The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘picture’

You might want to take a different approach when shopping for a 3D TV than a standard HDTV. Instead of just looking at the picture quality, you should also take a serious look at the brand’s 3D glasses. Some show some clear advantages to purchase that brand’s 3D TV and until there’s a standard format for 3D glasses, each brand requires its own unique glasses, thereby locking you into that manufacturer’s products. Yeah, it’s a bit messy right now. Click through for details on all of them.

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook.

Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.

Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave. And, it’s really starting to happen right now. It is realtime. It is social. It is mobile. And, it is about time. Literally, it is about productivity.

I’m energized by the excitement I see for a new generation of collaboration software in the enterprise to replace antiquated Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM’s Lotus Notes. I’ve enjoyed seeing my observation—that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg—reverberate around the web. But, the reality is the Facebook Imperative contained more than a funny line. It hit a nerve. We are all responding—debating—a question that is an imperative because we all need to take software to a new level, and now is the time. Microsoft and IBM have maintained the status quo on enterprise collaboration software too long, and it’s time for a change.

There are an overwhelming number of you who agree that its time to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. We are betting salesforce.com’s future on it. Approximately 40% of companies are already deploying or planning to deploy a social computing platform, a number that’s expected to rise, says Irwin Lazar of Nemeretes Research. Not everyone agrees, mostly the vendors that are milking their cash cows. But, make no mistake about it, this generation of social platforms is very different than the last.

Charles Zedlewski emerged from a long blogging hiatus to argue that Facebook is designed for entertainment—not productivity. Well, that’s not surprising given that he works for SAP, one of the companies I have previously referred to as “innovationless”—in my view they remain the Anti-Cloud. Their actions speak for themselves. Still, I’m astounded that more enterprises haven’t figured out how to tap into the real collaborative power of Facebook and Twitter, and the new social models that they have pioneered.

I consider Facebook and Twitter—and the ability to tap into my network of friends and followers—one the most productive ways I can start my day. Using these new Internet phenoms, I’ve tested new ad campaigns and elicited great customer responses, promoted my book to a large audience of people who cared, and with the help of my network, even named new products—all before I sat down for breakfast. I’m not alone; ask Vinnie Mirchandani for a sneak preview of his new book and read how Starbucks, Avon, and Pepsi are using these new social services to increase productivity in their enterprises. Or, look at how Causes, one of Facebook’s most popular apps, is having a fascinating impact on the future of philanthropy.

While my admiration for Facebook is no secret, the fact is that the Facebook Imperative—much like The Amazon Imperative of 1999—is just a metaphor. Like all metaphors, they are terrific catalysts to introduce an idea and orient people. They are rooted in inspiration, but they do not funnel down to the granular details. And, there are details that make this movement entirely new in practice. The power of this new model is to create the next level of productivity, collaboration, and learning in the enterprise. And, I see it happening now in our own company.

For years we’ve been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms.

We have deployed Salesforce Chatter internally through our own beta program, and we are now using the social models proven by Facebook and Twitter to run our company. Our new social enterprise is built atop our existing business information and applications. It’s not partitioned off from other enterprise applications, but is an integrated part of it—offering a new view of the data that is more productive and easier to use. Through enterprise sharing models, filtering and discovery tools, users have full flexibility over which people and data they follow—allowing them to fully maximize the value of their own feeds and eliminating the risk of “pollutants” some critics fear.

I have learned more about my own company in the last three weeks using Salesforce Chatter than I have in the last three years. It reminds me of the time we went live with http://ideas.salesforce.com. The awareness I have today of what is happening with our employees, our customers, our products, our customer service escalations, and even the deals we are closing is spectacular. Social computing for the enterprise is about seeing what matters to your company, what is happening with your products, and among your people. It’s about the information you need to make decisions finding you. I’m amazed at the potential of this technology. There is just no way I can explain it to you in writing, so here is an actual screen shot that I took off my desktop to give you an idea of the flow (click to enlarge):

It is time to let go of the past and start to create a compelling future for the software industry. I’m energized by the skeptics. It’s familiar. They all eventually convert to what’s important to customers, or become increasingly irrelevant. You don’t have to look any farther than last week when Steve Ballmer spoke to the University of Washington telling them Microsoft was finally “All-In” the cloud. Well, that only took a decade or two. No more software plus services, now they are 100% cloud too. Sure.

I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens.

Earlier today, Google chief economist gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.

Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media.  For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues.  Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red).  The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.

The collapse in print ad revenues is coming from two places: the overall ad recession of the past couple years and the shift to online news consumption.  Here are some telling stats from Varian’s presentation, which is also embedded below:

• About 40% of internet users say read news on the Web every day.
• Time spent on online news sites is only about 70 seconds per day, compared to 25 minutes spent reading a print edition.
• Online news readers tend to read at work, not for leisure, so they don’t have much time to stick around and are thus worth less to advertisers.
• Overall, less than 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues come from the online editions.
• Search engines account for 35 to 40 percent of “traffic to major U.S. news sites,” according to comScore.
• The cost of printing and distributing print editions, makes up about half the cost, while editorial operations only make up 15 percent.

