp noe, men flere rapporter om observasjoner kommer inn, og Times er åpne et Wave å hjelpe til med informasjonsflyten.
Beste tips: Jeg er ikke flink med datamaskinen utgave
Vi får mange e-post på MobileCrunch tips linjen. Virkelig, en hel jævla mye. Om lag 2% av dem er verdt noe tips. De resterende 98% består av andre bloggere utheving deres historier for linkage (som vi ikke noe imot litt), nigerianske prinser spør etter vår bankkonto detaljer (som vi gjør oppmerksom på), [...]
Why SimpleGeo abandoned games to sell its in-house tools
SimpleGeo is a Denver-based startup now beta-testing its line of software development tools, cloud storage, and other must-haves for mobile application developers who want to easily build location-based services into their apps. The firm has gathered a $1.5 million first round of investment from familiar names in the Valley VC world.
Co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan confirmed that bicoastal firm First Round Capital led the round. A total of $1.3M in seed funding came from Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and a mostly well-known set of angels: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schacter, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fannning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and David G. Cohen. Another $195,000 in debt funding came from Joanna Shields, David Liu, Ziv Navoth, Joanna Shields, David Liu, Ziv Navoth, Ravi Narasimhan, Jason Knapp, and Darius Contractor (yes, that’s his real name.)
Galligan says people unfamiliar with the details of location-based app development underestimate the value of software tools for developers. “We started the company in May to build location-based games,” he said in a phone interview. “It took three months to build a prototype.” The problem was lack of a location-centric developers’ kit with APIs and services. SimpleGeo’s programmers had to build their own. After re-examining the landscape, the company decided that buffing up and selling its in-house tools to other game makers would be a more profitable, more reliable business than making games. (I like to remind people about Portal, an Internet service provider from the first Web boom that got super-rich by changing course to sell its own billing system to its competitors.)
A typical layperson’s take on location-based apps is this comment on TechCrunch: “Does this have a future? It doesn’t seem that hard to include geo data in apps/sites, people seem to do it all the time.”
I asked Galligan to respond to that comment: “Location-based devices only provide a latitude and a longitude, sometimes an altitude,” he said. What they don’t provide is a ZIP Code, city, state, county, weather data, messages and photos posted near the site. They don’t provide business listings, Wikipedia entries, census data (for demographics), articles written or posted near the location,” all of which SimpleGeo does. For example, a location-based game set in San Francisco could accurately display its players gleaming in the California sun, or obscured by Golden Gate fog, based on the real-time weather data from around town.
In addition, storage of geodata requires lots of available, scalable space, the company learned. “It’s not just algebra, it’s geometry, tracking a three-dimensional space plus all the info on what’s around me,” Galligan said. In English, he means location info is more complicated than most online data and thus eats more disk space faster. SimpleGeo offers a solution that promises to let developers not think about the details of storage for their apps.
The company is still testing its tools in a private test program. The big unwrapping is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.
Co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan confirmed that bicoastal firm First Round Capital led the round. A total of $1.3M in seed funding came from Redpoint Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and a mostly well-known set of angels: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schacter, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fannning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and David G. Cohen. Another $195,000 in debt funding came from Joanna Shields, David Liu, Ziv Navoth, Joanna Shields, David Liu, Ziv Navoth, Ravi Narasimhan, Jason Knapp, and Darius Contractor (yes, that’s his real name.)
Galligan says people unfamiliar with the details of location-based app development underestimate the value of software tools for developers. “We started the company in May to build location-based games,” he said in a phone interview. “It took three months to build a prototype.” The problem was lack of a location-centric developers’ kit with APIs and services. SimpleGeo’s programmers had to build their own. After re-examining the landscape, the company decided that buffing up and selling its in-house tools to other game makers would be a more profitable, more reliable business than making games. (I like to remind people about Portal, an Internet service provider from the first Web boom that got super-rich by changing course to sell its own billing system to its competitors.)
A typical layperson’s take on location-based apps is this comment on TechCrunch: “Does this have a future? It doesn’t seem that hard to include geo data in apps/sites, people seem to do it all the time.”
I asked Galligan to respond to that comment: “Location-based devices only provide a latitude and a longitude, sometimes an altitude,” he said. What they don’t provide is a ZIP Code, city, state, county, weather data, messages and photos posted near the site. They don’t provide business listings, Wikipedia entries, census data (for demographics), articles written or posted near the location,” all of which SimpleGeo does. For example, a location-based game set in San Francisco could accurately display its players gleaming in the California sun, or obscured by Golden Gate fog, based on the real-time weather data from around town.
In addition, storage of geodata requires lots of available, scalable space, the company learned. “It’s not just algebra, it’s geometry, tracking a three-dimensional space plus all the info on what’s around me,” Galligan said. In English, he means location info is more complicated than most online data and thus eats more disk space faster. SimpleGeo offers a solution that promises to let developers not think about the details of storage for their apps.
The company is still testing its tools in a private test program. The big unwrapping is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.
Twitter tar ned gavekort midlertidig som nettstedet spenner
Twitter har suspendert sitt gavekort funksjonen midlertidig etter at området opplevde en flom av feil. $ 155 millioner dollar i venturekapital senere, og siden fortsatt går ned? C'mon people! Selskapet postet denne meldingen i ettermiddag: "Starter om 10 minutter siden, begynte vi opplever en svært høy grad av feil, og vi jobber med det underliggende problemet. Update (1:30 p): Vi er nå gjenoppretter fra denne uventede nedetid. Listene funksjonen er midlertidig utilgjengelig når vi diagnostisere årsaken til strømbrudd. Lister er en funksjon som Twitter rulles ut denne høsten. Du kan opprette grupper av brukere til følge og dele dem med andre. Det er hovedsakelig en oppdagelse funksjon som hjelper nybegynnere og erfarne brukere med å finne andre å følge.
Join VentureBeat & DEMO for holiday party in SF, this Wednesday
If you’re an entrepreneur, or even just a regular reader of VentureBeat considering launching your own company, you should join us at our DEMO/VentureBeat holiday party and jam session in San Francisco this Wednesday.
We’re meeting at the new hip Mighty Bar from 7pm to 11pm. If you play an instrument, bring it along, because we’ll let you jump on stage and jam with the band, like we’ve done in past years. It’s an open bar from 7 to 8pm.
The party, which is open to the first 400 people who register (yes, quite a few people have already registered, so move quickly), is part of a wider effort we’re making to meet up with entrepreneurs and other high-tech oriented professionals, to tell them more about what we’re planning for DEMO. DEMO is the leading event where technology companies launch their products, and the next one is to take place on March 21-23 in Palm Springs, Calif. So this is a sort of “pre-party.” I’m about to take several trips around the U.S., looking for the very best entrepreneurs interested in launching; but there’s probably no better place to start off than in S.F., home to some of the most innovative Web developers around right now.
You’ll also get to meet some of the top DEMO alumni, who we’re also inviting (indeed, the companies that have launched at DEMO show just how much we’ve taken care to select the very best companies: Salesforce, TiVo, Palm, Microsoft, Sun, ETrade, Adobe, Google and Symantec have all either launched their companies or products there — to name just a few). Other reasons for launching at DEMO is that it provides the highest production values around: Aside from the world’s media showing up, we offer an Internet that works without fail, coaching help and high-definition video of presentations that companies can use to market themselves. I’m really not aware of any comparable conference offering all of this, at such a professional level. I posted recently about some of the other cool things we’re doing.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Invest in France, Microsoft BizSpark and SpiderCloudWireless for the food, beverages and the band.
You’ll definitely want to stay until the end of the night when Invest in France will be giving away some of their finest wines.
See you there!
We’re meeting at the new hip Mighty Bar from 7pm to 11pm. If you play an instrument, bring it along, because we’ll let you jump on stage and jam with the band, like we’ve done in past years. It’s an open bar from 7 to 8pm.
The party, which is open to the first 400 people who register (yes, quite a few people have already registered, so move quickly), is part of a wider effort we’re making to meet up with entrepreneurs and other high-tech oriented professionals, to tell them more about what we’re planning for DEMO. DEMO is the leading event where technology companies launch their products, and the next one is to take place on March 21-23 in Palm Springs, Calif. So this is a sort of “pre-party.” I’m about to take several trips around the U.S., looking for the very best entrepreneurs interested in launching; but there’s probably no better place to start off than in S.F., home to some of the most innovative Web developers around right now.
You’ll also get to meet some of the top DEMO alumni, who we’re also inviting (indeed, the companies that have launched at DEMO show just how much we’ve taken care to select the very best companies: Salesforce, TiVo, Palm, Microsoft, Sun, ETrade, Adobe, Google and Symantec have all either launched their companies or products there — to name just a few). Other reasons for launching at DEMO is that it provides the highest production values around: Aside from the world’s media showing up, we offer an Internet that works without fail, coaching help and high-definition video of presentations that companies can use to market themselves. I’m really not aware of any comparable conference offering all of this, at such a professional level. I posted recently about some of the other cool things we’re doing.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Invest in France, Microsoft BizSpark and SpiderCloudWireless for the food, beverages and the band.
You’ll definitely want to stay until the end of the night when Invest in France will be giving away some of their finest wines.
See you there!
Søk på Google for Black Friday tilbud var opp 50 prosent fra i fjor
Som nettforhandlere er vitne til sterke Black Friday resultater, er Google rapporterer at det var en økning i online shopping søk med "Black Friday" på Thanksgiving dagen og fredagen etter ferien. Søk med begrepet "Black Friday" gikk opp med mer enn 20% år over år, ifølge Google. Søker på "Black Friday sales" og "Black Friday annonser" ble begge opp med mer enn 50% år over år. Disse dataene tyder på at forbrukerne samsvarer tilbudene rundt denne tiden av året med Black Friday, og at disse tilbudene blir stadig vist online versus på TV eller i aviser. Den mest hurtigvoksende butikk-spesifikke søkeord var "Walmart Black Friday", "Kohls Black Friday Ad", "Sears Black Friday Salg" og "Target Black Friday Deals Online."
MIT, Google og Umberto Eco Lyst å reise et realtime Cloud Over The 2012 London-OL
Hva er det med arkitekter at de føler behov for å Glomdalen på siste buzzwords å rettferdiggjøre sine prosjekter? En gruppe fra MIT Senseable City Lab søker om midler til et ambisiøst Observasjonsplattformen designet for 2012 London-OL. De kaller det Cloud. Det er en "lett transparent tårn, bestående av en" sky "av oppblåsbare, light-emitting kuler... Matet av sanntid informasjon fra hele verden." Strukturen er en arkitektonisk tolkning av sanntid sky. Videoer av olympiske øvelser, Twitter og Facebook bekker og andre realtime data som energiforbruk, Internett-trafikk, og mobiltelefon aktivitet vil bli projisert på LED-skjermer i skyen slik at folk i skyen kan observere hendelsene fra høyt over London .
Confirmed: IBM Acquires Database Security Startup Guardium For Undisclosed Amount
Rumors were swirling that IBM would be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, TheMarker, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue has officially confirmed to TechCrunch that it has acquired Guardium but did not disclose financial terms. TheMarker reported that IBM is shelling out $225 million for Massachusetts-based Guardium.
A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The company’s technology is installed in more than 450 data centers worldwide. IBM says it will integrate Guardium within IBM's Information Management Software portfolio. Guardium, which was founded in 2002, has raised a total of $21 million in funding from Cisco, Cedar Fund, Ascent Venture Partners, Stage One Ventures, Veritas Venture Partners and others.
A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The company’s technology is installed in more than 450 data centers worldwide. IBM says it will integrate Guardium within IBM's Information Management Software portfolio. Guardium, which was founded in 2002, has raised a total of $21 million in funding from Cisco, Cedar Fund, Ascent Venture Partners, Stage One Ventures, Veritas Venture Partners and others.
Eksklusivt: Digg stjeler Google Exec som ny VP Product
Digg har kokes Keval Desai bort fra Google som sin nye Vice President of Product har vi bekreftet fra selskapet. Desai's siste dag hos Google er i dag. Desai er lenge Google-ansatt, først begynte i selskapet i 2003. Han er for tiden sin Director of Product Management og har ledet utviklingen av produktet / virksomheter i Googles annonsering virksomhet (inkludert AdWords, Syndication og TV-annonser). Han vil bli Digg første leder av produkt, et ansvar som er delt på ulike tider av grunnleggeren Kevin Rose, administrerende direktør Jay Adelson og Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser. Og han har en stor jobb foran seg: Digg er hardt arbeid har gitt ut et helt ny versjon av nettstedet.
Review: TomTom Car Kit for iPhone og iPod Touch
Kort versjon $ 219.94. Prisen sier alt. TomTom Car Kit er stor, det fungerer perfekt, og jeg elsket å bruke den. Faktisk, jeg ønsker jeg kunne beholde den anmeldelsen enhet som TomTom har sendt meg. Når det er sagt, ville jeg noensinne tilbringe 2 regninger og endre på det? Mayyyybe, men det er usannsynlig. En frittstående TomTom [...]
Norge endelig får MiFi via Bell Mobility
Pokker, Canada. Som innbygger i et annet land på samme kontinent, er det min plikt å fremheve alle de tingene vi har at du ikke. Jeg mener, hvem trenger universelle helsetjenester når du har lastebil nøtter? Hver gang noen vil ta opp den amerikanske manglende Poutine, jeg teller med [...]
hi5 recruits a beastly gaming veteran as its president
Social network hi5 has hired a pioneer in the video game industry to kick its social gaming strategy into high gear. It remains to be seen if hi5 truly realizes what it’s getting in the hiring of Alex St. John.
St. John, founder of online game firm Wild Tangent and a former Microsoft games evangelist, will serve as president and chief technology officer at hi5. He will be responsible for its product development, technology, network operations and audience acquisition.
It might seem laughable that a mid-tier social network such as hi5 wants to become a leader in games. But St. John has changed the course of the game industry a couple of times in his career.
As a social network, hi5 has 60 million unique monthly users, most of them outside the U.S. But it looks like an also-ran next to Facebook, which has more than 325 million users, and hi5 has moved into games partly due to its struggle to remain relevant.
St. John acknowledged in an interview that hi5 needs to prove it can be more competitive in the social gaming market against the likes of Facebook and its game publishers like Zynga. But he said that the social gaming market isn’t locked up; rather, he said, it is just beginning.
That’s probably true. But I was surprised St. John didn’t just start his own company. He left his previous startup, Wild Tangent, more than a year ago, and he left its board in March. He grew Wild Tangent into the largest privately-held gaming site and fifth-largest gaming property in the world with 30 million monthly active users. But St. John said he doesn’t want to try that again because in today’s market it will be easier to use the large audience and platform of hi5 to grow a social games and entertainment business.
St. John will report to Bill Grossman, chief executive of hi5. Grossman said that adding a visionary like St. John to the team will help hi5 continue its evolution into a social entertainment platform.
St. John was a hard-charging games evangelist for Microsoft and was co-creator of DirectX, the game platform that enabled the creation of a huge games business on personal computers running Windows. Before DirectX, Microsoft’s presence in video games was pretty much a joke; but DirectX also led directly to the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox business. St. John had a reputation for playing hardball and was nicknamed “the beast,” partly because he weighed more than 300 pounds back then (he’s lighter now) and wandered the halls of Microsoft with a long beard and a fake battle axe.
I wrote about his role in the rise of Microsoft’s gaming business in my book, Opening the Xbox. It’s no exaggeration to say that the industry wouldn’t be what it is today were it not for St. John. Indeed, he managed to revive the fortunes of the PC industry just as 3-D graphics came of age in the 1990s. But Microsoft didn’t truly appreciate St. John’s renegade tactics. He got himself fired with one of the funniest non-apology apology/resignation letters in corporate history, as recorded in the book Renegades of the Empire by Michael Drummond.
He founded Wild Tangent in 1998. The company raised a huge amount of money — $132 million — from a variety of typically game-leary venture capitalists. Wild Tangent went through several business plans as online games took off. It ultimately became a huge distributor of casual online games and pioneered a virtual goods business model based on a virtual currency dubbed Wild Coins. Many other companies followed in Wild Tangent’s footsteps, and St. John brashly predicted that web-based game businesses such as his would hasten the death of game consoles.
That hasn’t quite happened, though growth in the console business stagnated this year. Meanwhile, social games have taken off like wildfire. While still at Wild Tangent, St. John saw the rise of social games on platforms such as Facebook. But he said he didn’t believe that was a business that Wild Tangent could jump into at the time, since it was doing so well with its mainstay online game portal business.
He left the companyfor personal reasons a year ago and said he is now ready to return to work. He said he has legal permission from Wild Tangent to join hi5.
