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Posts Tagged ‘Smart Move’

The Zany 2006 Twitter Video Biz Stone Would Probably Rather Forget

These days, thanks to its growing ubiquity in the media, nearly everyone knows what Twitter is. But back in 2006, when it was known as Twttr, a side project of the podcasting service Odeo, no one knew what it was. So co-founder Biz Stone made a video.

As you can watch below in “Twttr 101,” dug up by Say OMG, Stone dresses up as some sort of crazy scientist with Harry Potter glasses and sports an even crazier accent. Also worth noting is that at the time, Twitter was described as a “social texting service based on the contents of you mind.” Most users today don’t realize it, but in the early days, Twitter was almost entirely based around SMS.

For those wanting to know more about Twitter’s past, you should also check out Stone’s blog post from July 2006, announcing the launch of Twttr. In it, he writes, “Jack Dorsey is one of Odeo’s brightest stars so when he told us about this idea that has been haunting him for six years we had to listen. It’s not even remotely related to audio but it’s an awesome idea so we told him to go for it.” This foresight in switching from audio idea of Odeo and going with Twitter proved to be a very smart move.

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IBM Gives Students A Cloud Filled With Its Tech – Now That’s Smart

We often hear how cloud computing makes it more affordable for customers to use services that in the past would have been packaged as software and required buying, installing and maintaining on any number of individual machines.

But we often forget how it is also much cheaper for the vendor to produce and distribute services through the cloud. Cloud vendors do not need to test software on any number of operating systems. Version control is a nagging task. it’s unnecessary when the service is cloud-based. The idea of a software disc seems almost antiquated.

IBM seems to get this whole concept pretty well. The company has realized that it can use a cloud computing infrastructure to market its web-based services. Their target right now are college students and professors who are being offered the use of IBM software and databases through a cloud infrastructure IBM calls the “Academic Skills Cloud.”

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Programs now available to college students and professors include IBM Rational, WebSphere, and Informix. Services to be added to the cloud over time will include Cognos, Lotus and Tivoli.

This is a smart move by IBM. It shows how deeply ingrained cloud computing has become at Big Blue. It leverages the power of the cloud to offer IBM technology at minimal cost. Plus, it reaches students who will go on to associate IBM with cloud computing as they begin their professional careers.

The Academic Skills Cloud provides students with access to leading cloud computing technology and new methods for developing applications. Courses and work material can be accessed anywhere the student is located.

Professors can teach practices that students will see in the workforce once they graduate. Machines do not need to be continually updated with new software. It’s all available online.

Students who learn about cloud computing today stand a far better chance of adapting to a world where working with online services will be the way business is conducted. IBM is making guarantees that they will be top of mind for students once they move on to the professional world.

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Who Needs iTunes? doubleTwist Partners With T-Mobile, Now Bundled On Some Android Phones

Big news for doubleTwist, the iTunes alternative that allows you to manage media for hundreds of devices, including Android phones, the Palm Pre, and BlackBerry. Tomorrow, the company will announce that it has forged a partnership with T-Mobile, which is now promoting it as the supported way to sync media to its line of Android phones. As part of the deal, T-Mobile will begin displaying doubleTwist banners in their retail stores and on T-Mobile.com. And perhaps most important, doubleTwist will come pre-installed on some Android devices, including the new Fender/Eric Clapton myTouch 3G handset.

For those that haven’t used it before, doubleTwist is a media management program that’s both visually and functionally similar to iTunes in many respects, but with one big difference: it will work with nearly any device (iTunes only plays nice with iPods and iPhones). You can drag and drop songs to playlists, sync music, photos, and video to your devices, and share your media with friends using integrated Facebook and Flickr support. In effect, doubleTwist can serve as an “iTunes for Android”. The software is impressive in its own right, but the company has also gotten quite a bit of attention because it was co-founded by DVD Jon, who serves as CTO.

