Passwords: Get a random password from PassPub
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Skype on iPhone. No, seriously.
OK, this has to be the coolest news this morning. SHAPE Services, a Stuttgart, Germany-based company, well-known for making mobile IM clients, has just announced Skype for iPhone, an iPhone-optimized Web site that allows you to access Skype via the browser on the iPhone. You can try out this for free for a limited time.
It took me less than two minutes to get up and running. Sending messages was as simple as typing SMS messages. I am guessing that, since they ask you for your mobile number when you log in, there is some kind of call-back service built into the app. After all, the company says you don’t need WiFi.
IM+ for Skype works with BlackBerry RIM, Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Palm OS, Symbian and J2ME devices. The application works in any network and doesn’t require WiFi, the company says.
Dahan T&S shows off 42-inch widescreen multi-touch LCD
Just months after displaying Dahan T&S' 120-inch multi-touch panel, the firm is now showing off its 42-inch widescreen LCD that incorporates the same technology. This living-room-friendly display contains "multi-dot recognition functions to control image size and direction by [using your] fingers," meaning that a single press will translate into a left-click, while using two fingers will replicate a right-click. No word on resolution, price, or a release date just yet, but click on if you're down with a couple more pics.Continue reading Dahan T&S shows off 42-inch widescreen multi-touch LCD
NewerTech intros Mac mini-lovin' miniStack NAS
As if there weren't enough options to cram underneath your Mac mini, here's yet another. NewerTech is introducing its miniStack NAS enclosure, which can be pre-configured with as much as 750GB of storage, and should fit quite well above or below your mini. The box sports Ethernet / USB 2.0 ports, PC and Mac support, Ximeta's NDAS 2011 network chipset, LED status lights, auto power on / off, and "intelligent thermal monitoring for minimal fan power consumption." For those interested in adding their own HDD, the device itself can be snagged for $79.99, while ordering with a hard drive already included will run you up to $329.99 depending on capacity.
GM mulling battery rentals for the Chevy Volt
Tossing out the idea of renting / leasing the battery of an electric car isn't exactly revolutionary, but it sounds like GM may be hitching a ride on the ever-growing bandwagon. Reportedly, the firm is mulling the idea of allowing Chevy Volt buyers to "rent the vehicle's battery as a way of pricing the automobile at a comparable level to a traditional, petrol-driven family [motorcar]." Apparently, GM is hoping to get ten years of life from the battery packs and to price the Volt like a "traditional mid-market car." Notably, no further information regarding potential contracts or sales strategies were divulged, but considering the launch date for this sucka is just around the corner, we're sure relevant decisions will be made soon enough.
[Via AutoblogGreen]
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Screencasts: Play the web with Songbird
GMail Plus - A Smart Trick to Find & Block the Source of Email Spam
GMail Plus Addressing is not new but still very relevant and useful trick to help save your GMail mailbox from spam. And if you get spammed, you know exactly which website / online service leaked your email address to spammers.
[Was reminded of the GMail plus trick after an email subscriber actually used it today while subscribing to the DI newsletter - see screenshot above]
What is GMail Plus addressing? Say you have an email address like billgates@gmail.com. If you append a "plus" sign to your email username, gmail will ignore anything written between the + and @ sign.
So any email address sent to billgates+microsoft@gmail.com or billgates+blog@gmail.com or billgates+website@gmail.com will still reach your billgates@gmail.com inbox though technically, they are three different email aliases.
When you share your email with some non familiar service, like a newsletter, you can supply your existing email with a plus sign. If you ever receive spam addressed to that email alias, you know the exact source that's sending the spam and can easily block all emails using a GMail filter.
[type the alias in the To: fiedd and redirect all incoming message to Trash or apply a new label]
More GMail Easter Eggs [including the dot trick].
T-Mobile bringing HotSpot @Home to your landlines
T-Mobile's HotSpot @Home already brings WiFi VoIP to compatible cell phones, and the latest FCC filing from T-Mo and Linksys indicates that soon all the phones in your pad will be able to get in on the action: say hello to the WRTU54G. Apart from the T-Mobile branding and the two phone jacks on the back, the router features two user-accessible SIM card slots, which appear to be used to configure up to two phone lines -- we're not sure if they're VoIP or cell, however.
