Ideas on SWiK

The Death of Podcasting and the Rise of Videocasting? No, It's About Options

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:58:28 -0700

WritingFix: Writing Lessons Inspired by Creative Use of a Classroom I-Pod

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:58:28 -0700

Open Innovation - Innovation Exchange

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:59:01 -0700

Pay for innnovation service - best ideas get payed

Samba - Guía Ubuntu

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:59:10 -0700

Linpopup

Breaking: Joost Turns to the Web for Help

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:59:51 -0700

Joost, battling for relevance in the online tv world against Hulu and others, will soon no longer require users to download separate desktop software to access the service (its existing software is based on Xul). Instead users will be able to access Joost via a small browser plugin that will continue to use Joost’s P2P technology to distribute video among users quickly.

The service launched to considerable fanfare but has fallen off the radar as of late as the company has been plagued by a shortage of content and, well, users. And as the inertia of the online video business moves away from desktop clients and to the Web, it seems Joost has finally seen the writing on the wall and will launch an online video service of its own.

It’ll be interesting to see how it fares in an already crowded lineup of offerings headlined by Hulu, Amazon, and Fancast.

Update: Screenshots here.

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Joost

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The Race For Attention Tightens Online As McCain Gains On Obama

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:00:01 -0700

Now that convention season is over and the candidates have about eight weeks before they find out who will lead the United States for the next four years, it’s time we compare each candidate’s attention online as we head into the final stretch.

According to Google Trends data, Republican candidate John McCain is quickly gaining ground on Barack Obama and witnessed a spike in searches the day he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. However, Obama witnessed an even greater spike at the same time, perhaps due to his convention speech the night before and some comparative searches pertaining to Palin.

As online attention has shifted from Obama to McCain (and especially Sarah Palin), Hitwise is reporting that news and media outlets are also doing the same. According to Hitwise research, McCain’s coverage has jumped considerably in the past few days and more media outlets are sending readers to the candidate’s page. And although he still trails Obama, that gap is tightening each day.

For all the attention Obama and McCain are receiving though, neither has captivated the Web audience like Sarah Palin. According to Google Trends data, Palin’s search volume is more than double McCain’s and Obama’s, even after her initial spike.

Just because people are traveling to a specific candidate’s site or searching for them online, it doesn’t mean they will vote for them. But with such a contentious election underway that pits the red against the blue, it means at the very least that John McCain is gaining ground on Obama in the race for people’s attention.

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NetSuite Announces Chrome Compatibility

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:00:00 -0700

NetSuite, a company that touts itself as a provider of solutions that can help companies run almost every aspect of their business, announced Friday that it will be the first business application provider to provide native support for Google Chrome.

According to the company, Chrome’s browser is an ideal candidate for NetSuite products. Because the browser is optimized for Web 2.0, the company’s AJAX-powered features in its products should work much better on Chrome than any other browser. NetSuite was quick to point out, though, that its products can still be used on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

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Netsuite

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Track Hurricanes On Stormpulse

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:00:35 -0700

Wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? Hurricane season has lots of people glued to the Weather Channel to catch the latest updates on developing storms. But why wait for the weatherman to tell you what is going on when you can check for yourself online? One of the best places to do that is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can play around with them.

You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.

Data is pulled from the National Hurricane Center and other places. The site has storm data going back to 1851, soyou can see the paths and intensity of previous hurricanes. There is even an API for embedding Stormpulse maps on other sites.

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Billing Revolution Unveils ‘Single-Click’ Mobile Billing And Payment Service

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:59:38 -0700

Although buying products from your desktop at home has become just as customary as buying products at the store, few have found reason to buy products on their cell phones. In an attempt to buck that trend and make it easier for consumers to buy products from their cell phone, Billing Revolution announced today that it will offer a ’single-click’ billing and payment service that will streamline mobile purchases.

Once consumers are ready to buy something from the Web from a vendor that employs Billing Revolution’s service for payment, they are taken to Billing Revolution’s purchase page where they input credit card information from their phone. Once complete, Billing Revolution automatically sends an SMS receipt to their phone, which contains a link. After clicking that link, authentication is complete and with all future purchases, consumers will need only to click ‘buy’ for a transaction to be completed.

Billing Revolution is taking a risk with this platform that may or may not pay off. Right now, mobile purchases are just a small segment of online commerce and few consumers are willing to buy a product with their cell phones. But if Billing Revolution’s beliefs are right that all it takes is a simple process and the ability to buy products with a single click, it’s in a prime position to capitalize on what it believes is a booming market.