Looking around the market, St. John said that Zynga is very successful, but is still very dependent on Facebook for its success. He thinks that Facebook is in the midst of making changes that will shift profits in social games back from Zynga to Facebook. He isn’t surprised that Zynga’s reaction has been to create its own web site for the Farmville game, which has more than 65 million active monthly users on Facebook. He said that game companies that control their own social networks, such as hi5, will be in much better shape to control their own destinies.
While Facebook is the strongest player in social networks, St. John said it is a “fantasy” that it will be the only network with a great business in games. He thinks that social games today are still a lackluster experience — that they feel like little more than “meta games” that whet the appetite but have very little deep content to keep users hooked.
St. John said that hi5, founded in 2003 and one of the top 20 web sites in the world, has done well with its shift into games that started a year ago. It has another gaming veteran, Andrew Sheppard, who will report to St. John. The company launched a bunch of games this spring, including its hit games Spirehold and Organized Crime. St. John said he plans to accelerate hi5’s transition into social gaming and entertainment.
He is coy about saying what he will do exactly, but he believes that hi5 has to create its own original games in order to be successful.
“Chasing the crowd is not an interesting strategy,” he said. “I would like to do something highly differentiated. I intend to have a very aggressive content strategy. I hope to surprise folks. The social game party started without me. But hi5 is the best positioned to jump into the middle of the party.”
St. John, founder of online game firm Wild Tangent and a former Microsoft games evangelist, will serve as president and chief technology officer at hi5. He will be responsible for its product development, technology, network operations and audience acquisition.
It might seem laughable that a mid-tier social network such as hi5 wants to become a leader in games. But St. John has changed the course of the game industry a couple of times in his career.
As a social network, hi5 has 60 million unique monthly users, most of them outside the U.S. But it looks like an also-ran next to Facebook, which has more than 325 million users, and hi5 has moved into games partly due to its struggle to remain relevant.
St. John acknowledged in an interview that hi5 needs to prove it can be more competitive in the social gaming market against the likes of Facebook and its game publishers like Zynga. But he said that the social gaming market isn’t locked up; rather, he said, it is just beginning.
That’s probably true. But I was surprised St. John didn’t just start his own company. He left his previous startup, Wild Tangent, more than a year ago, and he left its board in March. He grew Wild Tangent into the largest privately-held gaming site and fifth-largest gaming property in the world with 30 million monthly active users. But St. John said he doesn’t want to try that again because in today’s market it will be easier to use the large audience and platform of hi5 to grow a social games and entertainment business.
St. John will report to Bill Grossman, chief executive of hi5. Grossman said that adding a visionary like St. John to the team will help hi5 continue its evolution into a social entertainment platform.
St. John was a hard-charging games evangelist for Microsoft and was co-creator of DirectX, the game platform that enabled the creation of a huge games business on personal computers running Windows. Before DirectX, Microsoft’s presence in video games was pretty much a joke; but DirectX also led directly to the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox business. St. John had a reputation for playing hardball and was nicknamed “the beast,” partly because he weighed more than 300 pounds back then (he’s lighter now) and wandered the halls of Microsoft with a long beard and a fake battle axe.
I wrote about his role in the rise of Microsoft’s gaming business in my book, Opening the Xbox. It’s no exaggeration to say that the industry wouldn’t be what it is today were it not for St. John. Indeed, he managed to revive the fortunes of the PC industry just as 3-D graphics came of age in the 1990s. But Microsoft didn’t truly appreciate St. John’s renegade tactics. He got himself fired with one of the funniest non-apology apology/resignation letters in corporate history, as recorded in the book Renegades of the Empire by Michael Drummond.
He founded Wild Tangent in 1998. The company raised a huge amount of money — $132 million — from a variety of typically game-leary venture capitalists. Wild Tangent went through several business plans as online games took off. It ultimately became a huge distributor of casual online games and pioneered a virtual goods business model based on a virtual currency dubbed Wild Coins. Many other companies followed in Wild Tangent’s footsteps, and St. John brashly predicted that web-based game businesses such as his would hasten the death of game consoles.
That hasn’t quite happened, though growth in the console business stagnated this year. Meanwhile, social games have taken off like wildfire. While still at Wild Tangent, St. John saw the rise of social games on platforms such as Facebook. But he said he didn’t believe that was a business that Wild Tangent could jump into at the time, since it was doing so well with its mainstay online game portal business.
He left the companyfor personal reasons a year ago and said he is now ready to return to work. He said he has legal permission from Wild Tangent to join hi5.
Looking around the market, St. John said that Zynga is very successful, but is still very dependent on Facebook for its success. He thinks that Facebook is in the midst of making changes that will shift profits in social games back from Zynga to Facebook. He isn’t surprised that Zynga’s reaction has been to create its own web site for the Farmville game, which has more than 65 million active monthly users on Facebook. He said that game companies that control their own social networks, such as hi5, will be in much better shape to control their own destinies.
While Facebook is the strongest player in social networks, St. John said it is a “fantasy” that it will be the only network with a great business in games. He thinks that social games today are still a lackluster experience — that they feel like little more than “meta games” that whet the appetite but have very little deep content to keep users hooked.
St. John said that hi5, founded in 2003 and one of the top 20 web sites in the world, has done well with its shift into games that started a year ago. It has another gaming veteran, Andrew Sheppard, who will report to St. John. The company launched a bunch of games this spring, including its hit games Spirehold and Organized Crime. St. John said he plans to accelerate hi5’s transition into social gaming and entertainment.
He is coy about saying what he will do exactly, but he believes that hi5 has to create its own original games in order to be successful.
“Chasing the crowd is not an interesting strategy,” he said. “I would like to do something highly differentiated. I intend to have a very aggressive content strategy. I hope to surprise folks. The social game party started without me. But hi5 is the best positioned to jump into the middle of the party.”
Warren Buffett: the next clean energy baron?
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens and master currency speculator George Soros have both gone green in the last several years. Now it could be Warren Buffett’s turn to crank up his participation in the cleantech sector. Already with four related investments in the space, he’s well positioned to lead private investors’ charge toward cleaner sources of energy.
In just the last two years, Buffett has thrown his weight behind Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD, greener railway company Burlington Northern Santa Fe, General Electric (which has pumped up its cleantech operations with the start of its Ecomagination program), and major cleantech investor Goldman Sachs. Granted, these are pretty solid — and safe — choices. But they could be indicative of more to come from the so-called “Oracle of Omaha.”
Today, analyst firm the Cleantech Group came out with a list of ten predictions for the sector in 2010 — one of which was that Buffett would spearhead a movement of individual billionaires investing in clean energy and other green technology companies. It pointed to ramped up involvement from both Soros and Virgin CEO Richard Branson, who gave $1 billion and $3 billion to clean energy projects, respectively.
While Branson was also very early to the cleantech game — investing as early as 2006 — Buffett appears to have more influence. There’s a sense that U.S. investors, who have been cautious when it comes to giving to green following the economic downturn, will take their cues from him if he does dole out more. Already, cleantech is predicted to be one of the biggest sectors for venture capital investing next year — but attracting the attention of American royalty could take it up another notch.
As for Buffett himself, it looks like his first order of business may very well be making electric and hybrid-electric cars a reality. His firm, Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of a $232 million stake in Chinese advanced automotive company BYD is the tip-off here, in addition to recent comments he made at Rice University that he sees electric cars dominating the roads as early as 2020.
This is one of the most ambitious predictions for the shift in transportation, considering that many people will still have cars they own today in 20 years. In order for EVs to have any chance of replacing gas-powered cars, battery prices will have to fall fast and far, and driving ranges on single charges will have to expand beyond the typical 100 miles. In short, people will need to be able to drive and pay for them just like they do their current automobiles.
BYD is working to solve both of these problems — pioneering technology that will allow cars to charge up halfway in just 10 minutes, and travel 250 miles on one charge. But companies like Coulomb Technologies, Better Place and R2EV are working on remote charging station solutions that could also expedite wider adoption of EVs. It wouldn’t be surprising if Buffett took a closer look at these startup and others working toward the same goals.
In doing so, Buffett would join his global counterparts, including French billionaire incent Bollore, CEo of the Bollore Group, who recently announced that he would invest $1.5 billion in advanced battery manufacturing facilities that will churn out alternatives to lithium-ion cells.
In just the last two years, Buffett has thrown his weight behind Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD, greener railway company Burlington Northern Santa Fe, General Electric (which has pumped up its cleantech operations with the start of its Ecomagination program), and major cleantech investor Goldman Sachs. Granted, these are pretty solid — and safe — choices. But they could be indicative of more to come from the so-called “Oracle of Omaha.”
Today, analyst firm the Cleantech Group came out with a list of ten predictions for the sector in 2010 — one of which was that Buffett would spearhead a movement of individual billionaires investing in clean energy and other green technology companies. It pointed to ramped up involvement from both Soros and Virgin CEO Richard Branson, who gave $1 billion and $3 billion to clean energy projects, respectively.
While Branson was also very early to the cleantech game — investing as early as 2006 — Buffett appears to have more influence. There’s a sense that U.S. investors, who have been cautious when it comes to giving to green following the economic downturn, will take their cues from him if he does dole out more. Already, cleantech is predicted to be one of the biggest sectors for venture capital investing next year — but attracting the attention of American royalty could take it up another notch.
As for Buffett himself, it looks like his first order of business may very well be making electric and hybrid-electric cars a reality. His firm, Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of a $232 million stake in Chinese advanced automotive company BYD is the tip-off here, in addition to recent comments he made at Rice University that he sees electric cars dominating the roads as early as 2020.
This is one of the most ambitious predictions for the shift in transportation, considering that many people will still have cars they own today in 20 years. In order for EVs to have any chance of replacing gas-powered cars, battery prices will have to fall fast and far, and driving ranges on single charges will have to expand beyond the typical 100 miles. In short, people will need to be able to drive and pay for them just like they do their current automobiles.
BYD is working to solve both of these problems — pioneering technology that will allow cars to charge up halfway in just 10 minutes, and travel 250 miles on one charge. But companies like Coulomb Technologies, Better Place and R2EV are working on remote charging station solutions that could also expedite wider adoption of EVs. It wouldn’t be surprising if Buffett took a closer look at these startup and others working toward the same goals.
In doing so, Buffett would join his global counterparts, including French billionaire incent Bollore, CEo of the Bollore Group, who recently announced that he would invest $1.5 billion in advanced battery manufacturing facilities that will churn out alternatives to lithium-ion cells.
Og vi er tilbake!
Du har kanskje lagt merke til ting har vært litt stille på MobileCrunch fronten de siste dagene. Etter noen måneder med nese-to-the-slipesteinen, sirenen kaller over-pakket plater og familie gode tider som stammer fra Thanksgiving ferie var for mye, vi låste opp butikken for et par dager, dro hjem, og hadde [. ..]
Playmesh topper listene med # 1 Game på iPhone: iFarm lastet ned 1 millioner ganger i løpet av 10 dager
Kanskje du finner dette overraskende, men toppen sosial gaming selskap på iPhone er ikke like de du kjenner fra Facebook og MySpace . Zynga tross $ 54.2M i finansieringen, har knapt gjort en bulk på iPhone. Hverken har Playfish, som nylig ble kjøpt for $ 300M. Playdom har ikke gjort knebøy, heller. Selv om "the [...]
PBworks tar inn $ 650K vert wikier for forbrukere
Wiki vertsleverandør PBworks, tidligere kjent som PBwiki har reist $ 650.000 i rettigheter og verdipapirer, ifølge en filing til SEC. Basert i San Mateo, California, selskapet er støttet av Mohr Davidow Ventures, Seraph Group, Ron Conway og Chris Yeh. Den tidligere tjente NOK 2.45 millioner kroner i venture-finansiering.
EoPlex bags $ 3.8M for miniatyr 3-D strukturer
EoPlex Technologies, produsent av verktøy som brukes til å bygge miniatyr strukturer, som enheter, sensorer og kretser, har brakt inn $ 3.8 millioner kroner av en målrettet $ 6 millioner runde av egenkapital, ifølge en filing til SEC. Basert i Redwood City, det er støttet av ATA Ventures, Labrador Ventures og Draper Fisher Jurvetson, og har tjente NOK 13.8 millioner til dato.
Polanski på farten?
Oscar-vinnende regissøren Roman Polanski kunne forlate fengsel for husarrest som helst, sa en sveitsisk talsperson.
Augmented reality does make money — AcrossAir turns profitable, launches bar finder
Augmented reality startup AcrossAir, which makes apps that help you find nearby subway stops and restaurants, turned profitable last month and is launching a bar finder this week. Augmented reality is a new field that lets you overlay 3-D graphics and information over the space around you through your phone’s viewfinder.
AcrossAir’s new app is a partnership with Stella Artois that lets you hold up your phone, pan around and see info tags superimposed over your surroundings pointing to nearby bars serving their beer. It will be a free app tracking 80,000 bars in the U.S. with Stella Artois pulling the data from their distribution database.
So how did AcrossAir start turning a profit? They rely on advertising, paid apps and partnerships like this Stella Artois deal. The company makes a number of augmented reality apps — from Nearest Tube, which helps you find subway stops, to Nearest Tweets, which shows you tweets from close by. There was also another deal to create WorkSnug, an augmented reality app that helps you find coffee shops to work in with WiFi and outlets (see a video here). The U.K.-based company’s augmented reality browser also has four paid advertisers on-board. Their most popular product is the subway finder.
Despite hype around the field, only one startup, Layar, has raised a venture-backed round in the last quarter.
“The whole augmented reality industry has just hit VCs in the face pretty quickly. They haven’t had time to digest it and see the impact. Secondly, no one really knows which particular platform is going to take off,” said Chetan Damani, AcrossAir’s CEO. “Then there are still concerns about technical limitations and GPS accuracy.”
Plus, augmented reality is pretty divisive in general, he said. “We rarely get the people down the middle — they either love it or they just don’t see the point.”
AcrossAir has eight employees and Damani self-funded the company. He and his business partner also run a digital marketing agency called Imano.
AcrossAir’s new app is a partnership with Stella Artois that lets you hold up your phone, pan around and see info tags superimposed over your surroundings pointing to nearby bars serving their beer. It will be a free app tracking 80,000 bars in the U.S. with Stella Artois pulling the data from their distribution database.
So how did AcrossAir start turning a profit? They rely on advertising, paid apps and partnerships like this Stella Artois deal. The company makes a number of augmented reality apps — from Nearest Tube, which helps you find subway stops, to Nearest Tweets, which shows you tweets from close by. There was also another deal to create WorkSnug, an augmented reality app that helps you find coffee shops to work in with WiFi and outlets (see a video here). The U.K.-based company’s augmented reality browser also has four paid advertisers on-board. Their most popular product is the subway finder.
Despite hype around the field, only one startup, Layar, has raised a venture-backed round in the last quarter.
“The whole augmented reality industry has just hit VCs in the face pretty quickly. They haven’t had time to digest it and see the impact. Secondly, no one really knows which particular platform is going to take off,” said Chetan Damani, AcrossAir’s CEO. “Then there are still concerns about technical limitations and GPS accuracy.”
Plus, augmented reality is pretty divisive in general, he said. “We rarely get the people down the middle — they either love it or they just don’t see the point.”
AcrossAir has eight employees and Damani self-funded the company. He and his business partner also run a digital marketing agency called Imano.
Crescendo Biosci stifter på $ 5M mer for autoimmun sykdom testing
Crescendo Bioscience, utvikleren av tester som tar en nærmere titt på autoimmune og inflammatoriske sykdommer ledd, har hevet 5 millioner dollar mer i en ny runde med venture-finansiering, og bringer den totale til 20 millioner dollar, ifølge Dow Jones VentureWire. Basert i South San Francisco er selskapet støttet av Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers og Mohr Davidow Ventures. Det vil bruke sin nye penger til prep for lanseringen av sitt første produkt. Selskapet har ikke avslørt mye om lanseringen, men det har vært arbeidet primært på tester for leddgikt.
Car battery maker EnerDel nabs early toehold in grid storage
The success of a cleaner, more efficient super grid hinges on the development of large-capacity storage — we heard that time and time again at GreenBeat 2009, from investors Vinod Khosla and Peter Wagner, as well as from Al Gore and Innovation Competition winner Locust Storage. Now, EnerDel, a subsidiary of Ener1, known for making batteries for hybrid electric cars, says it will take a stab at the problem.
The U.S. Department of Energy and utility Portland General Electric have tapped EnerDel to use its lithium-ion battery designs to store energy in five 1-megawatt power systems that serve 400 homes surrounding Portland, Ore. during peak energy periods. The DOE will chip in about $90 million toward the $178 million project, which aims to take the edge off peak demand, and provide reliable backup energy when solar and wind sources cut out.
