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Pete Cashmore: Good Riddance To Albums

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:31:20 +0000

One of my fondest memories as a kid was saving up my money and making trip to the record store where I would spend what seemed like hours going through the LP bins. Finally I would narrow down my selection to what money I had in my pocket. Sometimes I would be able to get only one album, maybe two or on those rare occasions when there was a sale going on I’d get more. I can still remember the very first album that I bought was YesSongs by Yes which was followed a couple weeks later by a purchase of Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Even though the 45 singles market was the most popular way to get the current hits albums were the my personal preference and over the years amassed quite the collection; especially of specialty coloured vinyl pressings. Sure albums where more expensive but at that time the quality of the music being produced generally meant the the majority of the album would be stuff that you liked. In the majority of cases there might one or two songs on the album that you might not like so the price we paid seemed to be a fair exchange.

As the years passed and vinyl changed to cassettes which then changed to CDs that fair exchange of money for quality music began to shift. Eventually it got to the point that you were lucky if there were two or three songs on that CD that you just paid $20.00 bucks for were any good. During this time along comes the Internet and ways to convert those CDs into single files that could be played on any computer. People began to discover that no longer were they having to buy a whole CD to have only the good songs from it. They also found ways to be able to share all those songs with people around the world.

It didn’t matter if it was legal or not to a great many of these people because they felt; right or wrong, that the record companies had been stealing from them for years. After all weren’t the musicians themselves saying that they made next to no money from CD sales – it was their record companies who were really making all the money. Into this fray then came Apple and their iTunes store with the radical idea of selling single songs for .99¢ and in short order it became almost the defacto standard for buying legal music on the Internet.

Music distribution had changed and for a change the people had the ability to buy exactly what they wanted for a fair prices without being forced to pay extra for garbage tracks. The album concept was slowing losing ground and once more the single track; the modern day equivalent of the 45, was the most popular way of buying your music.

For some musicians though this isn’t what they wanted and while some quite justly felt it ruined the musical experience they were trying to provide throughout the CD as a whole for others it was all about the money. Or is really the musicians that are concerned about this in the end after all aren’t they ones trying to tell us all that they don’t make any money from CD sales.

While some big bands have shown that it is still possible to produce quality CDs that is meant to be listened to as a whole and that people will buy them the majority of musicians still only produce one or two good songs per CD. It is case like this where in my opinion the album CD concept is just a con job from the record companies to make us spend more money for less quality. This is why some record companies are pulling songs from iTunes under the pretense of artistic merit so that they can return to the album CD model and the larger dollar figures they make from it.

Unfortunately thought those same record companies risk further damaging both theirs and the artists incomes by forcing this issue the way they are. The single track genie is out of the bottle and there is no way that it is going to go back in. People are getting use to being the ones finally in control of how they buy and listen to their music and the simple fact is that they aren’t going to pay for garbage tunes anymore. If the record companies push hard for a return to the album CD with only one, two or maybe three songs worth paying for people will give them the middle finger and return to the P2P networks in droves.

Using the argument that artists deserved to be paid for their work is partially correct. What is correct is that the artist – not the record label – is the one who deserves the lion’s share of the income. That comes with a caveat though – they only deserve the money if the product is worth what you are being charging for it.

At one time the album model worked giving you the best value for your money but that is no longer true in the vast majority of cases. As with the 45 the single tracks today is the customers best value and if the musicians want to make more money then start producing better music and less garbage.

The day of the album is gone unless the musician provides enough value for the fan so that they are willing to pay for an album format. If not the single track is what we will be buying for a very long time to come. It’s up to the musician.

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MySpace Photo Albums, Multi-Photo Uploader
Amazon Selling Sellaband Artists, and You Get a Profit

Tech Crunch: The Best of Android: Final Challenge Winners Announced

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:34:29 +0000

Last May, Google announced the first set of winners in its two-part contest called Android Challenge. The challenge is meant to kick-start the creation of 3rd-party applications for its nascent mobile platform by enticing developers with a total of $10 million in awards.

Today, Google is releasing the names of its second set of winners, 10 of which receive $275,000 and 10 of which receive $100,000.

The full list of winners can be found here.

The winners were picked from a pool of 50 finalists and include TuneWiki, a mobile media player we’ve raved about in the past, and Locale, a “dynamic settings manager” developed at MIT.

