The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘highlights’

Ron and Fez, the fantastic Sirius XM radio show that makes my day every day, will host the world’s first second Twitter party on Sunday! It’s a follow-up to last month’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Twitter Party , which was pretty much a gigantic success. What’s being celebrated this time around?

Go here to read the rest:
Yes! Another Ron and Fez Twitter party, this time for The Oscars!

In a brief interview with FOX Business Network, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about his views on the talking points of Obama’s Jobs Summit at The White House, which he attended.

The full clip is embedded below, but here are some of the highlights of what Schmidt said:

- small and medium sized businesses do much of the hiring in the U.S., so they should be running into less problems getting loans
- banks should be forced by the government to provide SMBs with more loans, by means of regulatory changes
- Google wants media companies to ‘make it’ because they depend critically on their content
- Comcast’s move to acquire NBCU was ‘probably pretty smart’ on their part and Google is unlikely to ever go down such a road
- The speed of operation at the government is so slow compared to Google’s that Schmidt deems it unlikely that he’d ever join President Obama’s cabinet

Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com

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We recently previewed the upcoming put.io cloud storage service which fetches media files and lets you stream them immediately.

The service has created a lot of buzz, because it’s able to keep redundant copies of your files which you can access from anywhere with a browser, including files for the iPhone and PS3.

These can be fetched automatically from bittorrent networks, FTPs, direct download links, Rapidshare links or basic http authenticated links. And you can stream your downloaded files instantly with an appropriate player. For example, Divx Web Player for DivX files. Cleary it has the potential to create something of a media storm.

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Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, fresh off a new funding and site relaunch, is showing some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report today at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.

We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below.

Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.

72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.

2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.

Lots more detail in the full presentation, below. You can see the audience reaction on Twitter here.

Technorati SOTB 2009 –

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A document on Sega America’s official FTP server suggests that Sony will launch it motion control thingamajig this Spring. The document summarizes a meeting between Sega and Sony, which took place last month.

See the rest here: 
Leaked Sega-Sony meeting doc says PS3 motion control coming this Spring

Taking place tonight in Seattle is The Naked Truth 2009, a Redfin-hosted conference to give entrepreneurs advice. Michael is there participating as an expert to discuss industry trends. This year’s topic is revenue models for consumer Internet startups. The four presenting startups, Redfin, UrbanSpoon, Picnik and Animoto have some interesting information to share via their slides, which we’re posting below, pointing out a few of the highlights.

For those who want to follow along live, you can find the video of the event here.

First up, restaurant recommendation service UrbanSpoon, which was recently bought by IAC. Some highlights of their slide:

• Of their visitors on the web, 74% come from Google.
• Of their visitors through mobile devices, 99% come through the iPhone (they have one of the more popular apps).
• They’re seeing more than double the revenue off of those mobile users versus web users.
• When they were featured in an iPhone commercial, they saw 300% growth.

Next up, online imaging editing service, Picnik (which has a partnership with Yahoo to edit Flickr pictures).

• 80% of their revenues come from paid subscriptions, the other 20% from advertising.
• About half of their subscribers do so on the first visit to the site, 75% of those do within 4 visits.
• “Partnerships are not nirvana” — obviously a shot at Yahoo.

Video slideshow maker Animoto (which recently raised a new round of funding):

• They have 700 paid users per 100,000 users, but are already cash-flow positive with that.
• They say their hybrid model (freemium + virtual goods) is working

And finally, online real estate company, Redfin:

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Microsoft’s competitor to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, has officially rolled out the new version, Silverlight 3, today. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform.

SIiverlight 3 launched a day earlier today on Microsoft’s servers, surprising the blogosphere. The new version has improved streaming capabilities, called Smooth Streaming. Here’s what Microsoft said about the new streaming function:

If the Internet bandwidth and video rendering capability on your playback device are sufficiently high, you’ll experience high-definition video playback of the sample content. You will also be able to simulate end user experiences under varying conditions by simulating drops and recoveries in bandwidth. If your actual bandwidth is below 3 Mbps, or your playback device is video-challenged, then you will experience the adaptive nature of Smooth Streaming without needing to simulate a bandwidth cap.

Microsoft is also extending Silverlight’s technologies beyond the browser by allowing developers to design and create apps that can run on the desktop. Microsoft will be announcing further details about Silverlight at its official launch of Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 tomorrow morning. We’ll have all the details. And Microsoft will also be demoing some of the real-time capabilities of Silverlight 3 at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow.

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So, as you may have seen yesterday, Yammer founder David Sacks is still alive in the World Series of Poker. In fact, he has to miss our events tomorrow because of it. But you know, there’s something that we’re missing today — Yammer.

The service has been down for a few hours now, with no signs of coming back up. Twitter is abuzz with the failure.

So while Sacks is busy playing Poker (okay, he’s actually working today, but still), leaving comments on our blog posts, and Twittering, his startup (which we love and use everyday, by the way) is suffering. Hope you win that gold bracelet, David!

Update: It’s definitely a hardware and not a software issue, we’re told. They’re still looking into the issue.

Update 2: After several hours, it looks like Yammer is finally coming back online. Our icons still aren’t working, but messages are going through.

Here’s a video Sacks and Calacanis talking poker and their bet:

Watch Internet CEOs Play Poker at the 2009 WSOP on RawVegas.tv

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