Eventually, the company plans to install 15 of these smaller storage systems, and test them for the next three years.
Based in Indianapolis, the company believes that storage will become even more of an issue once electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles roll into showrooms over the next two years. If commuters come home every day and plug in their cars as predicted, peak demand will not only hike prices considerably, it could also lead to massive energy waste and power failures (which are expensive for utilities to locate and fix).
Right now, the typical response to excessive demand is to switch on fuel-powered generators — something that is also extremely expensive and inefficient for utilities to do. Reliable and efficient storage systems could eventually negate this strategy — but only if they are cost efficient for utilities to adopt, which has yet to be the case.
EnerDel might have a leg up as an automotive battery maker. Considering its supply deals with Nissan, EV maker Th!nk, and others, it seems to understand the market potential, including how and when average consumers will use and charge their vehicles.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about turning EV and hybrid batteries into bi-directional fuel cells. What this means is that the grid could potentially draw energy out of car batteries when they are out of use — like during peak periods when extra energy is in dire need to lower costs and maintain grid stability. Energy would then flow back into the batteries overnight, during the wee hours of the morning, for example, when energy is at its cheapest.
Even if this isn’t going to be EnerDel’s core approach, the batteries it is making for cars still have the chemistry and technology that could be adapted for larger-scale grid storage applications.
The public company has definitely benefited from the $118.5 million grant it received in August from the Department of Energy under the Advanced Battery Manufacturing Initiative. It also used some of that money to buy eight electric vehicle power cycling and test systems, it said today.
Its competitors like A123Systems and Johnson Controls-Saft haven’t been making too much noise about getting in the smart grid — a potentially huge business for battery makers. It looks like EnerDel may have just scored one of the earliest footholds.
The U.S. Department of Energy and utility Portland General Electric have tapped EnerDel to use its lithium-ion battery designs to store energy in five 1-megawatt power systems that serve 400 homes surrounding Portland, Ore. during peak energy periods. The DOE will chip in about $90 million toward the $178 million project, which aims to take the edge off peak demand, and provide reliable backup energy when solar and wind sources cut out.
Eventually, the company plans to install 15 of these smaller storage systems, and test them for the next three years.
Based in Indianapolis, the company believes that storage will become even more of an issue once electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles roll into showrooms over the next two years. If commuters come home every day and plug in their cars as predicted, peak demand will not only hike prices considerably, it could also lead to massive energy waste and power failures (which are expensive for utilities to locate and fix).
Right now, the typical response to excessive demand is to switch on fuel-powered generators — something that is also extremely expensive and inefficient for utilities to do. Reliable and efficient storage systems could eventually negate this strategy — but only if they are cost efficient for utilities to adopt, which has yet to be the case.
EnerDel might have a leg up as an automotive battery maker. Considering its supply deals with Nissan, EV maker Th!nk, and others, it seems to understand the market potential, including how and when average consumers will use and charge their vehicles.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about turning EV and hybrid batteries into bi-directional fuel cells. What this means is that the grid could potentially draw energy out of car batteries when they are out of use — like during peak periods when extra energy is in dire need to lower costs and maintain grid stability. Energy would then flow back into the batteries overnight, during the wee hours of the morning, for example, when energy is at its cheapest.
Even if this isn’t going to be EnerDel’s core approach, the batteries it is making for cars still have the chemistry and technology that could be adapted for larger-scale grid storage applications.
The public company has definitely benefited from the $118.5 million grant it received in August from the Department of Energy under the Advanced Battery Manufacturing Initiative. It also used some of that money to buy eight electric vehicle power cycling and test systems, it said today.
Its competitors like A123Systems and Johnson Controls-Saft haven’t been making too much noise about getting in the smart grid — a potentially huge business for battery makers. It looks like EnerDel may have just scored one of the earliest footholds.
Michael Moore skriver åpent brev til Obama
Activist filmskaperen Michael Moore har skrevet et åpent brev til president Obama, cautioning øverstkommanderende mot økende tropp nivåer i Afghanistan.
Coca Cola, Starbucks top list of best brands on Facebook
For companies to stay relevant these days, and to actually matter in a digital age, they increasingly have to be involved on social networks—Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Everyone’s trying to connect with their customers, to be human, and to make a whole lot of money. But who’s doing it well?
That’s the question that The Big Money, from Slate Magazine, went out and asked. Their answers are in a report published today, The Big Money Facebook 50, listing the top 50 brands with official pages on Facebook – plus a lot of interesting analysis. With a couple of prerequisities (the company had to have at least 200,000 fans on Facebook, had to be active, and had to have shown growth thanks to the network), The Big Money charted just who the top 50 brands are on the global superpower that is Facebook.
The top 5 are all huge brands with huge Facebook followings: iTunes, Victoria’s Secret, Disney, Starbucks, and at number 1, Coca Cola. The list as a whole is equally diverse, with everything from Skittles to YouTube having figured out how to successfully market to and connect with people on Facebook.
One of the findings from The Big Money Facebook 50 was that there’s no rhyme or reason to success when it comes to social networks; everyone who does it well, does it somewhat differently. Some companies, like T.G.I Friday’s, promised free food to all their customers who became a fan of a particular guy on Facebook, and it brought them nearly a million fans within a month. Skittles even redirected its website, skittles.com, to its Facebook page for a while, and gained three million fans from it.
Coca Cola, too, is an interesting example of how to market successfully on Facebook: The page was initially created without any strategy, or even real content; it quickly exploded in popularity. Someone at Coke realized how useful it could be, and added to the pages things like videos made by fans, some recycling initiatives, and even a “Spin the Bottle” app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I kid you not.
The Big Money Facebook 50 is a lesson for any company not currently leveraging social media like Facebook and Twitter: the big players are doing it, and it’s a way anyone can successfully connect with customers and fans, from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop shops. It also means that, if you make delicious food, Facebook’s going to love you dearly.
The Big Money will also release the Twitter 12, a similar story about how brands are using Twitter, in the coming days
That’s the question that The Big Money, from Slate Magazine, went out and asked. Their answers are in a report published today, The Big Money Facebook 50, listing the top 50 brands with official pages on Facebook – plus a lot of interesting analysis. With a couple of prerequisities (the company had to have at least 200,000 fans on Facebook, had to be active, and had to have shown growth thanks to the network), The Big Money charted just who the top 50 brands are on the global superpower that is Facebook.
The top 5 are all huge brands with huge Facebook followings: iTunes, Victoria’s Secret, Disney, Starbucks, and at number 1, Coca Cola. The list as a whole is equally diverse, with everything from Skittles to YouTube having figured out how to successfully market to and connect with people on Facebook.
One of the findings from The Big Money Facebook 50 was that there’s no rhyme or reason to success when it comes to social networks; everyone who does it well, does it somewhat differently. Some companies, like T.G.I Friday’s, promised free food to all their customers who became a fan of a particular guy on Facebook, and it brought them nearly a million fans within a month. Skittles even redirected its website, skittles.com, to its Facebook page for a while, and gained three million fans from it.
Coca Cola, too, is an interesting example of how to market successfully on Facebook: The page was initially created without any strategy, or even real content; it quickly exploded in popularity. Someone at Coke realized how useful it could be, and added to the pages things like videos made by fans, some recycling initiatives, and even a “Spin the Bottle” app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I kid you not.
The Big Money Facebook 50 is a lesson for any company not currently leveraging social media like Facebook and Twitter: the big players are doing it, and it’s a way anyone can successfully connect with customers and fans, from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop shops. It also means that, if you make delicious food, Facebook’s going to love you dearly.
The Big Money will also release the Twitter 12, a similar story about how brands are using Twitter, in the coming days
Tweetdeck adds Twitter’s new bells and whistles, goes both ways on retweets
Tweetdeck, the most popular external client for Twitter, underwent a major overhaul today. It’s adding in LinkedIn updates, along with all of Twitter’s new features including geolocation, retweets and lists.
Like other clients, which help you read Twitter updates quickly, Tweetdeck is morphing into a social media dashboard by aggregating data from multiple social networks including Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn. This means you can read status updates from all four places in one space.
What’s interesting about the update is Tweetdeck’s unique integration of Twitter’s new retweet feature, which has divided the community. The old way of retweeting, or sharing a tweet from someone else, was done manually. You would type ‘RT’, the Twitter handle of the person, and then the retweet. And maybe you’d add in a comment or thought about what the other person said.
But when Twitter decided to add formal support for the feature, their version wouldn’t let users comment on retweets. It would automatically just copy what the other person said. Tweetdeck lets you go both ways. You can click one button to do it Twitter’s way, or another to add a comment or edit the tweet.
Tweetdeck’s lists and geolocation integration are pretty standard compared to what other clients have done. You can convert groups of Twitter accounts you follow into lists, import the lists you’ve built on Twitter.com as extra columns, or build your own inside Tweetdeck.
You can access Twitter’s geolocation feature by clicking a red dot under tweets. It will drop down to show you a map of where the tweet came from.
Tweetdeck has raised more than $2 million in two rounds of funding.
Like other clients, which help you read Twitter updates quickly, Tweetdeck is morphing into a social media dashboard by aggregating data from multiple social networks including Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn. This means you can read status updates from all four places in one space.
What’s interesting about the update is Tweetdeck’s unique integration of Twitter’s new retweet feature, which has divided the community. The old way of retweeting, or sharing a tweet from someone else, was done manually. You would type ‘RT’, the Twitter handle of the person, and then the retweet. And maybe you’d add in a comment or thought about what the other person said.
But when Twitter decided to add formal support for the feature, their version wouldn’t let users comment on retweets. It would automatically just copy what the other person said. Tweetdeck lets you go both ways. You can click one button to do it Twitter’s way, or another to add a comment or edit the tweet.
Tweetdeck’s lists and geolocation integration are pretty standard compared to what other clients have done. You can convert groups of Twitter accounts you follow into lists, import the lists you’ve built on Twitter.com as extra columns, or build your own inside Tweetdeck.
You can access Twitter’s geolocation feature by clicking a red dot under tweets. It will drop down to show you a map of where the tweet came from.
Tweetdeck has raised more than $2 million in two rounds of funding.
Rihanna kom med voldsom mote 'brøler'
Det er en grunn til at det heter "å gjøre et fashion statement", som Rihanna kjenner godt.
Hasselhoff sykehus
Skuespilleren var på et sykehus i to dager, hans eks-kone ble arrestert på en DUI charge.
The End Of The CrunchPad
Det var så nær jeg kunne smake det. To uker siden var vi klare til offentlig starte CrunchPad. Enheten var stabil nok for en demo. Det gikk timer uten å krasje. Vi kunne også la folk spille med enheten selv - brukergrensesnittet er intuitivt nok til at folk "fikk det" uten noen instruksjoner. Og utseendet til ren glede på håndfull av utenforstående som hadde brukt det gjort nesten 1,5 års innsats helt verdt det. Vår plan var å debut på CrunchPad på scenen ved Real-Time Crunchup hendelsen den 20. november, litt over en uke siden. Vi selv hadde håpet å ha enheter hacket sammen med Google Chrome OS og Windows 7 for å vise folk at du kan hacke denne ting å kjøre det meste du vil. Vi hadde satt 1000 av enhetene på pre-salg og ta ordre umiddelbart. Større skala ville begynne tidlig i 2010. Og da hele prosjektet selv destructed over annet enn grådighet, misunnelse og misforståelser.
eBay dømt til å betale $ 2.5 millioner Fine Over LVMH Product Sales spyttet
[Frankrike] En kommersiell domstol i Paris har bøtelagt eBay € 1.7 millioner euro (ca £ 1.6 millioner) for angivelig ikke stikker til en kjennelse utestenge brukere fra salg av produkter av luksusvarer konglomerat Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH kort). Tillater LVMH parfyme og kosmetikk til å bli kjøpt opp av franskmenn på sin franske og britiske nettstedet i henhold til den herskende brutt en tidligere rettskjennelse for å fjerne alle slike oppslag (juni 2008), en del av en € 38 million dommen sa eBay ikke hadde gjort nok for å stoppe salg av forfalsket LVMH elementer.
eBuddy Debuterer Premium iPhone App
Nesten fem måneder etter lansere en gratis, annonse-støttet applikasjon for iPhone og iPod Touch, er eBuddy dag introduserer en betalt versjon av programmet, som lar brukerne kommunisere med kontakter på tvers av ulike chat-klienter. Priset for $ 4.99 (iTunes link) som etter min mening er ganske dyrt, kan programmet du chatte med venner på Facebook Chat, ICQ, gtalk, AIM, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger eller Yahoo Messenger likt.
Funksjoner Chrome Mac Beta Will Be Missing
Som vi har nevnt, Chrome for Mac blir veldig, veldig nær sin offisielle beta lanseringen. Teamet er ned til bare 8 feil å fikse før den er klar (og det ser ut som listen har blitt trimmet til 7 som for noen timer siden). Dette er gode nyheter for Mac-brukere som ønsker å prøve ut Chrome opplever at PC-brukere har hatt i godt over et år nå. Men likevel, vil produktet være i beta, og det vil være ufullstendig. Det har vært kjent en stund at Google ville ha til å klippe noen av funksjonene fra den innledende Chrome for Mac betalanseringen å få det ut før selvpålagte "enden av år "tidsfrist. Men hva som skjer på hoggestabben? En skanner gjennom Chromium logger på Google Code synes å avdekke hva som vil og ikke vil bli en gå for Chrome-beta for Mac.
WeCanDo.Biz launches automated lead generation tool for Twitter
More and more Twitter is becoming a destination for millions of users to ask questions about products and services or even seek direct recommendations from their trusted network. While there are tools for listening to Twitter conversations, businesses are increasingly realizing the difficulties of trying to listen to millions of users and trying to determine potential customers. However, new services are emerging for Twitter business users to help increase the lead generation process and turn tweets into customers.
One such service was launched today by London based WeCanDo.Biz Limited, an online sales leads and business referrals network with 12,500 registered profiles. The new service, dubbed the Twitter Sales Leads tool, is designed to help SMBs identify and track potential sales leads through Twitter.
The tool works automatically searching millions of daily tweets looking for the key words included during a profile setup. While this is possible through other applications like TweetDeck, the Twitter Sales Leads tool takes it one step further. The tool not only finds tweets describing specific products or services, but filters results to show only tweets which emphasize a need for a product, service or recommendation. The tweet also has a location tag so that businesses can skip over those that don’t apply to their region. The company explains, “A business with fifteen keywords would need to perform 90 individual Twitter searches to produce the same results as the Twitter Sales Leads tool presents in a single view in seconds.”
Extremely helpful for businesses looking to converse with customers that they know are looking for their product or service. For example, if you tweeted that you were looking for a great restaurant in downtown Boston and asked if anyone had suggestions. The new tool would track your tweet and file it to be visible to local restaurants in your area using the service. There’s even a reply box within the tool to allow for responding. Wouldn’t it be great to then receive a response saying if you came to their restaurant tonight you could receive a 10% discount?
There are similar services and applications available, such as TweetScan which allows you to receive emails when key words are mentioned. Google Alerts can even be leverages now to find keywords in Twitter bios. However, none provide only need based tweets. The new service tool gives those lacking time and energy a more automated system for responding to tweets looking for particular products, services or recommendations.
The new service tool isn’t free, it will cost you £22.95, which equates to about $38 , but has no contract requirements.
One such service was launched today by London based WeCanDo.Biz Limited, an online sales leads and business referrals network with 12,500 registered profiles. The new service, dubbed the Twitter Sales Leads tool, is designed to help SMBs identify and track potential sales leads through Twitter.
The tool works automatically searching millions of daily tweets looking for the key words included during a profile setup. While this is possible through other applications like TweetDeck, the Twitter Sales Leads tool takes it one step further. The tool not only finds tweets describing specific products or services, but filters results to show only tweets which emphasize a need for a product, service or recommendation. The tweet also has a location tag so that businesses can skip over those that don’t apply to their region. The company explains, “A business with fifteen keywords would need to perform 90 individual Twitter searches to produce the same results as the Twitter Sales Leads tool presents in a single view in seconds.”
Extremely helpful for businesses looking to converse with customers that they know are looking for their product or service. For example, if you tweeted that you were looking for a great restaurant in downtown Boston and asked if anyone had suggestions. The new tool would track your tweet and file it to be visible to local restaurants in your area using the service. There’s even a reply box within the tool to allow for responding. Wouldn’t it be great to then receive a response saying if you came to their restaurant tonight you could receive a 10% discount?
