1 minute and 53 seconds on SOPA and PIPA
Posted 2 weeks ago
I suppose this acts as a bit of a followup to my post on Search+ yesterday, in which I defended Google in their move to include social context in search. In it, I stated that the reason Google+ features so prominently is because its what they are able to index. And yet, endless tech experts have gone after Google for not including links shared on Twitter. Luigi Montanez, quite rightly, calls them out for this misinterpretation…
There is no great conspiracy against Twitter here. Google is simply following the rules of
rel=nofollow.
Posted 2 weeks ago
MG is pretty angry. And I understand why. Google’s Search+ (or “Search plus Your World”, apparently) seems to be a blatant attempt to push a product that would otherwise have very little traction, by leveraging an industry in which they have almost a monopoly; web search. The truth is, though, that the functionality is awesome. We all know very well that social context is the next revolution in web search, and for Google to ignore that would be their downfall. It’s the reason I’m calling out Facebook and Microsoft for being stupid and not doing the same thing, within Bing, a long time ago. No; the issue isn’t the functionality - it’s the fact that it’s Google’s own product that is being pushed. And the reason that is the case is equally simple - Google are building this functionality with what they have access to. Matt Cutts just took the time to explain what it is that Google is exposing through the new feature, which includes public content outside of Google+. Is this is a bit of a “fuck you” to Twitter, who decided to end their agreement with Google last year? Of course. They’ve essentially just strong-armed Twitter and Facebook into exposing their services to be fully crawlable by Google. And that is going to make for a fantastic search experience for all of us.
Posted 2 weeks ago
Microsoft just made a point of telling everyone at CES that they are still very much cool. In fact, you know you might be trying a bit too hard when you pay Ryan Seacrest to walk out onto the stage with your CEO. And they’ve already lost that battle. Microsoft will never be a “cool” company in the same way that Apple or Google is; a consequence of corporate culture and branding that, despite dwarfed market caps, places them firmly as the ‘corporate giant’, rather than the cool and rebellious underdog. Bleached-teethed TV personalities and tweet-singing choirs won’t change that any time soon. The only thing that will is cool products.
The good news is that Microsoft has more than one of those.
The new Metro UI is truly brilliant. Bright colours and icons and intuitive interactions make it a joy to use, and is innovative in a way that will see it move away from being a mere clone of Apple and Google OSes. The updated Microsoft experience will see a unification between desktop, mobile and gaming products. Its hard to not love it.
The second bit of true innovation is XBox and Kinect. With 66m XBoxes already sold, it isn’t struggling for popularity and the Kinect-enabled gaming innovations and Metro UI have positioned Microsoft firmly in competition for the centre of home entertainment. And, at the end of the month, Kinect will come to PC, bringing a new interface potential to the world of mice and keyboards.
Will Microsoft have people camping overnight outside of flagship stores in a hope of being the first to get their hands on their products? Probably not. Will people travel from the world over to hear them announced in a spectacular stage show? Probably not. But will customers love using their products? Very possibly. Leave the awe-inspiring keynotes to Apple and focus on making more of those awe-inspiring products, Mr Balmer.
Posted 2 weeks ago
via parislemon
115 Notes
Since rejoining the Company in 1997, Mr. Jobs had not sold any of his shares of the Company’s stock. Mr. Jobs held no unvested equity awards. The Company recognized that Mr. Jobs’s level of stock ownership significantly aligned his interests with shareholders’ interests.
In a world where the likes of Steve Ballmer and many others routinely sell huge portions of their shares, Jobs kept all of his. $2,319,515,000 worth, as Dustin Curtis points out.
That’s dedication and loyalty. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.
(via parislemon)
Source: dcurt.is
Posted 2 weeks ago
the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population.