Other winners of $275,000 in this second round include:

cab4me: “cab4me enables you to easily call a cab to any location worldwide. You do not need to know the number of the local cab company. You do not need to enter or even know the address you want to be picked up at. You do not need to place a call. With cab4me you can order a cab to your current location with a single click.”
Compare Everywhere: “Scan a barcode to instantly check if that “sale price” really is a good deal. Read reviews to find out if those hiking boots will last a lifetime, or fall apart next month. Keep track of shopping lists, wish lists, and more.”
Ecorio: “Ecorio allows the user to accurately calculate their travel carbon footprint. Given awareness of their travel carbon footprint, the user can take action in three ways: Reduce, Inspire, and Offset.”
GoCart: “GoCart informs the shopper. It bridges the gap that exists between shopping online and shopping at the store. GoCart is your shopping cart on-the-go.”
Life360: “Life360 uses a multi-channel messaging system and neighborhood-centric social network to keep you up-to-date and in contact with your family and local community.”
Locale: “Locale allows you to create Situations, which specify Conditions under which your Settings should change.”
PicSay: “PicSay allows you to quickly add word balloons, titles, and props to the pictures you have taken with your mobile phone camera.”
Softrace: “With Softrace people around the world meet online to compete against each other in different physical activities. Races can take place in real time, just like traditional races.”
Wertago: “Wertago is the mobile application nightlifers have been waiting for—a single application that shows you up-to-the-second information about what venues are hot, helps you coordinate plans with all your friends, lets you share content and influence the social scene, and enables you to connect with socialites all across the city.”

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Richard MacManus: How to Rock Flickr Like a Champ

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:32:09 +0000

Yahoo's wildly popular photo sharing site Flickr is a lot of fun to use, but it really helps to take some time and learn how to use it well. We've recently engaged more seriously with Flickr and wanted to share some quick tips that we think will help you get more out of it, too.

Some people want to know how to do marketing on Flickr or use Flickr in nonprofit organizations, but in this post we're going to talk about ways you can enjoy the Flickr more for any purpose.

Set Up Publishing By Phone

The single biggest factor in changing our relationship with Flickr has been taking the time to set up publishing for photos taken by mobile phone. It's really quite easy. Just go to the email tab in your Flickr account and make note of the unique email address for you to post. Then pick up your phone, create a new contact named Flickr and enter that email for the contact.

Now take a photo and send it by MMS (Multimedia Message Service) to your buddy Flickr. Like magic, that photo will be published to your Flickr account. The subject line of the email will be the title, any text in the body will be a description. Knock yourself out, it's super fun. I don't know why it took us so long to figure out how this works, but we're betting that many of you haven't yet either.

Turn on Creative Commons Licensing

It's easy to turn the default setting for new photos uploaded to Creative Commons Attribution (our favorite) by visiting the Privacy & Permissions tab in your account. Unfortunately there's not clear, working links from Flickr to an explanation of the different licenses. Here they are on the Creative Commons site.

CC Attribution is a license that says other people can use it and change it, including in a commercial context, as long as they give you attribution as the creator. It greases the wheels for quick and easy media sharing. That's good and it would be nice if more quality media was licensed this way. We keep a link to the Creative Commons by Attribution search on Flickr in our browser toolbar and use it frequently for photos in posts. Those could be your photos we and others are using!

Video about the theory of Creative Commons

Take Even Better Photos

Attendees of the Gnomedex conference this year (which was a huge home run, by the way) were treated to an opening session with photographer Kris Krug about how to take better photos. That session isn't available yet in video, but Krug is a fun guy to pay attention to. Other popular photography bloggers worth checking out for inspiration and occasional instruction include Thomas Hawk (see his January post Top 10 Hacks on Flickr), Epic Edits (see their post Five Fantastic Flickr Photographers), Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir and Jeremy Cowart. We're sure readers here can share some more good ones.

Those folks are all fancy pants, though, and many of us just want to have fun posting photos from our phones. Check out this handy 5 minute video from VideoJug about how to take better mobile phone photos. Thanks go to Amit Agarwal again for posting this one last year. We're excited to try out some of these tips.

Share Screen Shots

Another way we've been using Flickr lately has been to share screen shots of interesting things we find online. Some of us here at RWW use Jing for this, others use the beautiful Mac app Skitch.

People like interesting screen shots and these apps make it really easy to shoot them up to your Flickr account with just a click. The reigning king of this practice right now is Chris Messina, but you don't have to be a super-early adopter to make screen shots on Flickr useful. Skitch makes annotation easy as well and sharing annotated screen shots is a great way to explain things to people.

Video demonstration of Skitch.com.

Turn on Your Grease Monkey

We use a number of Grease Monkey scripts that enhance the Flickr experience. If you aren't familiar with Grease Monkey, you must learn about it because it's great. See our recent post How to Start Using GreaseMonkey in Under 5 Minutes. Specifically, we use:

FlickrPM puts links to viewing and profile options in all the right places, where they aren't right now on Flickr.

