November 2007 - Posts
A report released by
Keynote Competitive Research finds that top mobile websites, in their opinion, are struggling to adapt to the needs of consumers. They cite response time (the average time in seconds to download a mobile website to a phone), download speed (average speed, in bytes per second, for a website to download to a phone) and success rate (how often a website was successfully downloaded).
Among the findings, Google ranked best in response time with 6.6 seconds, followed by Facebook at 6.7 seconds. Yahoo averaged 9 seconds, while CNN, MapQuest, MSN and ESPN ranked very low with a response time over 10 seconds. Beating the 10-second mark were Fandango, Schwab and the Weather Channel.
As far as download speed, CNN ranked the highest with 2,368 bytes per second, then ESPN (1,756 bps) and MSN (1,484 bps). Sites that ranked low (less than 1,300 bps) included Mapquest, Google, Fandango, the Weather Channel, Schwab and Facebook.
Success rate varied little - the highest was Google (99% of the time) and last was MSN (97%).
Here in Chicago we do not have many speed traps (it's hard to get enough
speed going in between stoplights to make a Chicago cop turn his head with so
much traffic). If you do live in an area where speed traps are the norm though,
take a look at Njection
Speed Trap mashup, a service which gives users the ability to find out where
speed traps are most likely to be placed and pinpoint them on a map.
The Web
application combines Microsoft Live Maps and the ability to pinpoint and review
speed traps located anywhere on the planet. The information shared by its
members is placed into a database and can be viewed by anyone. Members of
Njection.com community have the ability to add new speed trap locations and can
review speed traps already posted. In addition to the location of the trap,
members can post detailed information such as the type of speed detection used,
posted speed limit, and level of enforcement.
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Oodle just announced the release a
several new tools which aim to improve the way consumers use classified
sites online. |
Users of the local classified sites will be introduced to a personalized
interface that includes their recent searches when they visit their Oodle page.
When away from the site, users will also receive detailed email updates of new
listings that match their active searches. Oodle has some interesting features
beyond this personalization that attempts to answer users most pressing "buying"
questions such as "What's a great price?" and "How often do listings like this
appear?"
Oodle indexes over 500,000 new listings every day from over 80,000 classified
sites across the Web and powers classifieds for over 200 leading brands,
including Cox Interactive, Media General, The Washington Post, San Diego Union
Tribune and Lycos.
"Most people have a love-hate relationship with classifieds," said
Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle. "They can find great deals but it's incredibly
frustrating and time-consuming. Oodle not only gives users access to millions of
local listings, it now provides the tools they need to quickly discover great
deals."
Amazon.com has released a new product they believe to be the future of how we read books and media, dubbed Kindle. The 10-ounce device has wireless download capabilities so that a user can download books, blogs or newspapers in less than one minute, without a data plan or service provider. And that capability is touted as the reason the Kindle will revolutionize how we read. The six-inch display utilizes "electronic paper" so that the display looks more like a book and less like a digital screen. The device holds about 200 book titles but can be expanded with an SD memory card to hold much more.
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, speaking with USA Today said, "This is really a reading service. The store is right on the device. You can't
out-book the book. You have to find things that you could do with this device
that you could never do with a physical book. The idea that you could be on a
train, in a car, lying in your bed and 60 seconds later have a new book …" Certainly, that's a nice feature.
But the biggest problem with this new electronic book? It's just not a book. The display is still a digital screen, meaning limited space - much more limiting than a two-page spread of a conventional book. By the looks of it, you get about three paragraphs before you have to move to the next screen. Want to loan your latest greatest book to a friend? Unless you want to hand over your $400 device, your friend is out of luck. Personally, I like holding a book open, I like flipping pages and I like the satisfaction of holding the bulk of the book in my left hand right before I read the last page. And I'm no interior designer, but displaying your Kindle on a bookshelf just doesn't hold the same appeal as a nice, full bookshelf of your favorite titles. This all reminds me of the dawn of the Palm Pilot. I was pretty excited to sync my Palm Pilot after work and read the NY Times or a magazine on my way home from work. But before long, I grew tired of a small screen and went right back to print. And at $400, I can buy upwards of 30 books before the numbers work out - and that's before spending $9.99 or more for each title to fill my Kindle.
Personally, I would rather use my mobile device to scan newspapers and blogs and keep browsing my favorite bookstores for literary gems. But if you're interested, check out the
video demo of the Kindle.
Loopt is a mobile-enabled, social mapping service where friends can keep up-to-date with thier locations in real time. Proximity based messages can be used to detect when a friend is in the area.
Now Loopt users can integrate their address books and AIM Buddy List to share their location via SMS text or Instant Message. When a user sends an alert to a friend, they can attach their location and even a map to show exactly where they are at a that time.
