The Next Web |  |
- 140 characters to infamy. Take control of David on Demand.
- Google reportedly building a paid news content system.
- Chrome Working To Integrate PDFs Into The Browser
- Posterous Launches Comment Control And Moderation
- Why Foursquare Is At Risk Of A Spam Epidemic
- Ok, Who Hacked Google Trends This Time?
- You must see this very clever Tokyo Subway iPhone 4 Ad
- Hot Potato will Scrobble your World
- iPhone 3GS Versus iPhone 4 Smackdown – How Do They Stack Up?
- Is Google Spanking Microsoft In The Productivity And Email Wars?
- Rock Werchter 2010: The Official Application.
- Google Docs adds new features to make sharing easier
- Internet advertising: how to stand out in the upcoming flood.
- Wordpress 3.0 now available!
- Sensa Touch might have just standardized mobile HTML5 development.
- The Perfect Opportunity VS The Right Opportunity
- Yahoo! search results will become Bing search results in just over a month.
- Property hunting in the UK? There’s a Google Map for that.
- LivePitch Turns Your iPad Into A World Cup “Second Screen”
- Updated: Apple Blocks Interchanging Of iPad/iPhone 4 MicroSIM Cards
| 140 characters to infamy. Take control of David on Demand. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:38 PM PDT
Meet David Perez, aka David on Demand. David is your typical 20-something guy. He has a job in advertising, loves his job and would give anything to head to Cannes for the Lions International Advertising Festival. The only difference? His boss said that he’d foot the bill for David to go to Cannes, on one condition. David has to spend an entire week doing whatever the world wants him to do, all live on Twitter. So yes, within the bounds of legality, if you say it, he’ll do it. To prove it, he’ll spend the week wearing glasses equipped with a webcam to stream his every move all week. What does Perez think of this?
So check him out, starting on June 20th, and see what he does during his trip. So far, David is up to 2,131 followers but you can bet that number will skyrocket as the news gets out. Original title and link for this post: 140 characters to infamy. Take control of David on Demand. |
| Google reportedly building a paid news content system. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 04:15 PM PDT
No confirmation from Google on this story yet. As is common, Google tends to be very tight lipped about upcoming products. However, an article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica says that the Mountain View, California company has been reaching out to local publishers to test the water, so to speak. Is this the future of premium content on the Internet? Though some publishers believe so (just look at the catastrophe surrounding The Wall Street Journal), the commonly held belief is that any paid content system is going to take a lot of work before it would be accepted on a global scale. One possibility with this is a system called Newspass (a translation from the Italian paper, so this name might not be accurate). Not unlike any other subscription service, Newspass would allow its holders access to content across any site that used the service. It’s no coincidence, mind you, that this service would spring up in Italy. The country has been a hotbed of confrontation with Google, so this appears to be the first steps toward a resolution. According to Google, and from the Paid Content article:
Original title and link for this post: Google reportedly building a paid news content system. |
| Chrome Working To Integrate PDFs Into The Browser Posted: 17 Jun 2010 03:20 PM PDT
While Google understands the important role that plugins have played and will continue to play in the world of browsers, they are not as quick and secure as can be. That is why Chrome is working to make the viewing of PDFs not dependent on a plugin, to allow the rendering of PDFs to be accomplished like a normal HTML webpage. Google outlines the advantages of this integrated approach as the following:
There are some limitations to this approach. Chrome as it stands (in the most advanced developer version) does not match the capabilities of Adobe Reader. Google Chrome will eventually give you the option to launch PDFs in Adobe Reader if you desire, but should be able to handle the vast majority of the use case scenarios that come its way. If you are on the Chrome developer channel, head to chrome://plugins to turn it on. Alternatively, head here for more raw data on the release. Go try it out! Original title and link for this post: Chrome Working To Integrate PDFs Into The Browser |
| Posterous Launches Comment Control And Moderation Posted: 17 Jun 2010 02:09 PM PDT
You can access and turn on the new feature in your “Posting and Commenting” settings area. The button is small, but it is there towards the bottom.