There are similar services and applications available, such as TweetScan which allows you to receive emails when key words are mentioned. Google Alerts can even be leverages now to find keywords in Twitter bios. However, none provide only need based tweets. The new service tool gives those lacking time and energy a more automated system for responding to tweets looking for particular products, services or recommendations.
The new service tool isn’t free, it will cost you £22.95, which equates to about $38 , but has no contract requirements.
DiscoveryBeat Apps Contest deadline is today
The deadline for entries into our DiscoveryBeat Apps Contest is end of day today. With this competition, we’re trying to unearth some of the most interesting unknown apps.
It’s all part of our DiscoveryBeat event to be held on Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. The DiscoveryBeat Apps Contest is being sponsored by Flurry, which recently launched its AppCircle app recommendation engine for the iPhone.
Getting apps discovered is no easy task when there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of competing apps on a social networking or mobile platform. So the event is all about app discovery in an age of noise — how to get social, mobile and gaming apps noticed and take them to the top.
The winner will get a company profile on the VentureBeat site and two free tickets ($300 value) to DiscoveryBeat. In addition, if you nominate an app but are not from the company itself, your name will automatically be entered in a drawing for one free ticket to be announced on Wednesday, Dec. 2.
The winner and four runner-ups will be eligible for these prizes from Flurry.*
1. Free promotional credit of $500 for AppCircle which will cross-promote the winning developer(s) application across Flurry’s network of participating AppCircle developers. Participation in AppCircle guarantees additional downloads.
2. Free three-month trial of Flurry Analytics Pro, which provides application developers additional, powerful insight to improve their in-application marketing, including:
Free-to-Paid App Conversion Tracking: tracks how many downloaded free applications are converted to the premium version from within the application.
App Cross-Sell Conversion Tracking: tracks how many downloads of other applications offered by the developer are converted to additional downloads from within the application.
App Cross-Usage Tracking: tracks and reports which applications within a developer’s portfolio are used in combination across the developer’s user base.
*Note that to redeem these prizes, developers need to use, or be willing to add, Flurry Analytics and Flurry AppCircle.
“Flurry is proud to support DiscoveryBeat, an event that addresses what our network of thousands of developers tell us is their No. 1 pain point in the App Store: Discovery,” said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry. With only 100 applications in the featured or top 50 categories, over 99.9 percent of applications are not easily found by consumers. Flurry is working with developers to solve this problem in a collaborative, powerful way through its new service, AppCircle.”
Here are the rules for applicants:
1. Any company can submit an app. No more than one app recommendation per company.
2. Please don’t submit any apps that haven’t debuted yet (open betas are OK).
3. Submit by end of day on Monday, Nov. 30.
Click here to fill out the entry form to nominate an app that deserves to be discovered!
To buy tickets to the event, click here.
It’s all part of our DiscoveryBeat event to be held on Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. The DiscoveryBeat Apps Contest is being sponsored by Flurry, which recently launched its AppCircle app recommendation engine for the iPhone.
Getting apps discovered is no easy task when there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of competing apps on a social networking or mobile platform. So the event is all about app discovery in an age of noise — how to get social, mobile and gaming apps noticed and take them to the top.
The winner will get a company profile on the VentureBeat site and two free tickets ($300 value) to DiscoveryBeat. In addition, if you nominate an app but are not from the company itself, your name will automatically be entered in a drawing for one free ticket to be announced on Wednesday, Dec. 2.
The winner and four runner-ups will be eligible for these prizes from Flurry.*
1. Free promotional credit of $500 for AppCircle which will cross-promote the winning developer(s) application across Flurry’s network of participating AppCircle developers. Participation in AppCircle guarantees additional downloads.
2. Free three-month trial of Flurry Analytics Pro, which provides application developers additional, powerful insight to improve their in-application marketing, including:
Free-to-Paid App Conversion Tracking: tracks how many downloaded free applications are converted to the premium version from within the application.
App Cross-Sell Conversion Tracking: tracks how many downloads of other applications offered by the developer are converted to additional downloads from within the application.
App Cross-Usage Tracking: tracks and reports which applications within a developer’s portfolio are used in combination across the developer’s user base.
*Note that to redeem these prizes, developers need to use, or be willing to add, Flurry Analytics and Flurry AppCircle.
“Flurry is proud to support DiscoveryBeat, an event that addresses what our network of thousands of developers tell us is their No. 1 pain point in the App Store: Discovery,” said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry. With only 100 applications in the featured or top 50 categories, over 99.9 percent of applications are not easily found by consumers. Flurry is working with developers to solve this problem in a collaborative, powerful way through its new service, AppCircle.”
Here are the rules for applicants:
1. Any company can submit an app. No more than one app recommendation per company.
2. Please don’t submit any apps that haven’t debuted yet (open betas are OK).
3. Submit by end of day on Monday, Nov. 30.
Click here to fill out the entry form to nominate an app that deserves to be discovered!
To buy tickets to the event, click here.
Chip salget fortsetter utvinning i oktober med 5,1 prosent vekst
Globalt salg av halvledere chips steg 5,1 prosent i oktober til $ 21.7 milliarder kroner, sammenlignet med en måned tidligere, ifølge Semiconductor Industry Association handel gruppe. Veksten viser at chip industrien, er et bellwether for den totale økonomien, fortsatt på bøte på vei inn i høytiden. Men salget for oktober er fortsatt 3,5 prosent under de $ 22.5 billion rapporterte et år siden. For de første 10 månedene av året, chip er $ 180 milliarder kroner, ned 16,6 prosent fra $ 215.8 milliarder år siden. The sales tallene tre måneders glidende gjennomsnitt. "Oktober er historisk sett en sterk måned for halvlederindustrien som elektronisk utstyr produsenter rampe produksjon for høytiden. Lagerstyring hele forsyningskjeden har vært veldig stramt, og dette kan forlenge fjerde kvartal bygge sesongen av noen få uker, sier George Scalise, president i SIA. Den bedre chip salget reflekterer en gjenoppretting av den totale globale økonomien, sa Scalise. Oktober salget viste forbedringer i alle geografiske regioner, med Europa som viser den største forbedringen med salget opp 7,5 prosent over september. Samlet er chip salget ventet å falle 11,6 prosent til $ 219.7 milliarder i 2009 sammenlignet med 2008. Det er lavere enn tidligere estimater på en 21 prosent spådde nedgang.
Dads i shorts, er stilige moms
Dads i korte shorts og moms i bikube hairdos blir alle raseri på internett.
"Pulp Fiction" vinnerens problemer
Roger Avary, som skrev "Pulp Fiction", kan tweeting fra innsiden fengsel.
Falsk alarm: Sony Ericsson Aino ikke har blitt trukket ut etter alle
Det har vært noen urovekkende nyheter om Sony Ericssons siste. Først ble Satio trakk seg i Storbritannia, så det ble til Aino tur holdes tilbake. Heldigvis viste det seg at Aino's eksil er bare en ubegrunnet rykte ...
Answering entrepreneurs’ most vexing questions
(Editor’s note: Jason Cohen is an angel investor and the founder of Smart Bear Software. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
I characterize running a business as making 1,000 decisions every day – and being sure of none of them.
It’s a difficult, harrowing (and often lonely) truth. Even with co-founders to collude with, you’re always uncertain, and you always have a pile of questions you wish you could ask someone who’s been down this road before.
The rise of the entrepreneur blogger has helped. Advice from Jason Fried, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink and others have molded and encouraged countless startup founders, myself included.
But essays are still just static proclamations. They don’t answer your questions. They don’t take your unique situation into account. And they are the voice of a single writer who may or may not share your attitude, values, or business model.
A new community called Answers OnStartups is hoping to offer a new alternative. Entrepreneurs, VCs, and Angels all gather to share their collective intelligence – and it’s not done in essay form, it’s Q&A.
Besides advice from your peers, many of the better-known bloggers are participating in the conversation. Among the active users are Spolsky, Neil Davidson (RedGate, Business of Software), Bob Walsh (47 Hats) – along with myself and fellow Entrepreneur Corner columnist Dharmesh Shah.
The site has been up for about a month. To date, 1,200 users have answered more than 600 questions.
For example, recently new startup founder Sam Saffron recently asked which is better: Getting the exact domain name you want, but with a hyphen between the words, or getting a longer domain with a prefix or different words, but no hyphen.
The discussion brought up a number of interesting points that Sam might have otherwise overlooked – both pro- and con-hyphen. Among them:
Be careful if you decide to run words together. For example www.experts-exchange.com would be very bad as one word: www.expertsexchange.com because some people would see: “Expert Sex Change”.
People trying to find your site will often type the unhyphenated version by accident.
Hyphens convey inferiority (especially to the site w/o the hyphen in their domain) in that you accepted a hand me down domain. In addition it confuses users as to if your site is affiliated with the hyphen-less site.
Many SEO experts will tell you that hyphens in the domain with devaluate your search ranking.
Hyphens aren’t as bad as some make them out to be, since in the world of social media and search, people don’t type in your domain name. So it doesn’t matter which URL you use.
Search engines really, really, really like to see keywords in domain names. It’s probably more valuable to rank higher in search results than to eliminate a hyphen
If people remember your company name they’ll find it on Google. So it’s better to have a memorable name than eliminate hyphens.
As with any open discussion, there’s rarely universal consensus – but the replies gave Sam plenty of food for thought. (He ultimately went with the hyphen.)
The variety is one of the keys to how Answers OnStartups works. You’ll interact with experts whose material you might have read, but you’ll also talk business with fellow entrepreneurs – focusing on specific topics that are burning a hole in your head right now.
I hope to meet you there.
Photo by niallkennedy via Flickr
I characterize running a business as making 1,000 decisions every day – and being sure of none of them.
It’s a difficult, harrowing (and often lonely) truth. Even with co-founders to collude with, you’re always uncertain, and you always have a pile of questions you wish you could ask someone who’s been down this road before.
The rise of the entrepreneur blogger has helped. Advice from Jason Fried, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink and others have molded and encouraged countless startup founders, myself included.
But essays are still just static proclamations. They don’t answer your questions. They don’t take your unique situation into account. And they are the voice of a single writer who may or may not share your attitude, values, or business model.
A new community called Answers OnStartups is hoping to offer a new alternative. Entrepreneurs, VCs, and Angels all gather to share their collective intelligence – and it’s not done in essay form, it’s Q&A.
Besides advice from your peers, many of the better-known bloggers are participating in the conversation. Among the active users are Spolsky, Neil Davidson (RedGate, Business of Software), Bob Walsh (47 Hats) – along with myself and fellow Entrepreneur Corner columnist Dharmesh Shah.
The site has been up for about a month. To date, 1,200 users have answered more than 600 questions.
For example, recently new startup founder Sam Saffron recently asked which is better: Getting the exact domain name you want, but with a hyphen between the words, or getting a longer domain with a prefix or different words, but no hyphen.
The discussion brought up a number of interesting points that Sam might have otherwise overlooked – both pro- and con-hyphen. Among them:
Be careful if you decide to run words together. For example www.experts-exchange.com would be very bad as one word: www.expertsexchange.com because some people would see: “Expert Sex Change”.
People trying to find your site will often type the unhyphenated version by accident.
Hyphens convey inferiority (especially to the site w/o the hyphen in their domain) in that you accepted a hand me down domain. In addition it confuses users as to if your site is affiliated with the hyphen-less site.
Many SEO experts will tell you that hyphens in the domain with devaluate your search ranking.
Hyphens aren’t as bad as some make them out to be, since in the world of social media and search, people don’t type in your domain name. So it doesn’t matter which URL you use.
Search engines really, really, really like to see keywords in domain names. It’s probably more valuable to rank higher in search results than to eliminate a hyphen
If people remember your company name they’ll find it on Google. So it’s better to have a memorable name than eliminate hyphens.
As with any open discussion, there’s rarely universal consensus – but the replies gave Sam plenty of food for thought. (He ultimately went with the hyphen.)
The variety is one of the keys to how Answers OnStartups works. You’ll interact with experts whose material you might have read, but you’ll also talk business with fellow entrepreneurs – focusing on specific topics that are burning a hole in your head right now.
I hope to meet you there.
Photo by niallkennedy via Flickr
Serious Business looks for life beyond Friends For Sale!
Friends For Sale! has had tremendous staying power as a popular app on Facebook. Launched in November 2007, the social game has attracted more than 25 million registered users, and more than a million people still use it every day.
But the company that created the app, Serious Business, wants to be more than a one-hit wonder. That’s easier said than done, but we’ll see if it can make lightning strike twice. Earlier this month, the San Francisco company launched a spy game on Facebook called The Hierarchy, and so far the results are promising, with more than 600,000 users to date.
If it succeeds, Serious Business will indeed enter that elite group of companies that have more than one hit on one of the world’s most successful social networks. But so far, the company’s own struggles show how making blockbuster Facebook games is far from easy.
Friends For Sale! was the brainchild of Siqi Chen (right), who was working as an engineer at search engine Powerset, before it was acquired by Microsoft. He started working on his own app as soon as Facebook opened up its platform to third-party developers in May 2007. He built an app within six weeks and launched it on June 15.
The app was Mafia, a Facebook version of a party game where players pretend to assassinate each other. Within a month, the game had 100,000 users. That was pretty good, since it came at the beginning of Facebook’s rapid expansion. Chen was at the right place at the right time. He thought that someone would have the opportunity to create a company as big as Electronic Arts by making games on Facebook.
Chen was still working at Powerset full time. On the side, he continued making Facebook apps. His next app was a dating app that wasn’t billed as a dating app. He had noticed that it was embarrassing for friends to be caught on dating sites, since it made it seem like they were desperate. So he decided to design an app for socializing that served the same purpose, connecting real people with each other. But it was a tongue in cheek game that made you feel like either a “hot girl” or a “rich dude.” It was a marketplace around owning people, as if they were pets. You could make money buying and selling other people, and win popularity contests with bribes. That’s how Friends For Sale! was born.
Within a month after the launch, Friends For Sale! had more than a million users and Chen quit his day job. He applied for funding through the incubator, Y Combinator, but dropped out of it because Friends For Sale! was taking off. He co-founded Serious Business with his friend Alex Le. They started monetizing the game with ads at first.
Then another business model fell into their laps. One of their richest and most active users offered them $10,000 in cash to buy $1 million in the game’s virtual currency. Chen and Le turned him down. Then they found a week later that the user in question had become the most popular player in the game. He had done so by paying off other popular members with real presents. They then started to charge fees and use special ads known as offers in exchange for virtual currency.
The offers business model was very successful. The game’s fans include a lot of Facebook users who have never played games before. In the meantime, they were reading blog posts on social gaming by venture capitalist Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners. By that time, they had also recruited Ryan Ferrier, founder of Powerset, as their chief operating officer. Lightspeed invested $4 million in the company.
That was all the company needed to get off the ground, since the revenues from Friends For Sale! made it profitable. The company now has 32 employees and is still making money.
But Serious Games has had limited success with its other launches since Friends For Sale! One game, Happy Hour, did well until Facebook banned alcohol-related apps. Another game, Rock Legends, has more than 800,000 active monthly users. In that game, you form your own band and try to become the hottest act on Facebook. It was popular, particularly in East Asia. But it didn’t have the staying power of Friends For Sale!
In the meantime, lots of others have passed Serious Business by. Zynga has something like 209.1 million active monthly users, according to AppData, thanks to games such as the phenomenally successful FarmVille. It has stayed in the top ranks ever since launching Texas Hold ‘Em Poker — before Friends For Sale! — by coming up with repeat hits. Others who have done this include Playfish, RockYou, 6Waves and Slide. Serious Business ranks No. 23 on Facebook with 7.7 million monthly active users. It has a long way to go to catch up to its rivals. One of them, Playfish, was recently acquired by Electronic Arts for as much as $400 million. And Zynga, said to be making money hand over fist, is preparing for an initial public offering. It has grown to more than 500 employees and contractors.
In contrast to its rivals, Serious Business hasn’t expanded rapidly and hasn’t spent much on ads. Nor has the company copied other Facebook hits, and it hasn’t tried to make a sequel to Friends For Sale! — another familiar tactic in the game industry. That’s because the game is already more like a service that is constantly updated with new features. The company prides itself on being data driven and adjusting to whatever works in the market.
While he hasn’t built the biggest social gaming firm, Chen says he has no regrets. He notes with pride that the company has raised a small amount of money and has financed its growth largely through its own profits. The company has used those profits to load up on talent, hiring developers who have created games from Warbook on Facebook to Madden NFL for EA.
Chen has stayed close to the product development process, spending about an hour a day on programming. Development time is stretching out as production values go up, and the team hasn’t been shy about killing games that aren’t up to snuff. With that kind of product pipeline in place, the company is confident the hits will come.
