Business News: September 2012

Minggu, 30 September 2012

Weekly Wrap-Up: Foxconn Riots, My Week With Android, And How To Buy A Smartphone

My week with Android, or why I'm buying an iPhone 5; Foxconn riots; and how to buy a smartphone. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

My Week With Android, Or Why I'm Buying An iPhone 5

Not long ago, one of our editors did a very bad thing: he dropped hisiPhone 4 and cracked the screen. He was very sad, but the experience proved useful as it forced him to face up to his phone future. Did he want a new iPhone 5 or was it time to switch to a different brand of smartphone, My Week With Android, Or Why I'm Buying An iPhone 5.

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

Want to have this wrap up delivered to you automagically? You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email.

Sabtu, 29 September 2012

Enterprise Mobility & The Art Of The Possible

Smartphones offer tremendous potential to connect with customers, make employees more efficient and create new markets. Yet nothing is simple in the enterprise space, where security, data storage, authentication, and management issues are mission-critical. The key to enterprise mobility is getting past the quagmire to the art of the possible.

Three Obstacles

Mobility in the enterprise is, almost by definition, transformative. It is transforming how employees work, what devices are used, how data is gathered, maintained, distributed and secured and how companies interact with customers and clients. Navigating transformation is never a simple matter.

There are two primary concerns that enterprises must contend with when developing mobile strategies: internal and external.

Internal enterprise mobile issues are, on the surface, relatively straightforward and follow the traditional concerns of IT departments: hardware deployment, software distribution, data security, communication solutions and day-to-day management. But straightforward does not necessarily mean easy. Enterprise computing is complicated by consumer choice of smartphones: the 'bring your own device' problem. IT departments are forced to balance productivity and security.

In a meeting in Boston this week, IBM's VP of marketing for mobile, Mike Riegel, identified the three biggest hurdles that enterprises face in creating internal mobile solutions.

How to secure devices and data.
How to create solutions across multiple smartphone platforms and operating systems.
How to connect everything (back-end systems, cellular connections etc.).

Those three primary objections in the enterprise create a quandary for enterprise mobility. The problem is figuring out the future application of mobility as opposed to recreating traditional functionality in a mobile landscape.

The same three issues also apply to external (customer- and client-facing) enterprise mobile strategies. This is where enterprise executives face the most anxiety. They know they need to do something on mobile, but what and where to start are pain points that often do not have a clear solution.

Resource Management

In talking to many mobile development firms that work with these large enterprises, a surprising theme emerges. Many Fortune 500 companies are woefully ignorant and understaffed to handle mobile application development and deployment.

There are large, very recognizable companies in the United States that have one mobile developer on their IT staff that handles everything, from iOS and Android apps to bug fixes and customer queries. The art of the possible is moot when one very overworked mobile developer is struggling to handle everything. Traditional IT staffs are equipped to manage problems and create solutions, not build apps.

Most enterprises work on both internal and external solutions in predictable cycles that range between 12 and 36 months. This system is a legacy of the old client-server paradigm that evolved with the rise of personal computing through the 1990s and 2000s. This is where the transformative qualities of mobile clash head-on with existing enterprise structure. Whereas mobile is a fast-moving industry that iterates quickly, enterprises are simply not used to short cycles. Resources are deployed elsewhere from previous development cycles that did not prioritize mobile, leaving a vacuum in the enterprise infrastructure.

A cottage industry has developed over the past several years to fill that vacuum. Companies that are creating mobile solutions for enterprises come from every segment of the technology industry, from independent developers and consultants to startups to established mid-market companies to billion dollar behemoths looking to create new market verticals for themselves. There are boutique developers that specialize in making apps for enterprises on a contract-by-contract basis to companies like Brightcove that provide integrated development and cloud services solutions. Companies like SAP, Microsoft, Google and IBM specialize in both providing tools and resources to enterprises while also acting as consultants. Startups like StackMob or Kinvey can handle backend mobile infrastructures while wholesalers like Apptopia buy and sell apps from developers to enterprises. Almost anything that an enterprise needs to jump into the deep end of the mobile pool can be found with off-the-shelf third-party services.