You can enable comment moderation for any of your Posterous sites individually, depending on your needs. Once comment moderation is up and running, all comments are set aside until you give them the go ahead for publishing. You will receive an email when a post is commented on. A small step for Posterous, but a huge boon to their users looking to block abusive commenters and avoid spam like the devil. The following image is of the moderation process, happy posting!
Original title and link for this post: Posterous Launches Comment Control And Moderation |
| Why Foursquare Is At Risk Of A Spam Epidemic Posted: 17 Jun 2010 01:34 PM PDT
Foursquare spam is still a minor problem but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on. As a service with a fast-growing but relatively small userbase, true spam on Foursquare is difficult to find. However, it is there if you look hard enough.
His username (the same as the name of his business) has been sitting on top of the local leaderboard for several weeks. Meanwhile, check the Tips at a number of popular locations around the city and you’ll find advice like this one at a railway station:
While Kitchenham doesn’t describe himself as a spammer, he does confess to actively using Foursquare to raise awareness of his service. “Yes it is a deliberate tactic for marketing myParcelDelivery.com”, he tells me. “The spam issue is a contentious one, I have simply changed the name of my Foursquare profile to myParcelDelivery.com. I am a naturally (borderline OCD) competitive person so I would still be highly active on Foursquare so we are talking about a simple name change.” “I have been restrained in the leaving of ‘tips’ as this could really annoy!” One person’s innovative marketing strategy is another person’s spam and were Kitchenham’s tactics to be repeated by many more businesses, users of the service would be likely to get highly irritated.
A handful of cases doesn’t make an epidemic, but if it’s happening in the places we found, it’s probably happening elsewhere too. Indeed, the company’s support forum shows complaints of spam going back several months. Foursquare’s growing at breakneck speed according to the company’s own figures. It’s now got over 1.6 million users who are meeting in increasingly large numbers, in the last week its Android app was downloaded 50,000 times. We’ve seen it before with email, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and many more services over the years; as user numbers increase so does the level of spam. That doesn’t mean Foursquare wont be able to deal with the issue if it grows, but it’s definitely something for them to monitor closely. [Image: Freezelight] Original title and link for this post: Why Foursquare Is At Risk Of A Spam Epidemic |
| Ok, Who Hacked Google Trends This Time? Posted: 17 Jun 2010 01:23 PM PDT
“Lol n******” it read, leaving the Google team red faced and under scrutiny as to how, yet again, Google Trends was hacked. Either that of course, or coarse racial commentary become wildly popular overnight among Google’s users.
The last time that this happened, a swastika and “elgoog ouy kcuf” (F*** you Google) were the terms that someone tricked Google Trends into displaying. Prank from Microsoft? Eastern European hackers? Who knows, but Google needs to get a handle on their algorithms. Isn’t that what they are famous for? Original title and link for this post: Ok, Who Hacked Google Trends This Time? |
| You must see this very clever Tokyo Subway iPhone 4 Ad Posted: 17 Jun 2010 01:21 PM PDT |
| Hot Potato will Scrobble your World Posted: 17 Jun 2010 01:16 PM PDT
In this blog, we discussed all things location including our belief that “check-ins aren’t just for places anymore.” Going even farther back, I once wrote a post called “The Golden Age of Scrobbling,” that talked about the potential of all sorts of data streams from our day to day lives to be uploaded to a server for later use in fun and interesting ways. With the launch of Hot Potato 2.0, we now have access to a single, horizontal tool that lets us scrobble – ie log – all kinds of fun data from the music we are listening to, the events we are attending, the books we are reading, the TV shows we are watching, to even the thoughts we are thinking. Five years from now, when we all have sensors all of our body that makes this scrobbling implicit, we will look back at Hot Potato and laugh at what a clumsy and time intensive tool it is. But as of today, it’s the best we’ve seen. I was first introduced to Hot Potato at SXSW this Spring. I was less than impressed. It seemed to be a lot of unfocused collaboration tools being jammed into a conference setting. I didn’t get it. But what they’ve done with Hot Potato 2.0 is pretty impressive. They’ve seamlessly integrated a number of different verticals – tv, books, places, events, etc. – in a UI that somehow remains pretty simple and clean. The app is also rocket fast. Conventional wisdom says that implicit data logging should beat explicit data logging, as it’s easier – Foursquare and others have proven that this is wrong, at least for geolocation (see Chris Dixon’s post on this topic). Conventional wisdom also says that tiny startups should nail a vertical before going horizontal. This one may not apply either – we’ll see how Hot Potato does against vertical “check in non geo stuff” apps like Fanpulse. Hot Potato has lots of work in front of them – disambiguation of data alone could be a monumental task. But they’re off to a very good start. I think this app could be huge. Original title and link for this post: Hot Potato will Scrobble your World |
| iPhone 3GS Versus iPhone 4 Smackdown – How Do They Stack Up? Posted: 17 Jun 2010 12:57 PM PDT
Have an iPhone 3GS? Thinking about buying the iPhone 4? If you want to know if you need to take the plunge, read on. Thanks to our friends at Mahalo for putting this together.
