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Posts Tagged ‘Intention’

First Else hands-on: ’still alive and kicking’

We caught up with Else at CES to check on how they’re doing with the First Else since we last saw them back in November. According to CTO Eldad Eilam, the basic functions of the ALP-based phone are finally done and dusted, so now Else will mainly focus on fine-tuning its snazzy visual effects until beta around the end of March. There’s no doubt that it’s also finalizing plans — pricing, content distribution, and remote sync service, etc.– with various partners in the US and Europe. If you happen to be in Asia, then sorry — apparently Else has no intention to visit you guys just yet, but you might get lucky if you sneak into Sharp’s factories in Japan or China. For the rest of us, we shall continuously gaze at our hands-on videos until First Else’s expected end-of-Q2 launch — we’ve got a new one for you after the break.

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First Else hands-on: ’still alive and kicking’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yahoo BOSS To Survive Microsoft Deal In Some Form; Details Still Hazy

After months of silence, Yahoo’s BOSS team is opening up to frustrated third party developers about the future of the powerful search platform. A few hours ago, Yahoo’s Ashim Chhabra left a post on the BOSS group forum, offering an explanation for why it has taken so long for Yahoo to relay information to developers, and giving them some idea of BOSS’s fate. The good news? BOSS will continue to live on in some form, but it’s unclear exactly how things will be changing and which services will be powered by Microsoft technology — and there may be fees involved. That uncertainly will probably leave some developers on edge, but at least they know the project isn’t being scrapped entirely.

Chhabra’s post was clearly prompted by the actions of some frustrated BOSS developers, who grew tired of being left in the dark and approached the Department of Justice to talk about how BOSS will be impacted by the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal. The DOJ heard their complaints, scheduling a conference call with them for next week. Chhabra’s post may help placate them for the time being. We’ve included his full post below:

Folks,

Thank you for your feedback. We understand your frustration. This process has been long for all of us due to the complex nature of our agreement with Microsoft, and we appreciate your patience.

Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

As you know, we must receive regulatory clearance before actual implementation of the search deal with Microsoft can occur. Only then can we finalize the future shape of BOSS. Of course, we will provide additional clarity and certainty when we can.

Thanks for your attention!

Yahoo! BOSS team

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Nielsen stats: a lot of iPhones out there, but also a lot of everything else

Fact: most phones last. Thing is, for us (and likely many of you), they last far longer than our clinically-diagnosed Gadget Attention Deficit Disorder would ever tolerate — but for your dad, your sister, your college buddy with the hand-me-down ZEOS Pantera running Windows 95, or anyone weary of re-upping a two-year commitment, a handset can easily become a serious long-term investment. That helps explain why Motorola’s venerable RAZR series remains staggeringly high on Nielsen’s latest US phone usage report — third place, to be exact, at 2.3 percent of all subscribers behind the iPhone 3G at 4 percent and RIM’s BlackBerry Curve line at 3.7 percent. Needless to say, that doesn’t mean the ancient V3 line is still in third place for sales — it’s more a testament to the staggeringly huge RAZR user base Moto managed to develop over the years, many of whom scored their phones at sub-$100 price points as an attractive, midrange value in the phone’s twilight and have no intention of upgrading any time soon if they don’t have to. Maybe the most interesting part of this is that two V3 variants are also topping 2009’s most-recycled list, so they’re definitely getting taken out of circulation — it just might take a few years yet before you don’t know anyone that uses one, that’s all.

Nielsen stats: a lot of iPhones out there, but also a lot of everything else originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell Increases its Crowdsourcing Efforts – Will it Work?

Dell is increasing its crowdsourcing efforts on IdeaStorm, by giving hardware manufacturers more feedback on products and services. “Storm Sessions” are designed to attract a larger business community to the IdeaStorm site, by providing a more focused, structured approach.

Storm Sessions provide a way for Dell to listen to its community, but we are a bit skeptical that the effort will receive significant interest from the business community.

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This may be in part due to the transparency of the process. Will business people feel comfortable giving their feedback in such a public way?

Dell launched Ideastorm two and a half years ago, with the intention of giving customers the opportunity to post their own ideas about Dell’s products and services. Ideastorm now has 60,000 registered users. The community posts about 300 ideas per month.