Varian concludes: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”  It sounds like he agrees with Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, who recommends that newspapers “burn the boats” carrying their dying print businesses.

“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian.  They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink,, and so on.”  The problem is that on the Web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.

So what are they supposed to do?  He doesn’t really have a good answer, but ignoring the realities of consumer shifts in reading behavior and news consumption is not it.

One of the cofounders of Zynga, the company’s executive vice president of sales and business development Andrew Trader, is no longer with the company, we’ve confirmed. He has been quietly removed from the company’s management page. Remaining cofounders – Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron and Steve Schoettler, remain.

As of a month ago Trader’s title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named.

Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only “AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company.” Trader hasn’t yet returned a phone call asking for his comment.

Zynga’s revenue growth has been nothing short of astronomical over the last 18 months, so it would be hard to blame him for not bringing in the dollars. Perhaps he took the fall for the Scamville saga although that has largely blown over now.

Trader was with Zynga nearly three years, so he’s vested on a lot of his stock. Given how much money is at stake, the whole story about why the first cofounder of Zynga has left the building may never come out. Zynga raised $180 million in December 2009, at a rumored valuation of above $2 billion.

And no, I have no idea why he’s holding a banana in the picture.

Ever since Iomega announced the iConnect Wireless at CES we’ve been thinking long and hard about our NAS usage.

Here is the original:
Quick look: iOmega iConnect Wireless Data Station

If you’re either American or Canadian (or just a hockey lover), chances are you were watching the gold medal hockey game yesterday. And with over 400 million users, there’s also a good chance you have a Facebook account. So what does it look like when those two worlds collide? Like the picture above.

As you can see, Facebook status updates per minute exploded at two times yesterday. The first peak, at 2:29 PM PST, is when Zack Parise of the U.S. tied the game with a goal in the third period. The second, much larger peak took place at 2:54 PM PST, when Sidney Crosby scored the game-winning goal for Canada in sudden-death overtime. All told, more than 3.5 million status updates were sent during those two times, according to Facebook. Perhaps even more remarkably, that was twice the pace of updates for the rest of the day.

While Twitter has yet to release similar stats, the service also undoubtedly saw an explosion of tweets during those two times. At one point after the U.S. scored, my entire tweet stream except for two tweets was some variation of “USA USA,” “OMFG!! USA,” “GOAL HOLY JESUS USA !!!1!!!,” or the like.

Data released a week or so ago had Twitter seeing 50 million tweets per day now. Meanwhile, recent Facebook data says that the networks sees over 60 million status updates posted each day (from 35 million active status updaters).

That’s the JVC GZ-HM340 , which they say is the lightest and smallest HD camcorder with a built-in drive. Full review will be up later this week, but this picture was too cute not to share. Aww, look at them!

See the rest here: 
Aw – they love each other

In this episode we talk about watch repair tips and some classic watch legends. Enjoy! Mentioned this episode: Chad the Watch Guy Otto Frei watch repair Tokyoflash

Go here to see the original:
Another Hourtime Episode

What was unthinkable 10 to 20 years ago, has been reality for quite some time now: Not Japanese but Korean electronics companies are dominating the TV hardware market. American market research firm DisplaySearch says regarding shipment value, Samsung has maintained its position as the leader in the global flat-panel TV market last year. And another Korean company is becoming stronger, too.

Excerpt from: 
Report: Samsung No. 1 in global flat TV market, LG now on par with Sony

WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!

I met a lot of really interesting people, and learned a lot of interesting things, as a result of my participation in BBSes around town. I never got into CompuServe or AOL or Prodigy — they were too corporate for me. I was more interested in the smaller BBSes hosted by people with interests similar to my own: science fiction and fantasy, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and role playing games. I attended a couple of parties, picnics, and other social events coordinated by BBS users. Because the community of users was smaller — and local — there wasn’t nearly the prevalence of trolling or anonymous flamewars. BBSes were a great way to connect, and communicate, with people.

Of course, it was a simpler time back then. We weren’t bombarded with advertisements. There was no Flash animation. Heck, even downloading a low-resolution image of a pretty girl in a bikini took upwards of 20 minutes! There were no hyperlinks, no embedded images or videos: it was all text based, so there was a very real value to careful explication. The depth and breadth of discussion was often greater, with more personal insight and contribution (and sometimes BS). Generally we all knew one another, and welcomed new participants pretty quickly.

BBSes exist in stark contrast to today’s web, where the regular participants on many big blogs drown out newcomers, the audience’s fixation on neophilia and the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory prevail, and a pithy image or silly video can trump even the most erudite discussion.

Thanks Wired for the trip down memory lane!