GreasedLightbox sets up real quick little image slide shows from almost any page. It can also be a pain to use when you're on Flickr, to tell the truth. It works better on Ffffound, which is another great site if you like imagery.

AutoPagerize lets you zip through page after page of Flickr photos with no clicking or page load delays.

What are your favorite GreaseMonkey scripts for Flickr?

Use a Bulk Uploader

Grabbing a whole bunch of photos from your computer and putting them on Flickr is easier than you might think. We think Flickr's own bulk uploader is fun to use. Thomas Hawk prefers JUploadr.

GeoTag Your Photos

Did you know you can open a drop-down menu in the Flickr search box and search by location? You can also go directly to http://flickr.com/map and search by location. Flickr, all of Yahoo really, does a great job understanding location data - but you've got to play to win, you know? Many people (ourselves, for example) have never found geotagging on Flickr very easy to do.

Enter this awesome bookmarklet from startup Loc.alize.us. It makes geotagging your photos super easy, if not downright fun. You can increase your discoverability, participate in the geotagging scene and feel smarter by grabbing that bookmarklet, renaming it in your browser toolbar and then going to town. Which town? You'll be surprised by the sophistication of Flickr's comprehension of location information.

Follow the Flickr Blog To Keep Up to Date

Flickr has a really active community and thriving forums, but subscribing to the company blog is a good idea to stay up to date with new features. If you don't want to read all the entries there, and some of them are more important than others, then consider subscribing to just the highly discussed posts from the company.

Have Fun Off-site

It's not just on Flickr itself that you can have fun with your posted photos.

Last week Flickr released a handy slide show tool for embedding slide shows of your or any photos on a blog or social network.

There are lots of great ways to visualize Flickr photos by tag, but Tag Galaxy will probably knock your socks off if you haven't seen it before.

Turning on Flickr sharing in FriendFeed is a great way to bring more of your friends into the photo part of your life. You can hook up with the RWW staff's personal FriendFeed accounts here if you'd like to see our photos and other activities.

Dave Winer's FlickrFan is a screen saver slide show of Flickr photos from you, your friends and some important international news agencies. It can be a little tricky to set up but it's a lot of fun to use.

If you're coocoo for cocoa puffs over these kinds of tools in general, check out this long, long list of Flickr tools from QuickOnlineTips.com.

How do You Like to Use Flickr?

These are some of our favorite tips for using Flickr but we're sure many of our readers can suggest even more. Flickr is a canonical service in the Web 2.0 world. It's really worth spending some more time with. With less time than it took you to read this whole article, we think you can set up some systems that will make Flickr a much more enjoyable part of your life.

Richard MacManus: Comcast Wants to Cap Downloads: Puts a Damper on Innovation

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:20:09 +0000

Today, Comcast announced that it will amend its Acceptable Use Policy and add a clause to it that will establish a "monthly data use threshold" of 250 GB per month. This effectively puts a cap on the amount a Comcast user can download per month and codifies an informal policy Comcast was already enforcing. While 250GB is a large amount of data right now, it won't be once a large number users start watching HD streams which can easily take up numerous GB per hours.

That's a Lot of Data

Comcast's announcement tries to put this limit into context. According to Comcast, 250GB amount to:

50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
uploading 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

It's interesting that, judging from this, Comcast seems to add up uploads (photos) and downloads to get to these 250GB, making it an even smaller number - especially for those who upload large numbers of photos or videos, and, of course, for those who share a lot of files on Bittorrent. In Comcast's defense, the cap is agnostic to what service you use to burn up those gigabytes.

But Not if You Are a Power User

Comcast also cites that the median monthly usage be customer is 2-3GB a month. While some commentators have thought that this number is too low, we don't think it really is. For most broadband customers, broadband is simply always-on Internet. They don't necessarily make use of al the services available to them.

The problem here, however, is that the more advanced users also tend to use an exponentially larger amount of data. A standard movie might clock in at 2GB, but an HD movie can take easily take up more than 10GB.

It's All About Video

Also, these kind of limits are bound to stifle innovation in the streaming video business - and not even necessarily because people will start running out of bandwidth, but because there will always be a little voice that will keep nagging Comcast's users that they might be hitting the data cap if they download that movie.

We have to admit, though, that 250GB are a pretty high cap and, as Larry Dignan points out, it sure beats having metered Internet access. However, looking into the future, 250GB might be nothing once more people start using more data-intensive applications.

Will it be the end of the Internet as we know it, especially once other ISPs start announcing similar caps? Probably not - but it might just put a damper on the Internet we had envisioned for the future.

