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Posts Tagged ‘down-the-line’

A couple days ago we caught wind of a new Seesmic product called Seesmic Look. Today it is launching and we finally get a look at it. As suspected, it is a streamlined Twitter client aimed at the Oprah crowd. But it is also a Tablet-friendly client that tries to organize the stream into easily browsable channels, some of which are sponsored by brands.

Seesmic Look is the company’s second Windows client. As such, it works on touchscreen Windows Tablet computers, and can also be controlled by a remote on a computer-connected TV screen. It comes with pre-populated channels and interest streams so that users can dive right in without even creating a Twitter account.  Once you do log in, you can see your inbox (@replies and direct messages) and “social” stream, which is what the people you follow are Tweeting about.

As Tweets move down the screen they get smaller, or you can literally watch Tweets come in and fade-away in what looks like a screensaver mode. Linked photos appear in-line, and soon so will videos. Also, the background images are pulled in from each individual Twitter user’s account whenever you look at their Tweets.

The main navigation menu includes trends, favorites, interests, channels, and searches. When you select one, the app brings up Tweets, categories, and pre-selected accounts, which you can explore further.  Interests and channels are pretty much the same thing—curated lists of Twitter accounts by topic—except that the channels are sponsored by brand advertisers such as Red Bull, Live Nation, and Kodak, while the interests are not. Interests include news, sports, politics, music and celebrities.  The branded channels show a logo in the corner, but the actual Tweets are from real people. For instance, Red Bull puts together Tweets from athletes.

This is the first time Seesmic is offering any advertising spots in its stream reader. Since the branded channels are essentially just lists (although they are controlled by Seesmic, not Twitter), down the line they can be added into Seesmic’s other various desktop and mobile clients. Seesmic is also speaking with tablet and computer manufacturers about distribution deals.  And the app seems to be officially sanctioned by Twitter.  It has a “Powered by Twitter” icon at the bottom, which is notable given Twitter’s prior guidance that third-party apps not use the Twitter trademark.

Seesmic Look’s user interface reminds me of stripped-down interactive TV interfaces designed for a 10-foot experience.  The intention is definitely to make Twitter more accessible and TV-like.  The channel metaphor is there for a reason.  But do people really want to sit back and watch Tweets flow by?  I guess power users do that all day long squinting at their text-only streams.  Maybe to the extent that photos and videos are attached to Tweets, mainstream users will begin to find it addictive as well.

As you’ve probably heard by now, this morning Google finally officially announced the first Google Phone: The Nexus One. Plenty of reviewers and geeks are fawning over the new device, but some are proposing that it won’t even make a blip on the radar for your average consumer. In fact, earlier this evening the Wall Street Journal quoted one analyst as saying, “Unless [Google] gives it a big push with marketing dollars, which they are not, consumers aren’t going to know the phone exists.”

I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. Google is going to put its marketing muscle behind this in a very big way to ensure that consumer awareness persists long after today’s launch. Granted, the company says it is favoring an online strategy as opposed to television for its campaigns (which is why the analyst quoted above doubted its chances), but it can still plaster the Nexus One all over the web.

It’s already started. Visit the YouTube homepage right now, and you’ll see a fairly prominent link to the Nexus One official YouTube Channel, which is loaded with how-to guides and video walkthroughs. Google is also running quite a few AdSense ads for keywords like “smartphones”, “phone”, “maps”, and “android”. That’s not hugely surprising, though it is worth pointing out that Google is purchasing ads that compete directly against some of its partners.

I suspect this is only the beginning. Don’t be surprised if we see ads for the Nexus One on Google’s famously spartan homepage (this would be a very rare move for the company, but it set a precedent with the Droid launch). Likewise, we’ll probably see small ads pop up on various Google products, the same way the company often prompts users to try out Chrome. And there will likely be a big push on third party publisher sites.

Google has a lot riding on this launch. Sure, it would be nice for the phone to be a popular device in its own right. But, as many have pointed out, it’s the disruptive distribution model that’s going to have the biggest impact down the line. Google needs to show that this new online distribution model is something that people are willing to actually use.

As it stands now, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Buying a cell phone online will be a pretty foreign experience to most people (at least in the United States). That isn’t to say it’s a difficult experience. It’s just different. And it’s going to require plenty of ads and hand holding to get people used to the process, because they won’t have a sales rep standing next to them to help.

Also, keep in mind that Verizon reportedly spent $100 million to market the Droid in 2009. I doubt Google anticipates that the Nexus One will actually beat Droid in sales in the short term (given Verizon’s thousands of retail stores versus Google’s online-only storefront that would be very difficult indeed). But if three months down the line the Nexus One still represents a very tiny sliver of Android’s market share, you can be sure people will start calling the ‘Google Phone’ a failure.