“We think that things can change very quickly,” said Charles Hudson (pictured at top, left), vice president of business development at Serious Business. “Others have done well with a large capital base to accelerate their growth. But you still need to have viral growth. One hit game can lift you into the top tier of companies out there.”
Adds Chen, “Zynga and Playfish are not the be all and end all. There is still room for others to emerge.”
The Hierarchy launched at the beginning of November and is still in its public beta. It has been a top gainer on the Inside Social Games weekly list for three weeks, even without a big marketing push. Chen says one other game, using Adobe’s Flash technology, is in the works and will launch in a beta test by the end of the year. The company is adding four to six employees per month.
Chen has occasionally considered expanding into other platforms. But he says that Facebook has the “lowest friction for distribution.” That is, you can launch a game more inexpensively and watch it grow huge audiences more easily on Facebook than any other platform.
Meanwhile, the retention numbers of Friends For Sale! are high. At this point, about 90 percent of revenues come via virtual goods. And about 85 percent of those revenues come from direct payments. About 15 percent comes from special offers. The company’s top user has paid more than $70,000. With friends like that, Chen can count on Friends For Sale! fueling more game development.
But the company that created the app, Serious Business, wants to be more than a one-hit wonder. That’s easier said than done, but we’ll see if it can make lightning strike twice. Earlier this month, the San Francisco company launched a spy game on Facebook called The Hierarchy, and so far the results are promising, with more than 600,000 users to date.
If it succeeds, Serious Business will indeed enter that elite group of companies that have more than one hit on one of the world’s most successful social networks. But so far, the company’s own struggles show how making blockbuster Facebook games is far from easy.
Friends For Sale! was the brainchild of Siqi Chen (right), who was working as an engineer at search engine Powerset, before it was acquired by Microsoft. He started working on his own app as soon as Facebook opened up its platform to third-party developers in May 2007. He built an app within six weeks and launched it on June 15.
The app was Mafia, a Facebook version of a party game where players pretend to assassinate each other. Within a month, the game had 100,000 users. That was pretty good, since it came at the beginning of Facebook’s rapid expansion. Chen was at the right place at the right time. He thought that someone would have the opportunity to create a company as big as Electronic Arts by making games on Facebook.
Chen was still working at Powerset full time. On the side, he continued making Facebook apps. His next app was a dating app that wasn’t billed as a dating app. He had noticed that it was embarrassing for friends to be caught on dating sites, since it made it seem like they were desperate. So he decided to design an app for socializing that served the same purpose, connecting real people with each other. But it was a tongue in cheek game that made you feel like either a “hot girl” or a “rich dude.” It was a marketplace around owning people, as if they were pets. You could make money buying and selling other people, and win popularity contests with bribes. That’s how Friends For Sale! was born.
Within a month after the launch, Friends For Sale! had more than a million users and Chen quit his day job. He applied for funding through the incubator, Y Combinator, but dropped out of it because Friends For Sale! was taking off. He co-founded Serious Business with his friend Alex Le. They started monetizing the game with ads at first.
Then another business model fell into their laps. One of their richest and most active users offered them $10,000 in cash to buy $1 million in the game’s virtual currency. Chen and Le turned him down. Then they found a week later that the user in question had become the most popular player in the game. He had done so by paying off other popular members with real presents. They then started to charge fees and use special ads known as offers in exchange for virtual currency.
The offers business model was very successful. The game’s fans include a lot of Facebook users who have never played games before. In the meantime, they were reading blog posts on social gaming by venture capitalist Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners. By that time, they had also recruited Ryan Ferrier, founder of Powerset, as their chief operating officer. Lightspeed invested $4 million in the company.
That was all the company needed to get off the ground, since the revenues from Friends For Sale! made it profitable. The company now has 32 employees and is still making money.
But Serious Games has had limited success with its other launches since Friends For Sale! One game, Happy Hour, did well until Facebook banned alcohol-related apps. Another game, Rock Legends, has more than 800,000 active monthly users. In that game, you form your own band and try to become the hottest act on Facebook. It was popular, particularly in East Asia. But it didn’t have the staying power of Friends For Sale!
In the meantime, lots of others have passed Serious Business by. Zynga has something like 209.1 million active monthly users, according to AppData, thanks to games such as the phenomenally successful FarmVille. It has stayed in the top ranks ever since launching Texas Hold ‘Em Poker — before Friends For Sale! — by coming up with repeat hits. Others who have done this include Playfish, RockYou, 6Waves and Slide. Serious Business ranks No. 23 on Facebook with 7.7 million monthly active users. It has a long way to go to catch up to its rivals. One of them, Playfish, was recently acquired by Electronic Arts for as much as $400 million. And Zynga, said to be making money hand over fist, is preparing for an initial public offering. It has grown to more than 500 employees and contractors.
In contrast to its rivals, Serious Business hasn’t expanded rapidly and hasn’t spent much on ads. Nor has the company copied other Facebook hits, and it hasn’t tried to make a sequel to Friends For Sale! — another familiar tactic in the game industry. That’s because the game is already more like a service that is constantly updated with new features. The company prides itself on being data driven and adjusting to whatever works in the market.
While he hasn’t built the biggest social gaming firm, Chen says he has no regrets. He notes with pride that the company has raised a small amount of money and has financed its growth largely through its own profits. The company has used those profits to load up on talent, hiring developers who have created games from Warbook on Facebook to Madden NFL for EA.
Chen has stayed close to the product development process, spending about an hour a day on programming. Development time is stretching out as production values go up, and the team hasn’t been shy about killing games that aren’t up to snuff. With that kind of product pipeline in place, the company is confident the hits will come.
“We think that things can change very quickly,” said Charles Hudson (pictured at top, left), vice president of business development at Serious Business. “Others have done well with a large capital base to accelerate their growth. But you still need to have viral growth. One hit game can lift you into the top tier of companies out there.”
Adds Chen, “Zynga and Playfish are not the be all and end all. There is still room for others to emerge.”
The Hierarchy launched at the beginning of November and is still in its public beta. It has been a top gainer on the Inside Social Games weekly list for three weeks, even without a big marketing push. Chen says one other game, using Adobe’s Flash technology, is in the works and will launch in a beta test by the end of the year. The company is adding four to six employees per month.
Chen has occasionally considered expanding into other platforms. But he says that Facebook has the “lowest friction for distribution.” That is, you can launch a game more inexpensively and watch it grow huge audiences more easily on Facebook than any other platform.
Meanwhile, the retention numbers of Friends For Sale! are high. At this point, about 90 percent of revenues come via virtual goods. And about 85 percent of those revenues come from direct payments. About 15 percent comes from special offers. The company’s top user has paid more than $70,000. With friends like that, Chen can count on Friends For Sale! fueling more game development.
Samsung har solgt 50 millioner touch-telefoner, er Star i tet
Til tross for nedgangstider, er den vært et godt år for Samsung, med økt salg og markedsandeler, og det har vært et godt år for deres berøring telefon divisjon. Samsung annonserte i dag at de har ...
Nokia N900 UI stående modus aktiveres, kommer til deg snart
Det er ingen hemmelighet at Nokia N900 UI er i ferd med å få en stående modus-muliggjør oppdatering ganske snart. Hva kan komme som en overraskelse om, er at telefonen har alle funksjonene trengs allerede, og den trenger bare ...
BrightRoll says video ad profits are soaring
Video ad network BrightRoll is seeing rapid revenue growth, according to third quarter financial numbers it just released.
“Online video advertising is growing fast enough to make up for most of the fallout in display, email and other online businesses,” said chief executive Tod Sacerdoti. Additionally, campaign momentum is accelerating around its “performance pricing” structure, which includes CPE (cost per engagement), CPV (cost per completed video) and CPC (cost per click).
The market’s growing due to the availability of more inventory, Sacerdoti said (BrightRoll claims to offer the largest selection of branded video ad inventory of any third party ad network), plus publishers’ ability to move their video ad content to higher monetized/trafficked areas due to better targeting capabilities. With online behavioral targeting now available on the BrightRoll platform, and more content, plus the recessionary decreases in costs, online video advertising has become more recession resistant than other forms of advertising including online display and paid search.
According to Comscore, BrightRoll’s network now ranks in position #11 on the top 100 Video Properties (I’ve included the October list below), which is impressive when you consider they’re competing against the likes of Hulu, Facebook, Fox, etc. While it’s unlikely BrightRoll will beat out YouTube’s online ad network anytime soon, Sacerdoti believes the top five positions will be ad networks by this time next year.
According to BrightRoll, “Two overarching trends in 2009 are the importance of consumer product goods advertisers, now representing their largest ad category, and the trend of online advertising monetizing content beyond simply branded video content.”
In BrightRoll’s Q3 update, it says the high price of online video is no longer a barrier to video advertising, as the price has fallen and performance pricing (CPE, CPV, CPC) has emerged while Q3 sales are soaring. The company says the number of campaigns is up 46 percent, quarter-over-quarter, while the number of advertisers is up 31 percent.
Earlier this year, BrightRoll introduced performance pricing, whose success, over the first few months, is compelling. Take the case of Ooma, a phone service that lets anyone make free calls over the internet using its own device, the Ooma Telo. It’s not hard to see why Ooma is happy with their BrightRoll campaign, according to its statement in a recent BrightRoll press release.
I asked Sacerdoti about the technology and metrics the BrightRoll platform is able to collect and offer its clients. Monetizing online video has been somewhat problematic because the technology in place interfered with easy communications between publishers and third party video ad platforms.
But that’s beginning to change, partly due to the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), via the VAST Standard. According to the IAB, VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) includes a standard XML-based ad response for in-stream video and an XML Schema Definition (“XSD”) for developers. It’s meant to accommodate the majority of current practices within the online digital video advertising business. The gains we‘re seeing now were almost impossible to achieve until the VAST Standard made it easier to obtain end-to-end control between ad servers and associated video players.
Among the issues evolving, but yet to be fully resolved, control of the video player looms large, BrightRoll offers end-to-end control of the entire streaming process (measurement/optimization of it), while publishers usually want control of the video player, which ends up interfering with the best analytics we could get, according to Sacerdoti.
While most publishers do not typically relinquish control of the video player, a lot of data can still be gathered such as eyeballs viewing a video ad — often, by forcing an interaction to find out how present and engaged viewers are at key points while the video is streaming, which tells BrightRoll that viewers are still paying attention to a video.
Discussion about video ad standards and the success of BrightRoll’s performance pricing is encouraging because it’s a sign standards organizations such as the Internet Advertising Bureau and Web Analytics Association are effective and necessary for the evolution of online video advertising, web analytics and social media. The end results of standards implementation are better communications and measurement, ultimately resulting in higher monetization and a lower cost — and that’s to everyone’s benefit.
Among future developments to be tackled are the localization of video advertising –- Sacerdoti mentioned if an advertiser had $1 million to spend targeting the San Francisco Bay Area, there would not be enough publishers to spend that money, today. But in the future, he says there will be a large amount of local targeted advertising. And that will make third party video ad networks like BrightRoll even more profitable.
“Online video advertising is growing fast enough to make up for most of the fallout in display, email and other online businesses,” said chief executive Tod Sacerdoti. Additionally, campaign momentum is accelerating around its “performance pricing” structure, which includes CPE (cost per engagement), CPV (cost per completed video) and CPC (cost per click).
The market’s growing due to the availability of more inventory, Sacerdoti said (BrightRoll claims to offer the largest selection of branded video ad inventory of any third party ad network), plus publishers’ ability to move their video ad content to higher monetized/trafficked areas due to better targeting capabilities. With online behavioral targeting now available on the BrightRoll platform, and more content, plus the recessionary decreases in costs, online video advertising has become more recession resistant than other forms of advertising including online display and paid search.
According to Comscore, BrightRoll’s network now ranks in position #11 on the top 100 Video Properties (I’ve included the October list below), which is impressive when you consider they’re competing against the likes of Hulu, Facebook, Fox, etc. While it’s unlikely BrightRoll will beat out YouTube’s online ad network anytime soon, Sacerdoti believes the top five positions will be ad networks by this time next year.
According to BrightRoll, “Two overarching trends in 2009 are the importance of consumer product goods advertisers, now representing their largest ad category, and the trend of online advertising monetizing content beyond simply branded video content.”
In BrightRoll’s Q3 update, it says the high price of online video is no longer a barrier to video advertising, as the price has fallen and performance pricing (CPE, CPV, CPC) has emerged while Q3 sales are soaring. The company says the number of campaigns is up 46 percent, quarter-over-quarter, while the number of advertisers is up 31 percent.
Earlier this year, BrightRoll introduced performance pricing, whose success, over the first few months, is compelling. Take the case of Ooma, a phone service that lets anyone make free calls over the internet using its own device, the Ooma Telo. It’s not hard to see why Ooma is happy with their BrightRoll campaign, according to its statement in a recent BrightRoll press release.
I asked Sacerdoti about the technology and metrics the BrightRoll platform is able to collect and offer its clients. Monetizing online video has been somewhat problematic because the technology in place interfered with easy communications between publishers and third party video ad platforms.
But that’s beginning to change, partly due to the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau), via the VAST Standard. According to the IAB, VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) includes a standard XML-based ad response for in-stream video and an XML Schema Definition (“XSD”) for developers. It’s meant to accommodate the majority of current practices within the online digital video advertising business. The gains we‘re seeing now were almost impossible to achieve until the VAST Standard made it easier to obtain end-to-end control between ad servers and associated video players.
Among the issues evolving, but yet to be fully resolved, control of the video player looms large, BrightRoll offers end-to-end control of the entire streaming process (measurement/optimization of it), while publishers usually want control of the video player, which ends up interfering with the best analytics we could get, according to Sacerdoti.
While most publishers do not typically relinquish control of the video player, a lot of data can still be gathered such as eyeballs viewing a video ad — often, by forcing an interaction to find out how present and engaged viewers are at key points while the video is streaming, which tells BrightRoll that viewers are still paying attention to a video.
Discussion about video ad standards and the success of BrightRoll’s performance pricing is encouraging because it’s a sign standards organizations such as the Internet Advertising Bureau and Web Analytics Association are effective and necessary for the evolution of online video advertising, web analytics and social media. The end results of standards implementation are better communications and measurement, ultimately resulting in higher monetization and a lower cost — and that’s to everyone’s benefit.
Among future developments to be tackled are the localization of video advertising –- Sacerdoti mentioned if an advertiser had $1 million to spend targeting the San Francisco Bay Area, there would not be enough publishers to spend that money, today. But in the future, he says there will be a large amount of local targeted advertising. And that will make third party video ad networks like BrightRoll even more profitable.
SupportSpace tar $ 10M for ekstern teknisk support
SupportSpace, leverandør av teknisk støtte på forespørsel, har reist 10 millioner dollar i en ny runde med finansiering. Basert i South San Francisco er selskapet støttet av Emergence Capital Partners, BRM Group og Gemini Israel. Den har nå tjente NOK 24.25 millioner til dato.
søndag 29. november 2009
Black Friday e-commerce spending rose 11 percent, comScore says
Black Friday online spending rose 11 percent in the U.S. to $595 million, according to market researcher comScore.
The e-commerce spending figure compares to $534 million spent on Black Friday a year ago. On Thanksgiving day, online spending was $310 million, up 10 percent from $288 million a year ago. And in the first 27 shopping days of November, online sales were $10.57 billion, up 3 percent from $10.25 billion a year ago.
Black Friday saw the second-heaviest online spending day to date in 2009.
“Black Friday, better known as a shopping bonanza in brick-and-mortar retail stores, is increasingly becoming one of the landmark days in the online holiday shopping world,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni. “While this acceleration in spending suggests the online holiday season may be shaping up slightly more optimistically than anticipated, it may also reflect the heavy discounting and creative promotions being put forth by retailers that now encompass the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.”
Fulgoni said that Cyber Monday – the traditional kick-off to the online holiday shopping season – and the subsequent weeks will be the real test for how online retailers fare this season.
One of the new influencers are shopping sites known as Black Friday deal sites, which aggregate deals for shoppers. comScore studied eight Black Friday deal sites for the five days ending Black Friday (Nov. 23-27) compared to the corresponding days last year. Of those, BFads.net led the pack with 3.9 million unique visitors, up 4 percent versus last year. BlackFriday.info followed with 3.5 million visitors, while Black-Friday.net (up 136 percent to 2.3 million visitors) showed the fastest growth.
Meanwhile, comScore said the number of visitors to coupon sites on Black Friday grew to 3.3 million visitors, up 17 percent versus a year ago. Like Experian Hitwise, comScore reported that Amazon.com was the most visited online retail site on Black Friday, with traffic up 28 percent from the same day a year ago.