Flickr image courtesy of dmuth

Tech Crunch: Ashton Kutcher Is Pretty Excited To Launch Blah Girls At TechCrunch50

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:17:03 +0000

TechCrunch50 is just a week and a half away. The list of presenting companies is kept strictly confidential until the day of the event to ensure maximum audience attention. But we’re making one exception this year. Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg’s Katalyst Media will be launching Blah Girls, one of his new interactive online video products, at TechCrunch50.

Like all products launching at the event, TechCrunch50 will be the first time the public or press has seen it. We got a look at it a couple of months ago and think it’s going to be a hit. Look for a lot more activity from Katalyst Media over the coming months.

I asked Ashton to do a quick intro video saying how excited he is about TechCrunch50. He sent the video below. You have to read between the lines, but I think he’s pretty jazzed about all of the strict confidentiality requirements and the need to meet with us twice before the event to rehearse his presentation. Warning: There’s some strong language.

Next up: A Scoble video where he promises not to embarrass himself by chasing down Ashton for an autograph and a 45 minute exclusive video interview.

CrunchBase Information

Katalyst Media

Ashton Kutcher

Jason Goldberg

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Tech Crunch: Yahoo Shuts Down Mash, 0-4 On Social Networking

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:47:42 +0000

First came 360, launched in 2005 as an early attempt to get Yahoo into social networking, was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year. In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal (Bebo went to AOL for $850 million). Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago and is best known for sporting a Darth Vader playing guitar and eating a banana image when it was in private beta.

Today, Yahoo emailed users notice that Mash will be shutting down on September 29, 2008.

Fifth time’s a charm they say (right?). Let’s hope the next grand strategy works out better than the first four.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Mash joins the deadpool.

CrunchBase Information

Yahoo!

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tech Crunch: Can We Predict The Outcome of The Presidential Election With Each Candidate’s Traffic Data?

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:55:43 +0000

Can traffic to a Presidential Candidate’s homepage be used to gauge who will win this year’s election? Hitwise has published recent data on the traffic both American presidential candidates have seen in the last month (ending 8/23), and while the results may not shed much light on the forthcoming election’s outcome, they reveal a few interesting trends.

Hitwise has ranked each state by two criteria: its contribution to each site’s total traffic, and the the overall likelihood that a user in the state will visit the candidate’s site (called the Representation index). If either metric is applicable to the election, it will be Representation Index, which indicates the candidate’s popularity on a per-state basis and isn’t affected by the state’s population.

Unsurprisingly, California represents the most traffic share for both candidates, accounting for 13% of Obama’s total traffic and 12% of McCain’s. But both candidates have also seen a similar Representation Index from the state, which means that a similar number of Californians have visited each site. Given the state’s Democratic history, this is surprising - apparently Californians are interested in learning about the opposition. Conversely, in left-leaning New York, McCain’s site has only seen about half as much traffic as Obama’s.

Hitwise also notes that the highest Representation Index for Obama came from Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, and DC, while McCain’s come from Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, and Louisiana. More of McCain’s states are “battlegrounds”, but there’s no way of knowing if people are visiting these sites because they like him or hate him - perhaps the traffic stats from McCainSpace would be a better indicator.

CrunchBase Information

Hitwise

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Pete Cashmore: Email Photos to All of Your Social Networks with Pikchur

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:41:33 +0000

From the team behind DealQUE, we have a new service called Pikchur, a startup that posts your photos to a myriad of social media sites where you have residing accounts. What you can do is upload an image directly through Pikchur or send one to your assigned Pikchur email address via MMS or email from your phone or computer.

In concept, Pikchur is similar to TwitPic in that you can upload a photo and it will appear in your Twitter stream. A caption can be manually added for direct and MMS uploads, and your subject line will be the caption for photos sent via email. Pikchur moves beyond Twitter, however, and sends your images to a handful of other services like Tumblr, Pownce, Facebook (via the Pikchur Facebook application), FriendFeed and Jaiku. The result is a broad distribution for your photo within the micro-blogosphere, giving you a one-stop shop for immediate photo sharing.

There aren’t any import options for automatically bringing in photos from other photo-sharing sites for redistribution purposes, but a little bird has told me that Pikchur is working on some upcoming Flickr integration, so perhaps such import options will be added in the near future. Given the lack of photo importing for redistribution purposes, Pikchur really caters to mobile users that would like a quick and easy way to send out photos while on the go, so its updating capabilities sent out to microblogging platforms is appealing in its simplicity for this purpose.

Nevertheless, Pikchur is a handy service that makes photo distribution a brainless task, especially from an operational standpoint around your email. As services like Xoopit better turn your email into a searchable media database, microblogging and other auto-distribution methods can become very useful as media-sharing tools for a wide range of users.

