The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘experiences’

Today’s a very important day in the history of me using the Internet, a history that began in late 1996.

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Nice knowing you, AdBlock, but it’s time to move on

Call Greenpeace , they’ll want to hear this. Today marked the end of 120 years of mass-produced incandescent bulbs for Toshiba. They had planned to stop manufacturing a year from now, but seems the timetable got moved up in favor of those more efficient LED bulbs.

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Incandescent bulb production left in the dark

When it comes to dealing small businesses, the last thing you want is for the company you’re working with to renege on a transaction after you’ve contributed your half. Sending multiple invoices may be enough to annoy them into submission, but if that doesn’t work the legal fees and time involved with taking them to court usually isn’t worth it. Cortera, a new site that launched yesterday at DEMO Fall, is looking to help businesses avoid this kind of dispute.

Cortera can be thought of as a Yelp for business credit, offering reviews on large and small businesses alike that have been submitted by the community. In other words, it can help you figure out if a company you’re thinking of dealing with is going to pay you in a timely fashion, or if it’s run by deadbeats who should be avoided.

Up until now, the business credit market has been dominated by one major player: Dun & Bradstreet. But Cortera says that D&B fails to properly address small businesses, which account for a large percentage of America’s GDP. So Cortera has built out a database that includes not just the large companies that are D&B’s bread-and-butter, but also countless smaller ones that previously have been neglected.

The site’s members can use a review system much like the ones you’ll find on Yelp and Amazon to share their experiences with companies on the site, and paid members can also see key data like a company’s annual spending budget and supplier volume. Cortera offers one-off reports for as little as $3, and also has monthly plans beginning at $29 a month.

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This morning Google Voice was featured in a segment on the Today Show, during which NBC News correspondent Janet Shamlian outlined her experiences with the service over the last few months (her verdict: she loves it). It’s an interesting piece to watch if only to see how the mass media is trying to describe Google Voice without confusing everyone watching, which can be a difficult task.

Shamlian and Matt Lauer briefly address the potential privacy concerns that have been raised over Voice, which would give Google access to your voice conversations and voicemail. Given that many of us have already used Gmail for years, handing over sensitive data to Google isn’t exactly novel, but it’s a valid point nonetheless. That said, the Today Show piece entirely neglects the other real challenges facing Voice at this point: it requires you to start using a new telephone number (unless you wait it out until number portability) and the numbers shown by your outbound calls can be different from the ones your friends have, which can lead to confusion.

There’s also a pretty big goof at the end of the piece: Matt Laurer concludes the segment saying that Google Voice is “available today, nationwide”, which was big news given that Voice has long only been available to previous GrandCentral members. Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker has confirmed that this was a goof on NBC’s part, but says that invites have begun going out today to those who have previously requested them. Walker says that the team has “a long list to go through so it will take a while to get them all out”, so don’t be surprised if it takes a while before you get yours. Of course, it probably won’t be long before Voice does open up to the masses, as it wouldn’t make sense for Google to show off the product on the Today Show if the public launch is still months away.

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The tech blogosphere was abuzz yesterday with the news that Apple seemingly started accepting applications that contain nudity into the App Store. Now, it appears someone over at Cupertino as ultimately decided to reject the first such app to get into the store after all. In our tests, we could still locate the app via the iTunes link, but were unable to purchase it and download it to our devices.

Other applications with the new rating (”Rated 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity.”) could still be downloaded without a problem, so it seems Apple just let ‘Hottest Girls’ slip through the cracks - something we suggested as a possibility yesterday as well - and has now fixed it by blocking it specifically.

So much for the grand opening of the App Store to all things naked (regardless, go have your say in MobileCrunch’s poll on the subject).

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GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration, has raised $1 million in an extended Series A round of funding from Golden Horn Ventures. The company previously raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from Golden Horn in 2008.

GROU.PS currently has 1 million registered members and 40,000 social networks on the platform. The DIY social network is growing fast; the platform has grown from 200,000 users to 1 million members within a year.

GROU.PS’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups - each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc).

GROU.PS also recently added ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges).

But while the social network is growing, it is still having trouble gaining users in the U.S against the leader in the DIY space, Ning, which hit one million social networks recently. GROU.PS’ is mostly popular in Japan and Brazil.

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Glubble, social network for families, is launching several new features to improve photo sharing within its social network for families. Formerly a Firefox plug-in that let parents control what websites kids could visit online, Glubble evolved into a social network that resembles a FriendFeed but for families. Glubble has also raised $1 million in Series B funding from European investors, bringing the site’s total funding to $4 million.

Glubble lets families set up a private family home page where they can leave messages on the message wall, create online photo albums and organize their familyʼs schedule using the family events feature to post appointment, birthdays, holidays and reminders.

Glubble has always let users post photos to their families’ site, but the network has launched a useful tool called the “Family Timeline,” which provides visual navigation of family photos, events and messages through a timeline. Glubble has also created a new Toolbar interface (a Firefox plug-in) which provides families real- time message and events updates from the Family Page.

Currently, Glubble has 300,000 “family pages,” on it’s site and is still small. Glubble plans to make money from a freemium model, which will let families pay $39.95 for more storage space for photos.

Glubble’s interface and photo sharing features are easy to use but there are a plethora of social networks for families and it may be tough to differentiate itself in such a crowded space. Competitors include Cozi, Geni, and MyFamily.com.

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Were visits to the doctor ever a pleasant experience as a kid?

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Wiimbledon 2009 set for June 27 at Barcade in Brooklyn, help us raise money for sick kids

I just took a tour of the Electro-Harmonix factory in Queens, New York and came away with an interesting bit of information. Their lead web guy, Scott Matthews, has created a number of systems to connect musicians and EHX products in ways that I’ve never seen on other conventional music supply sites.

EHX is famous. They’ve been making pedals and effects since 1968 and the sounds their pedals produce have been heard in countless recordings in the last few decades. But how is the average Joe supposed to share his experiences with the pedals? Or, more importantly, how does the professional or amateur guitarist supposed to know how to use the pedals and which pedals to buy?

Nothing like a telling graphic to illustrate what most have been expecting, albeit probably not in this order of magnitude. Veteran media exec Alan Mutter discovered some horrid statistics about the state of ad sales for American newspapers on trade organization NAA’s website, and published his view on the Q1 2009 numbers on his blog. They don’t look pretty.

The stats show that total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago - 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers - we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years if you only take into account the first quarter.

The sharp decline is caused by the lousy state of both digital and dead tree ad sales: the stats posted on the Newspaper Association of America website show that print sales fell by 29.7% in the first three months of this year (to $5.9 billion), while online sales dropped a record 13.4% (to $696.3 million).

Classified advertising is clearly still taking major hits. Compared to the first quarter of last year, revenue from all types of classified ads fell 42,32% to less than $1.5 billion. Considering the fact that total classifieds ad sales topped $4 billion back in 2001 and were still at almost $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2007, that has got to hurt. The biggest losers in classifieds: Recruitment (-67.39%), Real Estate (-45.55%) and Automotive (-43.42%).

Annual ad sales for American newspapers came in at a grand total of nearly $49.5 billion in 2005 and dropped to about $37.8 billion in 2008. If the decline rate keeps accelerating the way these first quarter results suggest, we could be looking at somewhere in between $26 billion and $30 billion in total ad sales revenue for this year.

And yet somehow, I fear newspapers haven’t even seen the bottom of the barrel yet.

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