[Photo credit: New York Daily News]
The e-commerce spending figure compares to $534 million spent on Black Friday a year ago. On Thanksgiving day, online spending was $310 million, up 10 percent from $288 million a year ago. And in the first 27 shopping days of November, online sales were $10.57 billion, up 3 percent from $10.25 billion a year ago.
Black Friday saw the second-heaviest online spending day to date in 2009.
“Black Friday, better known as a shopping bonanza in brick-and-mortar retail stores, is increasingly becoming one of the landmark days in the online holiday shopping world,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni. “While this acceleration in spending suggests the online holiday season may be shaping up slightly more optimistically than anticipated, it may also reflect the heavy discounting and creative promotions being put forth by retailers that now encompass the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.”
Fulgoni said that Cyber Monday – the traditional kick-off to the online holiday shopping season – and the subsequent weeks will be the real test for how online retailers fare this season.
One of the new influencers are shopping sites known as Black Friday deal sites, which aggregate deals for shoppers. comScore studied eight Black Friday deal sites for the five days ending Black Friday (Nov. 23-27) compared to the corresponding days last year. Of those, BFads.net led the pack with 3.9 million unique visitors, up 4 percent versus last year. BlackFriday.info followed with 3.5 million visitors, while Black-Friday.net (up 136 percent to 2.3 million visitors) showed the fastest growth.
Meanwhile, comScore said the number of visitors to coupon sites on Black Friday grew to 3.3 million visitors, up 17 percent versus a year ago. Like Experian Hitwise, comScore reported that Amazon.com was the most visited online retail site on Black Friday, with traffic up 28 percent from the same day a year ago.
[Photo credit: New York Daily News]
Amazon.com kanter ut Walmart på Black Friday online trafikk
Mens Walmart dominerte høsttakkefest Internett-trafikk, så Amazon.com mest trafikk på Black Friday, som er den tradisjonelle begynnelsen av ferien salg sesongen. Experian Hitwise rapporterte at Amazon var det beste besøkte detaljhandel nettsted blant de topp 500 retail sites. Samlet trafikk til detaljhandel nettsteder var opp 4 prosent på Black Friday forhold til Thanksgiving Day, dagen før. Men år over år, var trafikken ned 9 prosent sammenlignet med Black Friday et år siden. Amazon fikk 13,55 prosent av USAs besøk blant de topp 500, opp 22 prosent fra 11,06 prosent på Black Friday et år siden og en økning på 9 prosent fra Thanksgiving Day, 2009. Dette er andre året på rad at Amazon var det beste stedet på Black Friday. Det betyr at den typiske mønsteret holder seg, slik Walmart.com har vært nr. 1 nettstedet på høsttakkefest for de siste fem årene. Walmart var den nest mest besøkte nettsted med 11,8 prosent av besøkene til toppen 500, opp 13 prosent fra 9,88 prosent på Black Friday et år siden, men ned 25 prosent fra Thanksgiving Day, 2009. Target hadde 5,65 prosent av besøkene på topp 500 på Black Friday, opp 22 prosent fra 4,62 prosent for et år siden og flatt sammenlignet med Thanksgiving Day, 2009. Blant de 20 beste steder besøkes på Black Friday 2009, så Apple Store den største økningen i antall besøk i forhold til Thanksgiving Day 2009, med 110 prosent økning. Staples så en 47 prosent økning fra et år siden og Dell så en 40 prosent økning. Den neste milepælen for å se på er Cyber mandag morgen, noe som er typisk en av de tyngste dagene for e-handel salg i løpet av høytiden.
And the best interactive outdoor holiday campaign goes to … Zozzy TV?
Interactive outdoor display advertising has become a hot holiday trend, with Google displaying voice search results on a massive screen in Times Square. Across town at Saks Fifth Avenue, Microsoft sponsored a display to promote Windows 7, which Mac fans tried to hijack.
But bootstrapped Dublin startup ZozzyTV.com may have quietly stolen a march on them both by enabling users worldwide the chance, a la David Hasselhoff, to be huge in Europe. Or at least Dublin.
In a joint promotion with Vodaphone, the video startup is selecting user-submitted videos to be “streetcasted” onto enormous LCD screens mounted on busy sections of Grafton Street, Henry Street, and Temple Bar in Dublin.
While all video is pre-submitted and screened, Zozzy TV has added functionality to allow users on-location to request their own videos via a text message. (Like a jukebox, the video will be played within an hour of the text request.) A Zozzy TV Android application, potentially available within the next two weeks, will enable users to shoot and upload on location.
Vodaphone is picking up considerable exposure from the promotion, with one in six videos providing a 30-60 second ad slot for the company. About 150,000 pedestrians daily are being exposed to the displays, says Billy Brennan, chief executive of Fireworkz Interactive, which owns the ZozzyTV.com site. Brennan sees the trial paving the way for new participatory outdoor display opportunities, for example where users can shoot and upload video at sporting events or music festivals.
Zozzy TV will apply no restrictions on non-copyrighted content, and submissions so far have run the typical viral gamut, including musical performances, stupid pet tricks, impressions, and apparently an angler catching fish. If you want to say hello to relatives or try being an Irish busker, submissions will be accepted throughout the holidays.
But bootstrapped Dublin startup ZozzyTV.com may have quietly stolen a march on them both by enabling users worldwide the chance, a la David Hasselhoff, to be huge in Europe. Or at least Dublin.
In a joint promotion with Vodaphone, the video startup is selecting user-submitted videos to be “streetcasted” onto enormous LCD screens mounted on busy sections of Grafton Street, Henry Street, and Temple Bar in Dublin.
While all video is pre-submitted and screened, Zozzy TV has added functionality to allow users on-location to request their own videos via a text message. (Like a jukebox, the video will be played within an hour of the text request.) A Zozzy TV Android application, potentially available within the next two weeks, will enable users to shoot and upload on location.
Vodaphone is picking up considerable exposure from the promotion, with one in six videos providing a 30-60 second ad slot for the company. About 150,000 pedestrians daily are being exposed to the displays, says Billy Brennan, chief executive of Fireworkz Interactive, which owns the ZozzyTV.com site. Brennan sees the trial paving the way for new participatory outdoor display opportunities, for example where users can shoot and upload video at sporting events or music festivals.
Zozzy TV will apply no restrictions on non-copyrighted content, and submissions so far have run the typical viral gamut, including musical performances, stupid pet tricks, impressions, and apparently an angler catching fish. If you want to say hello to relatives or try being an Irish busker, submissions will be accepted throughout the holidays.
"New Moon" fører ferie billettkontoret
"Twilight: New Moon" og "The Blind Side» førte det beste Thanksgiving helgen på billettkontoret.
lørdag 28. november 2009
Walmart vant Thanksgiving Day online shopping kamp
For femte år på rad, så Walmart mest online trafikken på Thanksgiving dag, ifølge analyseselskapet Experian Hitwise. Walmart hadde 14,97 prosent av av trafikken blant de 500 mest besøkte detaljhandel nettsider torsdag, opp 9 prosent fra 13,72 prosent for ett år siden. Amazon.com ble nummer to med 12,41 prosent, opp 30 prosent fra 9,56 prosent for ett år siden. Og Best Buy var 6,22 prosent av Internett-trafikk, opp 3 prosent fra 6,05 prosent for ett år siden. US besøk til toppen 500 detaljhandel nettsider var ned 15 prosent på høsttakkefest i 2009, sammenlignet med 2008. Den amerikanske trafikk til Black Friday steder på Thanksgiving dagen var ned 4 prosent fra 2008. Blant de 20 beste steder besøkes på Thanksgiving Day 2009, så Old Navy den største økningen i antall besøk i forhold til 2008 med en 59 prosent økning. Amazon så en økning på 30 prosent og Target så en 28 prosent økning på 65,63 prosent. Facebook mottok den største økningen i besøk fra et år siden, med trafikk opp 671 prosent. Ifølge Akamai, global retail trafikken toppet seg på Thanksgiving Day i USA på 5.732.966 besøkende per minutt rundt 2 pm, Eastern Standard Time.
Week in review: Modern Warfare 2 smashes records, Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises $9M
Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. (It’s a little shorter than normal due to the Thanksgiving holiday.) First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 smashes industry records — The latest in a parade of video game hits, Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has sold an estimated $550 million in the first five days of its release, bringing the entire Call of Duty series to $3 billion in sales.
16-year-old launches Vye music-sharing site. Another Napster? — With the help of close friends and family, Charles Allatt has launched Vye Music, which aggregates search results from other music sites.
What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS? — A former Google employee (who wasn’t involved in the Chrome OS project) argues that people are missing some of the key implications behind the in-development, web-focused operating system.
Review: Multiplayer gaming makes Modern Warfare 2 live up to its hype — VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi says the sales juggernaut’s single-player campaign has strong gameplay but a weak plot, but it really excels in multiplayer mode.
And here are four more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:
Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises $9M from Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz — The startup was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and lead engineer Justin Rosenstein, who say they’re trying to reimagine productivity management.
Our top 10 gift ideas: Last year’s gadgets are worth the price — We look at 10 products or services that make good gifts because they’ve been around for a while, meaning the kinks are worked out and the prices are lower.
LinkedIn expands platform in an attempt to one-up Facebook Connect — The professional networking site is allowing external business applications to access your LinkedIn data (with your permission of course). The goal is to turn LinkedIn into your default professional identity across apps.
IPO talk revs up for Tesla Motors — Rumors swirled earlier this week that the electric car maker would be considering an initial public offering soon, though the company denied it. Speaking of Tesla, the city of Downey, Calif. is looking like a probable spot for the company’s assembly plant.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 smashes industry records — The latest in a parade of video game hits, Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has sold an estimated $550 million in the first five days of its release, bringing the entire Call of Duty series to $3 billion in sales.
16-year-old launches Vye music-sharing site. Another Napster? — With the help of close friends and family, Charles Allatt has launched Vye Music, which aggregates search results from other music sites.
What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS? — A former Google employee (who wasn’t involved in the Chrome OS project) argues that people are missing some of the key implications behind the in-development, web-focused operating system.
Review: Multiplayer gaming makes Modern Warfare 2 live up to its hype — VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi says the sales juggernaut’s single-player campaign has strong gameplay but a weak plot, but it really excels in multiplayer mode.
And here are four more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:
Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises $9M from Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz — The startup was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and lead engineer Justin Rosenstein, who say they’re trying to reimagine productivity management.
Our top 10 gift ideas: Last year’s gadgets are worth the price — We look at 10 products or services that make good gifts because they’ve been around for a while, meaning the kinks are worked out and the prices are lower.
LinkedIn expands platform in an attempt to one-up Facebook Connect — The professional networking site is allowing external business applications to access your LinkedIn data (with your permission of course). The goal is to turn LinkedIn into your default professional identity across apps.
IPO talk revs up for Tesla Motors — Rumors swirled earlier this week that the electric car maker would be considering an initial public offering soon, though the company denied it. Speaking of Tesla, the city of Downey, Calif. is looking like a probable spot for the company’s assembly plant.
Acer lanserer Acer Væske, mer Androids på vei
Acer hoppet headfirst inn på mobilmarkedet i år, hovedsakelig stole på de prøvde og sanne PocketPC. De er klargjøring seg for år to og lovende en balansert WinMo / Android blanding ...
Entrepreneur Corner Roundup: Business before health and what to do if you’re hacked
Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.
Sacrifice your health for your startup – You’ve heard about the importance of a work/life balance, but if you’re an entrepreneur, those rules often don’t apply. Start-ups are demanding beasts, notes angel investor Jason Cohen, and if you’re not completely obsessed with your company in its early days – often at the risk of your own health – your odds of success may be lower.
Killing innovation with corner cases – It’s good to think ahead, but focusing too much on the future and remote probabilities can kill innovation. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank discusses how this corner case thinking can bog down a startup.
You’ve been hacked. Now what? – The first 48 hours are critical after your retail site is compromised by hackers. Chris Drake, CEO and founder of FireHost, Inc. gives you a to-do list to get back online and quickly restore customer confidence.
Moore’s Law beats customer feedback – Ignoring your customers doesn’t sound like a successful way to run a business, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang notes that by doing that – and trusting in Moore’s Law (which basically says tech performance will double ever year), the graphics company was able to survive and thrive.
The Start-up Chronicles: Who Is Invested in Your Success? – Start-ups face a variety of challenges on a day-to-day basis. This new weekly feature in EC gives an inside view of life in a bootstrapped startup. This week: Forming an eco-system.
Sacrifice your health for your startup – You’ve heard about the importance of a work/life balance, but if you’re an entrepreneur, those rules often don’t apply. Start-ups are demanding beasts, notes angel investor Jason Cohen, and if you’re not completely obsessed with your company in its early days – often at the risk of your own health – your odds of success may be lower.
Killing innovation with corner cases – It’s good to think ahead, but focusing too much on the future and remote probabilities can kill innovation. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank discusses how this corner case thinking can bog down a startup.
You’ve been hacked. Now what? – The first 48 hours are critical after your retail site is compromised by hackers. Chris Drake, CEO and founder of FireHost, Inc. gives you a to-do list to get back online and quickly restore customer confidence.
Moore’s Law beats customer feedback – Ignoring your customers doesn’t sound like a successful way to run a business, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang notes that by doing that – and trusting in Moore’s Law (which basically says tech performance will double ever year), the graphics company was able to survive and thrive.
The Start-up Chronicles: Who Is Invested in Your Success? – Start-ups face a variety of challenges on a day-to-day basis. This new weekly feature in EC gives an inside view of life in a bootstrapped startup. This week: Forming an eco-system.
Nokia E72 Review: The business of messaging
Nokia E72 er en av disse håndsettene alle snakker om lenge før utgivelsen deres. Det kan være noe mye å snakke om - tross alt alle vet hva du kan forvente av Eseries og de har aldri la oss ned. Men likevel ...
fredag 27. november 2009
Downey, Calif. says yes to Tesla Model S Plant
Downey, Calif. is one step closer to becoming home to Tesla Motors‘ pricey new assembly plant. The City Council voted earlier this week to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Industrial Realty Group, the company that manages the 80-acre tract of land that Tesla is considering.
Currently used by a film and television production studio, the property would be home to the EV company’s Model S manufacturing facility — a factory that could bring up to $365 million in investment to the local area. That’s how much the company said it would allocate from the $465 million low-interest loan package it received from the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year.
According to the Downey Council, the plant could result in $20 million in extra tax and utility revenue, on top of 1,200 to 1,500 new jobs. As part of its deal with the Industrial Realty Group, the city will pay the firm $8.7 million to lure Tesla to the area, money that could prove well worth it.
The electric vehicle company has been scouting for a plant site for months now. Its CEO, Elon Musk, had been adamant from the start that he wanted it to be in California — an interesting choice when competitors like Fisker Automotive have located much of their manufacturing operations in cheaper locales, including Asia.
It still hasn’t confirmed that Downey is its choice for the plant. The deal between the realty group and the city — which owns 20 acres of the land in question — would only make it easier for Tesla to choose it. But Downey mayor Mario Guerra insists that it’s pretty much a done deal.
Still, maybe the town shouldn’t get it’s hopes up. The company has previously been in pretty serious talks with San Jose, Calif. and Albuquerque, N.M. So until it actually inks a deal with Downey, no assumptions should be made.
Tesla is running out of time, however, and needs to get production rolling at its new facility fairly quickly to hit its late 2011 deadline for the Model S’s release. The company plans to sell each for $57,400, or about $50,000 after government tax breaks.
Currently used by a film and television production studio, the property would be home to the EV company’s Model S manufacturing facility — a factory that could bring up to $365 million in investment to the local area. That’s how much the company said it would allocate from the $465 million low-interest loan package it received from the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year.
According to the Downey Council, the plant could result in $20 million in extra tax and utility revenue, on top of 1,200 to 1,500 new jobs. As part of its deal with the Industrial Realty Group, the city will pay the firm $8.7 million to lure Tesla to the area, money that could prove well worth it.
The electric vehicle company has been scouting for a plant site for months now. Its CEO, Elon Musk, had been adamant from the start that he wanted it to be in California — an interesting choice when competitors like Fisker Automotive have located much of their manufacturing operations in cheaper locales, including Asia.
It still hasn’t confirmed that Downey is its choice for the plant. The deal between the realty group and the city — which owns 20 acres of the land in question — would only make it easier for Tesla to choose it. But Downey mayor Mario Guerra insists that it’s pretty much a done deal.
Still, maybe the town shouldn’t get it’s hopes up. The company has previously been in pretty serious talks with San Jose, Calif. and Albuquerque, N.M. So until it actually inks a deal with Downey, no assumptions should be made.