Richard MacManus: Online Dating: SpeedDate.com Raises $6 Million

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:30:34 +0000

If you think regular online dating is still too slow and inconvenient, SpeedDate.com might just be the thing for you. The San Mateo based online dating service just raised $6 million in a Series B round from Menlo Ventures after raising a Series A round for the same amount in January 2007. SpeedDate.com sets itself apart from its competitors by allowing its users to quickly set up short webcam conversations.

According to SpeedDate.com, it hosts over 100,000 online speed dates a day. Part of this growth is surely due to the fact that SpeedDate.com is also a very popular application on MySpace, Beebo, and Facebook (though it was banned there for a while in July). Because of this, it is hard to track exactly how popular the site is, but according to Google Trends for Websites, the site is indeed growing at a rapid clip and a lot of its growth seems to come from outside of the United States.

While the press release doesn't go into any detail, it seems safe to assume that the company needed a new infusion of money to sustain its rapid growth. While a lot of its competitors are for-pay, SpeedDate has adopted a free model, though it is considering the addition of a premium as well.

Online dating is a competitive field, where large entities like Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals seem to dominate, but at the same time, other sites like Randomate, WooMe, or OmniDate have been able to carve out a niche for themselves by putting different twists on the online dating model. SpeedDate.com, though, with its instant webcam conversations, looks like it stands a good chance to continue growing in this competitive field.

SpeedDate company profile provided by TradeVibes

Alexander Muse: Big in Japan’s GoCart Android Application Wins!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:46:33 +0000

I am pleased and proud to announce that Big in Japan Inc. won Google’s Android Developers Challenge with it’s GoCart™ application. Of course, the credit really should go to Rylan Barnes, GoCart’s developer. Here is the release from Google and the post explaining the contest here. GoCart was built specifically for Google’s Android mobile phone platform. GoCart users can easily scan the barcode of any product using their phone’s built-in camera. Once scanned, GoCart will search the inventories of nearby, local stores using data from the phone’s built-in GPS. Soon we will port GoCart to the iPhone and enable mobile payments.

Over the past year the Big in Japan team has become more and more involved with mobile applications. Our initial focus was the iPhone (applications like iPhoneVote), but quickly we began working on Google’s Android mobile phone building a fun application called SocialTones. Recently we decided to reinvent Big in Japan to focus exclusively on the development of mobile applications. GoCart is our first serious mobile application with a real business model behind it. The newly incorporated company has three co-founders (including me):

Rylan Barnes co-founded Big in Japan and is the developer of GoCart™, one of 50 winners of Google’s Android challenge. Rylan started his career at HP where his work on XML-based frameworks was widely acclaimed. Since then he has worked as a software developer for Vertical Alliance and Software Architects working with AJAX, C# and .NET.

Jason Hudgins co-founded Big in Japan and was on the team that developed Tunewiki, one of the 50 winners of Google’s Android Challenge. Jason has spent the last eight years developing software for companies including Idearc Media, DeviantART and Ariesnet.

Alexander Muse co-founded Big in Japan. Alexander is a serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of startup experience. He served as CEO of Architel, a provider of outsourced information technology services. Previously, he was founder and CEO of LayerOne, a ventured backed telecommunications infrastructure company he started in the late 1990’s.

Learn more about GoCart:

Pete Cashmore: Widexplorer Broadens Your Web Browsing Experience. Literally.

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:43:13 +0000

Normally, your search efforts involve one engine or another. You go to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search for the general Web, and perhaps photos, etc. You visit Digg, Reddit, or Yahoo Buzz for cool links. YouTube, DailyMotion and others for videos. The list goes on. But in the event that the default dimensions of your Web browsing experience gets dull, tedious and in need of a change (this is the moment of change, after all!), there is Widexplorer to satisfy a new leaning.

Sporting black, a dozen categorical hotlinks, Widexplorer is a simple thing. No miracles being performed there. Nonetheless, its presentation is the kicker. Click any keyword below the search bar to get a grip on what that means.

For instance, the ‘buzz’ label takes you to all the top Web 2.0 linking services. And all are laid one beside the other. Digg first, then Yahoo Buzz, followed by Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, Technorati, Popurls. It’s really quite interesting. It’s better than browsing through tabs, in a way, because there’s absolutely no clicking to do. Except for the movement of the horizontally-savvy scrollbar in the window. For users of scrollballs of various sizes, it’s even more simple to operate. My Apple-issued Mighty Mouse is a wonder here. You will want to play with this one for quite some time if you happen to be similarly equipped, I think.

