The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘cards’

Gift cards can be a double edged sword. I recently got married and received a number of gift cards to stores where I never shop. But at the same time, I don’t want the value of the card to go to waste. There have been a number of auction-like marketplaces, such as Plastic Jungle and Rackup, that have popped up to allow users can buy and sell their gift cards to each other in an eBay like interface (you can also do this eBay itself). Y Combinator startup CardPool is entering the space but with a slightly different twist to its model. Card Pool allows users to both buy and sell gift cards.

CardPool buys people’s unwanted gift cards, and sells gift cards at large discounts. Though the idea isn’t new, Card Pool has an attractive and fair pricing model. They judge the buyback and selling amount by how desirable the cards are. For example, you can sell a BestBuy’s gift card, which is highly desirable, to CardPool for 90 percent of its value. And on CardPool’s site, you can find a Best Buy gift card for 5 percent off its original value. On the other hand, 1-800-Flowers’ gift cards, which are not as popular as Best Buy’s cards, are discounted by 30 percent on the site.

I’m a fan of the site for a few reasons. The plus about CardPool is that it allows returns for cards for up to 100 days, and many of its competitors don;t have an expansive of a return period. Also, CardPool won’t sell gift cards that have expirations or fees. CardPool makes money off the spread between buying and selling cards. The startup is lean, with its two co-founders running the site, keeping overhead low. The company is also looking into forging partnerships with retailers like Barnes and Noble, Best Buy and others to sell their gift cards at discounted prices from CardPool.

CardPool also has talent on its side. Co-founder Anson Tsai developed online music player Anywhere.com, which was acquired by Imeem in 2008.

It’s been through several owners, legal battles and even the subject of books, but Sex.com will be sold once again in an auction next month. Bids will start at $1 million.

Ownership over the Sex.com domain was the subject of a decade-long legal battle chronicled in not one, but two books. It was sold to a company called ESCOM in 2006 for a reported $14 million. It is possible that ESCOM was never able to pay off that amount because the notice (embedded below) says the sale is due to a foreclosure “for default in the payment of debt and performance of obligations owed by Escom, LLC (“Borrower”) to DOM Partners LLC (Secured Party”).

The notice also states: “To be qualified to bid at the auction, bidders must appear at the auction with a certified bank check in the amount of $1,000,000.” The type-in traffic alone might be worth that much. But the domain itself has languished. The site is a PG-13 landing page with links to a story of the day, videos, horoscopes, a shop, and a classifieds section that is still under construction. Sex.com does not even appear in the first page of results on Google for the search term “sex”.

It’s sad really, like a scorned lover being put out on the curb. According to one of the investors, there were too many parties involved who “prevented the asset from being operated properly.” It sounds like the site was bedeviled by incompetence and infighting. “I wouldn’t bet on any auction happening with this group on that date, litigated first most likely,” says the investor.

It wasn’t too long ago that our own Nicholas Deleon was detained and manhandled at a Best Buy . Today, we hear reports of someone who, for the crime of having some trouble with gift cards, was handcuffed, frisked, and put in a holding cell at the station. The bright side of this story is that the person this happened to should feel free to sue the hell out of Best Buy and the NYPD

Read the rest here: 
Oh Best Buy, only you could get away with having someone arrested for gift card issues

Those Googlers are apparently having quite a bit of fun with their new Google Phones (aka Nexus One). From the looks of it, they’ve set up some sort of holiday game that’s a twist on the game memory. But the catch is that you can only access this game from the Nexus One, any other device will be forwarded to the standard Android homepage.

If you visit this URL, you should see a quick flash of the game’s rules before you’re redirected. But if you’re on the Nexus One, the rules page would remain. It reads:

Welcome to Nexus One!

For some festive fun, we’ve put a new twist on a classic game: “Memory”

Click on “Start Game” and you will have 5 seconds to memorize the placement of 12 pairs of cards. After 5 seconds, the cards will be flipped face down.

Your goal is to find all 12 matching pairs as quickly as possible

Just tap on a card to flip it over

Continue flipping cards until all matches are found

Start Game

Digging into the code of this page reveals that it is in fact sniffing to see if your device is the Nexus One. If not, it does the redirect.

