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Posts Tagged ‘Lookout’

LadyGaga as a Service: Bringing Apple and Google to Commerce 2.0

Lady Gaga, along with her record company, is evolving the album in the form of software as a service. Considering the content of her hit new video, Telephone, it is fitting that she would use software to tackle the hard problem of getting paid by amazing fans.

On her path to global dominance, the site, LadyGaga.com has innovated the next generation of brand management for artists. To do this, she creates a join between Google’s YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook. Way beyond having a an Twitter account, LadyGaga is hosting an interface party, and you’re invited. She’s a performer who is inventing ways to create the value of using multiple platforms to juice the network effects.

Sponsor

Commerce 2.0

Like it a lot? Take a souvenir home from the party for the low introductory price of $1.99 in your iTunes.

Today, we noticed another cultural icon, VC Fred Wilson posted this question on his blog as to what will emerge as Commerce 2.0.

“So the question is who will the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter of commerce be? Maybe they exist today and will emerge as large scale web services soon. Or maybe they are still ideas in the minds of entrepreneurs and will be hatched in the coming years.

It’s an area I am excited about and will be on the lookout for. Clearly I’m not the only one.”

This is where we think LadyGaga.com’s promotion for Telephone stands out as an example of the new world economy. This world is connected by the best ad engines of Google. And it is directly connected to Apple’s amazing commerce engine. Apple, in the context of digital goods is showing how extremely well it is positioned to be the industry payment engine.

Embedding YouTube: Get it Now, Anywhere

We witnessed YouTube transition from the Wild West to a control point for record labels. Now, a lot of the newest official artist videos flow straight to Vevo, the branded label friendly site that runs ads and controls the experience of the brand.

YouTube is taking advantage of its place as a channeling service for video. In this case, the top, most requested inventory pays for the rest of the service. The higher the demand, the more attention it gets.

LadyGaga.com, like many sites, uses embeddable YouTube. In addition to pointing to commerce services like iTunes, the video embeds curated links into other properties at Vevo. This provides the site custom promotion experience while leveraging the YouTube and Vevo distribution channel.

iTunes is prominently offered for both buying the video (which is also free on the same page) and also the album. So, there is a bet here that people want to own it, or place value in their iTunes library to offer this connected service.

This brings the user to a one-moment to buy scenario. Shown here, there is the familiar transition to iTunes from the LadyGaga site.

And, the authorization to ‘Buy Now’.

In default mode, iTunes is set to require a validation step (a second click) to buy the media. The user can can be set easily to bypass this step and enable the user one-click to buy from the web in the future.

This feature is available to any Apple affiliate, but we find it particularly effective coming from the artist embedded with the video and other endorsements.

Tweeting, End to End, Facebook, FTW

We noticed that with a simple interaction, we can logon to Facebook and Twitter from LadyGaga.com and drop a status post, or “tweet” into Facebook or Twitter. Incredibly, inside iTunes, both services are available as well. The real story is that social networks, and commerce networks work together, end-to-end, and, for-the-win.

In a twist of fate, in this version of digital music future the record labels win big. They do it by being close to both eyeballs (Google) and library (Apple), and bringing out the thing they know, the pop.

LadyGaga is on a roll

With the help of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple she will connect to more platforms than ever before, with fewer clicks and passwords.

We wonder how this evolve further into other platforms. Will LadyGaga’s services continue to find new ways to leverage real-time services? We’re starting to envision personal mobile and location aware fan applications.

Will the forces of cloud computing and commerce force Apple and Google be best-friends-forever in music?

And, will we ever build a phone that doesn’t disrupt us while on the dance floor?

And, for god’s sake, damn, Beyonce’ has her back.

Discuss

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OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD

CeBIT gets going next month, but OCZ Technology’s not waiting around for the show to begin. Instead, it’s pushing out details on its swankest SSD ever ahead of time, which will hopefully make room for some fancy prototypes to take up space in Germany. The Sandforce-based Vertex Limited Edition (LE) is based around an all-new architecture, and the company claims that this drive is its “fastest, multi-level cell (MLC), performance-based drive yet.” How fast, you ask? How’s about 270MB/sec on the read side and 250MB/sec on the write side, not to mention 15,000 IOPS. Unfortunately, it’s still stuck on the SATA 3Gbps interface, but for those indifferent to that lingering 6Gbps alternative, you can be on the lookout for these to ship in 100GB ($399.99) and 200GB ($829.99) flavors for a limited time.

OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kindle dev kit now rolling out in limited beta

Back on the 21st of January when Amazon announced that it would release its Kindle Development Kit, A/K/A KDK, we heard it would begin rolling out in limited beta this month, with a wait list of people getting access to the kit as space was available. Well, that moment has arrived, and you can now sign up to receive said KDK. Our tipster wasn’t able to get the software in hand yet, but we’ll keep on the lookout for it. Hit the read link to sign up, and to check out Amazon’s FAQ, as well.

[Thanks, Mark]

Kindle dev kit now rolling out in limited beta originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FTC drags out old, tired ideas for protecting kids online

The Federal Trade Commission is always on the lookout for what could be improved “for the children!” and a recent report highlights the newest areas of concern: virtual worlds. In its report released Thursday, the FTC announced the downright shocking news that there is sexually explicit and often violent content in virtual worlds that can be accessed by minors, along with a set of recommendations for service providers to better shield kids.

The FTC looked at 27 virtual worlds (are there even 27 virtual worlds that people actually use?) and found that 19 of the 27 contained at least one instance of sexually or violently explicit content. In five of those studied, the FTC observed a “heavy” amount of explicit content and a “moderate” amount in four worlds.

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Nyko Charge Base IC for Wii now shipping

Continue reading Nyko Charge Base IC for Wii now shipping

Nyko Charge Base IC for Wii now shipping originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Police Wii Bowling team issued stern rebuke

Filed under: Gaming

Police Wii Bowling team issued stern rebuke originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Zivity Adds Dudes. Let Me Know How It Goes (#zivitydude)

Venture backed adult site Zivity finally figured out that there’s a whole other market out there beyond guys (and a few women) who want to look at naked women. Lots of women (and a few men) apparently want to look at naked guys, too. So in a lightning bolt of marketing genius, they doubled their potential market size in a single blog post: Zividudes.

They’re taking nominations for who users want to see without their clothes on (topless for now). Once the list is set they’ll start going down the list to see who’s brave enough to say yes: “We’ll start with the top choice and work our way down until someone is brave enough to say yes! We’ll pay for the photo shoot by one of our top photographers, so the Zivity Dude will look *fantastic*.”

Who do you want to see shirtless? Twitter the name out with the hashtag #zivitydude and your vote will be counted. Early favorites include Kevin Rose, Chris Saad, Loren Feldman (although his wife is making the push), Jim Fishef and Sean Percival.

Let me know how it all turns out. And be on the lookout for Ashton Kutcher to try to steal the show. That guy will do anything for a little press. In fact, maybe Kutcher and Kevin Rose can do a dual bromance photoshoot?

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

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Digg Starts Nofollow-ing Links That It Doesn’t Trust

Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

Sure, all spammer who submit something to Digg hope that it hits the frontpage and brings a rush of traffic. But more important to them are the links associated with Digg. If a story is popular on Digg, it will also likely garner quite a few links back to it. But even if it doesn’t become popular, the link coming from Digg itself gives some weight to the spammy URL in a search engine crawler’s eyes.

Digg using nofollow has been a subject of debate since at least 2007, when the service was exploding with popularity. Around that time, Wikipedia decided to use nofollow for all of its outbound links. But what’s interesting here is that Digg isn’t adding nofollow to all of its links, and instead is only doing it for the untrusted ones.

“This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields, in an effort to lookout for the interests of content providers and the Digg community,” Digg’s John Quinn writes today. This would seem to suggest that company realizes it’s still in the interest of most content providers to get the link juice that comes from Digg. It would also seem to suggest that it doesn’t want firestorm of controversy similar to the one it created with the DiggBar.

This move comes at an interesting time for Digg, as sites like Bit.ly look to be setting up to battle for who has the most interesting link data on the Internet. Twitter itself has been testing out the tracking of links from its site, though it claims to be just doing so for internal product purposes.

How Digg judges which sites they trust, they don’t say. But one would have to assume that these sites are different from the ones that are straight-up blocked from the service for being spammy. Untrusted links in comments, profiles and story pages will also get the nofollow tag as well.

[photo: flickr/brianware3000]

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

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