The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘answer’

Editor’s note: This a guest post written by Joff Redfern. Redfern is the co-founder of FlattenMe.com, a site for creating personalized storybooks. He was formerly a vice president of product at Yahoo, where he managed Yahoo Buzz and Toolbar.

Amazon Kindle: The Road Ahead

I’m a recent Kindle fan boy. I like the instant access to earth-friendly books, the paper-like display and the way it fits in my hand like a paperback. I’ve also deeply admired the crispness of the Kindle vision—“any book, any language, in minutes”. But with Apple’s iPad announcement the playing field on which the Kindle competes shifts and the disruptive technology itself gets disrupted.

If I were running the Kindle I would answer this question today: “Are we innovating the publishing or the entertainment industry?” Is the Kindle just for my reading entertainment or is it for watching, listening, gaming, browsing, sharing photos, and communicating with friends & family too? Ultimately the answer is shaped by consumer preference, competitors and time measured in years.

As a product guy this is a really intriguing question to try to unravel—which path should Amazon choose? Over time this is what may push the Kindle into being more than just a reader . . .

For the same price, more is better

Will consumers prefer a multi-purpose entertainment tablet over a single-purpose reading device as their prices converge? This is a religious question; sides will be drawn. I look to the evolution of my own personal technology habits for the answer.

When I wanted to manage my contacts I started with a paper-based Address Book, upgraded to a Digital Rolodex, upgraded to a Palm V, upgraded to a Blackberry, then upgraded to an iPhone. Fundamentally I was trying to solve how I manage and communicate with my contacts. With each upgrade I got more functionality yet the price point for each device was not radically different.

If consumers can eventually get an entertainment tablet that also has the core features of a great reader (screen, content catalog, ease of purchasing) at under $200 they’ll want more.

Prices drop. Over time, price won’t be a factor in the purchase decision.

Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489.  That is pretty close already.  What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference?

Moore’s Law and business model innovation will drive the iPad-like devices to sub-$200 pricing. Unrealistic? The retail price of the iPhone 8GB dropped ~83% in 3 years from $599 to $99.

Also keep in mind that entertainment tablets are using different math from the Kindle. The device pricing will be “subsidized” by multiple revenue streams—downloads of books, music, movies, games, apps, advertising, and more. Today I can get a cell phone device for “free”, will my iPad be “free” some day?

Competitors are playing a platform war. Is Kindle?

Apple, Google and Microsoft have massive investments in their respective mobile platforms. In particular, Apple is king of the mobile mountain. As Jobs declared today, “Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world”.

This Apple sizzle has drawn 100,000+ developers and publishers to its iPhone (and now iPad) ecosystem. These apps are already available to entertain us in all sorts of ways on the iPad beyond what Apple exec Scott Forstall showed today.

Amazon knows this. Last week they announced a developer API is coming. So the question remains how robust is the API and will the developer community bite, or is it game over?

What would you do if you ran the Kindle?

Perhaps Apple was just being extremely careful not to draw any attention to the widely speculated name of its new multimedia device prior to this morning’s announcement, but one simply cannot overlook the fact that the company doesn’t have ownership over any domain names related to ‘iPad’.

For now, that is.

Apple does not own iPad.com, as you may have noticed. Others have, in any case, and some even suggest that the person who registered the domain name (one Martine Bejasa) sell it to the Cupertino company to become an instant millionaire. Unlikely to happen, IMHO.

But what else doesn’t Apple own? Well, they don’t have control over even a single domain name that has iPad followed by a country or generic TLD. Out of Cupertino’s hands, at least for the time being: iPad.net, iPad.biz, iPad.info, iPad.fr, iPad.de, iPad.es, iPad.eu, iPad.se, iPad.cn, iPad.be and iPad.jp. To name but a few.

They also don’t own iBook.com, iBooks.com or iBookstore.com or anything like that, in case you were wondering.

It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about domain names. It paid heavily for iPhone.com back in 2007, and it owns iPod.com, iMac.com, iWork.com, iTunes.com etc. (but not MacBook.com, curiously). Run a search on UDRPsearch and you will find that Apple regularly fights to (re)gain control over relevant domain names that carry one of their trademarks – which it doesn’t have for ‘iPad’ (yet), just to be clear.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Apple moved to seize 16 domain names from a single individual. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re going to be aggressively targeting the owners of the domain names listed above, once they secure or license use of the ‘iPad’ trademark.