Nice of Google to spread the holiday cheer with a game that only they can play. They even made their own festive Android icons for it (right). Bah humbug.

Update 1: Apparently, one of those cute Android guys is named “Robo-Ralphie” after the kid in A Christmas Story. Awesome. Thanks to Andy, one of our developers, for digging this up.

Update 2: Of course, if you really want to trick the sniffer into thinking you’re on a Nexus One when you’re not, you can do that too. Andy and Emmanuel both point out that you can easily spoof the user agent and play the game to your heart’s content. For example, in Safari 4 if you have developer tools enabled, go to Develop -> User Agent -> Other and type ‘Nexus One’ in the box.

You can do it in Firefox by typing ‘about:config’ in the address bar and filtering on ‘useragent’ and setting it there. It’s apparently not quite as easy to do with the Chrome dev tools.

The other way is to just download the source of the page and the JavaScript file that it links to and modify the JavaScript to not check your User Agent at all — that’s the more permanent solution.

[thanks Alberto]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

We’re here at Microsoft’s San Francisco headquarters so they can show off what they’re calling the “Bing Fall Release.” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of the Online Services Division is leading this presentation.

Today’s talk saw Microsoft focus on three key areas: Core search, mobile search, and their mapping. As you’d expect, Bing is pushing forward with regular search and mobile search, both with improvements in the core search functionality but also adding new ideas.

In terms of new ideas, the emphasis today was on Entity Cards and Task Pages. For example, when you do a search for a famous person on Bing now, you’ll see their official picture and a link to their official website front and center in their Entity Card. And if that person is a famous musician there may be a link to click on to get your concert information. This would be a Task Page. In that regard, Microsoft says it’s going to opposite way of Google and keeping people on Bing for a number of clicks to get information. Google’s stance is to get people to the information they want in one layer.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

SN: How we’re going to spend the next hour and a half or so is some knowledge and insight about what we’ve learned to far with Bing. Most of the time we’ll spend showing you new stuff though. It’s about the core search, the mobile effort, and our mapping.

• A little over 6 months since we launched Bing in June. It’s very early, there is no confusion as to where we still stand. long road ahead. We are up to 9.9% market share. Ever since Google launched no one has grown 5 months in a row, we have.
• And we have 48% unaided awareness now. We’re one of the hottest new brands – that’s great news for us. But again, it’s still very early and there’s a long road ahead.
• The most exciting thing for us is the younger audience. Growth is coming 18-24 and 25-34 groups.
• In terms of search behavior, images are very important, and videos and shopping. About 15% of our searches are for images right now.
• 50% of time spent on search engines is spent on sessions that are longer than 30 minutes. That’s very interesting to us.
• 60% of sessions include 4 queries or more. People are trying to do more with search now. It’s not just a navigational task now. And that’s growing.
• We have a notion of ‘peoples’ ‘places’ and ‘things’ many queries are pivots around these three key areas.
• Today we have two new interaction elements. Entity cards and task pages.

Derek Connell doing a demo of these new interaction elements.

• The new card is in the main scan pattern. At the top of the page is the official image and a link to the official site.
• We surface intent with the card and carrying it out with the task page. This task page may have a way to buy tickets for a music act, for example.
• But this also works for places. We have an official site for Miami, along with a slideshow thumbnail. And we have a nice looking way to see the weather. And now flight deals too.
• And now “things.” The newer Dublin release has emphasized video. Showing off a trailer of Paranormal. Lots of HD content coming in, trailers, music videos, etc.
• And we have lots of these entity cards for stores now. They do a search for Apple, funny.
• New deep financial intent page, pulls in all sorts of data.
• Cards of universities now, we have all the major ones. We have an admission task page.
• Also for medicine, entity cards for specific drugs, etc.
• All these have either gone out the past week or today.
• Today we’re going to show what we’re working on with Facebook and Twitter.
• With Facebook we took visual search and applied it to the Facebook data we have. It’s a nice way to scan.
• You can see upcoming birthdays visually. You can click on them and on the left hand side is more information about them. We’ll release this as soon as we iron out kinks.
• And now Twitter. Also a visual search gallery. You can visually see who tweets the most. You click through and off you go to Twitter.
• Are these people you follow? No, it’s just for whole feed.