This is a smart move by T-Mobile. One of the most jarring experiences when moving to an Android phone is figuring out how to sync media to the device. First, you have to manually mount the SD drive from the phone’s screen. Once that’s done, you may find yourself half-expecting iTunes to cheerily pop up to help transfer your media, but nothing happens — it’s up to you to drag and drop media from your computer to the appropriate folder on the phone. There are plenty of applications out there meant to help you do this, but it’s a poor experience for users who are trying the platform out for the first time. doubleTwist makes this much easier for new Android owners (it even shows you how to mount the SD card). It may not be quite as robust as iTunes, but it’s going to be good enough for most people. If this proves to be successful for T-Mobile, it wouldn’t surprise me if doubleTwist was adopted by other carriers as well.

One downside to the T-Mobile version of doubleTwist is that it’s missing one of the app’s best features: integration with Amazon’s MP3 Store. The feature, which launched in October, allows users to purchase music from directly within doubleTwist, much as you would with iTunes. doubleTwist wouldn’t comment on why T-Mobile decided to omit the feature, but the company is planning to further expand the software, so hopefully it’s in the pipeline. In any case, you can still download the fully featured version at doubleTwist.com.

Money is changing hands in the deal. Co-founder Monique Farantzos declined to comment on any specifics, but says that doubleTwist licensed its software to T-Mobile and that it’s a “significant source of revenue”. We should also note that while it was previously known that doubleTwist would come preloaded on the Fender myTouch phone, the full extent of the partnership hadn’t been announced before now.

doubleTwist isn’t the only company looking to establish itself as a viable alternative to iTunes. Earlier this month Songbird, an open-source media player/browser hybrid landed a deal with Philips to come bundled with some of its MP3 player devices.

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PBWorks Offers Templates – A Great Way To Get Started In Enterprise Collaboration

A distinguishing aspect to PBWorks is its industry-specific approach. The enterprise collaboration service has made a name for itself by focusing on the particular requirements of the education and legal markets.

Now PBWorks is taking a smart approach by extending its position in vertical markets and offering a template store that people may download and use in a variety of business- and industry-specific ways.

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The template store is opening with 25 applications, both officially approved and those developed by the community at large. PBWorks screens the templates that users provide.

The enterprise collaboration space is still in its early days. People understand the importance of collaboration but often they do not know where to start. The PBWorks templates provide some framework for how to start using wikis and other forms of collaboration. The templates can include embedded media, files and documents as well as folders.

PBWorks is making a smart move by offering templates. It follows a long standing tradition of providing a structure for people who are just starting to use new software or who want to improve what they are already offering. Microsoft has been doing this for years. The practice seems well suited to the increasing complex world of enterprise collaboration.

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ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable

We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup ChaCha. They launched in 2007 as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. Pranksters, obviously, loved it. And we noted the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people.

The human powered web search never really worked out. But ChaCha evolved. In 2008 they launched a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. Putting a human into the mix makes sense with mobile, with poor (or no) data connectivity and hard to use keyboards. But all phones have SMS, and ChaCha had a hit on their hands (they also had the infamous Eiffel Tower incident).

And ChaCha also made another smart move. They started archiving questions and answers on their website in January 2009. 300 million of them are now published on their website – you can view and search them from the ChaCha home page. Those pages have lots of ads generating revenue, and the search engines tend to rank pages like these highly. The company serves just under a million page views to answer pages per day, they say.

CEO Scott Jones says the company has had “explosive growth” in usage of their mobile product. In fact, the company has had to take steps in the past to control that growth, by limiting the number of questions people can ask each month. Even so, people now ask ChaCha a million questions a day via SMS. They recently passed Google and ChaCha is the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.

Those mobile questions bring in revenue, too. I asked ChaCha tonight “When and where is Avatar IMAX playing in San Francisco?” The first response, less than a minute later, was an advertisement. The second message came a minute later with the correct information: “AMC Loews Metreon 16 101 4th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 369-6201. Showtimes for 12/31/09. Avatar IMAX 9:45 am, 1:15, 4:45, 8:15, 11:45. ChaCha!” Even on a smartphone, and even dealing with the ad, it was far easier to use ChaCha than doing a mobile search via Google.

