The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘constant’

All 10.5 million blogs on WordPress.com, including TechCrunch, just got more realtime. Any blog hosted on WordPress is now PuSH-enabled, meaning that new posts get pushed out to feed readers such as Google Reader the second they are published. There were WordPress plug-ins that did this before, but now WordPress is doing it automatically for all hosted blogs.

PuSH stands for Pubsubhubbub, a realtime protocol designed to speed up RSS which launched at our first Realtime CrunchUp last year. Instead of waiting for your RSS reader to ping the servers for each blog and news site you subscribe to, which can cause a noticeable delay before it actually shows up in your feed reader, it will now be pushed out immediately.

The PuSH protocol does away with the constant polling required by RSS. Another way to speed up RSS is through a different protocol called RSSCloud, which WordPress also supports. There are subtle differences between RSSCloud and PuSH, the most significant being that RSSCloud just notifies your feed reader there is something new, while PuSH actually sends the content with the notification via so-called fat pings.

Google Reader also supports PuSH, so if you use Google Reader, all WordPress blogs will be updated much faster than before. Not that you’d necessarily notice unless you just came from a blog’s site or saw a link on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz or some other stream first. Let us know in comments if you notice any difference to how fast TechCrunch posts appear in Google Reader.

(Photo credit: Flickr/joiseyshowwa)

For quite a while now, I’ve been following the progress of the Pandora , an open-source handheld for music, movies, and games. It’s hard to stay excited, though, when there’s the constant threat of the thing ceasing to exist. That seemed to be a risk for a while, but now we’re being told that all the hurdles are jumped and the thing will start rolling off the assembly line any moment now

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Pandora open-source handheld is go

StockTwits, a social and microblogging service for stock investors, has pulled down another round of financing – $3 million in a Series B round led by Colorado-based Foundry Group. Foundry Group partner Seth Levine joined the company’s board of directors, and True Ventures, an investor from earlier this year, also participated in the round.

The service launched just a year ago as a way for Twitter users to organize, share and discover their thoughts on public company stocks: “Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.”

In September the service moved on from Twitter and built their own platform and Air desktop application. They kept the familiar 140 character format for messages, and users can easily cross-post to and from Twitter.

StockTwits is also part of an official NASDAQ iPhone application.

Traders are clearly enamored with the product and love the constant stream of company/sector specific data. And new products, like StockTwit TV, seem to be a hit (even if, for most people, listening to stock talk is like watching paint dry). The service will expand greatly next year, says CEO Howard Lindzon.

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There are hundreds of companies small businesses can turn to for tools that facilitate their e-mail marketing campaigns, some of which operate solely on the Web.

One of the largest such providers, Constant Contact, is actually much bigger than most people think.

Launched back in 1998, the company is now publicly traded on NASDAQ and boasts a market cap of nearly half a billion dollars, and the company caters to hundreds of thousands of small businesses and organizations who use its software to spam connect with their customers and members. So if such an e-mail newsletter juggernaut launches a new service that is bound to be a competitor to a host of Internet startups, we take notice.

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Some time today, Constant Contact is launching an event marketing tool, which will enable customers to promote and manage registrations and RSVPs for their meetings, seminars, parties and other events. Users will be able to enter details for their events, communicate them with their contacts via e-mail and an optional custom homepage, and receive payments for events that require attendees to pay in advance.

The tool also lets users track campaigns in real-time and get extensive, automated reports on the e-mail marketing performance, payments, venue capacity and much more.

I gained access to a preview version of the software, and found it had quite a robust set of features. See some screenshots below to get an idea of what it’s going to look like.

Startups, take note

Considering the company’s already vast customer base, I think it’s a logical step for Constant Contact to take and one that will likely provide them with another steady revenue stream. For Internet startups who operate in this field, the announcement of the new feature isn’t exactly going to be the best of news.

Not that Constant Contact’s newest endeavor will effectively kill any of them outright, but it certainly limits the amount of small businesses they’ll be able to convince to use their tools for event marketing. After all, there’s now a large, public company with a big track record in handling large-scale campaigns offering a combination of e-mail marketing, online survey and event marketing tools all-in-one.

Pricing for Constant Contact’s Event Marketing service will be based exclusively on the number of active events – not on the number of registrants – nor are there any additional charges based on revenue collected for events. A set-up fee will not be charged either. Pricing starts at $15 per month for up to five concurrent events.

Some of the startups that will no doubt be analyzing this pricing strategy today: Meetup, Eventbrite, Evite, Cocodot, Amiando – and there’s plenty more where that came from.

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The Clavioline was one of the first electronic synths in existence. Built in 1947 by Constant Martin it was featured in the song “Telstar” in 1962

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Blast off! “Telstar” on guitar and effects pedals

LG announced today their new “thin” display line.

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LG claims thinnest display in the world, Shinoda secretly laughs