Nadella is back.

• This is all about enhancing the experience. The search box doesn’t scale for all kinds of queries, that’s why we focus on visual search and video browse. Structured data is very important to us. We need to marry it with the regular search data.
• Mobile search
• The session data is very distinct for mobile searches. 70% of mobile search intent is completed in an hour, 80% is completed in one day – it’s different from the desktop.
• We want an all-in-one mobile client. Web, local, and news. Then maps. Also instant answers and entertainment. Plus multi-platform support is key.

David Raissipour who leads the mobile search team for Bing.

• The important thing on mobile is that you need to find your information quickly.
• We have shipped mobile clients on Verizon handsets – now are announcing 25 different devices. and Bing.com mobile version is in 31 markets.
• On mobile Bing, maps are very important. As our your favorite queries. And auto-complete for searches.
• You can quickly mark things as favorites within maps too. Raissipour is using a stylus with his phone – don’t miss those.
• Instant answers for things like stock prices – we show it at the top. Or you can easily see the news about that topic.
• We built voice-support into the product to make it easier to do a search. “Weather in Redmond, Washington” – works well, though a bit slow. It’s an instant card with the information you’re looking for though.
• We’ve built a very rich HTML-browsing experience. On the iPhone for example. They’re showing off rich results like football results – we wrote this up previously.

Nadella back again

• Spatial Search (Maps) is the last big topic for the day.
• Search exploration – Real-world visualization – Ecosystems and “Mash-ins”
• Many sessions have a very strong geo reference – people are search around locations.
• For real-world visualization we’re using a lot of the 3D work we’ve done.
• And we want to have “mash-ins” – we all know about “mash-ups” but in response to a search query we want to bring in knowledge and maps are very important to that.
• Some apps to demonstrate today.

Blaise (no last name given) who leads up the mapping efforts for Bing

• First the AJAX powered website we launched a month ago. Very fast responses to queries.
• We’ve been working on scaling down the latency. The past three months we’ve moved 300 terabytes of data for this project.
• Today we’re launching a new beta: Bing Maps Beta. It’s up soon at bing.com/maps/explorer. This is Silverlight powered – this is the future of where mapping goes.
• We can transition from ordinary to images. Very nice looking.
• Using images we have made a 4-angle stitched view, “kind of like Sim City”
• And we’re thinking a lot about human scale. Explore Streetside is Bing’s answer to Google Streetview. Their icon is called “Andrew.”
• Green helium balloons show up in the maps too – these are synths. They’re just as first class in coverage as our own imagery. Users make these synths – a 1,300 photo synth in the Met in New York for example. Again, very cool.
• New feature: What’s nearby – shows information about restaurants, shops, etc that are nearby. These are shown as purple icons. Nicely implemented. And you can zoom in with the new Streetside view seamlessly.

• You get reviews from various place like Yelp, whatever is crawlable.
• We’re taking a new “app-like” approach to maps now, we’d love to have companies like OpenTable or smaller companies to mash stuff in.
• The idea behind an mash-in is that if you want to generate click-throughs to your site, you can do that. We’re very open about this.
• Everything we’re showing is all Silverlight – not web-based AJAX. You just can’t do some of this stuff with that.
• Map App Gallery – we’re releasing today. This first batch are ones we’ve made or our close friends have made. But we’ll be opening this us to anyone who wants to make apps.
• A cool Today’s Front Pages app – shows newspaper frontpages around the U.S.
• Another demo of a app that shows hyper-local blogs around the map.

Ryan Sarver, head of Platform for Twitter, to demo a new app

• We’re excited to be a part of the Bing Maps ecosystem launch.
• We have the new geolocation API and Bing was so fast with implementing it into these new maps.
• You can see tweets on the maps, and drill down just to see tweets with images tagged to them, again on the map.