Fair warning, this is probably a fake – we all know that people love to prank the night before an Apple event. Some suspected pictures of the iPad have shown up on the net, but it looks fishy to me. I guess it is possible, maybe a prototype, or something bolted to a table, but I’m not buying it

View original here:
Twas the night before the Creation event, and all through the internet..

Ever since I got it, the album art for Cul de Sac’s Death of the Sun has intrigued me. I’m ignorant of 19th-century landscape painters, which is as far as I could nail the style down, and after extensive Googling I could find nothing on it at all

Read the original: 
Sometimes, the Internet works as advertised

Google has released a full version of its response to the FCC’s inquiry on Apple’s ban of Google Voice from the App Store, revealing the answer to ‘Question 2′ that had been redacted from the letter that was released in August. Question 2 asked Google to detail Apple’s stated reasons for rejecting both Google Voice and Google Latitude from the App Store, as well as any communication that had gone on between the parties involved. Google’s response? Apple told them the same line about “duplicating the iPhone’s core functionality” that it was giving third party developers.

No incriminating back-alley conversations. Google wasn’t trying to hide anything that could have hurt it in any way. It was just trying to give Apple a chance to take the high road. Instead, Apple apparently lied through its teeth to the FCC.

The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice iPhone applications, which had been on the App Store for months without any problems. Apple stated that these were somehow “duplicating” the iPhone’s functionality, which was a no-no. At the time Google said it was still working on its own official application, but later that day we broke the news that Google had in fact submitted its app weeks earlier, only to have it shot down by Apple. The FCC soon launched an inquiry to investigate why the application had really been rejected.

Three weeks later AT&T, Apple, and Google provided their responses to the FCC. AT&T, which had played the role of scapegoat in the debacle, proved to have little (if anything) to do with the decision. Google’s letter did its best to outline exactly what Google Voice does. And Apple spouted blatant lie after blatant lie in its inaccurate description of Google Voice, going as far as to imply that Google might be doing something nefarious with user data (though, of course, there are a number of Google apps that come pre-installed on the iPhone). And Apple triumphantly responded that it in fact had not actually rejected Google Voice (neener-neener), but that it was still “pondering” over what to make of the application.

This last point is the most interesting, because Google’s response directly contradicts it. In fact, Google’s previously redacted response explicitly says multiple times that both Google Voice and Google Latitude were rejected, in no uncertain terms. And, of course, Apple’s other claims are laughable. There are countless apps on the App Store that “duplicate” the iPhone’s functionality in some form, and the notion that users might get confused about the apps is ridiculous too — after all, users have to manually install these apps. The real reason for the ban is likely that Apple doesn’t want its device to turn into a platform dominated by Google services.

But one big question remains: why would Google redact the answer to Question 2 in the first place? Google’s response really only shows us that Apple stonewalled them the way they stonewalled everyone else (though Google did at least get some face time with Apple’s Phil Schiller). The real reason, I think, is that Google wanted to give Apple a chance to save face and let Google Voice into the App Store. Question 2 is the only place where Google explicitly says that its applications were rejected — the rest of them detail things like the way Google Voice works and whether or not Google has any more apps pending with Apple (it doesn’t). By redacting its response to Question 2, Google gave Apple the chance to make its ridiculous “pondering” claims, say it was all a misunderstanding, and let Google Voice into the app store a few days or weeks later.

But it’s been a month since those letters were released, and neither Google Voice nor Google Latitude have made their way to the App Store. Google could have fought the Freedom of Information Act requests that sought the unedited letter, but there really isn’t much point any more. It’s time to remove any doubt as to who the bad guy is here: Apple.

9182009_Google_Filing_iPhone –

Image by brankomaster.

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Listen up, music lovers. Mixcloud, the on-demand radio startup that’s re-thinking radio for the digital age, opens its doors to the public at noon on Monday. The site launched in private beta at SXSW earlier this year, and has had some positive reviews. Which is probably why it was shortlisted for a TechCrunch Europas award a few months back. After the jump, we’ve got 500 passes for TechCrunch readers to get a sneak preview of Mixcloud’s ‘cloudcasts’.