The free form aspects of the crowdsourcing effort attracts a consumer crowd. Product groups at Dell find Ideastorm useful. The Linux community is especially vocal on IdeaStorm and Dell now offers Ubuntu on Dell machines based on feedback from the Linux community.

Storm Sessions seek to better match business users with the community aspects of the IdeaStorm site, through a more structured process. Storm Sessions will live on the Dell site for two to four weeks. Dell is starting with two topics, covering mobile technology and the redesign of the Dell support site.

Sessions are presented with a statement, providing context about the issue Dell is exploring. Each session includes a count down.

Ideas are submitted through a UI that looks much like a blogging platform.

The ideas then get loaded to the IdeaStorm site.

Dell product groups receive the information collected from the sessions. It is analyzed and integrated into the product development process.

IdeaStorm is impressive, especially considering that just two-people manage it. The amount of feedback Dell receives in return is significant, which shows the power that crowdsourcing can bring to an organization.

Storm Sessions will initially focus on the education market, where Dell shows a strong presence. This could serve as the major draw for Storm Sessions.

We look forward to watching the progress of Storm Sessions and how other companies bring crowdsourcing into the enterprise.

Discuss

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The Facebook Verified App Saga Ends Tomorrow

For the last six months, you may have noticed that some of your favorite apps on Facebook Platform carried a special badge deeming them to be “Facebook Verified”. These apps “passed Facebook’s review for trustworthy user experiences”, and were given both greater exposure in the App Directory and less restrictive limits on the number of messages they could send to users. And tomorrow, just over six months after the program launched, Facebook is killing off Verified Apps for good.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Facebook announced plans to end the program in late October, and has been Emailing developers about it for weeks. But now that Verified Apps are going away, it’s a good time to look back at the long, convoluted road Facebook took to a program that was ultimately very shortlived.

The Verified Apps program has been anything but a smooth ride for developers. It was first announced at the Facebook developer conference in July 2008, with the intention of helping users identify the most trustworthy apps on the platform. In return for meeting Facebook’s guidelines, apps would be rewarded with bonuses like advertising credits and relaxed rules on how many notifications and messages they could send to users.

More concrete details about the program were revealed the following November, when Facebook opened up the program to applications. Developers were charged a $375 fee to apply, which we likened to a protection racket. But after developers paid their money, Facebook went silent about the program for half a year. That understandably led to growing developer unrest. Finally, nearly a year after it was first announced, Verified Apps made its debut in May 2009.

But Verified Apps was only supposed to be a stepping stone to the site’s true cream of the crop. The most elite class of applications was to be called “Great Apps”, and launched with iLike and Causes as inaugural members. But that was another false start. Two months after the launch of Verified Apps, Facebook revealed that it was canceling its plans for its Great Apps program and demoting current members to regular Verified Apps. Or, as Facebook put it, they were getting rolled into the same thing, so Verified Apps were getting the benefits that would have been reserved for Great Apps.

Despite these logistical hurdles, developers certainly benefited from the program. For example, CampusBuddy, a verified app we covered in September, has grown from 60,000 to over 150,000 monthly active users. CEO Michael Moradian says that the company will especially miss the “extra boosts” that applications received as part of the program because they helped virality. But while CampusBuddy would have liked to see the program continue, Moradian acknowledges that times may be changing. You can see his blog about the news here.

So why is Facebook getting rid of Verified Apps? Facebook gives the following explanation:

We are standardizing the idea of verification to apply to all of the applications on Facebook Platform. We are evolving the program to improve the overall user experience and ensure that applications on Facebook Platform meet verification standards. We intend to make sure that the experience that our users have on Platform is of the same quality as they experience elsewhere on Facebook, which is something that we are constantly asked for by developers.

In other words, Facebook wants every app to be trustworthy. To do that, they’re planning “to expand [the] team responsible for policy enforcement on Platform so that they can support the upholding of the principles we’ve introduced as part of our roadmap.” It’s not really clear why they wouldn’t have done this from the start.

