April 2008
43 posts
Techdirt: Exaggerating The Mobile Threat To Google →
Increasing use of the mobile screen is hardly likely to decrease usage of a full computer screen. If anything, it will likely make desktop computing more useful in some cases.
What business analysts do for software... →
“If you believe that software projects succeed or fail based on the quality of the requirements,” Schwaber says, “then you believe that software projects succeed or fail on the basis of business analysts, too.”
Microsoft | Microsoft device helps police pluck... →
Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes. The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use...
Election Day in Florida May Look Familiar - New... →
According to independent elections experts at Pew’s Electionline.org and other organizations, it is now harder to vote here[Florida] than in nearly every other state in the nation. Some critics predict that tens of thousands of potential voters will be kept off the rolls — many of them poor, black or Hispanic.
Informal Style of Electronic Messages Is Showing... →
As e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings become nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers, the informality of electronic communications is seeping into their schoolwork, a new study says. … “I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked...
How Different Is Murdoch’s New Wall Street... →
In the first four months of Murdoch’s stewardship, the Journal’s front page has clearly shifted focus, de-emphasizing business coverage that was the franchise, while placing much more emphasis on domestic politics and devoting more attention to international issues. But it is not, at least not yet, as broad as the New York Times on the same days.
For All You Do, Bud, This Blog Is About You -... →
Brew Blog is the brainchild of Paul Pendergrass and Pete Marino, communications consultants for Miller who wanted the brewer to have more influence over what’s covered in the industry. In 2006, they recruited Mr. Arndorfer from Advertising Age and told him to cover the sector like a beat reporter would.
Techdirt: Beer, Blogs And Bias →
Brew Blog. There are a few different, interesting points worth discussing here. First, the blog isn’t used as a blog about what’s going on at Miller Brewing. Instead, Miller hired an experienced reporter, and told him to just cover the beer industry as if he were a beat reporter. In other words, it’s reporting news — and even breaking stories on the competition.
Insurance Industry Explores Social Media, But... →
There really isn’t much activity happening in the insurance industry to use social media, and where it may be successful, it could likely be behind the firewall, impervious to public viewing. Update: Jeff Jarvis is also on the hunt for industries that are somewhat impervious to social media, I’ll agree, social media isn’t great for everything, let’s use our heads, not everything is a nail..
The Next Frontier after web 2.0 →
I’m not worried about information overload. I’m more concerned that sharing with intent is not supported very well right now. That is an area where we need innovation. RSS might become part of that innovation as a technology that lowers the threshold to share. But I’m betting on other things as well. In my opinion the next frontier will be to create alternative business models for “freemium”. If...
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes... →
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing...
NYC Is Getting a New High-Tech Defense Perimeter.... →
Every so often, great cities have to remake themselves if they want to stay great — adding a new layer of technological infrastructure to meet the challenges of the day. In the 1880s, Thomas Edison built the first central electrical power plant in lower Manhattan. In 1904, the city finished its very first subway line. The 1980s saw new fiber-optic data pipes, and today New York is in the middle of...
SlideShare Slammed with DDOS Attacks from China →
After these three failed attempts, SlideShare experienced a massive distributed denial of service attack starting at 10pm on Thursday, one day before the CNN website was attacked by Chinese instigators in apparent backlash to its coverage of the Tibetan protests. We’ve been told that the attack reached a peak of 2.5GB/sec and consisted entirely of packets sent from China.
Techdirt: GPS Will Now Tell You You're In A 'Bad'... →
While various GPS systems are competing to provide better, more interesting or more detailed “points of interest,” it appears that Honda is going even further. Its new GPS system will also warn drivers when they’re in a “bad neighborhood” where there’s a high crime rate, and where their cars may be more likely to be vandalized or stolen.
Caffeinate With Care: Small Shots Do a Brain... →
For optimal brain gain, regular tea breaks, as favored in the UK, are more effective than a 20-ounce French roast sucked down at Starbucks in lieu of breakfast.
The Three-Fold View of the Social Media User... →
I was documenting all of this in order to flesh out a psychologically-oriented framework for the user experience. One that would replace straight ahead user “needs” and “goals”, which work for user-software interaction design, with a self-reflexive set of user interests — better suited for user-software-user, or social interaction design. It seemed to me obvious that...
At Fast-Food Outlets: Premature Sticker Shock for... →
“Every single person has different caloric needs,” said Rebecca Solomon, the nutrition coordinator of the Program for Surgical Weight Loss at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “Just because you know the Rice Krispie treat is 430 calories doesn’t mean you have an understanding of how that fits into your caloric requirements.” She estimated that an “average-size person”— someone who weighs about...
Magic: Visual Search Engine Coming to iPhone in... →
Evolution Robotics ViPR visual search technology is coming to the iPhone this June. ViPR allows you to take a photo of any movie, CD or book, send it to a server, and automagically get an email back loaded with information and links pointing to YouTube videos or iTunes Music Store links.
Three Certain Things: Death, Taxes and the Shift... →
For the first time this year, more people filled out their tax forms using TurboTax’s online product than the version that comes in a box.
Soocial Enters the “Deep End of the Data... →
What do I mean by that? Automated, multi-way addess book sync is the Holy Grail of data portability. When it works flawlessly, it is damn-near magic. Make a change in any one tool, and it automatically shows up in all the others. Your hard drive crashes? Not a problem; there’s a copy in the cloud. But behind this “magic” is some of the hardest work in the software business. Why? Rock solid APIs...
how do you describe your friends? →
I don’t think our third partner is on Twitter, but he is also a pretty seriously rad guy big into YouTube and publishing
Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Facebook is... →
Jeremy Wagstaff has a blog post out saying Facebook is dead. It’s not dead really, it’s just that he’s noticing that he’s not getting any significant news feedy like information.