Back to Blaise

• It’s such a huge canvas for so many people to build things – we cannot do it all. We just give some new tools.

Nadella is back

• I wanted to wrap up by putting everything you saw into perspective.
• Bringing the most relevant results is still the core. “The arms race is for sure on [with Google and others].” We’ve kept pace and we feel good about the progress we’ve made – and we’re going to move forward with things like visual search.
• Scale beyond the one query idea. You have to scale it to the whole session – you should be smarter in your second query, third query, etc.
• “You gotta have a scaffolding and an interaction model” to surface all this interest and intent. We have to move from a hit-or-miss one search box to being more interactive.

————- Q&A Time ——————-

Q: College data – how automated is that?

A: We need to make sure bad data doesn’t come across but we’re not doing human curation. Structured data is very important to this going forward. We’re not trying to employ editors and be a portal, we just look at the structured data – and a set of partners.

Q: Are the structured pages indexable?

A: We will allow others to index, but it’s a question about reindexing search content (so that sounds like “no”)

Q: Will Bing Maps 3D be replaced? How many cities is this in?

A: We have about 100 cities right now for this “human scale” experience. And more coming monthly. Over 100 terabytes of data over the past few months we’ve averaged posting to the web. In terms of the 3D product – the Silverlight piece is the best of all worlds.

Q: We part does non-Google content (so your exclusive content) play in this?

A: The focus we have is not as much on non-Google content – it’s more on query intent and task completion. We’re not so focused on exclusive content – it’s just about the content that’s best for reference for what we’re doing. We have partnerships obviously – like the Mayo clinic, but that’s not exclusive.

A: We’re not like Google where they’re trying to drive people off their site necessarily – the second or third click may be on our site in these cards, we think.

Q: So the News Corp-exclusive thing – not true?

A: I’m not going to speculate on speculation about that.

Q: About the openness of the whole platform. Is there a partner program for the cards, for example? And what about Silverlight – why use your technologies, why not use regular standard web tech?

A: We want to get to a third-party scale model. We want to build an ecosystem and get it going. The Maps mash-ins are just the beginning – this will move to regular web searches too. But are we trying to reinforce a Microsoft stack message? That’s not our intent. We’re trying to use the best technology we have. But we’re looking for feedback on this.

A: Silverlight is cross-platform remember, that’s important to us. And it’s a great development environment. There are many levels of openness in that stack. AJAX today is not supporting a lot of these nice transitions that you saw.

A: Silverlight is in the spirit of empowerment, not lock-in. You can just do a lot of stuff with this.

Q: Can you comment in general terms about Microsoft’s relationship with the publishers (like News Corp)? Would you pay them to de-index from Google?

A: Our focus is to take advantage of all content that’s available (non-answer). And we’ll have different business models for the publishers. But there’s no focus to de-index content from Google. At the end of the day users will decide.

Q: So you’re ruling out paying for de-indexing from Google?

A: I won’t speculate on things in the future.

Q: Why now for Streetside? Could have been sooner – how much did you spend?

A: We had early previews a while ago for Streetside, but it was different as just the ‘birds-eye’ view. Now we came up with the new human-scale with the 3D feel. This is a huge project underway to get more cities. We made the sensors at are on the vehicles capturing this data.

Q: What’s global market share? And monetization, how’s that doing?

A: Monetization progress has been keeping in-step. Even though we have a smaller share than some, our audience is being monetized well. Even as we’re growing that has kept pace. In terms of global share, not sure about the numbers, but we just did a launch in the UK. A lot of our gains in share are in the U.S. but other places too like Canada.

Q: How is the Yahoo thing going?

A: We’re waiting for the deal to close obviously. Nothing new to announce, but we remain positive that the deal will gain approval. Yahoo wants to remain a key player in the [search] experience – and we’ll help them with that. They have their own experience, but the core engine behind Bing will be available to Yahoo.

Q: In Europe, when will there be a bigger push to close on Google?

A: The UK is a start, but we’ve been increasing staff in all of Europe for this. It’s going well in the UK so far. And then we’ll expand.