[Via TG Daily]
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Scrybe Closes Series A
You’ll probably recognize the company from the somewhat viral product demo that swept the blogosphere last October. Since then they’ve been through a private and public beta.
Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and The system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products.
The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
The Future Of Copyright Protection Is Here And It Costs $11 An Hour
It’s no secret that video sites like YouTube benefited from added traffic generated by hosting copyrighted content. But as these sites get acquired, integrate advertising, or just want to avoid a billion dollar lawsuit, they seek to shed their seedy past to stay kosher with the big media giants they hope will feed them content and advertising dollars.
There are a lot of startups offering technological means of keeping their noses clean. Most of the solutions function as digital detectives, comparing the video fingerprints of copyrighted content with uploaded content for a match. Some of these companies include Audible Magic, Advestigo, Gracenote, MotionDSP, Philips, and iPharo. YouTube has implemented Audible Magic, although I haven’t noticed a difference. MySpace also incorporated Audible Magic but took the added step of banning re-uploading content violating copyright (“Take Down Stay Down” initiative).
However, while computers are great for solving well defined problems at a dizzying pace, they don’t always do that well when the rules become murkier. Judgments need to be made about whether playing a song or video constitutes “fair use” and simply changing a few characters of the title can fool more basic filters. That’s why 5-year-old BayTSP has decided to keep humans in the loop. The WSJ takes an in depth look at the company.
The Journal reports that BayTSP has hired more than 20 “Video Analysts” to watch videos and report copyrighted content starting at $11 an hour. Their searches are helped by BayTSP’s software, which most likely gives them a head start on what to look for. The company’s most notable client is Viacom, which it supplied with the data for their 100,000 video DMCA takedown request last year. Viacom says it pays BayTSP more than $100,000 each month for the service. The takedown requests have resulted in over 230,000 clips being removed from YouTube for Viacom. BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.
Despite these efforts, video piracy remains rampant both on Google video search and many other social video sites. Once content is taken down, some users simply re-upload them to the site. MySpace is apparently countering this behavior through a file blacklist, but other video providers are certainly concerned with pushing away potentially valuable content and users. Content providers have continually leaned on the heavily manual DMCA safe harbor clause, while copyright holders clamor for embedded filtering. Google has recieved a long list of take down notices. AT&T has expressed an interest in filtering their network directly.
One thing’s for sure, there’s still a lot more debate needed amongst us humans before the computers chime in.
Big Media Is Buying, Hearst goes Kaboodle
Updated: First it was News Corp., then CondeNast and CBS Interactive. Now Hearst Corp. and Forbes have joined the Web 2.0 party, snapping up tiny start-ups, and trying to capture the ongoing online shift of both audiences and advertising dollars.
Earlier today, Venturebeat reported that Forbes was buying Clipmarks, a social bookmarking and clipping service based in New York. Now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hearst has snapped up Kaboodle, another bookmarking service that allows online shoppers to clip and save information, for an undisclosed amount.
According to our sources went for somewhere around $40 million. Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of the 18-month old start-up based in Santa Clara, Calif., declined to comment on specific terms of the deal.
When I asked him why he decided to sell the company, he candidly replied, that “the stakes are getting higher, and others [competitors] are raising a ton of money.” What do that say, any exit is a good exit.
The company had about 2.2 million unique visitors in June 2007, having grown 20 fold since its launch. It had raised about $5 million in venture capital, and was in the process of raising another round when the exit opportunity emerged.
Chandra said that since a large percentage of Kaboodle users are women, and the site has an e-commerce/shopping component, it fit nicely with the larger goals of Hearst. He also added that the deal doesn’t impact its deals with Conde Nast properties.
There is an interesting pattern in some of the buys by big media corporations. They are not just buying pure-content, but instead seem to be interested in content-enhancing tools that rely on communities than individual content creators. Newroo, Photobucket, Reddit, Last.fm, Clipmarks and now Kaboodle fit that profile.
This is a strategy not without risk. Big media companies have to leave the acquired-and-their communities alone. Back in June 2007, Liz wrote about this trend of big media companies leaving the “kids” alone.
Acquirers, despite their enormous and asymmetrical audience, money, and power compared to their purchases, seem like awkward first-time parents afraid of hurting a baby. They are more than conscious of their status as old farts swooping in and quickly turning cool to lame.