In the near term future, these third-party services will be essential for enterprises. The reason for this is fairly simple: scarcity. If I am a mobile app developer (working on either front or back end systems), the last place I am really going to look for work is a non-tech related Fortune 500 company. The technology industry is rife with talent wars for top developers with startups battling billion dollar companies like Google for a finite amount of qualified developers. Enterprises are then forced to work with those companies as opposed to employing the developers themselves.

Assessing Possible

In a meeting with forward-looking mobile thinkers in Boston, it was IBM's Riegel that posed the question: what is the art of the possible?

In this context, the possible is not the current landscape that enterprises find themselves but rather the next step where companies fully harness the capabilities that smartphones can offer. As it stands right now, most enterprises are just trying to catch up to the transformation that mobility has brought. The companies that can quickly iterate through the current obstacles and move onto creating dynamic new functions will be the ones that will reap the benefits.

The question then becomes, what are the types of dynamic new functions? The near-term future will be less about repurposing CRM systems for mobile (or something similar) and moving to features that harness contextualized data, persistent location and authentication, human behavior and social awareness. Features that not only know where you are, but who you are and what you are doing. There is extreme power in that notion, but it cannot yet be harvested by most enterprises while they still search for solutions to basic problems.

Apology Accepted, Apple. Now Get To Work, Google.

This is a big deal for Apple. Perfection - or at least the appearance of it - is a central component of the company's brand. Its last public black eye, a psuedo-social network called Ping, was being laid to rest just as critics and customers were winding up this new punch.

Apple never explicitly admitted failure with Ping. Instead, it quietly put its social scheme to rest in favor of integrating with established social networks. Steve Jobs didn't apologize to consumers even after the massive PR headache of Antennagate in 2010, when the company offered free bumper cases to help alleviate the issue.

But Apple had no choice but to address the Maps issue. It quickly overshadowed the iPhone 5 itself, the latest entry in a product line from which Apple draws an enormous percentage of its revenue. Cook went so far as to suggest competing products as alternatives while Apple irons out the kinks. And yes, that list included the Google Maps web app.

Cook's apology could have gone further. Why not offer an iOS 6-compatible version of the old Maps app in the App Store? Or, if users want to, let them easily downgrade to iOS 5? Of course, if he did that, Cook might not have been able to tout 100 million people using the new operating system.

Absent a drastic move like that, the apology will do. Apple has admitted fault, offered alternatives and assured the masses that it's working on the problem. Apple's Maps is a nice-looking product with a few very useful new features. We're confident it will mature into something awesome. In the meantime, Google, hurry up and ship Maps for iOS. Apple got its bad press. Now give the rest of us a hand.

Digg For iPad Lets You Pick Up Reading Where You Left Off

The nimble Betaworks team behind the new Digg has just released a new version of its iOS app that supports the iPad. It also adds a handy feature called "reading sync," which syncs your scrolling position in an article between the iPhone and iPad, so you can pick up where you left off. You can now share article links via text message, and the navigation in the app has been simplified.

The Digg app is still very simple, but the experience is remarkably consistent with the desktop Web version, which has been scaled back a bit to match its iOS siblings. It's a very basic grid of stories with an image and tag line, and there's one number indicating social network buzz.

But this team, which first built social news app News.me, has become known for packing small but awesome features underneath simple exteriors. The save-for-later functionality in Digg for iOS is now bolstered by reading sync, making reading on Digg a convenient cross-device experience. It also features News.me's pioneering Paperboy feature, which refreshes your article list whenever you leave or arrive at a location of your choice.

Jumat, 28 September 2012

Meet The Ubuntu Women - They're More Involved Than You Think

Take a quick look around the Ubuntu forums and IRC channels and you can miss the pattern: it's mostly men. That is not to say that there is no diversity in the open source community, only that you need to look a little deeper to find it.

According to a recent survey, only 12% of professionals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women. So I felt especially lucky to "sit-down" with Ubuntu Women members Elizabeth "Lyz" Krumback and Cheri Francis over a Google+ hangout to discuss the work they are doing with the organization.