Q: Will Yahoo have access to streetside imagery to make their own version of it?

A: That deal is most about the search deal, but yeah they can get that data.

———– That’s a wrap —————–

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Yahoo continues their strategic defeat from the front lines of innovation. Earlier today they announced that they’d be “deeply integrating” with Facebook Connect, allowing Yahoo users “to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content – ratings, photos, article comments, and more – directly on your Facebook stream.”

In other words, they’ve given up on their idea of leveraging all the known social connections among Yahoo email, address book and messenger users. Instead, they’ve outsourced all that social nonsense to Facebook.

In April 2008 Yahoo unveiled it’s plans to “re-wire Yahoo from the inside out…as part of this, we are going to make the consumer experience at Yahoo social throughout, and provide hooks for that for developers to do the same.” This was the centerpiece of Yahoo’s go-forward strategy. The company boasted 10 billion social connections among users, and they’d leverage that in the new Yahoo.

As recently as two months ago Yahoo confirmed to me that they were still behind this social strategy, and would be making announcements soon. And their recent re-hire of Daniel Raffel convinced us they were being sincere:

Since returning in late August, Raffel has been serving as a senior product manager under Cody Simms, the senior director of product management for Yahoo Open Source (Y!OS), we hear. He’s apparently working on mainly off-network projects such as making the Yahoo authentication platform more seamless. That might not sound sexy, but the bigger picture may be involve Yahoo building out its own platform product to better connect Yahoo with the rest of the web. Yes, think Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the like. The chance to get into this hot space and play a critical role in building a “Yahoo Connect,” may have also enticed Raffel to come back, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

Little did we know that Yahoo had already decided to give up on social in the same way they gave up on search – by outsourcing it to someone else.

Sure, search may be the most lucrative advertising platform ever imaged, but it was just too capital intensive for Yahoo to continue to compete. They wanted to focus their resources on their core business, which they said, still centered around turning Yahoo into a social platform that leveraged all those 10 billion mail/messenger connections.

Which makes some sense, sorta. Social seems to be the future, and Facebook just may do to Google what Google is doing to Microsoft (ripping apart their core business), if they ever find the right way to monetize it. Social graph monetization may be the next huge wave of revenue growth on the Internet.

But it sure won’t be Yahoo monetizing it. Because they just gave all that away to Facebook.

More and more Yahoo, still with half a billion monthly unique visitors, looks to be a site that cares little for technology. All that hard stuff can just be outsourced, obviously. And Yahoo seems very inclined to do it. They were 0-4 on social network tries until today. By my count, they’re now 0-5.

This company has no fight left in it.

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When I first heard about this “Thanksgiving” thing, I thought it sounded like a great idea.

We Brits spend a ridiculous amount of time each day giving thanks to strangers – we say thanks to people who hold doors for us, thanks to people who stop their cars to let us cross the road, thanks to waitresses when they give us our bill; even thanks again when we hand over the money to pay. But apparently you Americans – innovative people that you are – had found a way to streamline the process.

Rather than waste hours each day expressing gratitude, you had decided to compress all of your thank-yous into one annual 24-hour-period of uninterrupted Thanks Giving. Get all that politeness out of the way in one go. An inspired solution, I thought, and one we should copy back home. Hell, we should have a ’sorry’ day too – we’d reclaim weeks of time.

But apparently I’d got the wrong end of the stick. Having consulted Wikipedia, it turns out that today is not about mundane expression of gratitude, but rather about big-ticket Thank-yous. For friends, family, a baby’s laugh, spreadable cheese. Stuff that really makes it a joy to be alive, and living in the home of the brave.

In just under an hour, I’m heading out to my first even Thanksgiving dinner; I gather there will be turkey involved, and sweet potatoes – whatever they might be. And, despite my British cynicism, I’m very excited. But before I go, given that today’s celebrations began with some Brits moving to the USA and giving thanks for its awesomeness, I thought it might be appropriate to share five things – technological and otherwise – that make me… well.. thankful that a few months ago I too decided to make America my new home.