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Billing Revolution

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Negative Momentum: Newspaper Ad Revenues Gaining Downhill Speed (Even Online Is Declining)

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:36:52 -0700

Can it get any worse for the newspaper industry? The steep decline in print advertising just keeps getting steeper and, for the first time, even online ad sales have gone down. Total print ads in the U.S. were down 16 percent in the second quarter to $8.8 billion. That makes nine consecutive quarters in which “print revenues have declined at an almost continuously accelerating rate,” notes Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur. He put together the chart at left, which starkly illustrates the newspaper industry’s death dive.

The newspaper industry took in $1.7 billion less in print ads during the second quarter than the year before For the first half of the year, the industry is down $3.1 billion. At this rate, there won’t be an industry left by the end of next year. Of course, revenues have to stabilize at a lower level before that happens. Don’t they? Right now, we’re at 1995 revenue levels.

Don’t look to online ad sales to save the industry. Online ads came to only $777 million in the second quarter, which was down 2.4 percent from the year before. That’s marks the first decline ever in digital revenues. The practice if bundling print and online ad sales isn’t helping in this case, either. Advertisers trained to buy bundled ads are more likely to drop the entire bundle when making budget cuts.

The advertising recession is in full swing, and no segment is safe any longer.

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Clackamas River Water Providers

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:36:38 -0700

How to Chrome Your Industry - Umair Haque

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:57:33 -0700

iQualizer

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:03:54 -0700

The Great Online Advertising Divide Widens

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:54:40 -0700

As online advertising spending continues its meteoric rise — the Wall Street Journal is reporting a healthy gain of 20 percent in the second quarter alone — not every form of advertising is enjoying such success. In fact, as economic troubles continue, more and more advertisers are only willing to spend money on search ads and are increasingly ignoring other forms of advertising.

According to eMarketer, search ad spending will reach $10.4 billion this year, more than twice as much as advertisers will spend on display ads. More importantly for Google, search ads will represent 42 percent of all advertising spending, while display ads will account for just 21 percent of all online advertising.

With an economic downturn running amok, Google is quickly becoming one of the few companies that can actually withstand its onslaught. Because search results currently provide the best place for advertisers to spend money and realize a positive ROI, Google’s control of over 60 percent of the search market becomes even more important.

“We believe that if there were (a U.S. recession), we’ll be well positioned,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent earnings call.

Generally speaking, search ads are better targeted than display ads. And in an environment where companies have less money to go around, they need to find the best ways to utilize that cash and speak to the target audience. For now, display advertising will not be the best place to spend ad dollars and although Microsoft and others will do their best to compete, Google is still in the cat bird’s seat.

Just don’t mention DoubleClick.

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Google

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Zoho Releases Zoho Docs For Central Location File Browsing

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:55:08 -0700

Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.

Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.

According to Zoho, its new Docs application will allow users to upload any file type they wish with a ZIP upload process. The new software will also give users the ability to view documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a tab within the application via view mode. If they want to edit the document, they can open it with a particular Zoho app in a separate window.

Taking a page out of the Google Docs playbook, Zoho Docs now also offers group sharing, which, as you might expect, will let specific groups have access to, and edit, documents. And while working in Zoho Docs, the company has added a chat function, which will let you correspond with people in those groups as you work.

The new and improved Zoho Docs seems like a logical next step for the company. Finally, Zoho will offer many of the functions already found in Google Docs and won’t frustrate its users by requiring them to move back and forth between applications without a central location to work out from.

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socialmedian Launches First Major Upgrade

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:55:08 -0700

socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.

First off, the new socialmedian will make it easier for users to get content onto the site and enable bloggers to better promote their content. Dubbed “News-Streaming,” socialmedian’s latest foray into bringing only certain content to its users is quite complex.

News-Streaming lets users filter out all the junk from the social media that they broadcast through the site. According to the company, if users want to share their Twitter feed with the community, but only want their tweets that are actually newsworthy to be collected by socialmedian, they can first input their Twitter feed and next to that, place certain keywords into the field to help the service filter out the tweets that the user doesn’t want posted. In other words, if you want to only post your political tweets to socialmedian, add your Twitter feed to the service and select keywords that may have some relevance to politics. From there, socialmedian will grab all tweets containing those keywords and post it to the site. The same goes for Google Reader feeds, Digg submissions, and Delicious bookmarks, to name a few.

To make sure all that information isn’t annoying other users, socialmedian is adding a filter feature that will let other users “turn the volume up or down” on the amount of tweets and stories making their way across the pages. Those users can choose to see all updates or only those “relevant updates” that they preset.