And while there are a number of easy-to-use movie apps for the iPhone and Android, ChaCha is a multi-purpose app. I can just as easily ask it for flight schedules. Or the first king of England (answer: “No one is universally recognized as the first King of England. Some historians start with Egbert, the king of Wessex”).

We’ve said all along, though, that the ChaCha mobile service was useful. But we questioned its scalability since it involves humans.

Jones says they’re scaling just fine, thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily, so they must think it’s a reasonable deal. The cost of answering a question has dropped from $0.50 two years ago to just a few cents today, and Jones says they’ll get it to under a cent soon. They’re able to recycle a lot of answers, he says, and they’ve built tools to make it easier for guides to quickly answer most queries.

The company is now profitable per query, says Jones, meaning they are making more money from those SMS ads than they pay the guides. And when you add revenue from the archived website questions, the company is on path to profitability. Their current revenue run rate is $9 million or so. My guess is they need to roughly double that to become profitable as a business and support their 60 or so full time employees.

Jones says has raised $52 million, including a recent $7 million round from insiders. We’re tracking more than that on CrunchBase and have asked the company for clarification.

So ChaCha may just have a real business on its hands, despite the near constant criticism from us and others over the years. This is one time that I won’t mind at all being wrong.

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

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Ricoh GXR review roundup

Ricoh’s GXR certainly isn’t the most stylish camera out there, but it’s certainly one of the most unique. Boasting an ability to support interchangeable lenses and image sensors, this one offers up flexibility that few other shooters on the market can match. We’ve scrounged up a litany of reviews and hands-on impressions, and by and large, most everyone who got their hands around one enjoyed the experience. Photography Blog noted that the camera was “a remarkably mature first-generation product in an intriguing new photographic system, with excellent handling and image quality that will instantly appeal to all photographers who want to take pictures first and talk about gear second.” Unfortunately, it seems that praise quiets down a bit once you leave the bright outdoors and head inside, as the low-light performance was said to be less than awesome — though, to its credit, the built-in flash was deemed one of the better ones out there. We still aren’t seeing loads of evidence that ditching your starter DSLR setup for this is a smart move, but if you’re just now looking to upgrade from a P&S, you’d be doing yourself a solid by poking around in those links below.

Ricoh GXR review roundup originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink 1001 Noisy Cameras  |  Waloszek, Wouter, Photography Blog  | Email this | Comments
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Crunchpad manufacturer renames product JooJoo, promises launch this Friday at $499

A year and a half ago, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington set out to build and sell a “dead-simple Web tablet for $200.”

His reasoning: There’s a giant hole in the market for a computer bigger than an iPhone, smaller than an iMac, and meant to be used in a relaxed position and location, rather than typed at full-speed at a desk or on a handset.

Moreover, Arrington’s coverage of startups and gadget makers convinced him that, despite his zero experience as a gadget maker, he could design a tablet, hire a company to build it, and then sell it through deals with big-box retailers and online stores.

The computer, named the Crunchpad, was scheduled to ship in time for Black Friday / Cyber Monday shoppers two weeks ago. It would have been a great tale of how a journalist proved his own claims for the new rules of entrepreneurialism.

But at the last minute, Arrington posted on TechCrunch a claim that the production contractor, Fusion Garage — a 12 person company set up in Silicon Valley in February — had told him without warning that they and their investors had decided to sell the product themselves. Arrington would be pushed aside into a marketing / evangelism role.

The Crunchpad was dead, he said. Since Fusion Garage and Arrington’s Crunchpad business co-owned the intellectual property for the device, the gadget would surely never ship to customers.

This morning, Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan held a video conference to tell his side of the story. (Smart move, appearing in person onscreen rather than as a distant voice on a phone call.) Describing himself as “an inventor” rather than a businessman, he said, “I’m not the person I have been portrayed as in the blogosphere.”

After a long background story about how and why he partnered with Arrington on the Crunchpad (”I guess I had him at hello”), Rathakrishnan got down and dirty: “Unfortunately, Michael was unable to deliver. Michael was completely unable to deliver.”