Tesla is running out of time, however, and needs to get production rolling at its new facility fairly quickly to hit its late 2011 deadline for the Model S’s release. The company plans to sell each for $57,400, or about $50,000 after government tax breaks.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 smashes industry records
The latest in a parade of hits, Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has sold an estimated $550 million in the first five days of its release, bringing the entire The Call of Duty series $3 billion in sales between its six titles.
Modern Warfare 2 officially smashed opening-day sales records with 4.7 million copies sold in its first day in the U.S. and U.K. alone. To put that in perspective, James Bond has been a franchise for 47 years and grossed just over $5 billion.
Activision isn’t the only company growing fat on Modern Warfare’s success. GameStop, an online gaming retailer, sold 2.5 million copies of MW2 within three days of its release. Not coincidentally, GameStop’s Q3 sales rose to $1.82 billion, up from $1.7 billion in Q2. Activision ended the day’s trading up 0.09 percent, closing at $11.57.
“If you consider the number of hours our audiences are engaged in playing Call of Duty games, it is likely to be one of the most viewed of all entertainment experiences in modern history,” says Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision.
MW2 includes over 40 types of weapon and presents the player with the option of participating in a civilian massacre — a controversial move that VentureBeat reporter Dean Takahashi examined in his review of the game. This scene has inspired some outcry: There were early reports that it was banned in Russia. In fact, the game was released there, but without the massacre scene. To help offset some of the outrage over the massacre concept, Activision has donated $1 million to veteran’s groups in the U.S.
MW2’s launch beat every previous-best first and five-day launch in the entertainment industry: box office, book releases and video games launches alike have been humbled by its sales. Previously, the five-day sales of Grand Theft Auto IV held the record at 6 million units and $500 million dollars. MW2 has been so successful, in fact, that a special edition of the game is being offered with full functioning night vision goggles. So far, no handgun edition has been announced.
Modern Warfare 2 officially smashed opening-day sales records with 4.7 million copies sold in its first day in the U.S. and U.K. alone. To put that in perspective, James Bond has been a franchise for 47 years and grossed just over $5 billion.
Activision isn’t the only company growing fat on Modern Warfare’s success. GameStop, an online gaming retailer, sold 2.5 million copies of MW2 within three days of its release. Not coincidentally, GameStop’s Q3 sales rose to $1.82 billion, up from $1.7 billion in Q2. Activision ended the day’s trading up 0.09 percent, closing at $11.57.
“If you consider the number of hours our audiences are engaged in playing Call of Duty games, it is likely to be one of the most viewed of all entertainment experiences in modern history,” says Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision.
MW2 includes over 40 types of weapon and presents the player with the option of participating in a civilian massacre — a controversial move that VentureBeat reporter Dean Takahashi examined in his review of the game. This scene has inspired some outcry: There were early reports that it was banned in Russia. In fact, the game was released there, but without the massacre scene. To help offset some of the outrage over the massacre concept, Activision has donated $1 million to veteran’s groups in the U.S.
MW2’s launch beat every previous-best first and five-day launch in the entertainment industry: box office, book releases and video games launches alike have been humbled by its sales. Previously, the five-day sales of Grand Theft Auto IV held the record at 6 million units and $500 million dollars. MW2 has been so successful, in fact, that a special edition of the game is being offered with full functioning night vision goggles. So far, no handgun edition has been announced.
What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS?
Chrome OS is Google’s latest entry into the consumer space. It is designed to be an operating system that runs on customized hardware and provides the user with only a state-of-the art browser running HTML-5 and some plugins. The tech (and mainstream) media has seen no shortage of opinions about its meaning and future impact on the industry. Unfortunately, I think most people have missed some of the key implications of Chrome OS.
[As a disclosure, I am a former Google employee, having worked there from 2002 to 2008, but I don't have any inside information on this project. In fact I didn't even know of its existence before I left.]
Google has two main aims with this project:
To use the Google brand and buzz about its “game-changing OS” to push for new and better web apps using nascent technology. This lets Google reduce its customers’ dependence on local apps it does not control.
Once a lot of these apps are deployed and become heavily used, the mass market will force owners of closed systems like the iPhone to implement support for HTML-5, the latest version of HTML, and rich web interfaces. Coupled with net neutrality (which Google currently strongly supporting) this will allow Google to circumvent uncooperative devices and network providers, and access consumers currently hidden behind locked system.
Here is a more detailed analysis:
People are switching to netbooks in droves. Ever since the advent of AJAX and Web 2.0, a great number of things that people used to do using local apps are being done by web-based applications. This transformation is by no means complete; it is clear that many interfaces are not refined and much critical functionality is absent, but the trend is undeniable.
Modern operating systems have very rich interfaces that give application developers and users a great deal of power. This is great in some ways — it lets you write awesome local applications, and offers great performance. However, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” A rich interface provides ample opportunities for unforeseen consequences, bugs, viruses and other bad things.
As power and performance becomes less important (computers are getting faster, and word processing isn’t getting any more CPU intensive), it is becoming more difficult to justify all the extra responsibility. Although hardware and user-facing software has changed incredibly over the past three decades, operating systems are remarkably stagnant – virtual memory really hasn’t changed much in 15 years, and from the user’s perspective, file systems haven’t changed much since the days of UNIX, in the 1970s.
Motivations:
People these days mostly use their computers for a few key things: Internet browsing, dealing with email, writing documents, writing spreadsheets, playing music, watching video, and editing photos. As increasing numbers of people join the online world (especially in developing countries), users need to stay as happy with their Internet-related experiences. More happy users lead to more searches and more advertising revenue.
Google needs to ensure that the web and everything people use to access the web stays as open as possible. If closed ecosystems dominated by unfriendly companies, such as Apple (and its iPhone), and Microsoft (with Windows desktop and mobile) gain power, Google won’t have unfettered access to the end-user. To do challenge them, Google needs to reduce switching costs and make users indifferent about which computing devices they use by commodifying them. The Chrome OS plan is to entice users to move as much data as possible into the “cloud”, making the data and apps transparently follow the user onto whatever device he or she happens to be using.
Goals:
Google realizes that if this momentum towards cloud-based computing stalls, it will be in a difficult position — it will depend on others for its access to customers. So success of Chrome OS is not really about whether a lot of people use Chrome OS!
Instead, success (or failure) will be measured by the creation of new and better web apps using HTML-5 and HTML-5-related technology. This will allow Google to reduce dependence on local apps it does not and cannot control. (By the way, HTML-5 is the latest version of HTML, and will allow web sites to add offline storage — the ability to store data in your browser for use when disconnected from the internet — better video playback and graphics support, along with interaction between different documents.)
Let me repeat this: Success is not about whether a lot of people use Chrome OS, but whether a lot of people end up using Web applications. This is a simple conclusion, really, but very profound. Even if everyone ends up using some other OS, as long as all the apps they use are web-based, Google wins, because its products can compete on a level playing field. Instead of building special applications that run on your OS and store files through proprietary methods, a web application will run on any device, making them the same from the consumer’s perspective. Critically, enhancements proposed in HTML-5 will allow them to run offline as well as online. (In fact, Chrome OS, being open source, will probably be forked into a less proprietary system distributed by any number of parties. Even if this hurts the user base of Google Chrome, Google wins.)
Obstacles facing Chrome OS:
One of the largest looming issues for Chrome OS is the planned lack of local file system support. For various reasons (some copyright-related) most people store their music and movies locally on their hard drives. Removing local filesystems will reduce the difficulty of using the system but will pose huge problems for movies, photos, and music. Unless a decent web-based solution for this problem is invented soon, Chrome OS’ usefulness might be limited. The dearth of good photo editing solutions online is really no different than the poor quality of web applications — they will need to improve.
Moving down this path implies the users’ data will almost completely be stored primarily in the cloud. Having all their data concentrated in one location might give users pause: What if the service is unavailable when the data are needed? What if the service goes out of business or is hacked? These perceptions will need to be handled effectively.
What about Android?
Android, Google’s operating system for mobile phones, is going to be BIG. Google desperately needs to prevent the iPhone from building increasing global market dominance in its current form. Android already provides a better hardware abstraction layer, better testing, limited interfaces, better security and includes a full-fledged browser. It satisfies pretty much all of the requirements set out by the public docs of Chrome OS, and already includes support for local applications. In two years, there will be an even larger group of Android apps available. Looking at why Google wants to create a new OS and not simply co-opt (or even fork) Android provides the most convincing evidence of my hypothesis yet — that Google is more concerned about the proliferation of web apps than the wide adoption of Chrome OS.
Here are motivations people have raised for separating Chrome OS and Android:
Too many uses of Android will slow development on the OS internally. This may have a little bit of truth, but I think it’s not a good reason. Linux survives multiple changes to the source code from all kinds of people doing all kinds of different things with it, and it doesn’t slow down development that much. This is certainly true now that Linux is stable, but is probably true of its earlier, less solid stages too.
People use touch-screen devices differently than keyboard-and-mouse-only devices. This may be true, but what evidence is there that touch-screens won’t be on most netbooks within two years? If one wants to build a browser-based device, one should keep in mind that a touch screen is far more useful than a mouse.
Android isn’t ready for use on desktops. It’s too hard to get to work on different processors. This is a weaker argument — a lot of people have already ported Android to Atom processors, and there doesn’t seem to be much trouble getting it to run.
Adding a very different hardware platform will make UI and app design too hard. This is a pretty good argument. Supporting widely disparate hardware is not going to be trivial for app developers — the wide distribution in Android version and hardware configurations is already causing some angst. There’s no need to insist that all applications run on an Android notebook.
Android is for things with small screens you can make calls on. Chrome OS is for other things. Also a decent argument. In the next few years, Google Voice, Skype, and pervasive Internet will mean that phone and video calls will certainly be made from notebooks. Besides, any optimization you would make to Chrome OS to speed up browsing could easily be made to the Android codebase. Most of Android’s codebase is not designed to deal with calls, but with enhanced security, easy application development, and maximization of battery life — all things that Chrome OS will need.
Conclusions:
While Google would really love to have a large user base, even a Chrome OS with few users will not be a failure. The number of installs is secondary to the number of web-based applications that it fosters. Google will do everything in its power to make this happen. This includes building better web apps and cloud-based storage tools itself, and using its brand to scare other companies into building apps (for fear of missing out when Chrome OS gets big).
If Google promoted Android instead of Chrome OS, this strategy would not work; developers would simply focus on building Android apps. Android apps would help Google’s phones and make Android netbooks work nicely, but would not help Google penetrate other established and closed ecosystems. Getting the same apps to work across platforms is the key to success because it allows hardware commodification and easy migration paths between the systems.
And this is why Google is building Chrome OS.
Vijay Pandurangan worked for Google for six years, designing and implementing some of the core systems infrastructure for the company as well as parts of the ads system. He now runs a consulting firm called Olima Ventures and is an angel investor. You can read his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.
[As a disclosure, I am a former Google employee, having worked there from 2002 to 2008, but I don't have any inside information on this project. In fact I didn't even know of its existence before I left.]
Google has two main aims with this project:
To use the Google brand and buzz about its “game-changing OS” to push for new and better web apps using nascent technology. This lets Google reduce its customers’ dependence on local apps it does not control.
Once a lot of these apps are deployed and become heavily used, the mass market will force owners of closed systems like the iPhone to implement support for HTML-5, the latest version of HTML, and rich web interfaces. Coupled with net neutrality (which Google currently strongly supporting) this will allow Google to circumvent uncooperative devices and network providers, and access consumers currently hidden behind locked system.
Here is a more detailed analysis:
People are switching to netbooks in droves. Ever since the advent of AJAX and Web 2.0, a great number of things that people used to do using local apps are being done by web-based applications. This transformation is by no means complete; it is clear that many interfaces are not refined and much critical functionality is absent, but the trend is undeniable.
Modern operating systems have very rich interfaces that give application developers and users a great deal of power. This is great in some ways — it lets you write awesome local applications, and offers great performance. However, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” A rich interface provides ample opportunities for unforeseen consequences, bugs, viruses and other bad things.
As power and performance becomes less important (computers are getting faster, and word processing isn’t getting any more CPU intensive), it is becoming more difficult to justify all the extra responsibility. Although hardware and user-facing software has changed incredibly over the past three decades, operating systems are remarkably stagnant – virtual memory really hasn’t changed much in 15 years, and from the user’s perspective, file systems haven’t changed much since the days of UNIX, in the 1970s.
Motivations:
People these days mostly use their computers for a few key things: Internet browsing, dealing with email, writing documents, writing spreadsheets, playing music, watching video, and editing photos. As increasing numbers of people join the online world (especially in developing countries), users need to stay as happy with their Internet-related experiences. More happy users lead to more searches and more advertising revenue.
Google needs to ensure that the web and everything people use to access the web stays as open as possible. If closed ecosystems dominated by unfriendly companies, such as Apple (and its iPhone), and Microsoft (with Windows desktop and mobile) gain power, Google won’t have unfettered access to the end-user. To do challenge them, Google needs to reduce switching costs and make users indifferent about which computing devices they use by commodifying them. The Chrome OS plan is to entice users to move as much data as possible into the “cloud”, making the data and apps transparently follow the user onto whatever device he or she happens to be using.
Goals:
Google realizes that if this momentum towards cloud-based computing stalls, it will be in a difficult position — it will depend on others for its access to customers. So success of Chrome OS is not really about whether a lot of people use Chrome OS!
Instead, success (or failure) will be measured by the creation of new and better web apps using HTML-5 and HTML-5-related technology. This will allow Google to reduce dependence on local apps it does not and cannot control. (By the way, HTML-5 is the latest version of HTML, and will allow web sites to add offline storage — the ability to store data in your browser for use when disconnected from the internet — better video playback and graphics support, along with interaction between different documents.)
Let me repeat this: Success is not about whether a lot of people use Chrome OS, but whether a lot of people end up using Web applications. This is a simple conclusion, really, but very profound. Even if everyone ends up using some other OS, as long as all the apps they use are web-based, Google wins, because its products can compete on a level playing field. Instead of building special applications that run on your OS and store files through proprietary methods, a web application will run on any device, making them the same from the consumer’s perspective. Critically, enhancements proposed in HTML-5 will allow them to run offline as well as online. (In fact, Chrome OS, being open source, will probably be forked into a less proprietary system distributed by any number of parties. Even if this hurts the user base of Google Chrome, Google wins.)
Obstacles facing Chrome OS:
One of the largest looming issues for Chrome OS is the planned lack of local file system support. For various reasons (some copyright-related) most people store their music and movies locally on their hard drives. Removing local filesystems will reduce the difficulty of using the system but will pose huge problems for movies, photos, and music. Unless a decent web-based solution for this problem is invented soon, Chrome OS’ usefulness might be limited. The dearth of good photo editing solutions online is really no different than the poor quality of web applications — they will need to improve.
Moving down this path implies the users’ data will almost completely be stored primarily in the cloud. Having all their data concentrated in one location might give users pause: What if the service is unavailable when the data are needed? What if the service goes out of business or is hacked? These perceptions will need to be handled effectively.
What about Android?
Android, Google’s operating system for mobile phones, is going to be BIG. Google desperately needs to prevent the iPhone from building increasing global market dominance in its current form. Android already provides a better hardware abstraction layer, better testing, limited interfaces, better security and includes a full-fledged browser. It satisfies pretty much all of the requirements set out by the public docs of Chrome OS, and already includes support for local applications. In two years, there will be an even larger group of Android apps available. Looking at why Google wants to create a new OS and not simply co-opt (or even fork) Android provides the most convincing evidence of my hypothesis yet — that Google is more concerned about the proliferation of web apps than the wide adoption of Chrome OS.
Here are motivations people have raised for separating Chrome OS and Android:
Too many uses of Android will slow development on the OS internally. This may have a little bit of truth, but I think it’s not a good reason. Linux survives multiple changes to the source code from all kinds of people doing all kinds of different things with it, and it doesn’t slow down development that much. This is certainly true now that Linux is stable, but is probably true of its earlier, less solid stages too.
People use touch-screen devices differently than keyboard-and-mouse-only devices. This may be true, but what evidence is there that touch-screens won’t be on most netbooks within two years? If one wants to build a browser-based device, one should keep in mind that a touch screen is far more useful than a mouse.
Android isn’t ready for use on desktops. It’s too hard to get to work on different processors. This is a weaker argument — a lot of people have already ported Android to Atom processors, and there doesn’t seem to be much trouble getting it to run.
Adding a very different hardware platform will make UI and app design too hard. This is a pretty good argument. Supporting widely disparate hardware is not going to be trivial for app developers — the wide distribution in Android version and hardware configurations is already causing some angst. There’s no need to insist that all applications run on an Android notebook.
