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Posts Tagged ‘does-the-world’

If you’ve been waiting for some way to put your low- to middling-resolution videos onto a big TV, your prayers have been answered. Flip, through their mouthpiece Walt Mossberg, just dumped out a big bucket of howsyerfather and announced the Flipshare for all to enjoy

The rest is here:
Wham: FlipShare video is handled by Mossberg

If you’re worried about the amount of energy your monitor is drawing, you’re probably nuts, since your PC draws ten times that, but if you must indulge your inner environmentalist, this line of displays from NEC should suffice. They’re LED-backlit, which I suspect accounts for all the savings

Original post: 
NEC’s new green monitors run cool, save energy

Does the world really need another URL shortener? Apparently, the U.S. government thinks so. It just launched http://go.usa.gov as a link shortening service for government employees. It shortens links from any .gov, .mil, or .si.edu site.

For instance, http://go.usa.gov/llX takes you to a page on Nasa’s site with some nice satellite imagery showing the Fall colors in Wisconsin. And http://go.usa.gov/liO is a link to www.Recovery.gov (I think you save two characters n that one). The idea is that if you see one of these short links you know it is coming from a government employee, which doesn’t exactly make it official but is supposed to make it more trustworthy.

When you see a go.usa.gov tweet, it will be like getting a messge directly from Uncle Sam, or rather, one of his minions. But I mean, really, can’t they just use bit.ly like everyone else?

With commercial link shorteners such as Cli.gs and Tr.im falling by the wayside, maybe the government will start a short URL bailout next. Go.USA.Gov!

(Hat tip to Anil Dash)

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A team of Yahoo veterans who built its behavioral targeting advertising technology are publicly launching a hybrid ad network today called Rocket Fuel, which they’ve tested over the past year with major brands including Nike, Dell, Microsoft, and American Express. Despite keeping quiet, Rocket Fuel’s ad network reaches 40 million people and shows them about 100 million ads per month.

CEO George John calls Rocket Fuel a “hybrid ad network” because it combines all sorts of targeting data (social, behavioral, contextual, geographical, search) to figure out what works best at any particular moment. “We saw how important it was to let the data tell you which ad to show,” says John, who came from Yahoo along with president Richard Frankel and CTO Abhinav Gupta.

Rocket Fuel’s algorithm considers everything from a consumer’s online behavior and location to the time of day and what particular ad was shown. If people who listen to electronica music are more likely to click on an ad than those who listen to jazz, or people who log in from work respond better than people from home, Rocket Fuel tries to ferret out those details and feed them back into the mechanics of the ad campaign. John explains:

We let the date tell us what works and what is important. Instead of inflicting on customers thousands of targeting options, we figure out which options are working well and move inventory in that way.

Sounds simple enough, but apparently this is not the way most ad targeting is done. Instead, advertisers and ad agencies typically are given a confusing array of targeting options and are left to their own devices to sort through them all. Rocket Fuel is automating that testing process and speeding up the feedback loop so that advertisers can hone in on whatever combination of targeting is working at that second.

But does the world really need another advertising network, hybrid or otherwise? If Rocket Fuel can deliver better advertising campaign ROIs, advertisers will give it a shot. That’s all that matters. If it can’t, it won’t make it off the launchpad.

The companyl raised $6.8 million in a series A round a year ago from Mohr Davidow, Labrador Ventures, and individual angel investors.

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So Microsoft is once again playing catch-up to compete in spaces in which others are already succeeding: online business productivity suites. Google and Zoho are doing well here, and have a well-established base. Microsoft, in its constant quest to be the only software provider on the planet, is taking Office online, too

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Microsoft Office Online: Free as in puppies

When Facebook redesigned its homepage in early March in a wholehearted embrace of the real-time activity stream as its primary user interface, everybody complained. “Why on earth does the world need 2 Twitters?,” asked one of my friends on Facebook. Twitter-envy aside, some early data suggests that embracing the stream was the right decision after all.

Since the redesign went into effect, Facebook’s growth has accelerated. After flat 0.3 growth in February, Facebook added nearly 4 million unique U.S. visitors in March (up 6.6 percent over February), and another 5 million in April (up 10.3 percent over March) to end at 67.5 million domestic uniques, according to comScore. That puts it within kissing distance of MySpace’s 71 million unique U.S. visitors in April, by the way (see chart below), and keeps a healthy 50-million visitor gap with Twitter, which added 8 million U.S. visitors in April alone.

Facebook is not alone when it comes to wading in the stream. AOL has found religion as well and is injecting “lifestreams” into everything from Bebo to Socialthing to AIM.

On the other end of the spectrum, is tiny FriendFeed, which is one big activity stream. Despite leading on the innovation front, FriendFeed has been struggling when it comes to gaining users. But a redesign that went into beta in early April, and is now the default homepage seems to be paying off with a 28 percent rise in unique visitors in April and more time spent on the site ComScore only estimates 188,000 unique visitors in that month (Quantcast puts it a bit higher at 241,000), so it is still extremely niche, but at least its numbers are now headed in the right direction. The redesign makes the whole feed update continuously now so you can really watch your what your friends are doing on the Web as they are doing it.

Complain all your like, but the stream is here to stay and it will only get stronger.

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