The timing is certainly suspect. Some of the companies we called out in our ScamVille posts for using scammy offers, like Zynga, have some of their apps Verified. Granted, Facebook announced the decision to end Verified Apps a few days before we first broke the Scamville story, but they’ve been aware of the infringing games, offers, and ads for a long time. In effect, they’ve been stamping their seal of approval on games using tactics that are the target of a class-action lawsuit.

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Windows Marketplace’s newest anti-piracy measures already thwarted

Yar, that was fast. Less than a day after Microsoft updated its Windows Marketplace for Mobile with new advanced anti-piracy measure, some apt xda-developers community member has managed to crack the new code — in under two hours, according to Chainfire’s posting. The hack itself won’t be posted, but we’re sure other astute programmers, many of more nefarious intention, will be able to have their way with it just as easy. Sad for developers who’ve been wanting something more secure — better luck next update.

[Via WMPoweruser]

Filed under: Cellphones

Windows Marketplace’s newest anti-piracy measures already thwarted originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola Sholes / Droid comes in US HSPA flavor, probably not US-bound

We’ve been led to believe in the past that there’d be a GSM version of Motorola’s mighty Sholes for markets outside the US, but this particular version that passed the FCC this week — ID IHDP56KC5, if you must know — has us particularly interested. Why? Well, it’s packing WCDMA on the 850 and 1900MHz bands, which means it’d work on AT&T, Rogers, and HSPA newcomers Bell and Telus. We’ve been led to believe, though, that this particular device is destined for Latin America where 850 / 1900 is also used in favor of the 2100MHz spectrum more prevalent in Europe. That doesn’t rule out Canada, but our instincts tell us that Verizon has every intention of locking up the Sholes as a US exclusive, which means AT&T is a likely no-go — the carrier’s been strangely silent on Android, anyhow, and we haven’t heard a peep of recent intel suggesting they’re prepping Google-powered gear in time for the holidays. Of course, enterprising individuals will probably figure out how to unlock and import this bad boy, so if you’re an American and the thought of switching to Big Red for a Droid makes you physically ill, take heart that there might yet be hope.

[Via MobileCrunch]

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola Sholes / Droid comes in US HSPA flavor, probably not US-bound originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twillist Wants To Become The Ultimate Resource For Twitter Lists

Ever since Twitter started increasing in popularity, there’s been a clear need for a more efficient way to manage groups of users than Twitter natively provides. We’ve seen desktop clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic build their own grouping functionality, as have standalone sites like WeFollow. TweepML has even created an open standard for managing and sharing groups of Twitter users. Today, you can add one more to the bunch: Twillist, a dead-simple site for building your own list of Twitter users.

Of course, Twillist’s release comes less than two weeks after Twitter announced that it would offer its own natively supported Lists, which are still in testing with a subset of users. So where does that leave Twillist?

Founder Michael Broukhim (who is also the co-founder of Totspot) says that the site plans to feature heavy integration with the upcoming new Twitter API features, with the intention of becoming the de facto place to create and find Twitter lists. The site will include added features like the ability to see which shared links are most popular in a given list, embeddable lists that you can share on your blog, the ability to collaborate on Lists with friends, and a feature that would let you see which Twitter users appear in the most lists. These features would all certainly come in handy — at this point it’s a matter of where users are going to turn to to find them.

Twillist is easy to use, and can effectively serve as an alternative to Twitter’s web interface. At the top of the page is a box where you can tweet new messages, along with a menu containing all of the lists you’ve created. Clicking one of the lists will bring you to a page that looks similar to your normal Twitter feed, except it only shows tweets from the members of the list. Creating a list is simple too: just enter what it should be titled, as well as their user names (you can add more people to the list later on, too). My only gripe with the process is the lack of an autocomplete function, so you’ll have to make sure you’re spelling each name correctly.

Twillist is quite well done, with a simple but good looking interface and straightforward functionality. That said, it’s certainly got its work cut out for it: along with the aforementioned grouping/list sites that already exist, we’ll likely see quite a few other sites spring up that look to become the authoritative site for Twitter Lists. And this all assumes that Twitter isn’t intending to make a hub of its own, which is hardly a given. But for now, Twillist offers a good way to create and use Lists on Twitter, before they’re actually available through the service itself.

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