The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘publishers’

Surphace, previously called Sphere, is an excellent tool for bloggers and other publishers to add related content to their articles and posts. The company, which was acquired by AOL in 2008, has now released S4, a self serve product that gives smaller sites the ability to use Surphace’s more advanced features. More than 2 billion articles per month bring in Surphace content, says CEO Josh Guttman.

Until now only the largest publishers were able to tailor the types of related content links, as well as the look and feel of the Surphace widget. Small sites had to make due with a standard pop up Surphace widget that had little flexibility in terms of content and design.

Now, sites of any size can customize the size, interface and types and quantity of content that Surphace pulls into posts. The result, says Surphace, is higher reader engagement.

Here’s an example of a site beta testing S4 (scroll down to the bottom of the post and look for the Surphace content. Here’s another one with different content and design.

Setup is very straightforward. Most people will choose a narrow, standard or wide column widget, and publishers can decide to include content from their own site(s), mainstream media, blogs and/or video. Surphace decides what content is relevant to the post (they tend to do an excellent job). Publishers can also choose to completely customize the Surphace content with a bit more work:

In the future, says Guttman, Surphace will give S4 publishers the option to embed advertising from Aol with a revenue share. And they’ll add “real-time conversational buzz” from Twitter streams.

S4 is currently in private beta. If you are a publisher and want to give S4 a try, sign up here and use the invite code s4tc. The first 250 publishers to use the code will get instant access.

A new development in the Amazon vs. Macmillan fiasco. Amazon just posted an announcement indicating that it will be “capitulating” to Macmillan by selling the publishers’ books for their desired prices.

Macmillan is trying to price their e-books at $15, while Amazon prices e-books at $9.99. Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent said that unless Amazon sets the price of new e-books to $15, the publisher will not distribute new books to Amazon when they are released. On Friday, Amazon basically banned titles, both paper and digital, published by Macmillan by refusing to directly sell them. And Macmillan took out an ad in the Publishers Marketplace magazine protesting the tactics being used by Amazon regarding pricing.

Amazon is now giving into Macmillan’s demands because of the publisher’s monopoly over its titles. In a passive aggressive manner, Amazon says that readers will decide whether it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for e-books. And that other publishers will compete by offering their books and lower prices.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said last week that publishers were unhappy with Amazon’s pricing mode, foreshadowing this disagreement with Macmillan. Jobs revealed that publishers are withholding their titles from Amazon because of Amazon’s pricing model. Jobs also said that prices for books on Apple’s new tablet device, the iPad, will be the same as Amazon’s pricing.

Here is Amazon’s announcement:

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

Apparently all is not well in e-book land.

Read more here:
Amazon fighting with publishers over pricing

Book publishers are increasingly embracing digital books, and not just on Amazon’s Kindle.  Today, John Wiley and Sons, Barnes and Noble imprint Sterling Publishing, Chronicle Books, and the University of Chicago Press announced they will join a total of 150 publishers to offer ebooks in the Scribd Store.  Wiley is the venerable publisher of the For Dummies series of books as well as Frommer’s travel guides and CliffsNotes.

Scribd lets people embed and share documents in a Flash viewer, but has been partnering with publishers since March to also sell downloadable digital versions of their books. Other publishers already on board include Simon & Schuster and O’Reilly Media.  The ebooks are downloadable as a PDF, and excerpts can be shared through the Scribd reader.  

Scribd’s strategy is a counterweight to the closed Kindle store, where ebooks bought on Amazon can only be read on the Kindle. Of course, you can also read PDFs you download from the Scribd store on a Kindle. But as more tablets and ebook readers emerge, you might just end up reading books on the Web in your Scribd Flash viewer. At least that is what Scribd and competitor DocStoc (which has its own document store) hope will happen.

I personally wouldn’t pay for a PDF copy of a book. It is just not an enjoyable reading experience. Let me flip through it, share it, read it on my iPhone or future tablets, Tweet out quotes, and maybe I’ll pay.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tinker, the product from Glam Media that aggregates real-time conversations on services like Twitter and FriendFeed, and allows publishers to embed them in widgets, has launched a new 1.0 release to the public. The company announced the new version at this week’s DEMO Fall conference.

Tinker actually launched back in March, offering both a consumer facing site that serves as a central hub for monitoring events in real-time as well as a number of widgets for publishers looking to leverage this real-time content. Today’s release introduces a number of new features, including a new section that focuses on News. The feature draws on the real-time updates that Tinker typically monitors, as well as news feeds from online publications and wire services.

Also getting a boost are Tinker’s media apps, which let bloggers, news sites, and other publishers manage the tweets they’d like to display on their pages. For example, we could include a Tinker app on TechCrunch that would only show tweets from TechCrunch staff, or could display the latest tech trends to surface on Twitter.

Tinker has also recently launched a new advertising product called ‘Tinker Stream Ads’, which let major brands create a filtered stream of real-time content relevant to their products, which can then be displayed on publisher sites. In September alone these new ads saw over 50 million impressions.

Finally, Tinker now offers a real-time search engine that lets you search through the news, tweets, media, and other content that’s tracked by the site.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

One nice feature of the Twitter web app Brizzly is that it has an explanation for why each trending topic on Twitter is popular at any given moment. And because these explanations are user-editable, they’re always up to date. Now Brizzly wants to share that data with the launch of “Let’s Be Trends,” its trending topic API.

The idea is to have other Twitter third-party developers use this data in their apps. Let’s Be Trends features both “current trends” and “get trend” actions that will allow apps to call the most recent popular topics on Twitter as well as the explanation for any one trend upon search, respectively.