The online video industry is at a strange crossroads right now. While penetration is at an all-time high, the time spent watching video is still at just 1.4% of that of traditional television. But the lines between the two are increasingly blurring. With television and cable internet access bundled in their delivery to consumers, and devices like Xboxes (with their Metro update) and smart televisions becoming increasingly prevalent, it is easier for traditional television viewers to access ‘online’ video content within the same environment that they would ordinarily watch television. Whether it be an on-demand episode delivered over IP, or a PVR-ed cable episode, their is a decreasing concious decision and action required to differentiate the two. As the barrier-to-access to online services such as Netflix and Hulu continues to decrease, time spent watching will climb at an incremental rate, and an online video offering will be a more and more attractive to advertisers, being substantially more targeted and measurable than the traditional counterpart. The ball is your court, television networks…
Posted 3 weeks ago
So I’ve just got my iPhone 4S up-and-running, and I thought I’d put together some initial thoughts, having spent 15 minutes with Apple’s latest flagship phone.
Would I recommend you upgrading if you already have the iPhone 4? No. Unless you are due for an upgrade on your contract anyway (like me). But if you have an older iPhone, or haven’t yet made the move over, there is no doubt that it is an incredible phone. 15 minutes with it will be enough to convince you of that…
Posted 3 weeks ago
This really is the next big move from Facebook, allowing for what is best described as ‘frictionless sharing’. Essentially, it will see actions taken all over the web being pushed back into Facebook (assuming you give Facebook permission, of course) for all your friends to see. The ‘shares’ appear in the Ticker, and summaries of actions taken by a user appear in their Timeline. This is only half the story, though.
What is truly innovative about what Facebook is doing is that the are building a new data model around real-world objects and interactions in the same way as what the Social Graph is to social interactions and data. This VentureBeat article, for example, suddenly becomes more than just a web page - it is now defined as an ‘article’ with users able to make actions against it, for example ‘reading’ and ‘commenting on’. This approach to defining virtual objects as real-world objects is a game-changer.
It has already proven very successful for the partners that Facebook launched with, including Netflix, Spotify and WSJ.
Posted 3 weeks ago
So chuffed to see the news that IFTTT has raised a seed round of $1.5M from some top-notch investors, including Betaworks, SV Angel, Founder Collective, CrunchFund and David Tisch.
I was lucky enough to be pointed to the service by Womers some months ago, and have since been using it to automate a load of useful tasks, including archiving photos to Dropbox and sending liked articles on Instapaper to Evernote.
TechCrunch’s description of IFTTT as “a glue gun for sticking the web together” does it justice. It allows you to create tasks from existing ‘recipes’ - which perform actions between two web services including RSS, Dropbox, Evernote, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook (you get the idea..) - or to create your own ‘recipes’ which are then available for others to use. Designed with large (very large) fonts and simple graphics, it is incredibly simple to find your way around and to accomplish otherwise-complicated and time-consuming tasks.
All the best to Linden Tibbets and the growing team as they put the new-found cash to good use in the coming months. I’m incredibly excited to see what happens.
Posted 3 weeks ago
3 Notes
Clay Shirky has, once again, tackled the issues around the commercialization of the print media industry online; an industry that has been continuously erroded financially since the precedent for free online news was set in the early days of the Internet.
He points to a principle problem - that there is, as yet, no tried and tested revenue model. The traditional print business model allows revenue to be realized through 2 streams - readers and advertisers. The problem in an online context is that the readers won’t pay, and that advertisers won’t pay as much for the audience as they would in a print context. And yet, the costs of the production of the same content remains exactly the same.
“The easy part of treating digital news as a product is getting money from 2% of your audience. The hard part is losing 98% of your advertising base.”
The tradeoff between advertiser and reader income continues, so when newspapers such as The Sunday Times introduced a paywall, 98% of readers disappeared and the advertising revenue decreased dramatically. While threshold paywalls (in that you pay for reaching more than x articles a month) seems to address this, the reality is that 80% of the readership will never reach that threshold.
Shirky argues that commercializing the core audience is the answer, who are more active, in exchange for being more demanding about the content. What that means for advertising revenue is still uncertain, but the idea of a niche and focused audience is certainly an attractive one from a commercial standpoint.
In ‘traditional’ media, revenue comes from controlling the media itself, rather than the content. Newspapers bundle content and sell the paper, and satellite and cable TV providers bundle channels and sell access to them. That model has failed to work in an online context. Instead, users pay for individual pieces of content. Even CDs have been unbundled into individual songs.
The problem is more cultural than it is economic. It requires that publishers shift their thinking from product to content.
Notes