Here goes…

• 1. Free refills
  Seriously, if the Pilgrim Fathers were pleased with their first harvest, they would have shit themselves at the idea of free refills. Back home, a Coke or a coffee means precisely that: one Coke or one coffee. Here it means as much Coke or coffee as it’s humanly possible to drink. And then some. Why you people don’t take hollowed-out false legs with you to diners I will never understand.

• 2. Getting cool technology first
  I still remember the frustration I felt living in London and writing about technology. Every new, cool tech launch: the iPhone, Hulu, the Kindle, full episodes of the Daily Show on demand… had to be prefaced with the words “It’s not available in the UK yet but…”. Even technology we did get – SMS notification for Twitter, say -  risked being shut off at a moments notice the moment the math(s) of subsidising a foreign market stopped making sense. Since moving here, my attitude has completely changed. Now I get all the cool stuff first. Screw my fellow countrymen, I’m buying a Droid.

• 3. Magic ATMs (and banking in general)
  Given that the PIN (n)umber – and thus the modern ATM – was invented by a Brit, you’d think our ATMs would lead the world in terms of features and ease of use. Not so. With a few exceptions, British ATMs are capable only of doling out money and/or swallowing our cards. Here they can read cheques – sorry, checks – and tell you when they’re likely to clear! (The fact that no Brit has written a cheque since 1992 is irrelevant) They allow you to transfer money between accounts! They sell stamps! I imagine, if I asked nicely, they would also perform sexual favours. Seriously, America, kudos on the ATMs. (While I’m on the subject of banking – additional kudos for making it easy to open a bank account here. Two forms of photo ID and I was out of Wells Fargo, account details in hand, in less than 20 minutes. Note to fellow Brits: they set up your Internet banking username and password at the same time. I know. Freaking mindblowing.)

• 4. Double-decker trains
  American trains are pretty awesome on their own. Twice as much leg-room as their British counterparts, at less than half the cost. The urban ones run like clockwork, and the cross-country ones are so comically unreliable that it’s always an exciting adventure to use them. A dude in a hat actually says “all aboard!” like in movies! And as if all that wasn’t great enough, you stack two of them on top of each other. Twice the awesome!

• 5. American women
  Ok, I may be biased, given that my last God-knows-how-many girlfriends have been American. But let’s be honest, there’s a reason why iTunes is full of songs like ‘I wish they all could be Californian’ and ‘American Girls’, and yet there’s a conspicuous absence of tracks titled ‘I wish they could all come from Croydon’ or ‘Welsh Girls are great’. (Useful tip, don’t search for that last one on Limewire). Of course American women are – without exception – crazier than a box of Glenn Becks, but somehow that only adds to their charm.

• Bonus item: Glenn Beck
  Howard Beale from Network, piped into every home (or hotel room) in the land, daily. What’s not to love?

For all of those things – and so much more: thank you, America. And happy Thanksgiving.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This is a crazy fun demo of the new Avatar toys by Mattel. Each toy includes a little card that is scannable via webcam and creates an on-screen augmented reality robot or character. While this is old hat for most of us, Mattel is quite proud of being ahead of the curve and for good reason. You can see more demos at AvatarItag.com.

Total Immersion made the technology and even added a little “button” system to the cards. When you touch a spot on the card, the onscreen character pulls a knife, shoots a gun, or recounts part of the story. The added information and data will change over time, up to the release of the movie on December 18.

Obviously this requires a computer and a patient kid but it’s still an exciting addition to an already interesting movie.

We’ll have some of these toys in next week and we’ll stage mock battles for you all. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could put two cards on the table at once and have them fight? OMG!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Do you remember the days when video cards were only as large as your hand? I personally remember installing a TNT2 — and at the time, I thought that was big. Now you’ve got dual-GPU monsters like the just-leaked 5870 X2 coming out which, in addition to taking up two PCI-e slots and requiring a secondary power source, are nearly a full foot long .

Excerpt from: 
Foot-long Radeon 5870 X2 leaked

This is either a good thing or a bad thing. Actually, like most things, it’s a bit of both

More here: 
NVIDIA and Abobe combine forces for hardware-accelerated flash video