I’ll leave you to browse the remaining options available at Widexplorer, but suffice it to say that this one, if nothing else, deserves a bookmark. The only reservation to have with it - other than its impracticality as a day-in-day-out search service - is that website load times can leave you waiting for the white space to fill out with data. But that is the case with the Web browsing process in and of itself, so it’s hard to nab Widexplorer on that point. In all, I say you take a look. Just one to five minutes’ time will have you sold. No question about it.

Alexander Muse: Google’s Android Market Annouced!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:20:12 +0000

On the heels our Big in Japan’s release of GoCart fot the Google’s Android phone, Eric Chu has announced the details of Android Market, “an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.”

The market will initially support free applications on the first Android handsets and soon after that paid applications will be possible. This is great news. Eric explained, “We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.”

Pete Cashmore: Google’s Needle Hits Yahoo’s Vein in October, Says CEO

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:38:45 +0000

While Bloomberg News takes a good amount of flack for yapping about a stone-cold Steve Jobs when it’s well known that the man’s blood is still rich and warm, another bigwig of the tech realm, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked with the publication’s reporters Peter Cook and Crayton Harrison about his company’s fascination with Yahoo and the movements the two will make in the next 60 days. As Schmidt explains, Google “will proceed with the agreement by early October.”

The company’s reasoning is stated equally simply. In reference to the U.S. Justice Department’s interest in peering into the proposed Google-Yahoo search advertisement deal, which the two tested to the DOJ’s very vocal irritation, Schmidt said, “We are in the process of talking to the government. They’ve not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.” Indeed, the logic is very elementary. “Hey DOJ, while you’re there giving what we see as your silent treatment, we’re going to go ahead and start making more money, m’kay? Kay.”

Naturally, Schmidt isn’t totally gung-ho with an eye on its October non-surprise. “We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong,” is his response to judicial qualms over what some consider possibly imperialist tendencies by the “Mad Men” of Mountain View.

My take on this refresh of the dispute? Business is business, and if Google manages to pass go, well, who’s to say no. Chances are DOJ won’t remain silent ‘til the autumn push, though. If anything, this is a straight reminder sent the way of regulators to recall that the matter has yet to be resolved completely. In a manner of speaking: Get to it, guv’nors.

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Yahoo May Consider Letting Google Handle Paid Search
Yahoo Math: $800 Million > $12 Billion
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Pete Cashmore: Swarrm Dishes Social News Recommendations (The Startup Review) - 100 Invites

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:34:13 +0000

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Swarrm

20-word Description: Swarrm is a social news site that gives users content from around the Web based upon their interests.

CEO’s Pitch: Swarrm is based on the idea that rather than sifting through thousands of stories submitted by strangers to find something you like, Swarrm users could have news presented to them aesthetically and efficiently as it’s published based upon interest.

What Pandora did for music discovery, we hope Swarrm will do for news and blog content. Swarrm has several pieces of intelligence running behind the scenes. The system looks at things like user preference and behavior in addition to interaction with friends and ascertains what a particular user may like to see. Swarrm also extracts stories from several thousand sources and serves them up based upon keywords of interest designated by the user. The same methodology works inversely to diminish content frequency if it seems there is no interest.

Other features include the ability to see all current content from a specific site rather than cherry picked stories. Users can submit articles to 3rd party sites including Digg, Reddit, Newsvine. Features like auto-tagging, micro-blogging and more, create a unique experience news junkies are sure to like.

Mashable’s Take: How many of you read multiple blogs on a given day? How do you choose which ones to read? A bunch of services have set out to answer this question, and have created products that address the recommendation system a number of different ways, from personalized feed readers to curated memes to group interaction with a given set of search results.

Swarrm, currently in private beta, is the latest to take on this particular feat in a way that may not be the most useful right away, but has caught enough of my attention to point out its system. What Swarrm does is ask you your news topic preferences and presents an activity feed of sorts with news items listed according to their time stamp and date.

You can see where items come from based on the icons that appear for each, along with the article’s title (meaning there is no summary paragraph or two-sentence snippets, Google-news style). From there, you can choose to view the whole article, share the item with your Swarrm friends, submit it to a flurry of other social and bookmarking networks, or save it to your Swarrm account. The sharing option obviously presents itself as an internal “trusted” recommendation system allowing for direct suggestions amongst users.

What’s missing, however, is an ongoing direct feedback system in Swarrm for indicating what type of content you’d rather not see. This limits the amount of true filtering and recommending Swarrm can offer its end users. What I find interesting about Swarrm is its news delivery format, which looks a lot like a FriendFeed activity stream. (To that end, it wouldn’t hurt Swarrm to offer an RSS export capability for its recommendations and search results.)

