The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘over-the-next’

Last night, I spent a truly obscene amount of time reading through Action Button’s incredibly good reviews of games, old-school and new. The Super Metroid and Super Mario Bros 3 reviews in particular struck me in particular, because it was clear that the reviewers love these games even more than I do, which didn’t think was possible. These are deep waters indeed, I reflected — love of games can be far more intense and complex than I thought.

More: 
Heartwarming: gamer helps blind gamer beat Ocarina of Time

Personalized search is something that we all know Google feels strongly about. Today, the search giant is adding a new feature to help users mark searches: Stars. So when you see search results, you can click to mark a star next to a result that you feel is relevant. The next time you perform a search relevant to a starred item, the result will appear in a special list right at the top of your results.

The feature will be rolled out to users over the next few days and will be available to users who are signed into their Google accounts. Google says that stars will make it it easier for users to remember their favorite results because they don’t have to keep track of them after they star them. Google will essentially do all the heavy lifting by remembering starred items and presenting those results when appropriate. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can access your list of starred items in one place if you’d like to see them. Stars can also be used to mark pages when browsing the web; you can click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, which will show up in your starred items.

Google says that stars in search will replace SearchWiki, a tool which we weren’t very fond of. Searchwiki allowed users to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. Apparently others felt the same way, because Google said that users disliked changing the order of Google’s “organic search results.” Stars appears to be an effort to personalize search results in a simpler way. Google notes that if you have been using SearchWiki, your edits will be preserved with your Google Account.

Apple and Google are engaged in a fascinating battle of mobile OS’s. Among other things, they’re duking it out on patent infringement, developer relations and carrier support. Lines are being drawn, and everyone’s taking sides.

That begs the question: what’s the difference between the App Store and Android Market for developers? And how does this affect their bottom line? Mobclix, a TC50 Company, just released a report comparing the Android Market to Apple App Store. They are a mobile analytics and advertising platform whose footprint includes over 6,500 publishers including ngmoco, SGN, and NewToy (creators of Words with Friends).

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Hamburg, Germany based Qype, a Yelp-like site that’s focused on European markets, has recently had long acquisition looks from both Google and Nokia, we’ve heard from multiple sources. A deal with Nokia in particular was looking extremely likely until recently.

The site was first launched in 2005 and today attracts 9 million monthly worldwide visitors, according to Comscore, just a little less than Yelp’s 11 million. Both likely have far more actual visitors, but Comscore is good for comparision – in December, for example, Qype told us they had 17.7 million unique visitors. A year ago the company brought in a new CEO and have been expanding rapidly across Europe.

Google supposedly took a look at the company and passed, opting instead to just import Qype’s content. Nokia made a run for the company after Google, with one source saying that a term sheet had been signed in the $50 million range.

But another source says that a term sheet was never signed and the deal negotiations broke down over both price and other contract terms.

Qype isn’t helping much with the story, sticking to their no comments. But founder Stephan Uhrenbacher did email to tell us that the site has 500,000 registered users who’ve left over 1 million reviews. They are available in seven languages and have sites in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Ireland.

So for now at least Qype may remain independent. But like Yelp, which had its own acquisition drama late last year, Qype is in the local advertising sweet spot, where billions of advertising dollars (and euros) will be flowing over the next few years.

Qype has raised around £8 million in venture capital.

Yesterday, Luke Wroblewski – Chief design architect at Yahoo! – wrote a blog post singing the praises of audiosharing site Huffduffer. But it wasn’t Huffduffer’s service that got Luke W animated, so much as their sign-up page.

While most sites use a standard form with text-boxes and radio buttons for new sign-ups, Huffduffer presents its questions as a ‘Mad Lib’ style statement…

“I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be _____________ and I want my password to be _____________. My email address is _________. By the way, my name is ______________ and my website is ___________.”

…which is kinda neat.

But Luke, being a ‘chief design architect’ (one of the world’s more tautological job titles), wanted to find out more. Specifically, he wanted to know if this style of form actually encourages more people to sign up than the usual Name: ___________ / Email address: __________ format. So he persuaded Ron Kurti at Vast.com to do some A/B testing and, whaddya know?, it turns out the conversational fill-in-the-blanks form increased conversion by 25-40%.

Given those impressive numbers it’s a cast iron certainty that in the next few months dozens of sites, starting probably with Yahoo!, will consider upgrading their sign-up pages to this new, friendlier format. The trick, of course, will be to get the wording just right – to customize each sign-up page for the site’s particular audience.