Wired News - AP News →
Web site technology is expensive, Freed said, but the payback is significant. The same survey showed that highly satisfied online banking customers are 31 percent more likely to buy additional services from the bank and 54 percent more likely to recommend the bank to others. So as banks wrangle with a deteriorating credit climate and huge mortgage-related losses, they will need to keep investing...
Twitter, again | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com →
there’s a huge hive mind out there around Web 2.0: All (or most) or its members subscribe to all (or most) of the other members’ Twitter streams. Thoughts appear, bounce around, scatter and coalesce. Apparently, reading blogs is no longer enough: By the time something hits the blogs, it’s old news. If you really want to keep up, you have to use Twitter.
Mowser Founder Says Mobile Web Is Dead. It’s The... →
So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.
A VC: We Need A New Path To Liquidity →
Watching all these machinations between Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, AOL, News Corp/MySpace, and their ilk makes me sick. They are playing around with Internet assets like they are toys. And meanwhile the services we have come to rely on like Flickr, AIM, Delicious, Yahoo Groups, FeedBurner, etc are an afterthought. The Internet is decomposing into a vast array of micro-services that we, the end...
Nokia develops navigating system based on image... →
Dr. Pulli says that there is nothing like it in the navigation market at the moment. “The instructions are based totally on real world pictures, not on synthetic maps,” he says. “We started developing the landmark mode when we realized that people read maps in different ways depending on things such as cultural background and gender.” A Nokia research group in India figured out that people there...
Techdirt: California Lawmaker Wants To Change Law... →
if the law starts treating digital goods as tangible goods, will that give people other rights — such as the right to do what they want with the content after purchase?
Google's App Engine: Aiming At Facebook, Not... →
If the Silicon Valley echo chamber wants to make up a competitor for AppEngine, its proper correlate (by a whisker) is Facebook’s F8 platform. If you must cram this new service into a pigeon hole, think of App Engine as the Facebook Platform for the grown-up web.
Barcodes on tombs to connect with the dead - The... →
A Japanese tombstone maker, Ishinokoe, has started putting the little square, black and white barcodes behind small, lockable doors on gravestones, allowing relatives of the deceased to access information and pictures about them, and even upload their own contributions. It will supposedly give people a way of staying “in touch” with the dead. Like a sort of gravestone based, family fueled, wiki of...
CBS Said to Consider Use of CNN in Reporting - New... →
CBS has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its news-gathering operations to CNN
Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Robert Scoble at... →
When ‘normal people’ decide to sign up on a service, they enter a pretty lame environment since there are no friends. Or as Scoble puts it: “The first experience is a real crappy experience, since there’s no input. And it’s all about input from other users”. According to Scoble, social networks should work on improving this first experience. One network that tried this a bit was MySpace, as they...
Bar Code Sales Tool Is Failing Campus Test - New... →
the biggest downside of the Mobile Discovery trial is that the technology is not free. The price for each transaction varies by participating carrier (the others are Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Alltel Wireless) and by whether the phone owner has an Internet access plan or pays by the data download
The Long Tail: Follow-Up on a Free Book Experiment →
Late last month, Random House’s Crown imprint launched its first free book experiment, which quickly became more controversial than the publisher expected. Crown released Scott Sigler’s new book, Infected, online as a free (no DRM) pdf on March 27th, five days before it would be available in stores. The hitch was that this was limited-time deal: on March 31st, the day before the book...
BMW Turns to the Web for Its 1-Series - New York... →
The online elements of the 1-Series campaign include letting members of Facebook, the social-networking Web site, design virtual cars and send them to Facebook friends; buying dominant positions, known as take-overs, on the home pages of msn.com and yahoo.com; posting video clips on YouTube; and developing a microsite devoted to the 1-Series (bmwusa.com/new1).
How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top... →
For all the press that FriendFeed got last week for allowing people to post replies directly to Twitter, it was still 65th on our list and registered barely a fraction of total tweeting activity. Some analysts think FriendFeed is a threat to Twitter’s existence, but remember that 56% of users still interact with Twitter on the main site, and Twitter makes up 44% of activity on FriendFeed. So...
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till... →
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Apple iPhone Users Do All but Talk - International... →
iPhone owners spend just 46.5 percent of their time with the product engaged in voice calls
"Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs - Silicon... →
In today’s “free” world, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when...
MediaPost Publications - Wireless Providers Ready... →
AT&T HAS QUIETLY AGREED TO support a marketing service that lets advertisers design mobile phone campaigns that link two-dimensional print ads, billboards and product packaging with interactive digital media. Other U.S. carriers—Verizon and T-Mobile—are expected to follow suit, according to sources close to the project. The service relies on an ordinary cell phone with photo...
Change Blindness - Natalie Angier - New York Times →
The mechanisms that succeed in seizing our sightline fall into two basic classes: bottom up and top down. Bottom-up attentiveness originates with the stimulus, with something in our visual field that is the optical equivalent of a shout: a wildly waving hand, a bright red object against a green field. Bottom-up stimuli seem to head straight for the brainstem and are almost impossible to ignore,...
The Rise of Independent Media Brands Online - John... →
more than 80 percent of the advertising inventory on the Web today is sold for less than a $1 CPM. Compare that to the average sold CPM in the magazine business or on television - reports vary, but it’s anywhere from six to 40 times higher. That delta, to my mind, has everything to do with engagement. Or put another way, why is it that a brand marketer looking to reach college educated...
Doc Searls Weblog · Getting airports and hotels... →
The problem here is that the Net is seen by too many hotels and airports as a way to make money rather than to keep customers happy. That’s because it’s seen as a private business rather than a public utility. It would be better for everybody if we admitted that it’s the latter, even when private businesses provide access to it. Yes, it has costs. So do electricity, water, waste collection and...