Original title and link for this post: iPhone 3GS Versus iPhone 4 Smackdown – How Do They Stack Up? |
| Is Google Spanking Microsoft In The Productivity And Email Wars? Posted: 17 Jun 2010 12:23 PM PDT
The company made two major claims: that Google Docs (et al, the full suite) is actually much more popular than Microsoft Office among current computer users, and that Gmail is dominating Outlook. Before you sputter and dribble tea on your keyboard, they are basing this claim on acutual data. The company does this: “RescueTime provides a time management tool to allow individuals and businesses to track their time and attention to see where their days go.” That sounds reasonable, let’s look at their data that they have aggregated from their myriad users.
Wow, you might think, not only is Gmail taking over the world’s communication online, but Office is on its way out. A small party for Google’s coup in both email and the traditionally offline productivity application sphere is in order! But wait just a second, Gmail reaches nearly 55% of all computer users? That sounds high. After all, Comscore told us that late last year Gmail was the third most popular online email application. Odd, but perhaps that data is just old? The Office data smells bad as well, though. According to Wakoopa, Word has nearly twice the users that Google Docs does. Oh dear. It seems odd that Gmail and Google Docs are overrepresented in the above data. What is going on? The answer is simple, and not malicious. People have to opt in to RescueTime and install their tracking application to send in data. Now just who is going to do that? The most web savvy. And what applications do the most web savvy people use? Cloud based applications. That in a nutshell is why the above data is not a lie, or a damn lie, but is just statistics. In this case the data has been pulled in from a pool of self selecting heavy technology users. The average person has no idea what Google Docs is, so to contemplate an 80% market penetration is lunacy. However, among the RescueTime users, I am surprised it is not higher. Don’t sell that MSFT stock just yet it seems, at least according to the above graphs. Microsoft might be struggling to build a great browser tool for document creation and the like, but that hardly means that they have died. Original title and link for this post: Is Google Spanking Microsoft In The Productivity And Email Wars? |
| Rock Werchter 2010: The Official Application. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 12:06 PM PDT
Rock Werchter has been called the world’s best music festival for several years, and its extra touches like having its own location-based application that keep it going over the top year after year. For this year’s event, Facebook and Twitter integration come to an application powered by Proximus. But it’s not just Facebook and Twitter. Far from it, in fact. Here are some other highlights:
Over-the-air synchronization will keep your application up to date with the latest news, announcements and happenings through the festival. To top that off, the data is stored locally so you won’t have to worry about being out of touch when you’re out of coverage. If you’re not sure what time something is happening, the schedule will show you who is going to be where and when. And in case you’ve lost track of time, there’s a dashed line in the schedule to show you what time it is and give you a point of reference.
