The Good NET Guide

Archive for September, 2009

If you suddenly find yourself with $300 to burn, an old laptop, and too much time on your hands this weekend, I might suggest that you build a DIY Google Street View -style rig for your car. That’s what West Point student Roy Ragsdale did for his “disruptive technologies” class. And if someone at West Point does it, it’s okay for you to do it.

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Make your own Street View rig for fun and profit

Remember the big technology story of the first half of the year? Analog signals were suppose to be shut-off on February 17, but Obama saved millions of households from their procrastination by delaying it a few months

Continued here:
DTV box sales “plummet” – surpise, surprise

Earlier today, we passed on word of a rumor that the Sprint Touch Pro 2 would be seeing a price cut from the oh-so-absurd price of $349 (after a $100 mail-in rebate, mind you) down to the much more reasonable $149. It sounded great! With Verizon’s Touch Pro 2 already at that price, it certainly didn’t sound too good to be true - but it was, for the most part.

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Bad news: That Sprint Touch Pro 2 price cut? Not happening.

If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.

You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.

The reason they would want to do this should be obvious: Clicks-throughs. Any content producer who is likely to use such a program undoubtedly already has a strategy in place to monetize their site. That is quite likely based around the traffic their site receives, and RiotWise’s goal would be to help the content producer increase that traffic. But more importantly, it would be to increase the traffic by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content being displayed on the page, OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk tell us.

The obvious question is: How can OneRiot be sure this is relevant content and not just a spam blog looking for clicks? As a realtime search engine, OneRiot already devotes a large percentage of its team to spam prevention, OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says. And OneRiot’s engine is already doing the hard work of going through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. With RiotWise, it’s just a question of taking the content from the providers who are using the service and pulling it out to highlight it.

So where will it be highlighted? Initially, RiotWise will roll out on OneRiot’s main site. This sponsored content would be housed in a right-hand column, separate from the main realtime feed, as you can see in the picture above. Yes, it looks a lot like AdSense, but it’s content. This aspect of RiotWise will be launching next week.

But the bigger picture for RiotWise is to include this sponsored content in the feeds that OneRiot sends to all of its partners. This means that third-party sites using OneRiot search results will eventually see RiotWise as well. Also, it means that places which pull in one OneRiot feeds, such a some Twitter feeds, will start getting these sponsored results as well.

Musk realizes that it’s important to be delicate when inserting ads into streams. He notes that just as with sponsored results, sponsored items in feed streams will be clearly labeled as such. He also notes that it’s important not to overload users with too many of these sponsored results in that setting. Ideally, OneRiots algorithms would be tailored to serve up just one sponsored result a day that a user would want to click on, he says.

The key to all of this is the realtime aspect of OneRiot. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search, getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot has been seeing strong click-through rates on items and big numbers when it comes to users doing multiple searches, we’re told. And OneRiot’s RiotFeeds product, which sends OneRiot results surrounding certain topics over to Twitter has been gaining popularity, and is also seeing big-time click-throughs on its links.

A solution like RiotWise seems like the perfect idea for a new or second-tier blog that feels its content is good, but isn’t getting the exposure that some of the big guys do. As long as the content is good, OneRiot is happy to accept it, and strike a deal with the producer to take some fees on a CPC-basis, the majority of which would then be handed over to OneRiot’s partners that serve up its content.

“This is the way to monetize the real-time web,” Musk says.

As I mentioned above, the plan is to launch RiotWise on OneRiot first as early as Monday of next week. A couple weeks after that, the company hopes to roll out the sponsored results to its partners, letting the money sharing begin.

A month ago, OneRiot raised a new $7 million third round of funding.

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Bluetooth is a really versatile technology, and despite the fact that it has been out for years, we’re still seeing new stuff come out that uses it.

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TENQA rolls out three new Bluetooth audio devices

The Qualcomm FLO TV is slowly taking shape.

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The Qualcomm FLO TV retail box leaks out, launch imminent?