Why Ubuntu? All jabs at Unity aside, it is still one of the most popular Linux distributions and this group is doing its best to promote that message while also encouraging women to become more involved.

From its humble beginnings in 2006, the Ubuntu Women mission has been clear - to encourage women to use and contribute to Ubuntu. The organization is not political, so you'll find no mentions of feminism or the like, but rather a safe place where women, curious about the Ubuntu developer community, can come and ask questions without fear of intimidation or condescension. The group's membership has grown to over 300 (including myself) with support from everyone from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth himself to other community leaders and project teams.

What exactly do the Ubuntu Women Do Anyway?

Mentorship

Though efforts at a formal mentorship program fizzled, the team was not deterred. After some retooling, what emerged was a more informal, but much more effective system. When new members reach out, usually via mailing list or the IRC chat room, someone from the team immediately responds and puts them in touch with a community member who can help get them going.

Contributions

Contributions to the Ubuntu and open source community are as varied as they are numerous. Here's just a snapshot of some of the areas where the Ubuntu Women as individuals and a team have made a significant impact:

' IRC channel support

' Documentation

' Education

' O'Reilly Linux DevCenter blogging

' Package maintenance

' Development & testing

' Local community leadership

Recently elected to the Ubuntu Women leadership team, Lyz Krumbach just won the O'Reilly Open Source Award for her open source contributions. And she will soon be traveling to Ghana to help San Francisco non-profit Partimus - which provides repurposed computers running free software to students and schools in need - with deploying Ubuntu systems.

Cheri Francis, another member of the leadership team, is the spearhead behind the group's monthly Career Day. She also heads up her local community group, ReLoCo and also participates with the accessibility and NGO teams.

One of Francis' proudest moments is introducing Ubuntu to her mom, who has multiple sclerosis. Ubuntu offers the customization she needed to modify the system to make it easier for her mother to use and remember things. This has allowed her to do more than she has with any other computer.

Also sitting on the Ubuntu Leadership team is Amber Graner. She is the co-author of The Official Ubuntu Book, and a frequent organizer and speaker at open source events around the world.

Education

Each month, the group hosts a Career Day chat on IRC in the Ubuntu Classroom #ubuntuclassroom. Cheri Francis spearheads this initiative, frustrated by the lack of information available about IT careers that could help her and others make more informed career decisions.

An IT industry professional attends the online chat and posts information about her career - like how to break into the field, skills needed and what a typical day is like. Each session lasts about an hour, with time included for questions and answers. The next chat will be October 18, 2012, featuring Silvia Bindelli, a computer science engineer who will discuss her work as an engineering software release coordinator.

Needs

The open source community backbone is comprised of a legion of fiercely dedicated volunteers. Still, the needs are many. In addition to the obvious need for technical talent - developers, QA, designers and the like - there is also a need for writers, bug triage, organizers and everything in between.

If you'd like to join the Ubuntu Women, contact anyone on the leadership team, or check out the #ubuntu-women and #ubuntu-women-project IRC channels.

The Key To Social Network Success: Rip Off Pinterest?

This week is apparently the week to do exactly that. First, MySpace previewed its next iteration, which moves away from traditional profiles and social streams in favor of a grid-based layout showcasing media content shared by users. Sound familiar?

The very next day, StumbleUpon launched a beta redesign that also bears a visual similarity to Pinterest.

MySpace and StumbleUpon aren't the first companies to take cues from Pinterest's design approach. The design of the explosively popular social scrapbooking service has been widely mimicked in recent months. Its tiled layout, based on the widely-used Masonry jQuery layout plugin, has begat countless Wordpress and Tumblr themes.

Sites using this visual approach are too numerous to name. StumbleUpon and MySpace stand out because they are both once-beloved social networks from a half decade ago that have declined in usership and relevance. Meanwhile, Pinterest has become the latest social media phenomenon, even as many in the broad public struggle to understand why on Earth they should use it. It's hard to say how long Pinterest's growth will last or whether it will find a viable business model, but for now its success has given other contenders in the social space something to emulate, sometimes shamelessly.