So while on one hand Swarrm appears to be very similar to services like FriendFeed, there is the ever-growing problem of content overload coming from activity feeds like FriendFeed that don’t readily offer the most practical filtering and recommendations. Whether this is re-hashing of content in a filtered way or a useful tactic for finding good content will depend on Swarrm’s execution.

Swarrm is giving 100 invites to Mashable readers. To get yours, go to Swarrm.com and enter the code: “mashable”

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Pete Cashmore: Google Clues Developers in on Android Market

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:24:16 +0000

Android Mobile Platform team member Eric Chu wants you to know that its content distribution system - an Apple App Store think-a-like by the name of Android Market - is going to be user-driven. All thanks to “Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers.”

As one might expect for a developer-targeted message, this notice, plus screen grabs, is perhaps similar to the ones Apple delivers to its own third-party coders. But it just goes to show that Google’s efforts are very much in conceptual emulation of the iPhone/iPod touch. It would be unjust to point out the subjective visual inferiority that one might view Android Market with. It may well prove more voluminous than Apple’s own storefront when all is said and done. But that is something of relative interest to developers and users alike. What precisely does this mean?

Chu writes that Google will regard Android Market with a similar perspective as that given to YouTube. The service will run on a three-step publishing process: merchant registration, software uploads (with any necessary information to describe to potential users the utility of their solutions), and, finally, publication. Google also intends to “provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.”

Unlike the iPhone’s initial 2007 rollout, Android Market will arrive in tandem with the first handsets to launch with the Android platform installed. Whether this debut will be one marked by a full-fledged marketplace (with a payment structure in place, for instance) is not certain. Chu has only confirmed that developers “can expect support for free (unpaid) applications,” with an update allowing for financial transactions to be issued “soon after launch.”

This is in fact not so terrible a release plan, as it enables Google to trial this beta-to-be without fear of encountering disruptions to the system and loss of users’ interest to ultimately invest in paid downloads. But the company’s point about a YouTube-like software download experience could prove disabling. If Google offers any less of a vetting process than that given by Apple to its App Store, faulty designs could crop up in even greater number. It is imperative that Google ensure a solid quality-assurance experience as a mediator that exhibits both partial and impartial behavior as doorman to the palace.

As to the planned Android Market update, it will be September at the very earliest that US-based consumers will have a chance at Android. And if/when T-Mobile, the first carrier purportedly committed to releasing the first Android-based handset, does indeed celebrate the debut in the fall, Google may well deliver an update “on first startup.”

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Pete Cashmore: The N Factor 30 Book Giveaway (Authors @ Mashable)

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:58:17 +0000

Continuing our Authors@Mashable series after a great start with Ori Brafman of the New York Times Bestseller Sway and Frank Warren of the award winning blog PostSecret and PostSecret book series, Mashable would like to introduce to you Marion Freijsen and Adrie Reinders’ The N Factor: How Efficient Networking Can Change the Dynamics of Your Business.

In 2004, Adrie Reinders, Roeland Reinders and Marion Freijsen started a company called OHM Inc. OHM focuses on doing business development for technology companies mainly all over the world, leveraging contacts in the Fortune 1500 companies the founders had created over the course of their individual careers. It was with OHM, that Adrie and Marion realized connecting people was their core business rather than one of many tools they used.

“It inspired us to write the N.Factor, and share our experiences with networking and how to apply the principles learnt with other entrepreneurs and high potentials in the business world. It is very much a hands-on book, with lots of anecdotes from the authors’ careers rather than an academic book. The N.Factor looks at many different aspects of networking, including the use of technology to maintain and enhance your network as well as networking in many different cultures, with contributions from diverse countries.”

Marion and Adrie will kick off the series next week followed by a Live Q&A. To celebrate our third installment of Authors@Mashable we are giving away 30 autographed copies of the book.

*Update: All 30 books are spoken for.

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Pete Cashmore: How to Find Statistics on Social Media

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:53:48 +0000

Selling management on the value of investing time and resources into building an online community using social media is a challenge, and you need all of the support you can get. One way to convey the value of corporate social media participation is to leverage published statistics about who’s using social media platforms and how they are using it. There have been a host of new studies published recently that you can use to help make the case for your own company’s involvement:

The Society for New Communications Research recently published their report titled, “New Media, New Influencers & Implications for Public Relations” that provides several case studies illustrating how social media has benefited organizations like the American Red Cross, the Mayo Clinic and Quicken Loans. Among their findings, “Social media is rapidly becoming a core channel for disseminating information. Fifty-seven percent of this group of early social media adopters reported that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities, while 27% reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.”