"The most common mobile question in the world is 'Where are you?' and we are excited that Loopt can extend the service to a larger mobile universe," said Loopt co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. "Now, Loopt users can share their location with any friend so there'll never be any more missed social connections when everyone is on the go."
Pandora, the streaming Internet radio service that allows you to create "stations" based on your musical taste has launched a mobile service currently available to AT&T and Sprint customers. The mobile device must be capable of 3G connectivity to handle the bandwidth. The list of devices capable of the new service is available on their
website, along with a free trial. After the free trial, Pandora will charge $8.99 per month.
Hungry for a pizza but can't fit the phone call into your busy schedule? No problem - pizza franchise Papa Johns is now accepting text message orders. After an intial online registration, customers can choose to save up to four "favorites," then text FAV1, FAV,2, etc. or order something entirely new, then get thier pie 30 minutes later. Papa Johns sends a message back, where customers can then confirm or change their order.
Expect the services to be a big hit with the younger demographic, who have become text-messaging conissuers. "The high-technology ways of reaching customers probably appeal to
younger people, who live with their text messaging and their
BlackBerry," said Bear Stearns restaurant analyst Joe Buckley.
This is an excellent example of adopting technology to a traditionally brick-and-mortar business and a sharp recognition of a business catering to its consumers. Papa Johns scored a big hit when they introduced online ordering in 2001 - now accounting for nearly 20 percent of thier U.S. sales.
Some images are so compelling as to warrant an action on the viewer’s part. But when you come across an image on the Internet, you're forced to right-click, save the image - sending it to the no-man's (or woman’s) land know as your hard drive if you want to take a look later. If you deem the image worthy enough to share it with your friends, you're then forced to dig through that cluttered file structure of yours, find it and then send it off to your online pals.
The answer to your question is yes. There is a better way - social bookmarking designed specifically for visual contents. Who's doing it and doing it right?
vi.sualize.us for one and they're enabling the image obsessed to remember their favorites and share them with a great deal of convenience.
Say you’re tooling around checking Google Images for a new background for your desktop. If you were registered with vi.sualize.us and had the services’ bookmarklet installed within your browser, sending that image to the platform can be done quickly in a few clicks. When you are on a page with an image, click the bookmarklet and then select the image you would like to add to your vi.sualize.us account. Add a description, a few defining tags and its saved for later viewing.
What’s clever about vi.sualize.us is the social bookmarking twist placed on standard image galleries. Being able to share you photo bookmarks with the rest of the Web is bound to help us all find more cool stuff more often.
Have you ever had a song in your head that you could not put a title to, and try as you might, you couldn’t name that tune? Well I’ve been there; and I’ve often thought that I should hunt the web for a site (or software) which would somehow enable me to identify that song reverberating in my cranium.
After ending my procrastination and a brief search, I found a site called “
midomi”; and it is very cool. Part song search, part social network, and part music store; this site brings together a community seeking web harmony.
It works like this, you configure your computer’s microphone and hum or sing a representative sample of the music you seek information on; after some brief search processing, midomi returns a hierarchical list of tunes which it believes to be most relevant to your sample recording. My own informal yet discrete testing (I didn’t want to totally alienate my co-workers with my incessant humming), wherein I maintained a conscientious sotto voce, yielded a 66% success rate after just a few attempts.
What really engages the visitor however is the facility to participate in midomi’s social network; here you can comment on other member’s own vocal renditions of various musical genre, as well as contribute your own. Granted, the talent pool tends to congregate a little towards the shallower depths of the karaoke realm; but if you’ve already stuck your toes in and tested the water, then just enjoy the swim!
midomi receives its principle monetization through its “Hot Artists” section, where one can purchase recordings by contemporary songsters. And while one cannot purchase midomi’s amateur “Stars” renditions of popular songs, the call to action to buy the original version is prominently displayed.
Additional revenue is derived through Ads by Google’s contextually relevant listings. midomi, which still touts its beta status, is a product of
Melodis Corporation, a Silicon Valley company involved in sound recognition and search technologies.
If you’re anything like me, you can’t stand to pay full price for anything. Fortunately, living in a capitalist society means that companies fight for our attention – on and off of the Web. This most often comes in the form of coupons and there are quite a few Web services online which make keeping a few dollars in your pocket all the more possible.
Collaborative coupon, deal hunting and sharing site RetailMeNot.com is a real innovator in the online coupon space and a favorite of serious online shoppers. Since November 2006 when the site launched, RetailMeNot has offered over 45,000 discounts for sharing at over 8,000 online stores.
Each coupon is rated and ordered by its usefulness and each store is categorized and ordered by its popularity within a category. The users of the service ensure that the best deals get the most attention and those that are expired move off the list.