Take Chill, for example. The social video-sharing service originally sprang out of the group-listening hype generated last summer by music startup Turntable.fm. In early 2012, the company shifted its focus from real-time group video watching and content discovery. Today, Chill bears a striking resemblance to Pinterest, from its Masonry-style layout to the placement of its dark pink, handwritten-looking logo.

People are ripping off Pinterest's design for one simple reason: it works. In 30 months (much of which was a closed beta period), the service's subscriber list has ballooned to more than 20 million users who have generated 1.9 billion monthly page views and spend an average of about 15 minutes pinning and browsing. In terms of registered users, that's not quite Instagram-level growth, but it's still remarkable.

A feature in the September issue of Fast Company explains the origin of Pinterest's design:

As they sketched out Pinterest, [cofounders] Silberman and Sharp cast aside many then-predominant orthodoxies of Web design. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and many other content-driven websites were organized around "feeds," lines of text or images that ran from top to bottom by time' The idea was to remove the rigid organizational strictures that the Web imposed - directories, timestamps, pagination - and replace them with a grid of images that would feel more like visiting a store or a museum.

The result was what we see on Pinterest today: pleasing images of attractive people, delicious-looking confections, stylish accessories and awe-inspiring scenes laid out on a fixed-width grid with no bottom. That infinite scroll is part of what makes Pinterest so addictive - and helps boost the coveted time-on-site metric.

Unlike most hot social startups, Pinterest even has the beginnings of a non-advertising-based business model within reach. The service is already driving tons of traffic to online retailers as its users lust after many of the products pinned there. The company is not officially implementing any particular monetization strategy yet, but many of the components of one are sitting there waiting to be picked up and built into a cash cow.

Of course, half of that potential future equation is a massive user base, which Pinterest has. Other sites can borrow from its design all they want, but whether or not they can win over users on such an immense scale is another story altogether.

How Journalists Are Using SoundCloud

Musicians and remixers were among the first to settle into SoundCloud, but the social audio-sharing service has been expanding in new directions. The company is sharpening its focus on providing a hub for radio-style journalism and commentary with an interactive twist. (This is part four of a four-part series on how journalists are using social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter.)

The initial wave of SoundCloud users from the radio world included CNN Radio, Boston's WBUR and KCRW in Los Angeles. Since then, the company has been cultivating the on-air community in earnest.

This summer, SoundCloud nabbed Jim Colgan from public radio station WNYC to help sharpen its new focus on bringing traditional radio content to the browser. Earlier this week, Philadelphia-based WHYY became the latest NPR affiliate to join SoundCloud, using it to post clips from recent episodes of shows like Fresh Air. For WHYY and many other public radio outlets, it's less about hosting the program's entire digital presence and more about using SoundCloud as a way to extend their brand and grab the attention of listeners on a large - and rapidly growing - platform.

Kamis, 27 September 2012

Small Business Owners Renew Pay-For-Play Allegations Against Yelp

Yelp, the leading website for online reviews of restaurants, hotels and other service-based businesses, has long denied ongoing allegations of pay-for-play. But small business owners continue to insist their good reviews are being held hostage until they agree to buy advertising.

Go to the Yelp page for TraxNYC, a Manhattan jeweler, and you see the dreaded one star, based on just one review. An employee of the jeweler responded to the review and even said the company would consider issuing a refund.

Still, that one-star review stings, and it means TraxNYC sinks to the bottom of search results when people search Yelp (or even Google, which gives added heft to Yelp pages) for jeweler recommendations

The problem, according to Jen Lim of TraxNYC, is that single review is not the jeweler's only review on Yelp. If you click on the barely noticeable 'filtered reviews' button and then go through a reCAPTCHA protocol to prove 'you're not a robot,' you'll see 10 additional reviews, nine of which rate the company five stars.

Lim, and a dozen other small business owners interviewed by ReadWriteWeb, are all crying foul over the situaton, saying the good reviews were filtered only after they refused to buy or canceled advertising on Yelp.