“Brizzly users are coming up with awesome explanations,” co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. He wouldn’t share any exact stats for how often users update these trending topic explanations, but says they do so “quickly.” Quite vague, but based on my own usage of the site, it certainly seems true.

While landing third party apps for this data would be great, the big fish to catch, obviously, would be Twitter. Currently, it uses the third-party service “What The Trend?” to display information about trending topics. Right now, it only shows that information on the main Twitter homepage when you’re logged out, but it has been rolling out showing the data across the site. When that happens, the provider of that data should be in very good shape.

Brizzly, which is a product under Shellen’s Thing Labs, has been steadily rolling out improvements as it nears a public launch.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Tweetboard, a recently-launched product that lets you create a Twitter-powered forum on any site, is adding additional functionality by releasing a Twitter client, new API, and a URL shortener, called PO.ST.

As we’ve written in the past, the advantage to Tweetboard is is the ability to view discussions as a thread, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook. Tweetboard threads all replies, and all nested replies (replies to replies) on Twitter. With Tweetboard’s functioning web-based Twitter client (which will be released at the end of the month), you’ll be able to access the threaded conversations around a particular Tweet. Plus, you’ll be able to Tweet and access your stream from within the Twitter client.

Aside from its fairly original name, Tweetboard’s new URL shortener is designed to compliment it’s client and site widget, letting people shorten URLs from the client and product. Tweetboard is also releasing an an API to allow developers to integrate Tweetboard and is launching a private label service that will let users create a branded “Tweetboard” widget for their sites.

While Tweetboard, which is a product of startup 140Ware, is currently in private alpha, the startup has generously given us 20,000 invites to TechCrunch readers, which you can access here.

Tweetboard may be a little late in the game to launch a Twitter client and URL shortener, which are both areas that are over-saturated with offerings. But packaging conversations into a forum and thread from the client is innovative and could be appealing to users.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

There’s really no excuse for going on a date in this day and age without knowing anything about the person — even if they’re a complete stranger. With so much information available about people online whether through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or the like, it’s relatively easy to find out way more information than you probably want to know. And now there’s an app for that.

DateCheck by Intelius (more on them below), which launched today at the DEMO conference in San Diego is an iPhone app that allows you to look up a whole range of information about the person you’re on a date with. All you really need is one piece of data as a starting point. It can be something as simple as a name, an email address, or a phone number. From there, you can look up a whole range of information.

The best feature is the “Sleaze Detector”. Basically, this takes the information you collected and does a background check on the person to see if they have a criminal record. This works by current or previous registered addresses that the person has. You can also check out a person’s net worth, their living situation (are they living with their parents), as well as get the usual range of information from Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Unfortunately, though Intelius didn’t really mention it on stage, obtaining all of this information costs money, as TechFlash notes. For example, a criminal check is $19.95. Pulling social network info? $9.95. So while the app itself may be free, the service is anything but.

All of this is more than slightly creepy, but with tag lines like “hook up before you look up” it was an easy crowd favorite at DEMO. Unfortunately, Intelius, and its co-founder Naveen Jain, have a bit of a sketchy history, including allegations of fraud. Jain, who left InfoSpace to start Intelius, was said to be buried in lawsuits back in March, and the company was looking like it could be in trouble.

Have things turned around for Intelius? Will a hooking up app save them? In a world where a sex offender finder app was a hit, it seems like this certainly could be. But the extra costs will likely kill it. Hopefully, Intelius is up front about these costs unlike it has been in the past.

I also hope people don’t try to go to do a Google search for “datecheck” — the first result is an “Escort Directory of Female MILF Escorts.”

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

As if the New York Times doesn’t have enough to worry about, with total advertising revenues down 32 percent in the second quarter, its online business is deteriorating as well. In its earnings announcement this morning, the company breaks out Internet advertising revenues of $68 million, which is a 15.5 percent drop from a year ago.

The year-over-year declines keep getting worse, as you can see in the chart above. In the last three quarters the annual decline went from a 3.5 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2008 to a 6.1 percent decrease in the first quarter of 2009 to negative 15.5 percent this quarter.

Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues

4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%

While the $68 million is a fraction of the NYT’s $454 million in total advertising revenues in the quarter (and an even smaller portion of the company’s overall revenues of $702 million, which includes circulation and other sources), the NYT is a bellwether when it comes to media sites on the Web. And if it can’t stem the bleeding on the Web side of its business, other publishers are likely having trouble as well.

There is one glimmer of hope, however. On a sequential basis, compared to last quarter, the NYT’s Internet ad revenues were virtually flat ($68.0 million vs. $67.6 million). And the company as a whole was able to eke out a profit of $21 million, but only because it slashed $132 million worth of costs. And Classified advertsing revenues were down 45 percent. So it is still very much in the woods.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Hello, my name is Christopher Hawker. I am a professional inventor, specializing in innovative consumer products. My company is called Trident Design, LLC. I have developed many products in numerous industries and have over 20 products on the market. My most famous invention is the PowerSquid, a cephalopod-inspired power strip with outlets situated at the end of short cords, thereby eliminating the problem of losing outlets to bulky transformer plugs. John Biggs, editor-in-chief of this blog, has asked me to write the story of the birth of the PowerSquid and its development and journey to market. This is the Song of the PowerSquid.

Part 1: Genesis

This is a story of the birth of a product, a company and a career. It’s an example of how to turn ideas into reality. But, more importantly, it is also a story – albeit a cautionary one – of how to earn a profit from new product ideas, something easier said than done.