Like many of you, my knowledge of Greenpeace begins and ends with that one Seinfeld episode , the one where the NBC executive, so in love with Elaine, freaks out and joins the organization in order to impress her. That is to say I don’t really understand the “point” of the organization, or who appointed it the protector of the environment. But, it is, somehow, so let’s roll with it.

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Greenpeace hates Apple, HP a little bit less today

Bad news, sports fans.

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No, you can’t use the DJ Hero turntable on any other game

Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet. The team (which is based in Australia) decided to push them out later today so they could be up to deal with issues surrounding the massive influx of new users. And judging from the response on the web, “massive” is also the perfect word to describe the anticipation for the service.

Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trend Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash.

Actually, some amount of backlash started immediately after it was first revealed in May. While we were wowed after a hands-on demonstration we got, writing that Wave “drips with ambition,” there were plenty in the press and general public who quickly jumped on the other side of the coin. Upon seeing the public demonstation, reactions ranged from “Wow” to “I don’t get it.” But the real test will come later today when many of those people actually get to use it for the first time.

We have been using Wave since Google I/O, and while it has been very buggy, the team has worked hard to iron out a lot of the kinks since then. Still, there will be plenty who begin using it today who will be disappointed. It’s a tricky situation for the Wave team. From the get go, they’ve said that the ultimate vision is for Wave to be a new communication platform for the web — meaning they hope hundreds, if not thousands, of other services are built with Wave as the backbone. But that’s a long ways out. Today, all we have to play with is Google Wave, the service, which is still very early in its lifespan.

It’s really Google Wave’s ambition that is a dual-edged sword. Because the team is trying to do so much with the product, there will be plenty of people who find it confusing and cluttered. And to some extent, they’re right. But anyone who labels it a failure at this point is either a curmudgeon or an extremely shortsighted person claiming to have foresight. It’s a nice thought that every product should be a taut bundle of execution with an easy path to monetization. But the web, and really the world, would be a much more boring place if that were the case.

Part of Google’s strategy with Wave, and part of the reason they’re putting it out there early, is to see what developers and the users make of it. In that regard, it’s not all that different from Twitter, which started as a simple status-update side project, and transformed into something much different thanks to its users and the third-party developer community around it.

Wave is much more complicated than Twitter, and that could well be a downside (remember, keep it simple, stupid). But there’s a difference between clutter and ambition, especially when you have the resources of Google behind you. Shooting for the Moon is a good thing, and Wave has a unique opportunity to do that.

I’m not saying Wave will be a success. Many of the most ambitious projects often crash and burn — it’s the nature of high risk/high reward. But we’re still way too early in its lifespan to make that call for Wave. I can see the backlash already, and I think we should give it a chance. The end result could well be something that greatly benefits us all, but getting to that point, if it ever does, will take time.

[images: Paramount Vantage]

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With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.

This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut.

There are a couple of key factors that could be attributed to Orkut’s recent drop in visitors. First, in India, Facebook has been pushing out an aggressive campaign on its social network to get users to import their friends from Orkut with a special Orkut import tool. It basically lets them find friends on other social networks, like Orkut, who are also on Facebook and makes it easy to send a friend requests to those contacts. The purpose of the tool is to make it easy for users to quickly find new friends and establish their social presence on Facebook. The social network offers this in the U.S. for Gmail, AIM and other contact platforms. But this new tool in India is for Orkut specifically. Facebook users are also seeing is the Orkut contact importer in Brazil, Orkut’s home base and stronghold where Facebook is clawing for market share.

Another reason for Facebook’s growth in India could be the recent launch of Facebook Lite. India was one of the original target markets for the lightweight version of the social network, since it is particularly useful in developing countries where high speed Internet connections are sparse or non-existent.

Facebook has been eying India’s huge market and steadily adding features that help the social network establish its reach in the growing country. For example, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam, in May of this year.

It’s plainly obvious that Facebook is growing fast in India and could quite possibly overtake Orkut in the next few months. Meanwhile, other social networks are dropping like flies in the race; with Yahoo shutting down SpotM and MySpace considering layoffs in India because of the its lack of traction among users.

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