Android is for things with small screens you can make calls on. Chrome OS is for other things. Also a decent argument. In the next few years, Google Voice, Skype, and pervasive Internet will mean that phone and video calls will certainly be made from notebooks. Besides, any optimization you would make to Chrome OS to speed up browsing could easily be made to the Android codebase. Most of Android’s codebase is not designed to deal with calls, but with enhanced security, easy application development, and maximization of battery life — all things that Chrome OS will need.
Conclusions:
While Google would really love to have a large user base, even a Chrome OS with few users will not be a failure. The number of installs is secondary to the number of web-based applications that it fosters. Google will do everything in its power to make this happen. This includes building better web apps and cloud-based storage tools itself, and using its brand to scare other companies into building apps (for fear of missing out when Chrome OS gets big).
If Google promoted Android instead of Chrome OS, this strategy would not work; developers would simply focus on building Android apps. Android apps would help Google’s phones and make Android netbooks work nicely, but would not help Google penetrate other established and closed ecosystems. Getting the same apps to work across platforms is the key to success because it allows hardware commodification and easy migration paths between the systems.
And this is why Google is building Chrome OS.
Vijay Pandurangan worked for Google for six years, designing and implementing some of the core systems infrastructure for the company as well as parts of the ads system. He now runs a consulting firm called Olima Ventures and is an angel investor. You can read his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.
Twitter Japan’s new monetization plan: Premium content
Twitter Japan will start allowing “premium” tweeters to charge readers a fee, said an executive at Twitter’s Japanese partner.
The announcement comes from Kenichi Sughi, an executive at Digital Garage, whose remarks at the Mobidec 2009 conference were reported by local news sources and then summarized by Media Asia. It’s not entirely clear what users would have to pay to read — other sites picking up on the news are describing it as a way to charge for access to tweets, but Media Asia says “the plan will allow audiences to view some text on all pages but will charge a fee to unlock access to certain images, URLs, and text.” Readers could pay a monthly subscription fee, or a one-time fee to access specific content.
Is this something that could work across Twitter’s user base? TechCrunch’s Serkan Toto, who is based in Japan, lays out the case that the premium content model is a good fit for the Japanese market because consumers are already used to paying for content on their phones and online.
But what about in the United States? First of all, it’s important to remember that Twitter’s Japanese service has been very different, business-wise, from its American counterpart — it launched last year with ads, for one thing, while Twitter executives in the U.S. are only starting to talk about “non-traditional” advertising. It’s hard to imagine paying to access tweets, per se, since they get passed around and republished so liberally — they’re about the length of a brief quote in a newspaper article, after all.
I do find the idea of charging for additional text, images, video, or audio kind of appealing. A news organization, for example, could use their Twitter account to break stories in real-time, then supplement those stories with additional content that they charge for. As with any online pay-for-content scheme, it would be a tough balancing act to pull off, but it’s good to see someone try.
The announcement comes from Kenichi Sughi, an executive at Digital Garage, whose remarks at the Mobidec 2009 conference were reported by local news sources and then summarized by Media Asia. It’s not entirely clear what users would have to pay to read — other sites picking up on the news are describing it as a way to charge for access to tweets, but Media Asia says “the plan will allow audiences to view some text on all pages but will charge a fee to unlock access to certain images, URLs, and text.” Readers could pay a monthly subscription fee, or a one-time fee to access specific content.
Is this something that could work across Twitter’s user base? TechCrunch’s Serkan Toto, who is based in Japan, lays out the case that the premium content model is a good fit for the Japanese market because consumers are already used to paying for content on their phones and online.
But what about in the United States? First of all, it’s important to remember that Twitter’s Japanese service has been very different, business-wise, from its American counterpart — it launched last year with ads, for one thing, while Twitter executives in the U.S. are only starting to talk about “non-traditional” advertising. It’s hard to imagine paying to access tweets, per se, since they get passed around and republished so liberally — they’re about the length of a brief quote in a newspaper article, after all.
I do find the idea of charging for additional text, images, video, or audio kind of appealing. A news organization, for example, could use their Twitter account to break stories in real-time, then supplement those stories with additional content that they charge for. As with any online pay-for-content scheme, it would be a tough balancing act to pull off, but it’s good to see someone try.
Mendes sitter kledd i siste anti-pels kampanje
skuespillerinne og dyrs rettigheter aktivisten Eva Mendes håper du vil unngå pels som du handler for ferie.
'Everybody's Fine "stasjoner hjem familien meldingen
Hvis du stirrer på tomme seter rundt Thanksgiving middagsbordet, Robert De Niro's nyeste film kunne hjelpe.
Samsung å avsløre Bada 8. desember i London
Jeg er fortsatt en stor pose med blanda reaksjoner når det kommer til Samsungs nye mobile operativsystem, Bada. På den ene siden Samsung har alltid vist seg å være ganske dårlig på programvaresiden ting (Trenger du bevis? Se den varme rotet som er Samsung Se II). På den annen side er det ingenting som litt [...]
Og du trodde at iPhone allerede var dyrt
Hvis jeg hadde $ 3.2 millioner dollar for å kaste bort på noe som en telefon, vil jeg mye heller bare bygge en hær av robot transportør duer til å levere alle meldingene mine for hånd. Noen, antar jeg foretrekker litt mer begrunnet i deres fullstendig irrasjonell kjøp - og dermed eksistensen av denne $ 3.2 millioner dollar iPhone. The [...]
Blanchett: Jeg elsker oppdra gutter
Cate Blanchett kan være et moteikon, men i hennes virkelige liv skuespillerinnen er en mor som elsker den daglige chore av støvsuger.
Skudd av Facebook's Kommende Redesign In The Wild, med en ny vekt på Søk
I løpet av de siste dagene, har Facebook tilsynelatende blitt rullet ut noen UI endres til et lite antall brukere, flytter mange av navigasjonen elementer som nå hvile på bunnen av skjermen tilbake til venstre sidebar. Endringene er subtile nok til at de sannsynligvis ikke vil gnist enda en bruker opprør mot Facebook - bortsett fra folk som vil hate den automatisk - men de er veldig viktige. Endringene i skjermbildet ovenfor er nesten identisk med skudd som ble presentert på Facebook's utviklere garasje for en måned siden. Men er det noen viktige forskjeller. Først, søk nå mye mer fremtredende plassering, vises like ovenfor (og nesten som en forlengelse av) din News Feed.
Stange Bedfellows: eBay og Microsofts Team Up To Offer Daglig Avtaler Til IE8 Brukere
I tid for Black Friday, Microsoft og eBay er i partnerskap for å tilby eBay Daglig tilbud til Internet Explorer 8 brukere direkte fra nettleseren. Via en Internet Explorer Slice, vil Microsoft tilby brukerne den beste "Daily tilbud" fra eBay fra leseren. Avtalene vil bli funnet i løpet av dine favoritter på IE8, og vil bli oppdatert daglig innenfor leseren. I forbindelse med den nye funksjonen vil eBay også lansere en "12 Days of Deals" kampanjen som har en del av dagen i nettleseren starter i morgen. Søkefunksjonen vil også la deg søke eBay fra IE8 og vil vise foreslå populære produkter på eBay til brukerne. Og du kan finne og forhåndsvise eBay elementer fra alle nettsteder du er på uten å forlate siden. eBay tidligere lansert en nettleser merkepenn for IE fjor.
Adam Lambert album selger godt
Adam Lambert's tankevekkende American Music Awards resultatene ikke har skadet salget av sitt første album.
Going Shopping i dag? Del What You # JustBought med alle dine venner
Perfekt for Black Friday: JustBought.it lar deg dele hva du tenker på å kjøpe - eller hva du allerede har plukket opp - med Twitter og Facebook-venner i løpet av et par skritt. Når du registrerer deg for tjenesten, du kan ha den kobles direkte til Twitter og / eller Facebook regningen, og gir deg muligheten til å dele shopping erfaring med din sosiale grafen ved å la dine venner og tilhengere vet hva du har kjøpt der (inkludert bilder og produkt linker). Du kan koble opp med andre som har lignende interesser og lett finne ut om du har venner som allerede bruker tjenesten på Gmail eller Hotmail.
Makibishi: Cool interaktive Ninja komiske spillet for iPhone
Det er mer enn 100000 godkjente programmer i App Store nå, gjør det vanskeligere og vanskeligere å få øye på de virkelig gode. En av disse apps som ikke får nok oppkoblingstid (og at jeg vist en demonstrasjon av nylig) kalles Makibishi Comic (iTunes link) og tilbys av Tokyo-baserte GungHo Works (det er tilgjengelig på japansk og engelsk).
6 grunner til Twitter Japans Abonnement modell kan fungere (I Japan)
Vi rapporterte i dag at Digital Garage, Twitter partner i Japan, er klar til å rulle ut en ny Japan-eneste måten å tjene penger på tjenesten. Måten det vil fungere er ganske enkel: Japanske Twitter-brukere vil snart kunne lade sine tilhengere til å vise tweets - på månedsbasis eller per enkelt tweet. Ellers vil de bare se utdrag eller ingen tekst i posteringer i det hele tatt. Digital Garage får et 30% kutt. Lader ikke bedrifter for å holde regnskapet, men at brukerne skal betale for å vise tweets? Hva kan høres ut som et dristig trekk ved første faktisk gir mening, som Internett i Japan (hvor jeg er basert) har en rekke særegenheter som spiller i hendene på Digital Garage japanske operasjoner.
Let’s vote on it: Will Europeans use Gowalla, FourSquare or what?
So it's been nearly 10 days since Foursquare launched its social mobile game 'ground assault' into 50 more cities, including a bunch of European ones. But what I'd like to know is who's actually using it here in Europe?
Because, you see, Europeans are already quite well served by location based mobile applications like Qype, the various localised versions of Yelp, and other startups like Rummble. And there are increasingly new kids on the block like Flook.
What is clear however, is that only Foursquare and Gowalla (at least to my knowledge) have come up with this gaming approach to 'checking in' which has attracted so much interest from high profile blogs like TechCrunch and bloggers like Robert Scoble.
The question is, which will scale and ultimate prove the winner? Because - at least in this instance - we have two distinct approaches to the issue of social, mobile and location.
Because, you see, Europeans are already quite well served by location based mobile applications like Qype, the various localised versions of Yelp, and other startups like Rummble. And there are increasingly new kids on the block like Flook.
What is clear however, is that only Foursquare and Gowalla (at least to my knowledge) have come up with this gaming approach to 'checking in' which has attracted so much interest from high profile blogs like TechCrunch and bloggers like Robert Scoble.
The question is, which will scale and ultimate prove the winner? Because - at least in this instance - we have two distinct approaches to the issue of social, mobile and location.
Osmond's kalkun med en side av gevinsten
The Osmond family Thanksgiving fest kan ha hatt noe litt ekstra i år - en speilet disco ball trofé.
Sony Ericsson Aino trekkes ut fra britiske butikker like etter Satio
Bare en uke siden Carphone Warehouse dro ut Satio fra sine butikker på grunn av programvare problemer. Nå er det ikke-så-touchable Aino fulgt sitt Symbian søsken med klager touch ytelse ...
The Start-up Chronicles: Who Is Invested in Your Success?
(Editor’s Note: The Start-up Chronicles is a new weekly feature giving an inside view of the trials of a bootstrapped start-up – The Cost Savings Guy. CEO and founder Bruce Judson is also the author of “Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building A Successful Business on Your Own” and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.)
In business books, you read a lot about the ‘eco-system’ that surrounds successful companies. Generally, this consists of smaller companies that arise around (and feed off of) massively popular entities such as Google or Twitter (which are, in turn, enhanced by the smaller firms). For example, there are now a number of services that offer platforms to help businesses connect with potential customers through Twitter.
For smaller companies, though, the eco-system is made up of other companies—ranging from suppliers to business partners—that will benefit from their success. For a start-up, a motivated eco-system can be a significant way to jump-start awareness – as well as the value of its products and services.
As we approached the launch of “The Cost Savings Guy” (CSG) a few weeks ago, I gave this area a lot of thought. For a start-up, the dynamics of engaging an eco-system are far different than those faced by larger companies. Established companies create them by enabling other entities to work with their products or services – often making their API’s available, so that developers can integrate valuable new products and services.
In contrast, a start-up needs to aggressively motivate its eco-system. It’s unrealistic to think anyone will instinctively act on your behalf. Nothing happens unless you make it happen.
In launching CSG, I realized that the central issue for this rollout was not who constituted the eco-system of the business. (CSG is built on partnerships. We have a relationship with every company whose cost-saving services we recommend.) The real issue was what we could reasonably expect it to do to enhance our launch.
From experience, I knew there were at least three hurdles in motivating an eco-system to take action:
The need for specificity. When working with busy people, broad requests for aid don’t cut it. You are far more likely to get action with a very specific request.
Your request needs to be easy to implement. If you’re not creating work for others, you’re ahead of the game.
Ask for something special. Articulate why your requests have benefits for everyone involved.
With all this in mind I put together a plan and started making active requests. As objections occurred, I met them.
In some cases, I simply said, “I will write the first draft of what I am talking about and send it to you. Then, you can decide. “ By taking this approach, I made the request tangible and far more real, demonstrated I knew exactly what I wanted, eliminated as much of the work for the recipient as possible and showed that I was serious when I said “I will do all the work to make this happen.”
At launch, the eco-system responded and awareness of our service is quickly climbing. Right now, The Cost Savings Guy is ranked as the number #1 startup in November on KillerStartUps.com , and I am starting to get calls from press contacts initiated by our eco-system.
This effort also opened the door for discussions of joint initiative that can enhance CSG’s chances of success. Many of our partners have large, ongoing e-mail communications with customers in our target market. The right e-mail initiatives from these trusted providers, discussing CSG’s service, could quickly build a large customer base for the company.
These last benefits were unanticipated – and they underlined what’s probably the most important lesson of all. The best opportunities are rarely the ones that you predict ahead of time. They arise as you move forward, and often surprise you. But, they never happen unless you act first.
Photo by AndyRob via Flickr.
In business books, you read a lot about the ‘eco-system’ that surrounds successful companies. Generally, this consists of smaller companies that arise around (and feed off of) massively popular entities such as Google or Twitter (which are, in turn, enhanced by the smaller firms). For example, there are now a number of services that offer platforms to help businesses connect with potential customers through Twitter.
For smaller companies, though, the eco-system is made up of other companies—ranging from suppliers to business partners—that will benefit from their success. For a start-up, a motivated eco-system can be a significant way to jump-start awareness – as well as the value of its products and services.
As we approached the launch of “The Cost Savings Guy” (CSG) a few weeks ago, I gave this area a lot of thought. For a start-up, the dynamics of engaging an eco-system are far different than those faced by larger companies. Established companies create them by enabling other entities to work with their products or services – often making their API’s available, so that developers can integrate valuable new products and services.
In contrast, a start-up needs to aggressively motivate its eco-system. It’s unrealistic to think anyone will instinctively act on your behalf. Nothing happens unless you make it happen.
In launching CSG, I realized that the central issue for this rollout was not who constituted the eco-system of the business. (CSG is built on partnerships. We have a relationship with every company whose cost-saving services we recommend.) The real issue was what we could reasonably expect it to do to enhance our launch.
From experience, I knew there were at least three hurdles in motivating an eco-system to take action:
The need for specificity. When working with busy people, broad requests for aid don’t cut it. You are far more likely to get action with a very specific request.
Your request needs to be easy to implement. If you’re not creating work for others, you’re ahead of the game.
Ask for something special. Articulate why your requests have benefits for everyone involved.
With all this in mind I put together a plan and started making active requests. As objections occurred, I met them.
In some cases, I simply said, “I will write the first draft of what I am talking about and send it to you. Then, you can decide. “ By taking this approach, I made the request tangible and far more real, demonstrated I knew exactly what I wanted, eliminated as much of the work for the recipient as possible and showed that I was serious when I said “I will do all the work to make this happen.”
At launch, the eco-system responded and awareness of our service is quickly climbing. Right now, The Cost Savings Guy is ranked as the number #1 startup in November on KillerStartUps.com , and I am starting to get calls from press contacts initiated by our eco-system.
This effort also opened the door for discussions of joint initiative that can enhance CSG’s chances of success. Many of our partners have large, ongoing e-mail communications with customers in our target market. The right e-mail initiatives from these trusted providers, discussing CSG’s service, could quickly build a large customer base for the company.
These last benefits were unanticipated – and they underlined what’s probably the most important lesson of all. The best opportunities are rarely the ones that you predict ahead of time. They arise as you move forward, and often surprise you. But, they never happen unless you act first.
Photo by AndyRob via Flickr.
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