Part two of socialmedian’s new initiative will make it easier for bloggers to promote their material. In order to do that, socialmedian will launch a “reverse-blog widget,” which after users place their blog feed into their updates, will be featured in the clips section to the right of the socialmedian page and display the latest stories from the blog.

Taking a page out of the Digg handbook, socialmedian is also offering a page displaying the most popular stories of the day, week, and month. Instead of calling newer stories “Upcoming,” like Digg, socialmedian has two new entries called “Rising Fast” and “Hot Discussions.” Genius.

Finally, socialmedian opened up its site to make almost every page available to search engines and users won’t need to register any longer to view different pages on the site.

All in all, socialmedian’s updates seem rather logical and don’t really break the mold in any way. The site was in desperate need of improvement and it looks like it has finally happened. Now we’ll need to wait and see if its users embrace it.

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Coming Up with Good Research Paper Topic Ideas

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:36:34 -0700

Coming up with interesting ideas for research papers, or any others. can be hard. This article has some great advice on how to come up with great ones.

Stylesight Raises $16 Million In Series A Funding

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:55:04 -0700

Stylesight, a company that specializes in trend forecasting and product development tools for professionals in the fashion and style industries, announced Wednesday that it has completed its series A round of funding with $16 million from Fidelity Ventures.

According to Fidelity Ventures, Stylesight “addresses a huge need in the fashion market and could shift the way apparel manufacturers, brands, and retailers do business.” With the help of Stylesight, designers, manufacturers, and retailers will have access to the latest fashion data and images, which can then be used in advertising campaigns, design plans, and merchandise displays.

Stylesight will use the financing to expand its research and development efforts and provide more content for its users.

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Mozilla Fights Back With New Firefox Benchmarks

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:55:15 -0700

The dust hasn’t even settled on Chrome’s release and already Mozilla is feeling the pressure. The company today released a series of benchmarks showing Firefox 3.1 will be faster than anything Google can muster with Chrome.

Chrome is running V8, an open source Javascript engine, which Google claims, is faster than anything currently offered on the Web. And based on our tests of Chrome, we tend to agree.

But in the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, which should be available by the end of the year, Mozilla will employ TraceMonkey, a new engine that according to one of its coders, Brendan Eich, will easily eclipse even the fastest instance of Chrome.

To prove it, Mozilla tested Firefox running on TraceMonkey and compared it to Google’s Chrome beta using its own benchmarking solution called SunSpider. According to the company, Chrome was 28 percent slower on Windows XP and 16 percent slower on Windows Vista.

Mozilla is quick to point out that TraceMonkey has only been in development for a few months and will only get better before it’s rolled out later this year, but the company has a vested interest in seeing Firefox come out on top in its benchmark testing, so all figures should probably be questioned, to say the least. And the same goes for Google’s five benchmarks.

For now, Chrome is the fastest browser in the market and anyone using both Firefox and Chrome will find that out quickly. But once Firefox 3.1 hits the Web, we’ll find out if Chrome has what it takes to stay on top after TraceMonkey becomes Mozilla’s engine of choice.

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Six Degrees of Separation Is Now Three

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:54:19 -0700

Is it time to revise the old saw that everyone in the world is connected by just six degrees of separation? A study from French mobile carrier O2 has found that strangers are more connected to each other than they ever have been.

According to the study, the average person is now connected by just three degrees within a shared “interest” or social group instead of six. In fact, it found that people are usually a part of three main networks: family, friendship, and work.

O2 asked adults across three different age groups — 18-25, 35-45, 55+ — to make contact with random strangers from areas all across the globe using only personal connections. By linking their shared interests, the participants were able to connect to that person in three person-to-person links.

Stanley Milgram originally coined the term “six degrees of separation” in 1967 to show that everyone in the modern world was capable of connecting to another by linking people and interests. But in today’s world of social networking, links between strangers are closer than in Milgram’s day.

According to Jeff Rodrigues, a social networking specialist that carried out the study, 97 percent of the participants said they felt more connected to people today than they ever have in the past and for older respondents, email and mobile phones were the key factors in reducing the degrees of separation. But for those in the younger generation, Facebook was the main factor. Text messaging was also mentioned as an important component in reducing degrees of separation.

“What the study has brought to light is that the way we now interact means it’s never been easier to make connections and build networks of contacts,” Rodrigues said in an interview.

It should be noted that the research is not the epitome of a real scientific study—O2 paid for it, after all. And anyone who has a LinkedIn account knows that it is still easy to find plenty of people who are more than three degrees away from you. But the study does underscore something we all know:more so than ever before, everyone is connected (even if it is only tangentially).