From a Silicon Valley perspective, emergence of buyers outside of the G-Y-M (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) triumvirate is a good thing. Sure it rules out billion dollar exits, but it ensures that there are more buyers with cash.
Scripps Networks Acquires a Pickle; Explains Future
I remember when Hearst and Scripps fought for my business during my corporate America days. Now they are fighting with Internet acquisitions. Hearst acquired Kaboodle this morning, now Scripps has announced their acquisition of Incando who is known for its personal media sharing service Pickle.com and the user-generated content management platform Powered by Pickle. Scripps acquired Recipezaar last month.
A clip from the official release:
"We are committed to our strategy of owning the food, shelter and lifestyle categories online as well as on air,” said John Lansing, president of Scripps Networks. "With the acquisition of Incando, we now have the back-end tools to engage consumers, viewers, and marketers in a multi-branded, multimedia online universe with compelling, personalized experiences.”
If you are curious as to where Scripps is heading, here is some clues from their release.
Within the next few years, Scripps Networks expects as much as 50 percent of its online content to be co-created by its users.
I love this statement from the release - love the "Web 2.0 Technology" usage!
Based on proprietary software, Incando's Web2.0 technology enables speedy uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site and will enhance the user-centric, social media and personalization functionality around Scripps Networks' lifestyle content.
Om Malik has a great summary of big media's recent tech purchases.
NVIDIA stuffs four Quadro FX 5600 GPUs into 1U server
Yeah, we all agreed that the Quadro Plex 1000 was hot stuff in its heyday, but NVIDIA's latest GPU server blows away prior iterations by cramming four Quadro FX 5600s into a 1U enclosure. The Quadro Plex VCS Server packs a "record number" of GPUs into a 1U form factor, and its 6GB frame buffer (1.5GB per GPU) and mind-boggling computational abilities should please those interested in remote graphics / offline rendering. Additionally, it's built to "dynamically allocate compute, geometry, shading, and pixel processing power for optimized GPU performance," and while there's no mention of a price, those actually in the market for this beast probably aren't concerned.[Via MacsimumNews]
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Leveraging Facebook To Compete With eBay Won’t Work
Facebook users can use the application to sell thing directly to others via their Facebook profile. Buy.com charges a flat 5% commission on completed sales (the seller will also have to pay Paypal or other payment fees. The application says “thanks to Garage Sale, Facebook users don’t have to leave their profile page to advertise and sell personal goods.”
There are other Facebook applications doing nearly the exact same thing. Mosoma, for example, is one that I tested a couple of weeks ago. It also allows users to sell items on their Facebook profile.
There is an argument that a closed network is a better way to sell items because the people who view the listing know you and, presumably, trust you. That gets you over a big hurdle - eBay’s feedback system provides information on the buyer and seller which helps them get comfortable transacting. Without that feedback system to encourage sales, it’s important that something else takes its place. In the case of Garage Sale and Mosoma, user familiarity is the key.
But in practice this doesn’t work so well. Sellers are looking for a big base of buyers to sell into to leverage the network effect. eBay obviously does an excellent job of this. Otherwise there is no reason they would command a long term leadership position with their high fees. Buyers and sellers put up with the fees because it is the place to go to conduct p2p transactions. The network effect perpetuates their success and newcomers have a very difficult time gaining market share.
With Garage Sale and Mosoma, sellers can’t access this large pool of buyers because only their friends will see the listings. And sellers who are looking for a specific item are still likely to hop on over to eBay and do a quick search. They’ll only buy from friends if they serendipitously happen to catch site of an item in a friend’s news feed that they were already looking for.
Microsoft experimented in this area in late 2005/early 2006 with their Live Expo product. Originally Expo was a way to buy and sell items to your MSN IM buddies, or coworkers at a company, which is very similar to the Facebook experiments now being conducted. But over time they seem to have expanded Expo to become a more generic listing service. People want deep listings when they are looking for something.
Closed networks work for some things, but they don’t seem to work for trading physical goods. My bet is that Garage Sale and Mosoma fall short of expectations, and that eBay is looking on with, at best, bemused interest.
Legend Marketing
Your BRAND is what you tell your customers you are.
Your LEGEND is what your customers tell others you are.
Legend Marketing is a strategy, product development, and marketing consulting firm that helps you articulate your legend so your customers can pass it on for you.
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