The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘trends’

One of the advantages of having a plethora of app directories for iPhone and Android devices, is the wealth of additional data that has emerged regarding users buying and downloading habits. Facebook-based app directory mPlayit has a few compelling stats out today that show that games are four times as popular among iPhone users than among the Android user base. BlackBerry users are twice as likely to be looking for games content than Android users, eventhough BlackBerry devices are primarily used for business purposes.

According to mPlayit, 83 percent of Android app activity on the directory/store is related to non-game related mobile apps, and 17 percent of activity is towards downloading and checking out games. On the other hand, 36 percent of iPhone app activity is related to non-game related mobile apps, with 64 percent of activity towards gaming on the device.

Other trends identified by mPlayit include the massive growth of location-based apps, with Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla all receiving attention on the directory by users. But mPlayit says that even lesser known location-based apps such as FastMall and AroundMe on iPhone are receiving an increased number of downloads. Evernote continues to dominate on the Android, iPhone and BlackBerry platforms, in the Lists & Notes category. Barcode-scanning apps are also increasingly popular, holding the top Utilities category slot for iPhone and BlackBerry, and the second Shopping category slot for Android and iPhone.

The fact that that Android platform doesn’t support gaming as well as the iPhone is not new. But with the introduction of powerful Android devices such as Motorola’s Droid and most recently, Google’s Nexus 1, gaming apps and functionality has improved on the device. Especially now that both devices have multi-touch technology. That being said, it may take a bit longer for both developers and users to catch on.

MPlayit /2009/11/18/myplayit-launches-mobile-app-discovery-directory-on-facebook/”>launched its Facebook app that allows users to discover, share and recommend a variety of mobile apps back in November and covers apps available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Mobile (Java) devices. Mplayit’s directory of apps includes a dedicated page for each app where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from various app markets, including Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site.

U.K. startup Skimlinks is hoping to revolutionize the affiliate model by turning normal product links into affiliate links. The startup gives publishers access to affiliate programs of thousands of merchants across a number of affiliate networks. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. With Skimlinks, a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The publishers makes money from content via affiliate fees and Skimlinks takes a 25% cut of the commissions. Today, the startup is launching a nifty discovery tool for publishers to search for affiliate links by keyword.

The desktop tool, called a Skimkit, is powered by Adobe AIR and is essentially a live searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants. The tool lets publishers research, find and link to products they are writing about, with immediate access to deeplinks and image URLs.

So, If a website publisher is searching for a link for red shoes, the user can search for red shoes on the Skimbit. The startup will produce results from retailers who have affiliate programs for links. SkimKit also features a service that creates shortened, monetized links for use in Twitter and email newsletters. SkimKit is available for free to Skimlinks publishers.

Skimlinks, which was born from Skimbit, is already being uses as a monetization service on more than a half million sites worldwide and has raised a total of $2.5 million in funding. Publishers using the affiliate service include Elle.com, The Daily Mirror, and a number of fashion blogs and sites.

Image recognition technology startup Kooaba yesterday released an API that definitely deserves some developer attention.

The Swiss company aims to unlock its library of over 10 million images, ranging from album covers to books and movie posters, and provide access to all that precious data via the cloud.

Kooaba hopes that the launch of the API will trigger third-party developers to develop more mobile applications – iPhone and Android versions exist already – or tools that tap into social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, etcetera.

Here’s a video of Kooaba for iPhone in case you’re familiar with the company and its offering:

Conde Nast has been working to fuse its fashion content with technology and social media. Lucky Magazine incorporated e-commerce into its online site and also partnered with Four Square. Today, Vogue Magazine is launching an innovative iPhone app that takes a page from social fashion startups like Polyvore and the Like.com’s Couturious.

The free app, called the Vogue Stylist, is meant to be used by women to do exactly what its name indicates: help style women’s wardrobes. Users can choose one of the trends highlighted by Vogue within the app and upload clothing they already own. Vogue Stylist will then produce stylish outfits from the pieces that reflect the current trend. The catch: Vogue will style outfits only with products from their advertisers.

March trends include The Trench, Floaty Dress, Tribal, Natural Shades, and Bright Lip. User can also their looks via a click to buy feature,and can locate the item in a nearby store. The app has a social element to allow users to save styled looks and publish to Facebook. The App will launch with 91 brands and over 600 articles of clothing and beauty products. Pilot brands include Gucci, Hudson Jeans, Kate Spade, Longchamp Paris, Nine West, Valentino, and Via Spiga. Within the app, Vogue will also offer special event invitations, and shopping discounts.

Conde Nast also has fashion-focused iPhone apps for Style.com, Lucky Magazine and Teen Vogue.

Mobile question and answer startup ChaCha has been able to turnaround its model, possibly achieve profitability, and raise boatloads of money, much to our surprise. Today, ChaCha is rolling out a Facebook application allows users open access to questions and answers from both ChaCha and all of their friends.