Find an artist that you’re really liking? Tap the heart in the corner of the profile and they will be added to your personal favorites list, for easy reference. Now what would a location-based app be, if it didn’t have points of interest? You’ll want to check out the points for drink stands, catering and the like, but you can also create your own. So make sure you tap the shield for your tent, your car or other areas you want to remember, then you’ll be able to easily find them again. What you’ll need to knowAccording to the Rock Werchter release:
Want more information about Rock Werchter 2010? Hit up the official website for more information than you could possibly ever need. Original title and link for this post: Rock Werchter 2010: The Official Application. |
| Google Docs adds new features to make sharing easier Posted: 17 Jun 2010 10:33 AM PDT
Google Docs has just released a significant upgrade that makes sharing even better. Here’s the highlights: 3 Sharing Options (Private, Public on Web, Link Only). All docs will start out as private, but then you can choose the level of access according to what you want to do. Public on the Web will be indexed via Google, though the rest will be private and hidden from the crawling.
Original title and link for this post: Google Docs adds new features to make sharing easier |
| Internet advertising: how to stand out in the upcoming flood. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 10:16 AM PDT
That’s some pretty heavy information, both for businesses and for those who are specializing in online advertising. What it comes down to is a tidal wave of online advertisers, and it will lead to a noisy space in the near future. What can you do to stand out? How can you, in a sea of ads, make sure that yours is the one that gets noticed? We have some thoughts, and we’ll share them with you. (As a bit of background, and justification for my thoughts, please bear in mind that I worked in radio and television for over 10 years, and I’ve worked in marketing for over 15. I’ve seen the best and worst advertising, and I’ve seen the fatal mistakes of those who created it.) 1 – Stop Being AnnoyingYou ever wonder why used car dealers tend to have the same annoying advertising? It’s because for years they’ve been certain that if they had the loudest, most obtrusive message, it would gather the most attention. But what do you do when an ad comes on? Change the channel? Mute the program? Regardless, I’m betting that you don’t watch it. The same is true with online advertising. Buyers love to use the most annoying, invasive medium that they can find. Float-in ads, pre-roll advertising on major websites, embedded audio. Whatever the format, consumers will tend to tune out these ads just as they’ve done for years previous. In the world of the Internet, changing the channel gives me a lot more options that it does on television. There are literally more websites than any of us would care to count, and you’re not advertising on all of them. Don’t make me change the channel. 2 – Don’t Do It YourselfRoy Williams (dubbed The Wizard of Ads, some 30 years ago), has a unique idea about business owners: you are the absolute worst person to design the advertising for your product. Why? Because you’re the only person who will see it the way that you do. So what do you do? You hire people who can give an objective, wide-based perspective about what you’re trying to sell. We recently wrote about Trada, a Colorado-based company that is doing just that. Trada puts the energy of 500 pay-per-click experts at your disposal, and lets them find out the different ways in which your product should be represented. 3 – Forget TraditionHere’s a thought to ponder: she doesn’t care about cut, clarity, color or carat weight. What she does care about is the look on her friends’ faces when she shows them the ring. Tradition tells you to advertise facts. But good advertising will go above and beyond that, and will tell your customer what the facts truly mean to them. Find a way to connect your words, images or video to your customers’ emotions and you’ll find successful advertising. 4 – Go Mobile“But I don’t do mobile stuff!” Sure you do. Have a website? You do mobile stuff. If you don’t think that mobile advertising is a big enough medium, then you should look at both Apple and Google. Just because you don’t have a mobile application doesn’t mean that you can’t offer mobile-oriented content. In 2009, $414 million was spent on mobile advertising. By 2014, that’s expected to be $1.6 billion. Yes, billion. Get in early, get your foothold and hang on for the ride. Don’t write off the mobile market, just because it doesn’t seem like the right thing at the time. 5 – Be the CustomerAny time that we talk about advertising, we get a rash of comments about “use adblock” and the like. But let’s face it, those are a minority. The general user of the Internet doesn’t have ad blocking software. So be that user, if you’re not. Start paying attention to what ads annoy you and what ones pique your interest. Once you’ve found that, you can follow suite. There’s no one sure answer to advertising success. Or, if there is, nobody has found it yet. Instead, we have ideas and guidelines. There are no rules, so don’t let anyone try to fool you into it. All you can do is pay attention, get objective help and branch yourself out of your area of comfort. Original title and link for this post: Internet advertising: how to stand out in the upcoming flood. |
| Posted: 17 Jun 2010 09:53 AM PDT
Let’s start with the intro video while you download. Oh, do look out for some easter eggs, hinted at in the Wordpress blog: Now, for the major changes:
Though what I find most interesting about the information in the blog is the fact that Wordpress will be taking some time off. From development, anyway. According to the blog, so much time has been spent on the core software that it hasn’t left time for much else.