…which has given me an idea for a ‘fun’ weekend contest! Hurrah!

Your challenge is this: suggest some Mad Lib-style wording for the sign up page of your favourite web 2.0 site. The funnier the better. Post your entry in the comments and his time next week I’ll pick the funniest (say) three and award some excellent prizes.

Prizes that will include (but are not limited to): fame, recognition of your brilliance and whatever crap I can find in my hotel room – a signed copy of my eBay-auction-winning book, a TechCrunch tshirt and maybe one of those little bottles of shampoo you get.

Here are some examples off the top of my head to inspire you. Yours should be better…

Twitter:

“I do everything Oprah tells me to do so I’d like to use Twitter for three days. I’d like my username to be __________ and my password to be ‘password123′, or the name of my dog which is ______________. Please autofollow me to Oprah, Ellen Degeneres and Taylor Swift.”

Google:

“My name is ___________ and I would like to sign up to use Gmail/Google Buzz. The name of the person I am secretly having an affair with is ___________ and my social security number is _______________. Please display this information on my public profile.”

YouTube:

“LOL!!!! My n@me is ____________ & I wanna join yutube becos this video sukkkssss!! I think _____________ is GAAY!!! LOLLZ”

Livejournal:

“My name is ______________ and joining Livejournal is my only hope of getting anyone to read my poetry. My birthstone is ____________ and my current mood is _____________ and lonely. No one understands me. I hate my life.”

MySpace:

“My name is ____________ and due to some kind of administrative error I would like to join MySpace.”

Go, submit!

The rapid evolution of mobile phones, both on a hardware and a software level, combined with a surge in application storefront releases, deployments of higher-capacity network infrastructure and recent developments in positioning technologies could drive revenues from mobile location-based services to more than $12.7 billion by 2014, according to a new report published by Juniper Research.

The report found that while MLBS had experienced a number of false dawns from 2000 to 2007, improvements in handset UIs together with easier consumer access to an range of app distribution channels had led to greater interest from service providers in providing mobile location-based applications.

While service usage will be highest in Far East China over the next few years, greatest revenues will come from Western Europe, Juniper forecasts.

Revenues will come from sales of apps through application stores and other channels, but also from mobile advertising tied to those apps. In fact, the Juniper report notes that advertising will likely form an increasing share of MLBS-related revenues over the next five years.

In the words of co-author Dr Windsor Holden:

“Location-based applications are extremely interesting for brands and retailers in that they allow those companies to direct consumers to outlets in their vicinity while simultaneously providing information about the products on offer. When these are allied to measures such as mobile coupons and vouchers, you have the combination of information and financial incentive which can be compelling for consumers.”

This should sound like music in the ears of juggernauts like Google, Facebook and Nokia, as well startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, aka-aki, Loopt, Rummble and a couple of hundred others playing this extremely crowded field.

Most hardware manufacturers are finally rolling out USB 3.0 devices. We’ve seen motherboards, hubs , hard drives, and notebooks all rocking the new and improved USB standard

More here: 
eSATA is faster than USB 3.0 — at least right now

Like them or not, e-books are here to stay. Personally, I don’t like them — but that’s mainly because e-book readers have been ugly, clumsy, and limited in function and selection. The tidal wave of readers we saw at CES, however, suggests that even die-hard curmudgeons like myself may soon be among the faithful. What this means, of course, is that e-books, while a real business already, are going to be looking at serious growth over the next two years. And since that necessarily will impact negatively the sales of real ink-on-paper books, retailers are looking for a way to ride the e-book wave.

French retailers, like most in the world, are in an awkward position. So they’ve gone arm-in-arm to see the wizard, in hopes that France will set up some sort of national e-book “hub,” by which I suppose they mean website or software.

There’s something noble in this scramble for self-preservation, like an antelope kicking a lioness in the jaw, but it seems to me that it’s too late: the pride is closing in.

You’ve probably heard about the BMW Mini E lease program — 500 or so of the little buggers were let into the wild to be given real-life, long-term testing by regular people.

See more here:
BMW expanding its electric presence with Active-E leases

Bungie has done a great job of making fans salivate over Halo: Reach by keeping most the aspects of the game under wraps. Thus far, all the info we have been able to discern has come from the trailers which Bungie released–until now.

Original post: 
Everything you need to know about Halo: Reach