Online radio is very much a digital media orphan; languishing in a fragmented space while innovations in other aspects of streaming media have come thick and fast over the last few years. Mixcloud’s vision is to be the YouTube of radio with on-demand radio shows spanning music and talk and truing to make it make it more social, personalised and ‘democratic’.

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Over the past several months, the social search service Aardvark has gained a lot of fans. But what’s somewhat peculiar is that most of those users interact with the site via email or IM, rather than some slick-looking web app. And in fact, the service’s new iPhone app, launching today in the App Store, is easily the best-looking way to use Aardvark yet.

And it also looks to be the best way to use the service, period. That’s because the way it uses Push Notification on the iPhone is pretty killer. One of the reasons that users love using Aardvark over IM is that responses come in quickly and without you having to do anything — the same is true with the new iPhone app, but it’s even faster, CEO Max Ventilla tells us. Whenever someone answers a question you ask, you’ll get an alert almost instantaneously that your answer is ready.

Ventilla says the company spent a long time perfecting this app, 4 months to be precise. And the effort shows, as the app is pretty slick, while remaining straight-forward. The main screen simply asks you to ask a question. And it lets you know that Aardvark will find the right person to answer it. Meanwhile, the Answer tab allows you to answer questions that you are interested in for other people. This works perfectly for mobile because so many people now pull out their phones when they have a few minutes to kill; Aardvark gives you a way to kill time by helping other people with a question.

Also built into the app is Facebook Connect funtionality, so you can post Aardvark questions as your status updates. The service promises this won’t spam your friends, as you can choose how much or how little to post. But sometimes you may be asking a question that requires a larger social graph than Aardvark offers — certainly Facebook qualifies as that.

Speaking of spamming, when Aardvark first launched earlier this year, there were some issues users had with the amount of notifications (mostly via IM) coming in. The service quickly made it easy to turn notification frequency down, and that has transfered over to the iPhone app as well. You can set the frequency with which you get pinged to answer a question, for example.

Using the iPhone’s location functionality, Aardvark can also tell where you are, and tailor questions and answers based on that. The service also takes advantage of the in-app browser that iPhone 3.0+ offers. This allows it to also have a form of monetization with the affiliate links it uses in appropriate situations (for example, if an answer to a question of yours is the name of a music album).

Ventilla says that eventually the plan is to expand onto other mobile platforms, but for now they really want to perfect this iPhone app. Ventilla himself realizes that it is the best way to interact with the service yet, and they hope it grows the audience. Currently, Aardvark still has under 100,000 users, but they’re quickly approaching that milestone, we’re told.

Right now, Ventilla says the vast majority of questions are answered in under 5 minutes. That was a big goal for this year, to get under that time, we’re told. Overall, about 90% of questions are answered. And the ones that aren’t are usually bogus or make no sense.

Aardvark Mobile is available now in the App Store. It’s a free download. Find it here.

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Myriad Group, one of the largest mobile technology software companies, with over 2 billion devices, has announced today that it has acquired Xumii, a company that provides mobile social networks. Financial information was not disclosed, but Myriad Group stated that the acquisition was asset based.

Using a cloud computing architecture, Xumii integrates a mobile user’s phone contacts, social networks and instant messaging services into a single “social phonebook”. Mobile users can then simultaneously access Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Windows Live and other popular Internet services, sending messages, updating status and sharing photos and videos.

Xumii released an iPhone application back in February, that lets users have a mobile social address book that connects to AIM, Flickr, and other networks. This seems like a great fit for both companies, considering Myriad Group already provides software to all of the major phone manufacturers, as well as more than 30 mobile operators across the globe. Having Xumii’s technology with Myriad Group’s also established relationships with mobile operators makes this a perfect opportunity. Xumii’s 17 employees will be moving to Myriad Group as part of the acquisition.

Xumii is based in San Mateo, Calif. and Sydney, Australia, and has raised $5.5 million from CM Capital and Southern Cross Venture Partners in September 2008.

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IMshopping, a human- powered shopping search site and Twitter shopping service, is rolling out a new feature, Merchant Answers, that lets consumers ask shopping questions directly on retailers’ sites via an embeddable chat widget. We reviewed IMshopping’s May launch here. IMshopping’s site is a shopping 411 service in which human guides on call respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users about what product best suits their needs.