We love Wordpress. It’s hard not to. This newest release has some amazing features, and you should go update yourself now. For those of you who have thought of starting a blog in the past, this is the perfect time. Original title and link for this post: Wordpress 3.0 now available! |
| Sensa Touch might have just standardized mobile HTML5 development. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 09:37 AM PDT
Sencha Touch is the first full-blown HTML5 development platform to focus entirely on the mobile environment. Now, I’m not a developer, but even I can see how cool this has the potential to be. Ext JS, jQTouch and Raphaël are what have combined to come up with Sencha Touch. What it enables is a really comprehensive UI widget library, complete management of touch events and CSS transitions along with the deep data package.
According to the Sencha Touch website, here’s what we need to know:
What’s more? Sencha Touch is tiny. It sits at a svelte 80Kb, with all options enabled. This is an amazing thing, considering that some offerings are sitting at over 8,000 lines of code just to run a video player. Want to go play with Sencha Touch? Of course you do. You’ll need a webkit-based browser (such as Chrome or Safari) at the very least. However, all of these are designed expressly for mobile devices, so fire up the iPad and take a look at the examples.
For now, Sencha Touch is licensed open source, under GPLv3 + FLOSS. The reason? Again, according to the site: “We'd like to give open source folks the benefit before we introduce a commercial trial license. And we'd like to take the opportunity to emphasize something that many people miss: that we have Free and Open Source exceptions as part of our GPLv3 license”. So developers, go nuts. Play with this, and tell us what’s cool about it. You’re the ones with the lead in this game. Cheers to Edward Sanchez from Kohive for the heads up. Original title and link for this post: Sensa Touch might have just standardized mobile HTML5 development. |
| The Perfect Opportunity VS The Right Opportunity Posted: 17 Jun 2010 09:22 AM PDT
How would you define Playboy magazine? An American men’s magazine, right? Lots of nude photography, some stories about sex and then some stories for entertainment, all focused on pleasing the male readers. Almost true. That sums it up for 70% to 80% of the readers. Estimates say that 20% to 30% of all Playboy magazines are bought and read by women. Lets say you open a bar and decorate it as a 60s Rock & Roll bar. You’ve got the jukebox, Chevrolet and Elvis Presley posters. You open up your bar and it turns out that right next door is the local hangout for goth fans. Your bar starts to be THE hangout for goth fans. What do you do? Option one: you stick to the plan, chase those goths away and work harder at attracting folks who are into rock & rolll. Which option is right? It was a trick question: none are. A smart ass entrepreneur would have found out about that goth hang-out before he opened up his bar and seen the opportunity. Unfortunately we don’t always see the opportunity beforehand or it just appears after we get started. What you want to do is be ready for opportunities as they present themselves. As Michael Dells once said “Don't spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity, that you miss the right opportunity.” There is an even older saying goes “Plan early, plan twice”: the better you plan everything out in advance the harder it will be to open your mind to new opportunities. I wonder if Playboy is adjusting their magazine to please the 20-30% female readers. And if Harley-Davidson is adding briefcase and coffee-cup holders and to their next line of bikes.It might not be the perfect opportunity, the one that you brag about in bars and to your friends, but it just might be the right opportunity. Original title and link for this post: The Perfect Opportunity VS The Right Opportunity |
| Yahoo! search results will become Bing search results in just over a month. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 06:35 AM PDT
From the article:
Assuming that this testing phase goes well, Yahoo! users should start seeing full Bing results by August or September of this year. This is well ahead of the expected “by the holidays” timeline that we were given before. We’d talk about the number of searches that Yahoo! does daily, and how this can increase overall market share, except there’s still a looming problem with those figures. While comScore figures out how to fix these results, we’ll just say that Yahoo! results account for roughly 16% of all searches on the Internet. Original title and link for this post: Yahoo! search results will become Bing search results in just over a month. |