One of the most popular studies is the Universal McCann’s Social Media Research Wave 3 research report, which looked at 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries. According to this study, social media can have a dramatic impact on your brand’s reputation. “34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog and 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs.”

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”

If you’re especially interested in stats about Facebook or other social networking sites, Comscore released some statistics earlier this month announcing the growth of social networking worldwide. Included is the statistic that social networking use grew 25% year over year worldwide, with notable increases in Europe and the Middle East.

Rapleaf released the results of their study examining the gender and age of social network users. Note that these two studies were conducted independent of each other, so don’t confuse the results between them.

As part of the promotion for their book Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff created the Social Technographics profile tool where users can plug in some basic information and then see how participation varies among demographics. The resulting graphs are useful in illustrating the social media habits of your target audience. You can also use Trendpedia or BlogPulse to create interesting visuals examining keyword statistics about topics in your industry.

If you’ve seen some other relevant statistics that aren’t referenced here, please share the links in the comments section below.

Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant. In addition to his posts on Mashable, he blogs about social media and communications at Disruptology.

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Pete Cashmore: SciVee’s Science Videos Get More Interactive With Virtual Posters

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:02:41 +0000

How’s this for science trivia. SciVee, a science video upload site that’s been steadily growing itself for about a year now, has just this week unveiled a new option for users to upload feature material in the form of “postercasts” that enable users to complement their traditional video presentations with an interactive documentation component. The synchronous delivery of these is remarkably user-friendly.

SciVee offers quite a few viewing options to users not including the postercast dimension. Many are quite useful, too. If, say, you click a typical link on SciVee, you’ll generally see a normal-sized video, or a miniaturized video with a text-based column in the main column of the page. These layouts are sensible, particularly when the subject matter warrants prioritization of one component over another. Yet, what a postercast upload does is give viewers a large-size graphic that triggers a full-screen experience. I don’t think it’s too much to say that this is something which will pique the interest of quite a few site members and prospective registrants.

Now, SciVee isn’t likely to be out-and-out mauled by hits because of this addition to its toolset. Though Web video viewers are no strangers to scientific experiments, they’re normally more transfixed by YouTube-bound delights. The Mentos-plus-Coke mix, for one, which brought many millions of people to YouTube’s archive. Chemistry gone viral, so to speak. But some would likely prefer a more exclusive venue to observe science-related activities, particularly those with educational and serious academic connotations. So they’ll go to SciVee. Or JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), a site that recently grabbed the interest of the National Library of Medicine and commissioned to index the repositories of MEDLINE and PubMed.

It’s been proven in a number of cases that online efforts in the networking and media worlds to address niche interests is effective in building devoted communities. It is the classic outlook that the value of the long tail is high. And SciVee, as well as JoVE, seem to exploit the sector well, in focus and in delivery. SciVee, it should be said, makes for a remarkably stronger impact insofar as user experience, and a good bit more with Postercasts involved. But both are thorough in addressing their core pursuits.

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Tech Crunch: Jaiku Uncaps Invites, Migrates to Google Infrastructure

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:54:43 +0000

Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter’s most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google’s technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users.

But now we’re seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends.

The new data center isn’t Jaiku’s final resting place, merely a step towards running things on Google App Engine. However, it’s an important one for a company that appears to be preparing itself first and foremost for scalability (a problem that notoriously has plagued Twitter).

As VentureBeat points out, Jaiku has also introduced a new terms of service and privacy policy, so it’s getting its legal house in order as well.

Are you a Jaiku member? Share some of your unlimited invitations with outsiders over at InviteShare.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tech Crunch: Android to Get Its Own App Market

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:48:00 +0000

The Android Blog is reporting that Google has officially announced the Android Market, an App Store like solution that allows publishers to upload programs and sell them online.

Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.

More information on CrunchGear as we get it.

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Alexander Muse: Huge Big in Japan Announcement!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:45:15 +0000

Part one of the Big in Japan annoucement I promised you HERE. Part two to follow this evening as soon as I am given the green light (no hints).

Richard MacManus: Sweetcron: Your Lifestream on Your Server

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:43:11 +0000

We were pretty excited when we first heard about Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestreaming application developed by Yongfook. Today, after a bit of a delay, Sweetcron has finally released its software and we immediately downloaded and installed it ourselves. While it is still pretty barebone, Sweetcron represents a great solution for those who don't necessarily want to participate in the discussions on Friendfeed, but still would like to set up a lifestream.

Installation

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It's a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron's directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn't handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the "Boxy but Good" one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn't seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don't mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky's list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.