I reached out to Google to see if they’d offer any specifics about their upcoming marketing plans. Their spokesperson wasn’t willing to share much, but they did reaffirm that Google’s spending would be focused primarily online rather than on television:

Because the Nexus One is exclusively sold online, our marketing plan will heavily focus on online marketing to educate users on the benefits of the phone and the new way of buying it. We are using a broad range of Google online advertising tools, which we believe to be the best way to run targeted and measurable advertising / marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, we are not going into detail on our specific marketing plans for the future.

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File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive has landed a deal with Hewlett-Packard to power the technology giant’s newly announced CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks beginning in January 2010. HP CloudDrive, which will be powered on the backend by ZumoDrive, will allows netbook consumers to quickly and easily access their music, documents and other content onto their netbooks even if their media libraries are larger than their available on-device storage. Read our initial reviews of ZumoDrive here.

ZumoDrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, ZumoDrive. which was built specifically for netbooks, tablets and other devices with low amounts of storage, creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a twist-ZumoDrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

The startup also launched a new version which lets users to access their music playlists, photo albums and document folders on any device. ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage. Its iPhone app lets users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. And the service has also been upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content.

The Zumodrive-powered HP CloudDrive features the ability to stream music, videos and photos to iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa and Windows Media Player, offline access, mobile acces via the iPhone app, folder linking, playlist syncing, file sharing and tired storage options.

This is a pretty big coup for the bootstrapped Zumodrive, which just raised $1.5 million in funding last year. Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.

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Your Roku box just got a whole lot more interesting. Roku, if you remember, makes the Roku player, a small device that sits next to your TV and plays Netflix, Amazon Video, and MLB selections. Roku has just added ten new channels to that line-up and built a fascinating platform for adding more down the line.

The current channels will include: blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. More channels will be available here shortly.

Today Intel agreed to pay rival chipmaker AMD $1.25 billion to settle a raft of ongoing litigation going back decades. AMD accused Intel of anti-competitive practices, which sparked an antitrust investigation. By settling now with AMD, Intel avoids paying out billions more down the line and being branded a monopolist by the government for abusing its 80 percent PC-chip market share.

The size of the settlement is as close to an admission of guilt we’ll ever hear from Intel. It still maintains its innocence, as any prudent corporation would, but you don’t pay out $1.25 billion just to avoid the hassle of a trial. And while $1.25 billion is an enormous sum which will help shore up AMD’s balance sheet, it amounts to only 10 percent of Intel’s $12.9 billion in cash and short term investments.

Just to put the size of the settlement in context, last year Intel’s revenues were $38 billion. Last quarter alone, it was making roughly $104 million a day. At that rate, Intel brings in $1.25 billion every 12 days. It can absorb the settlement pretty easily.

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This morning, Google is making a slight update to Wave to help users unclog their inbox from public waves. Previously, you could see public waves in your inbox, which was fairly annoying. Now for a wave to appear in your inbox, you need to “follow” the wave.

When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. But when you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on and monitor the conversation, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can also archive waves, which will removes waves from your inbox. When there is an update to an archived wave, it will appear in your inbox again. And you can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

Google says the “unfollow” feature replaces the mute command. You can still find waves that you are not following by searching for them or if you have organized them into saved searches or folders. The feature certainly gives your more control over your inbox, which is always a good thing. Google needs to continue adding more intuitive features to help users better understand the innovative, but confusing communications product.

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One of the most interesting but under-appreciated processes in building a web site is the amount of testing that goes on to figure out exactly what should go where. Many startups rely on A/B testing as they roll out new features, and the big guys — namely very popular sites like Google and Facebook — conduct extensive usability studies that can involve interviews, eye monitoring, and more. Today YouTube has revealed some of the action that goes on behind the scenes as it continues to tweak its all-important ‘Watch’ page — the site you see when you’re actually viewing a video on YouTube.

To help gauge the Watch page’s ideal layout, YouTube invited in a number of users and gave them magnets that represented different elements from YouTube and other popular video sites. The results were not surprising, but they present an interesting challenge to YouTube: the vast majority of users chose to streamline their page as much as possible, featuring a large video player, a search box, and a strip of related videos. But the site’s heavy uploaders, who are obviously key to YouTube’s success, tended to favor a more complex site with a greater emphasis on analytics, sharing, and social interaction.