'We chose not to advertise with Yelp and since then, all our good reviews get filtered,' Lim said. 'It's predatory at its best and I am sure our business suffers for it.'

Pay-For-Play Or Overzealous Algorithm?

It's not the first time Yelp has faced pay-for-play charges, and, as it has for other media inquiries on the issue, the company denied the allegations, saying the automated review filter keeps 'content as useful and trustworthy as possible.'

Darnell Holloway, Yelp's manager of local business outreach, denied that Yelp's filtering algorithm gives preferential treatment to advertisers or punishes non-advertisers.

'Let me be perfectly clear: the review filter applies the same set of rules to everybody, and we do not have a pay-for-play system,' Holloway said. 'We take a very serious stance when it comes to review quality on site.'

Holloway said a small business owner will begin paying attention to their Yelp page after they are contacted by one of the company's sales reps. Some may start soliciting reveiws from family and friends, which the filter weeds out, and that may be fueling the appearance that Yelp is punishing advertisers.

'If those solicited reviews get picked up by the filter, the business owner may develop a correlation between the sales person's call and the filtered reviews,' he said.

Yelp claims it is trying to curtail the paid review sites that promises small businesses good reviews for a fee. It also says its filter protects small businesses from reviews left by competitors or disgruntled employees.

Todd William, founder of Reputation Rhino, an online reputation management company, said he has one client with 19 published reviews and 365 additional reviews caught in the filter. Still, William takes Yelp's claims at face value and thinks the problem is with the algorithm that filters messages.

'While I am sure a 'hard sell' by certain Yelp representatives may suggest otherwise, the problem for Yelp is an inadequate and ineffective filter system,' William said. 'The Yelp filter system favors active Yelp members comments and reviews. New Yelp members are almost always relegated to the filter to prevent fraud, but this unfortunately penalizes well-meaning customers who merely want to show their appreciation for a positive experience with a company and do not have the time or inclination to complete a profile, comment actively on others' businesses, socialize with other Yelp members or otherwise engage the Yelp community.'

Advertisers Get Some Preferential Treatment

But the same small businesses Yelp says it is trying to protect from phony reviews aren't so sure the company is being forthright in its explanations.

Jon Katz, CEO of Katz Moving, said he has been hit by negative Yelp reviews since first refusing an offer to advertise on Yelp in 2008.

'I was getting about three to four phone calls a day about advertising with them,' Katz said. 'After about 45 days they started to 'filter' our reviews... And then all of a sudden we went from having eight 5-star and one 4-star reviews to having three, then two reviews stay on our page.'

Katz said he has spent the past several years trying to work around negative reviews. During that time he has paid close attention to competitors that do pay to advertise on Yelp and has noticed that once a company advertises:

Yelp filters more negative reviews
Yelp mixes in older good reviews while pushing newer, low-rating reviews lower on the page.
Yelp allows advertisers to choose whether they want their ad displayed on a non-advertising competitor's Yelp page.

Holloway denied Kat's first two allegations, but did concede advertisers can purchase packages that remove competitors ads from their Yelp results as well as search placement ads that would allow their ad to be displayed on a competitor's Website.

The whole truth about exactly what's happening here may never be entirely clear. But it's a safe bet that concerns about these issues won't go away as long as Yelp reviews have an effect on retailers' bottom line.

New Ethics Scandal Rocks Wikipedia

A week after allegations of high-level Wikipedia editors promoting paid content, questions remain on how much damage the actions will inflict on the popular wiki site.

The story broke September 18, when CNET reporter Violet Blue posted a detailed analysis of internal Wikipedia discussions surrounding the apparent activity of former Wikimedia UK Chair Roger Bamkin and a Wikipedian-in-Residence Maximillion Klein, who were apparently using their positions within the Wikipedia editorial process to push content onto Wikipedia's Did You Know section on the site's home page.

These allegations have been vehemently denied by both men, but two days after the first CNET story broke, Bamkin stepped down from his Trustee position.

"Roger has always conducted himself with openness and honesty with regards to his business interests, which the Board greatly appreciates. However we have reached the decision together that it is best if Roger steps back from the Board, and thus the Board has accepted his resignation. I look forward to working with Roger in future," stated current Wikimedia UK Chair Chris Keating.