| Property hunting in the UK? There’s a Google Map for that. Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:46 AM PDT
You can narrow down your searches quite a bit, as well. Not only can you look at houses for sale, you can also find places for rent, number of bedrooms, bathrooms and even by price. According to the Google Lat Long Blog:
So what brought about the change? Apparently you did. Nearly 1/5th of people surveyed just prior to the launch of Google Street View across the UK said that they had used the service to go house searching. Where does Google get its information? Apparently thousands of listings from sources such as PropertyLive, Zoopla, Ezylet, SmartNewHomes, Vebra, Property Pal, Spicer Haart, Countrywide, and Zoomf. We suppose that, when you have the world’s largest search index, there are thousands of new and interesting way to use your information. Original title and link for this post: Property hunting in the UK? There’s a Google Map for that. |
| LivePitch Turns Your iPad Into A World Cup “Second Screen” Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:06 AM PDT
LivePitch is an iPad app aimed at football/soccer obsessives who want match and player stats while they watch the game. The app has been designed by London-based Mint Digital and allows users to watch the game on TV as normal, while having their iPad on their lap providing all sorts of other data that real fans often want. LivePitch visualises how active each player on the pitch is, and how possession is divided between the teams in real-time, as the match unfolds. Fanscan compare individual players’ stats, as well as check out how teams are doing in groups and standings. The app comes from the same stable as Picklive, the game designed to be played by fans as they watch a match. Picklive recently launched in an iPad-friendly format, showing how important the device could become as an accompaniment to TV viewing in general. LivePitch sources its data from the Picklive service. LivePitch is in the iTunes App Store now [iTunes link]
Original title and link for this post: LivePitch Turns Your iPad Into A World Cup “Second Screen” |
| Updated: Apple Blocks Interchanging Of iPad/iPhone 4 MicroSIM Cards Posted: 17 Jun 2010 02:24 AM PDT
Updates at foot of post. If you bought an unlocked iPhone 4 and planned on using your iPad’s MicroSIM with its unlimited data plan to provide your handset with the service it deserves, your actions will be met with a firm “No.” from Apple. Leigh, over at GadgetGuy, pointed us to Apple’s iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 FAQ page where customers can find out what they will need to be able to use their new iPhone 4 devices. One of the questions: “Are iPhone 4 and iPad micro-SIM cards interchangeable?” spells it out in black and white, your iPad MicroSIM will not work with your iPhone 4.
The move doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, especially as Apple has already ruled out iPhone/iPad tethering. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple, in negotiations with the carriers, have been specifically told not to allow the porting of MicroSIM’s so the networks can enforce their strict data transfer policies. That isn’t to say that some enterprising Apple hacker can’t enable something within either Apple device to unlock the functionality, I assume the block would be on the device, not the MicroSIM itself (although I am happy to be wrong). Sorry Apple, my money is on the hackers. Update: We have had some great comments on Twitter alerting us that iPad MicroSIM’s do not have call functionality. Taking this into consideration, Apple will not have “blocked” the interchanging of SIM’s. The card will not work in your iPhone 4 because it simply cannot make calls unless your network carrier is specifically amends your service to make your MicroSIM a dedicated iPhone 4 SIM. This would of course mean you would be tied into a new contract and tariff, negating the unlimited plan in the process. Update 2: We have received an official response from o2, their spokesperson said:
There you have it. Original title and link for this post: Updated: Apple Blocks Interchanging Of iPad/iPhone 4 MicroSIM Cards |
When you think of the average Harley-Davidson purchaser you see a guy in his late twenties or early thirties in jeans, leather jacket and a 3-day stubble. Right? Wrong. The 
We talked about this toward the beginning of the month, but things have rolled out quite a bit faster than we’d initially been told. Yahoo! search results now look a lot more like Bing, according to an 
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