With ChaCha’s Facebook App, when individuals pose a question to any friends within their social network, the question is also automatically submitted to ChaCha. ChaCha returns an answer from its database of hundreds of millions of answers. Users can also select “add to profile” to get a permanent “Ask ChaCha” prompt on their profile pages.

Additionally, users can select “share” when they submit a question, and the question and answers will post to their friends’ Facebook walls that they select. Individuals receive points for questions they answer for pure recognition and fun, and based on points attainment, users receive different titles which are displayed on a leader board. ChaCha has also recently launched an iPhone App and Twitter integration via @chacha, so people can ask questions on the microblogging platform.

ChaCha has rolled out its API, allowing developers to tap into the startup’s database with of questions and answers. ChaCha offers developers three variations of its API’s: Quick ChaCha Answer (query the API with a specific question, get an answer instantly); Top ChaCha Answers (query the API with a general topic or keyword(s) and get a list of the most popular answers); and ChaCha Trends (query the API to find out what the world is asking about).

Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. ChaCha encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people but then evolved into a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. The site also archives questions and answers on their website, with 500 million of them currently listed on the ChaCha site. ChaCha is answering one million questions a day via SMS, passing Google as the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.

MySpace, once the King of the Internet, lost its second CEO yesterday in less than a year. The response from press has, rightfully, been bleak.

Owen Van Natta, who was celebrated as the savior of MySpace when he was hired, was apparently fired over something as simple as trying to control his executive team. His Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn has been telling friends for months that he’d soon be leaving MySpace. We wrote that he was on his way out last week. Hirschhorn’s comment the next day to us was “I was sleeping and just woke up to see [TechCrunch] unfortunately in the middle of someone’s game.”

Apparently Hirschhorn was right. There was a game going on, and he won. Or at least he half won. He’s now co-president with Mike Jones, previously MySpace’s COO. And both of these guys report directly to News Corp. Digital Chief Jon Miller.

But all that’s old news now. Today is a new day. Let’s take stock of the current MySpace situation (page view and unique visitor stats are Comscore worldwide), compared to nine months ago when all of the guys mentioned above started their jobs:

• Unique visitors nine months ago: 125 million
• Unique visitors today: 122 million (-3%)
• Facebook unique visitor growth in same period: 48%, to 469 million
• Page views nine months ago: 35 billion
• Page views today: 20 billion (-44%)
• Facebook page view growth in same period: 118%, to 193 billion

MySpace also failed to launch a single new product of note. Which was apparently Van Natta’s chief complaint about Hirschhorn, who was the Chief Product Officer before being promoted yesterday.

MySpace now effectively has three CEOs – Hirschhorn, Jones and Miller. And none of them can likely get anything drastic done, even in the unlikely event that they were to agree on what that drastic thing is.

A company that is hemorrhaging users this badly, and soon to lose their biggest source of revenue, can’t afford to have leadership by committee which is then subject to veto by the corporate parent.

A further concern is the fact that MySpace can’t offer lucrative stock options to employees, since they are a subsidiary of a public company. The best engineers won’t go anywhere near MySpace.

MySpace’s only hope, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here, is to be spun off from News Corp. into an independent entity. They need an intelligent management structure (no co-presidents) filled with enthusiastic executives (who don’t trash the company in public) and they need a radical product plan. And they need to be private so they can give employees stock options.

MySpace is just an afterthought for News Corp. An unwanted step child. MySpace, once the King of the Internet, deserves better.

Below are some charts showing How MySpace has been crushed by Facebook during Van Natta’s reign across all metrics: visitors, pageviews, and time spent. Note that the charts below measure the U.S. only, as opposed to the worldwide numbers above, but the trends are the same:

After yesterday’s news, no one is giving MySpace the benefit of the doubt any more. Stick a fork in it, this turkey is done.

There’s a very interesting op-ed piece in The New York Times today entitled Microsoft’s Creative Destruction. In it, the author details what he feels are the reasons that Microsoft has failed to innovate at the same pace as their competitors over the years. Big deal, right? After all, a lot of people write these types of pieces all the time. The difference this time? It’s by Dick Brass, who was a vice president at Microsoft for seven years, from 1997 to 2004.

Brass’ comments have caused such a fuss, that Microsoft’s vice president of corporate communications was even forced to respond on their official blog. And while obviously Microsoft’s PR team is going to downplay some of Brass’ comments, and refute others with counter examples, the post completely ignores what I see to be Brass’ main point: that Microsoft has become a place with dozens if not hundreds of civil wars going on within the company.

One example Brass cites is ClearType, which he worked on. While, as Microsoft counters, ClearType now is a part of Windows, Brass says it should have and would have been implemented much sooner had other groups within the company not “felt threatened by our success.”