(For more on Wikipedia controversies, see Why Wikipedia Doesn't Belong In The Classroom and Why Wikipedia Does Belong In The Classroom.)

The Pitch Of Gibraltar

Throughout the controversy, Bamkin and Klein, while not exactly denying that they were working with the British territory of Gibraltar to create a separate Gibraltarpedia site for the purposes of increasing the amount of information about the territory on Wikipedia. Links to the Gibraltarpedia section appeared 17 times on the Wikipedia front page in August, 2011, which is a relatively high rate of occurrence.

Klein's consulting business untrikiwiki previously advertised SEO consulting services that implied that the firm could take advantage of Wikipedia as a very powerful SEO source. Language previously appearing on the untrikiwiki site included the following:

'A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO: it's almost guaranteed to be a top three Google hit. Surprisingly this benefit of writing for Wikipedia is underutilized, but relates exactly the lack of true expertise in the field. ... WE HAVE THE EXPERTISE NEEDED to navigate the complex maze surrounding 'conflict of interest' editing on Wikipedia. With more than eight years of experience, over 10,000 edits, and countless community connections we offer holistic Wikipedia services.'

Since the story broke, that language has been removed, and Klein has issued a rather cool response on his blog:

"We've never made a single edit for which we had a conflict of interest on Wikipedia ' ever. Although we have advertised such a service, we've not aggressively pursued it ' and we have not accepted any clients interested in on-Wikipedia work."

Yet there is still the odd presence of Gibraltarpedia on the Wikipedia home page, and a £1 million investment in the project revealed by Gibraltar's own Tourism Board, which Blue uncovered in a follow-up story Sept. 20.

Money? Yes. Scandal? No.

But just because there was money changing hands, Wikimedia UK insists that there was nothing improper going on.

"Roger [Bamkin] has always been open with Wikimedia UK about his commercial interests and has declared them in public at appropriate times. He has not voted in any Wikimedia UK decisions about Monmouthpedia since the start of his consultancy relationship with MCC or on any decisions about Gibraltarpedia or QRpedia. All our decisions about this have been taken by the other trustees, with the aims of the charity in mind. Roger has not received any Wikimedia UK funds for any of these projects, except for out-of-pocket expenses incurred in his role as a volunteer in the early development stages of Monmouthpedia before becoming a consultant, paid in line with our normal expenses policy," Wikimedia UK said in a press statement.

While all may be above board within Wikimedia's own standards, there is little doubt that this will undermine the level of trust people place in Wikipedia as a source of information. That trust was never universal, but Wikipedia, for all its faults, has usually seemed moribund by its own policies and biased outside influences, not improper internal manipulations.

Wikimedia may benefit from this in the long run; by experiencing this crisis, as unsavory as it may be, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia may learn more about what not to do and how its members should conduct themselves. SEO businesses that advertise themselves as Wikipedia experts, however, may end up suffering more obstacles in their paths, if Wikimedia does take the right lessons away from this incident.

But that remains to be seen. Wikipeida is about to wrap up its 12th year of operation, and if the team hasn't figured out a strong ethical stance and operational response by now, I find it hard to imagine that this incident, another in a line of problems, will be the one that finally gets things on track.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Celebrities & Startups: That's So 5 Minutes Ago

Web groceries, sock puppets, podcasting - Internet trends come and go. The trick is to know when the end is near and avoid doing something foolish, like paying $580 million for MySpace. Today, that means consumer Internet startups taking on celebrity investors.

The Benefits Of Being Famous

The temptation is understandable. Celebrities offer a startup many potential benefits. Bold-face names can attract instant attention and help draw paying customers. At the same, they can establish credibility with investors, who these days will fund consumer Internet companies only if they can demonstrate a customer-acquisition cost lower than Kim Kardashian's neckline.

Plus, the celebs are into it too. Ever since Ashton Kutcher and Bono got (way more) rich investing in startups like Foursquare and Airbnb (Kutcher) and Facebook and Dropbox (Bono), every Hollywood star and has-been wants in on a hot startup.