Maybe it is time to revisit Milgram’s study in a more robust way. It could help silence the critics who believe Facebook and the rest are nothing more than places for kids to waste their time. Let’s face it – how often will you find one service or industry that can totally transform the way people are connected?

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WritingFix: Writing Lessons Inspired by Creative Use of a Classroom I-Pod

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:57:20 -0700

Learning to Craft Term Paper Ideas from Writing Prompts

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:01:42 -0700

This is terrific for first year college students who aren’t really familiar with academic writing yet. Besides that, it’s got some great tips for how to break through writer’s block!

Can Hulu Be A Bigger Business Than YouTube?

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:54:13 -0700

Google’s foray into the online video market has been criticized by many. In fact, some believe that Google’s decision to acquire YouTube was one of the worst it has ever made, thanks to the confluence of massive copyright violations and Google’s financial backing, which gave copyright holders the impetus they needed to sue the popular site. Others believe that Google’s decision to enter the online video market and become a quasi-content firm wasn’t the best way for it to capitalize on the booming video advertising business. Either way, Google is now wholeheartedly invested in online video and YouTube is the centerpiece of its strategy.

YouTube’s Sorry Situation

YouTube may be wildly popular, but Google’s ability to realize a profit has been difficult, at best. The company spent $1.65 billion for YouTube and so far, it has yet to find a way to monetize it effectively and realize a positive return on its investment.

Estimates for how much revenues YouTube can produce are all over the place. While Forbes estimates YouTube’s revenue will reach $200 million worldwide this year and $350 million next year, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney thinks Google can make $500 million next year if it focuses more of its efforts on display ads.

But just because YouTube may be able to recognize revenue of $500 million next year, doesn’t mean it will. YouTube needs to do a much better job in the advertising department to get there. It has done little to allay many of the fears advertisers have about the content presented on the site—the limited success of its Video ID program aside. Whether YouTube, the business, can be as successful as YouTube, the video site, is still a big question mark.

For all its business challenges, YouTube remains the most popular video service on the Web. The site commands 34 percent of all Web videos streamed in the U.S. market, while the second-place service, MySpaceTV, only controls 6.4 percent, and Hulu brings up the rear with 0.7 percent (according to May, 2008 numbers from comScore Video Metrix).

Head-to-Head With Hulu

Hulu may not size up well against YouTube – in May 2008, Hulu served about 88 million videos compared to YouTube’s 4.2 billion videos – but it has the luxury of monetizing the vast majority of its videos instead of the three percent that YouTube can sell ads against. Three percent of 4.2 billion is 126 million videos a month that can carry ads—not much more than Hulu.

That pretty much levels the playing field in terms of revenue and profit potential. According to one estimate, Hulu could enjoy $90 million in revenue in its first year. And although it may not be quite as much as YouTube’s estimated worldwide revenue total of $200 million this year, it equals a Bear Stearns estimate for YouTube’s domestic 2008 revenue (of $90 million). Considering that Hulu mainly caters to an American audience, both YouTube and Hulu could see roughly the same revenues in the U.S. this year.

Unlike YouTube, Hulu isn’t plagued by copyright concerns and doesn’t need to worry about questionable user-generated content. More importantly, all of its content appeals to advertisers.

As Chris B. Allen, director of video innovation at Starcom told Forbes, “most of the momentum now is for ads within full episodes run on the TV networks’ sites, such as NBC and Fox’s Hulu, ABC.com and CBS.com. It’s a format that advertisers understand.”

But understanding the format is just a modicum of the business advantage Hulu has over YouTube. In contrast to much of YouTube’s videos, Hulu’s content doesn’t cross as many lines of decency and demographics are readily available. (Albeit, Google did launch Insight, its video statistics service, to help with demographic information).

If YouTube has shown us anything, it proves that there is a huge market for user-generated content. But from a business standpoint, professional content is the place where advertisers want to spend money and how video sites will solidify their financial position. Athough Hulu will probably never grow to the size of YouTube and Google can use that size to its advantage, Hulu’s own advantage is its ability to draw advertisers to the content that more effectively attracts their target audience.

The heart of the issue is the value of mainstream versus niche buys. Advertisers want to place ads on videos that they know their target audience is watching. YouTube has started to make a push for professional content as of late, including a deal with Family Guy creator, Seth MacFarlane. But it needs to work harder to solve the problem of making money from its costly user-generated content, which is not only the vast majority of its videos, but also the content that most advertisers don’t want any part of.

In contrast, Hulu is the epitome of a video site that has capitalized on the inertia of the industry by providing users with content they know and can enjoy, while making it a service that would appeal to practically any advertiser.