He further elaborates that the vice president of pocket devices went as far to say that they’d support it only if his group gained complete control over it. He also notes the head of Office being opposed to it. And that’s interesting because it’s also the head of Office that he also blames for helping to kill the tablet PC concept Microsoft started all the way back in 2001.

As Brass tells it, the VP of Office products refused to modify his software to work properly with the tablet. This is exactly the opposite of what Apple showed off at last week’s iPad event, as Steve Jobs brought the iWork team out on stage to show how they reworked the software specifically for the new product.

Now, iWork is not Office, obviously. No matter what you think about the two products, iWork is a very small part of Apple’s big revenue picture, while Office is a large part of Microsoft’s. But that’s exactly the point. As Brass notes, Microsoft’s is making a ton of revenue, but almost all of it comes from two places: Windows and Office. Because of that, those two branches undoubtedly have a huge amount of power, and his two examples showcase that.

The problem with this is that if Google (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has their way, both Windows and Office will be less important going forward. Obviously, that’s far from a sure thing, but the trends of everything moving towards mobile and/or to the web are very clear. And Microsoft would not be investing so much in its online division, if they didn’t agree. But despite the investments, things aren’t going too well for Microsoft in the online realm from a revenue perspective. In fact, they’re going horribly. And from the way Brass tells it, here’s why:

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

Microsoft is not Apple. That is to say, their employees will often talk about their experiences working for the software giant. And to say that many of them echo Brass’ points about teams working against one another (and in some cases, people in the same team working against one another) is an understatement. In fact, I would say that most of them concede to this being a major problem within the company. Even if they say it’s not a problem within their actual group, they’ll admit that in other groups within the company it is a huge problem.

That’s a management problem. And if it involves certain divisions getting priority or resources over others, it’s an upper management problem. Microsoft supporters are always quick to point back to the revenues as if to say, “things can’t be going that badly if we’re making all this money.” And the bottom-line is obviously important, but it doesn’t address any underlying problems. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes Windows and Office. And to rest on those while innovative new products suffer, is foolish.

Another ex-Microsoft employee, Don Dodge, has been quick to criticize the company in recent months as well on some of these issues. Here’s what he had to tell VentureBeat recently:

At a high level, Microsoft today is where IBM was in late ’80s, early ’90s. When I was just starting my career, IBM ruled the world. IBM was the dominant computer provider in the world — hardware, software, network, you name it, IBM was king. I think in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw that shift and Microsoft became king of the hill. And in 2009, 2010, going forward, Microsoft is sort of like IBM. It’s a longtime company with a great tradition and still very profitable, but it’s not the leader.

The fact of the matter is that the two hottest things being talked about right now are mobile and tablets. Microsoft was heavily involved in both of those very early and yet somehow either managed to completely fail (tablets) or let their product bleed to death in an age of bandages (Windows Mobile). It doesn’t seem to be a lack of vision, it’s a lack of execution.

So what’s the root cause of all this infighting? Are those in power at Microsoft too old (one Microsoft-watcher has pondered that twice now). Is the entire company just too big (at least one Microsoftie thinks so even after 5,000+ layoffs). Is it a lack of enthusiasm among workers? More importantly, what is Microsoft going to do about it?

As ABC’s hit show Lost enters its final season, it’s basically been impossible to avoid the commercials about it for weeks now. But one of them somewhat reminds me of this situation at Microsoft. Maybe the company needs a Jack Shephard-type leader to gather them all together and say, “if we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone.”

[image: ABC]

Sega Toys’ series of planetarium projection systems for home use, the so-called Homestars , is getting another update . The company has announced [JP, PDF] the so-called Homestar Aqua for the Japanese market (everyone living outside this country can pre-order the Aqua here )

Read the original post: 
Homestar Aqua: Sega Toys rolls out new planetarium for your bathroom (video)

Businesses and brands have already caught onto the immense power of the social stream that runs through Twitter and Facebook to track the pulse of conversations around consumers. Both tech giants and startups are competing to provide enterprise-friendly, social platforms to businesses that combine both collaboration and social media monitoring. Socialtext and CubeTree offer compelling social collaboration offerings to the enterprise. And Salesforce.com recently entered the market with a new, more social version of its Service Cloud, and also debuted its take on a social platform for the enterprise, Chatter. Now Jive Software, a Sequoia-backed company that develops an all-in-one social enterprise software is acquiring Filtrbox, a startup that provides tools for social media monitoring, to boost its offering. You may remember Filtrbox as a Class of 2007 alum of incubator TechStars. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jive says that Filtrbox’s social media real-time monitoring technologies will be absorbed into Jive’s platform to help businesses and brands harness the power of the real-time web from within Jive’s collaborative software. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive combines computing with social collaboration. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. The company, which is profitable, recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, letting Jive users easily access data and content from the CMS into Jive’s software.