Rathakrishnan also criticized Arrington’s Internet-celebrity approach to talking up the Crunchpad before its launch. “Publishing pictures of an unfinished product on a blog … is not a recipe for success,” he said. In Rathakrishnan’s version of the story, Arrington spent his time blowing hot air about what he was going to do, while Fusion Garage did all the work to finish the design and build the product.

Enough gossip, let’s skip to the product: It’s been renamed JooJoo — the URL is thejoojoo.com. It’ll cost $499, it works over Wi-Fi only, and Rathakrishnan says the formal launch will be this week. He’s giving a video demo right now: “It has the graphic power to deliver full HD video on the go.” It will also have built-in e-book capabilities, he said.

JooJoo is based around a 12.1″ touchscreen, the hardest part to build reliably according to Arrington’s past posts. Rathakrishnan’s top selling point, though, is that JooJoo “gets you onto the Internet faster” by booting in 9 seconds, “the fastest bootup sequence out there.”

“We don’t boot to an operating system,” he said. “We boot directly to the Internet.”  The operating system under the hood is a Unix variant.

Pre-orders will be available beginning this Friday, December 11th.

Fusion Garage will also announce a new round of funding, on top of the $3 million the company has already raised from unnamed investors.

For now, JooJoo is one of those “it remains to be seen” stories. Will Arrington stop Fusion Garage? Will the two parties reconcile in the interest of making some money and not ending as the Internet’s latest FAIL tale? And if so, will enough customers spend five hundred bucks on one? Or will Apple debut its rumored tablet Mac and eat everyone’s lunch? For at least the rest of this week, JooJoo speculation and rumor-mongering will be a news beat all to itself.

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CNN.com Gets a Radical Redesign

CNN.com, one of the top 25 websites in the US, just announced a radical redesign of its service at a press event in New York City. The new CNN.com homepage will be split up into three parts. On the left, CNN will now highlight breaking news stories, the middle section will feature older stories and a ‘highlights’ section, and the right sidebar will be customizable with personalized weather and sports scores. Right beneath the fold, the new CNN will feature a list of ‘editor’s choice’ stories – similar to the NYTimes’s ‘Inside NYTimes.com’ section. The new site will go live next Monday.

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According to CNN’s General Manager of CNN.com Kenneth Estenson, CNN.com currently gets about 1.7 billion page views and 100 million video views every month. In total the CNN homepage has been called up over 120 billion times since its first iteration in 1996.

CNN clearly put a lot of thought into this redesign. As William Hsu, CNN’s VP for News Advertising Sales for Asia Pacific told Exchange4media.com earlier this week, the CNN team “did a lot of research, biometric research, in Europe” (update: a CNN spokesperson just told us that this study was done independent of the site redesign). According to Hsu, these studies showed that very few users ever went beyond the current homepage. Because of this, the new homepage will show far more content but will also make it easier for readers to navigate the site.

More Emphasis on Video – Including Videos from TED

At today’s press event, CNN also stressed that the new site will integrate more of its TV product. Instead of keeping video and text separate, the new CNN.com will bring the two together. 50% of CNN’s users already watch both the video and read the story, so bringing the two closer together is a smart move for CNN. CNN also announced a partnership with TED, which will bring TED videos to a completely new audience.

NewsPulse

The new homepage will also have a new feature called ‘NewsPulse.’ This will allow users to reorganize news stories by correspondent, subject, or keyword. Today’s press event was low on specifics, but this looks like a good way to personalize CNN’s homepage and to find interesting content on the site.

Similarity to CNN Go

CNN also recently launched CNN Go, which focuses on news for the Asian market and also has a more magazine-like layout.

What About the Competition?

We have also heard that MSNBC will soon launch a redesign of its own. While we aren’t aware of any specifics yet, the new MSNBC will focus on adding value to news wire stories by bringing together more material from NBC’s affiliates and a larger focus on interactive elements designed specifically for MSNBC.

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