Advertisers are throwing money at Web video, but who is going to capture that growth?. According to eMarketer, online video advertising will amount to $1.35 billion this year and Google, a company that controls more than 30 percent of the U.S. video market, can only attract 15 percent of advertising spending this year. As more advertisers look to spend money on online videos and continue their search for professional content with dependable demographics data, Hulu could become the service of choice.

We can’t forget that Hulu is still in its infancy and quite a bit can happen between now and when it becomes a more powerful brand. But we also can’t forget that it’s quickly becoming the place where TV and film studios – organizations that have historically distrusted the Web – want to place content for free on the Internet. We also can’t forget that YouTube is public enemy number one for those studios because it was once (and still is, to some extent) a haven for copyright infringement.

All Google needs to do to ward off the Hulu threat is to make a little bit more of its video inventory appealing to advertisers. Not much, maybe 10 percent.

But if Google doesn’t lure more professional content as quickly as possible and do its best to monetize user-generated content, Hulu will gain ground financially and could solidify itself as a big money maker in the industry. Perhaps even bigger than YouTube. All the while, Google will keep spending millions each quarter to pay for YouTube and desperately search for business models that will one day hopefully see it turn a profit, while NBC and the rest laugh all the way to the bank.

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YouTube

hulu

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Open Sourcing Your Creativity | LifeDev

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:56:56 -0700

Fiorina Versus Whitman: Who Would Make A Better Vice President?

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:53:53 -0700

Update: McCain has chosen someone from outside Silicon Valley: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

As John McCain prepares to unveil his selection for a running mate today, Mitt Romney seems to be a favorite. But two former Silicon Valley CEOs are also on the short list, and they are both women: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Picking Romney would help McCain solidify his position with the Republican base, but it would also be predictable and boring. Picking a woman with executive experience would show that McCain is as open to change as Barack Obama.

Other women also have a shot at the VP slot, including Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But if it came down to Fiorina and Whitman, who would make the better Vice President? Both are whip-smart and have managed large organizations. Fiorina, of course, was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and Whitman was the CEO of eBay.

Both, however, left their CEO posts during troubled times for each company (although Fiorina was forced out, while Whitman stepped down voluntarily after a decade at the helm). Looking at each one’s performance at each company, you’d have to give Whitman the upper hand. The vast majority of her years at Bay were spent overseeing its meteoric rise. (She is also co-chair of McCain’s campaign). But Fiorina (who is the “Victory Chairman” of the RNC) is perhaps more adept at the political arts, and has proven she feels comfortable on the world stage. (Listen to our recent interview with Fiorina—she certainly has a good grasp of the issues that matter to Silicon Valley).

Who would make the best VP—Whitman, Fiorina, or someone else? Who would give McCain the biggest boost at the polls?

Who Should John McCain Pick As His Vice Presidential Candidate?
( surveys)

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[from martti] Creative Advertising - 192 Smart & Clever Ads

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:58:26 -0700

"AIAIAI" Aiaiai Y-Com Headphones at oki-ni

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:07:36 -0700

The portfolio of Bryan Katzel | Design, illustration & stuff to make you smile

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:07:00 -0700

Learn How To Develop For The iPhone - NETTUTS

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:37:39 -0700

Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:07:24 -0700

New technologies tend to follow different trajectories of hype, hope, and despair as they are discovered by different groups of people and finally adopted (or ignored) by consumers. Gartner actually goes ahead and charts this hype cycle for different technologies. Its latest hype cycle for 2008, shown above, is making the rounds. (It was released in July, but is just now reaching the upward trajectory in its own cycle). According to Gartner’s view of the world, the visibility of new technologies peaks early as initial excitement gains steam. This phase is followed by a “trough of disillusionment” in which inflated expectations hit reality. But as technologies prove themselves, their visibility begins to grow again at a more measured pace.

Of course, not all technologies go through these phases. Some just drop of the face of the Earth never to be heard from again; some wander around for years and don’t hit their hype cycle until later in life, and some build visibility at a steadier pace. But it is still a useful visual metaphor, especially for high-profile technologies that do exhibit these traits.

So where are we in the hype cycle exactly? Some technologies still moving towards the “peak of inflated expectations” include cloud computing, microblogging, and 3-D printing. Public Virtual Worlds, RFID, Web 2.0, and Wikis are troughing. And emerging into the “slope of enlightenment” are Tablet PCs (oh, yeah) and location-aware applications (thank you, iPhone).

What else belongs on the hype cycle, and where would you put it?

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