IMshopping’s Merchant Answer’s feature is similar in functionality, except it is branded and specialized for a particular retailer’s site. As a consumer is shopping on an e-commerce site, he or she will see a “get assistance” or similarly worded button on the site. When consumers click on this, they will be led to a window where they can ask a shopping question specific to that site. The question is routed to human shopping guides for an answer. Guides can be employees of the retailer or can be from IMshopping’s community of trained shopping guides. Answers are given back to the consumer with links to the product in question. Shoppers are also shown recent questions asked by other users on the retailers page.

Merchants can also use Twitter to help answer consumer questions. The merchant can link their Twitter account to their IMshopping account and once that is done, any Twitter user can send a message to the retailer’s account and the Tweet will automatically be answered by a shopping guide, with the answer sent back as a direct message.

IMshopping hopes to fill the gap of personalized, detail-oriented service that e-commerce sites don’t have, since these sites are focused less on answering technical questions about a product and more on price and reviews. IMshopping’s standalone site also leverages Twitter, so that users can directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping on Twitter and receive a direct message with the answer and product details.

So how is IMshopping making money from this new venture? The site has implemented a monthly subscription pricing model based on the volume of questions asked. For $300 per month, a retailer can get 300 questions answered, which includes the payment for IMshopping’s guides. For $1000 per month, a retailer can have 2500 questions answered, with additional guides included.

Twenty online retailers including BargainCell, AMB Furniture and Rainbow Appliance have already created shopping communities powered by IMshopping on their sites.

Since the startup’s launch in May, the site has delivered 52,000 human recommendations via Twitter and web. But as we’ve said in the past, human search hasn’t been to successful in the past; as evidenced by ChaCha’s former business model. While human assistance is definitely a powerful part of the shopping experience, many online retailer have online chat assistance to help with the process. IMshopping’s tool may resonate with smaller sites which have trouble doing this in-house but many major retailers already have this functionality.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

IMshopping, a human- powered shopping search site and Twitter shopping service, is rolling out a new feature, Merchant Answers, that lets consumers ask shopping questions directly on retailers’ sites via an embeddable chat widget. We reviewed IMshopping’s May launch here. IMshopping’s site is a shopping 411 service in which human guides on call respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users about what product best suits their needs.

IMshopping’s Merchant Answer’s feature is similar in functionality, except it is branded and specialized for a particular retailer’s site. As a consumer is shopping on an e-commerce site, he or she will see a “get assistance” or similarly worded button on the site. When consumers click on this, they will be led to a window where they can ask a shopping question specific to that site. The question is routed to human shopping guides for an answer. Guides can be employees of the retailer or can be from IMshopping’s community of trained shopping guides. Answers are given back to the consumer with links to the product in question. Shoppers are also shown recent questions asked by other users on the retailers page.

Merchants can also use Twitter to help answer consumer questions. The merchant can link their Twitter account to their IMshopping account and once that is done, any Twitter user can send a message to the retailer’s account and the Tweet will automatically be answered by a shopping guide, with the answer sent back as a direct message.

IMshopping hopes to fill the gap of personalized, detail-oriented service that e-commerce sites don’t have, since these sites are focused less on answering technical questions about a product and more on price and reviews. IMshopping’s standalone site also leverages Twitter, so that users can directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping on Twitter and receive a direct message with the answer and product details.

So how is IMshopping making money from this new venture? The site has implemented a monthly subscription pricing model based on the volume of questions asked. For $300 per month, a retailer can get 300 questions answered, which includes the payment for IMshopping’s guides. For $1000 per month, a retailer can have 2500 questions answered, with additional guides included.

Twenty online retailers including BargainCell, AMB Furniture and Rainbow Appliance have already created shopping communities powered by IMshopping on their sites.

Since the startup’s launch in May, the site has delivered 52,000 human recommendations via Twitter and web. But as we’ve said in the past, human search hasn’t been to successful in the past; as evidenced by ChaCha’s former business model. While human assistance is definitely a powerful part of the shopping experience, many online retailer have online chat assistance to help with the process. IMshopping’s tool may resonate with smaller sites which have trouble doing this in-house but many major retailers already have this functionality.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.