Filtrbox, which raised $1.4 million in funding last February, allows users to monitor thousands of content sources, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. After inputting the terms they’d like to keep track of, Filtrbox can send them continuous updates, weeding out duplicates (you can also choose to receive periodic digests). Filtrbox prioritizes feeds and dials the “noise” up or down to sift through information from social media blogs and other sites. It uses intelligence to adjust rankings based on how the user interacts with the data, and offers the ability to analyze the trends and influencers in an enterprise’s market.

Jive says that one of the advantages of Filtrbox’s technology is that it has a scalable architecture that enables enterprises to process large volumes of social intelligence faster and at a lower cost. This isn’t the first acquisition for Jive, the company bought online calendar software developer Jotlet last year.

Jive is wise to boost its offerings as it is going to be competing with Salesforce’s Chatter and other social offerings. But the company is ready for the fight. Jive recently raised $12 million from Sequoia Capital and also expanded its operations to Silicon Valley with a new Palo Alto office.

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What is it about the dawn of a new year – and, in this case, a new decade – that inspires such an interminable parade of lists? The 100 best albums of the decade (The Strokes? Seriously?), the 30 best TV series of the decade (The Wire? Seriously?), the 10 most influential games of the decade (The Sims? Seriously?) – even the 10 best conservative movies of the decade (just — seriously?).

Apparently in the days between Christmas and New Year, the world stops demanding actual journalism – or writing. Instead, stuffed large with leftover turkey and re-gifted booze, we’re happy to accept any old rehashed crap, provided it’s appended with the words “…of the year” (2.5 billion results on Google) or “…of the decade” (72.8 million results).

But not so at TechCrunch. There’s a reason why we had more stories on Techmeme’s list of the ‘ten objectively biggest tech stories of 2009‘ than any other single news source, and that’s because – even in a week when no one is reading anything we write – we retain our passion for real journalism and impassioned campaigning, along with our hatred of lazy, crowd-pleasing bullshit.

Nah, just kidding. Here’s this week’s list of the best lists published on TechCrunch this past week…

2010: My Fifth Annual List Of The Tech Products I Love And Use Every Day
Arrington has been doing this for five years now: naming the 24 products and services he can’t live without, presumably so that his legions of fanboys can use the self-same apps and in doing so become even closer to their hero. Let’s just hope Foursquare’s servers can cope with the tsunami of new users signing up just to fake check-in at the Pyramids.

Snapstream’s Top TV Trends of 2009
Leena reports on Snapstream’s interesting – if utterly predictable – research into the most frequently used words and phrases on American TV in 2009. According to their findings, which are generated by analysing closed caption text from all of the major channels, this year’s top television obsessions were “Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy).” In other “no shit” news, we also learn that over-exposed media darling Twitter was mentioned more frequently than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. Twemendous.

Amazon’s Best-Selling Products of 2009
If you were in any doubt that 2009 was the year that ebooks finally reached their tipping point then consider Amazon’s list of best-selling products for 2009, as analysed by CrunchGear. Not only was the Kindle their best-selling electronic item but the utterly mainstream Dan Brown was the device’s best-selling author. What was it Clay Shirky said? Here’s comes everybody!

370 Passwords You Shouldn’t (And Can’t) Use On Twitter
From the depressing to the terrifying, Robin scored an interesting scoop this week by uncovering Twitter’s (not very well hidden) list of banned passwords. To save you the effort of paging through all 370 words and phrases, all you need to know is that there are no fewer than five euphemisms from vagina (not counting vagina itself, which is also there), but only two for penis (with penis itself curiously absent). The word ‘monkey’, meanwhile, is inexplicably on the list twice. Can’t be too careful with monkeys.

Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010
And finally, while everyone else on TechCrunch was looking backwards, Erick whipped out his crystal ball and tried to predict what we’ll be looking back on this time next year. No surprise to see “the tablet” on the list, or Geo(location) or real-time search. In fact, no surprises at all: if Erick is right (and when is he not?) then 2010 is going to be the most dull and predictable year ever. I mean, HTML5 is going to rock 2010? Would it have killed him to have included hoverboards or robot maids?

X-ray sunglasses?

Cybergeese?

Come on!

…

Still hungry for lists? Here are twelve Lists That Didn’t Make My Top List Of TechCrunch Lists…

Six New Years Resolutions For Apple And The iPhone In 2010
Top Ten Mobile Voice Searches Of 2009
Flixster Users Name Top 2009 Movies
The Top 10 MobileCrunch Posts of 2009
The Best iPhone Apps Of 2009 (Appvee Edition)
Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade
Unexpected Success Stories
Biggest Losers in Tech
The best console games of the decade
PC Games of the Decade
The Biggest Product Flops of the Decade

…and of course…

JibJab’s Year In Review Plays Off 2009, With Help From Keyboard Cat

Have a great year! Of the decade!

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