YouTube’s task is to figure out a way to appeal to both sets of users. And to do that, it sounds like there’s going to be a new set of customization options coming our way, which would allow users to tweak their watch pages with the features they want. YouTube wouldn’t confirm that this feature is definitely coming (the company is still doing extensive testing so it may not be sure itself), but don’t be surprised if you get the option to build your perfect ‘Watch’ page six months down the line.

Last month YouTube gave us a peek at another one of its recent research revelations: its five star rating system doesn’t work, because people tend to either rate videos as 5’s or 1’s.

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There was a lot of action surrounding the first seed round of funding for Foursquare, the location-based social network. From what we’ve heard, there were a number of investors upset that they couldn’t get in on the round, which was relatively small at $1.35 million. But what we didn’t know was everyone who was involved in the round, but more names continue to come out.

While Foursquare eventually disclosed that the main investors were Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, there were a set of individual angel investors that the company wouldn’t talk about. Last week, it was revealed that one of those investors was Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. Another is Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley’s former partner at his last startup Dodgeball, Alex Rainert. Both of those are confirmed. Ron Conway and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter are believed to have participated as well. And now a fifth has just outed himself: Digg founder Kevin Rose.

Rose revealed his investment during his presentation at FOWA in London. (Which itself is rather interesting, titled “9 Ways To Take Your Site From One To One Million Users” — kind of like the post he did for us, 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers.)

Foursquare is proving to have quite an impressive roster of investors. Meanwhile, the service may or may not have gotten a shout-out in The Simpsons the other day. The key to the scene is that the episode was apparently heavy with social network references, such as Twitter and Facebook. Even though they do appear to be talking about the actual game of four square, it may be a sly reference. Those chattering about it on Twitter seem convinced.

[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

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Looking for nudity in the App Store? Well, it exists. Contrary to what hundreds of application denials might have implied, it seems that Apple’s perfectly okay with showin’ the goods within an application – so long as said goods are shown in itty-bitty (though zoomable) thumbnails.

Before we dive too deep, we should make it clear: We’re very much in the “This shouldn’t be an issue” boat. We don’t mind at all that a collection of pixelated chests have found their way into the app store. To be completely honest, we think there’s a damned absurd amount of money to be made if Apple embraced a “Well, as long as it’s legal!” mindset and opened up an age-restricted section for those who’s interests swung that way.

That said, we’re also very much in the “Apple needs to figure out their damn rules” boat.

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23andMe isn’t making too many headlines in tech circles any more, but there’s little doubt in my mind that it, or at least companies like it, will become incredibly important over the next decade or so. Affordable genetic testing will likely revolutionize the way we treat health care, and its effects on society will be profound. And well known celebrities like Sergey Brin (who happens to be married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki), are already beginning to publicly demonstrate some of the benefits of learning your genetic forecast.

Still, it’s hard to really call 23andMe “affordable” for most people at this point. The price has come down drastically from the $1000 Michael paid when he tried it out in late 2007 (it’s now only $399), but that’s still pretty steep for testing that most people probably have a hard time wrapping their heads around in the first place.

Today 23andMe has announced that it’s launching a much cheaper $99 version of its product as part of a new Research Revolution, which is meant to help 23andMe initiate research studies on genetic diseases that would otherwise require major logistical hurdles and funding. The effort is part of the company’s 23andWe research arm, which has the goal of building grassroots studies from communities of members who are afflicted by various genetic diseases.

Here’s how it works: 23andMe has picked out ten different diseases that it’s looking to study first (the company plans to study more down the line — this is just a starter set). Users visit the site and “pledge” to one disease. The first disease to reach 1000 votes will be the first one studied by 23andMe researchers, though all ten will eventually be studied. Participants agree to complete a number of surveys, and users who have previously submitted their DNA to the service can opt-in and submit votes as well. Voting will run through September 2009.

Unfortunately, the cheaper price comes with some downsides: you’ll miss out on a lot of the analysis that makes 23andMe really cool, like the ability to see your ancestry data, some of the site’s community features, and the ability to download your raw genetic data (which you could theoretically have analyzed again at some point in the future). What you’re left with are the site’s research reports, a list of risks for 100 diseases, and “traits”, along with some basic sharing and community functionality. You can see a full list of differences here.

Finally, it’s not clear if this is going to work at all. This is a new approach to genetic research, and some science blogs believe that a 1,000 person sample size may not be enough to generate adequate data. Still, provided that 23andMe ensures that all patients are given adequate informed consent and the resulting data is considered valid by the scientific community, this could prove to be an efficient new way to conduct scientific research.

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