The beauty of the service is that anyone can add a coupon. If you are a merchant or know someone who might benefit from participating, consider offering a featured discount, which are displayed more prominently on the site. The simplest way to add your products (merchants only) would be join existing affiliate networks like Commission Junction or LinkShare. If that doesn’t work you could always pony up one hundred dollars for a category sponsorship.
If for one minute you think that big media companies (not to mention your own employer) is not watching your every movement online, you would be sadly, sadly mistaken. If you’re a Firefox browser users, you may want to check out TrackMeNot, a Firefox extension which protects web searchers from the peering eye of the big boss (surveillance) or big brother (data profiling – to serve more “targeted” ads).
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that sends out randomized search-queries to popular search engines such as AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. The extension essentially hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of “ghost” queries, making it exceedingly difficult to collect data and formulate accurate user profiles.
If you’re sensitive about some of the largest companies on the Web knowing exactly what it is that defines your searching behavior, TrackMeNot can, if not protect you outright, make it so that you are not defined by all those key lime pie recipes you’ve been collecting on the sly.
Music is defined as the organization of sounds with some degree of rhythm, melody, and harmony. The rhythms, melodies and harmonies of music created by various artists appeal to humans and over time, we develop a personal list of favorite artists. But how do you keep track of when those artists release a new album? Music-Alerts.com has made it easy with an interesting solution which creates an RSS feed that notifies users when their favorite artists release a new album.
Creator Adam McFarland, co-founder of web development company Pure Adapt of Albany Park, NY was frustrated trying to keep up with release dates for his favorite artists. Not finding any service which solved the problem, Adam took the situation into his own hands and created a web application which pulls information about various artists from Amazon.com.
Remember the days when you had to dress up those presentations with clipart? While imaging has come a long way, there’s no shortage of places to find that certain element to make your presentation look as though you know what you are actually talking about.
The Open Clip Art Library is a project which aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. Any graphic submitted to the OCAL is within the public domain through a Creative Commons license. That, for you rocket scientists, means that’s it’s free – as long as you attribute the image to the creator.
The website provides some great detailed information on the number of uploads, the most sampled artists, the number of uploads and signups each month, but one of the more interesting areas of the site is that users are able to search for that just right image using a simple tag search. For example, if you’re looking for some images to spruce up your nautical themed MySpace page, you may want to select the “boat” tag and see what is available. There were about fourteen very attractive images, both drawn and turned into clip art and those created with digital imaging software.
The downside of the site is that you may just encounter more broken images that actual files. You can’t beat the value though – just make sure you attribute properly.
Collaboration is an important part of the new age of media. Working with others in your network (whether personal or business) and building a community around a product or idea can take what may seem like an inconsequential thought and turn it into the next big thing.
YouFig has a very robust platform for Web users get together online with their friends and colleagues to exchange ideas, network, and collaborate in real time.
If you’ve got a class project coming up, need some input on your homework (or if you’re a teacher and want to offer help on all those exceedingly difficult calculus problems you assigned), are planning a vacation, brainstorming the next Google killer or even simply if you want to participate in a group discussion about last week’s smash and grab job at the roller rink, YouFig makes it pretty easy to assemble your team and collaborate in real-time. The result is less back and forth so you’ll save time and have everybody on board.
YouFig is essentially a dedicated workspace, where groups can discuss, chat, write, create and share in a closed environment.
An individual picture used to be one thousand words. Now, thanks to digital
photography, our personal photo collections are worth (at least to us) more like
the value of a small nation. With the Eye-Fi
wireless memory card, digital photo junkies can upload pictures from
their digital camera to a PC or Mac and to popular photo sharing, printing,
blogging or social networking websites wirelessly and immediately with ease. How cool is that?
The thing about digital photography is that you can quickly end up with
hundreds of photos. With the Eye-Fi Card, all you need to do is pop the memory
card into the digital camera and start taking pictures. The card then stores
pictures like a regular SD card but when you turn on your camera and computer, Eye-Fi uploads the photos automatically upon
connecting to the home network through a built in wireless connection - no
cables, no waiting, no digital hassles.
The Eye-Fi Card stores a whopping 2GB worth of photos, includes a USB memory
card reader to make set up a breeze and handles full-resolution jpeg images.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Eye-Fi is that it supports free and
unlimited uploads to photo sharing, social networking and printing websites,
including KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Wal-Mart, Snapfish, Photobucket, Facebook,
Webshots, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Flickr, Fotki, TypePad, VOX, dotPhoto,
Phanfare, Sharpcast and Gallery. The Eye-Fi service works behind the scenes to
handle the photos, connecting to the sites, managing logins and passwords and
even re-sizing pictures if necessary – and all within a secure and private
environment.