But if you have a consumer Internet company and you don't already have a celebrity investor, you've pretty much missed the bus. The startup-star marriage is over. Over like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Over like Paris Hilton and DJ Afrojack.

Every Which Way But Loose

Trouble is, all the good celebs are taken. There are only a handful of stars like Kutcher, who invests serious money and, by all accounts, adds real value to the companies he funds. The rest are just into tech for the buzz. And you don't want people like that - or their hangers-on - getting their paws on your startup.

'This is typical monkey behavior of imitation and greed,' says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation who focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation. 'We're all a bunch of apes and we see the other apes doing things that make them money and get them attention, so we imitate. And there's no place more full of imitative behavior than the entertainment industry. These people are acutely aware of being a fast follower and that currently involves this fondness for technology.'

Kedrosky says celebrities come with the same advantages and disadvantages as other angel investors 'but dialed to 11.' Some do have domain competencies that match the startups they pair off with - like Lady Gaga and Turntable.fm - but even then they tend to be fickle. They don't have the attention span for follow-on investments and they hit the exit at the first sign of trouble. 'It's the usual bipolar disorder you get when dealing with angel investors,' Kedrosky says, 'but way more exaggerated.'

Is Your Startup A "Winner"?

Worse, you could end up hitching your company to a Charlie Sheen or Amanda Bynes. 'You rise up with them but then they become embroiled in some goat-boy scandal and you fall with them, with no connection to the merits of your company.'

If you feel you must recruit a celebrity, aim for a star with a large Twitter following. 'If you are going to get an angel investor involved who's writing smaller checks, they'd better be able to bring a lot of Twitter followers,' Kedrosky advises. 'There's a correlation between people on Twitter with the most followers and the likelihood they'll become celebrity investors. I have no hard data but I'd argue that is absolutely the case.'

Make Sure The Stars Align

Also make sure your product aligns with the talents of the star, Kedrosky suggests. 'If you have some kind of enterprise application for building cloud services, good luck with that. Odds are you won't get an A-list actor to invest.'

Whoever you decide to pursue, you should hurry. The celebrity-investor craze is coming to a close. In fact, Kedrosky thinks it's time to get out of the consumer Internet business altogether.

'As soon as it becomes obvious to people that this is an easy way to make money, then it no longer is easy. So we're approaching the end of the current cycle. My guess is we're long past the peak of the consumer Web and the mobile/local/social cycle. It peaked at least a year ago and now you have a bunch of monkeys showing up at the end, not knowing that the meteor has already struck and the fire is coming across the landscape and they are toast.'

Hmmm. ToastedMonkey.com? Somebody get Billie Joe Armstrong on the phone!

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Rabu, 26 September 2012

How "Big-Data-as-a-Service" Can Help Smaller Companies Compete

The common perception of how big data is used centers around giant multi-national enterprises spending millions trying to fine tune their business strategies to eke out every last penny from their customers. But in reality, big data is worming its way into businesses large and small, often as a service instead of on-premises software.

The Evolution Of The Comment Card

Visit a bustling diner in a small town and you may see them tucked in among the bottles of ketchup and sugar packets on the linoleum counter: 3 X 5 comment cards. How was your meal? How was your service? Fill it out and tuck it in the little wooden box by the cash register, please.

Regulars might make their concerns known directly to the staff, but diners such as this - like nearly every other business in the world - need to attract and keep new customers in order to grow. That's the point behind comment cards: get as much feedback as you can so you to improve what needs fixing and keep doing what's working well.

Moving the comment card into the 21st Century is essentially what big data is all about.

The most common form of big data in busines today was created as a technological response to tracking all of the data that was generated by commercial websites. Once marketers and other business execs saw that they could monitor an online customer's responses all the way down to the mouse click, software engineers started figuring out a way to keep that data and mine it for ever more useful information.

The combination of speed and volume needed to catch all of this information is what makes big data tools and technology really necessary. But for the vast majority of businesses that do not have big ecommerce sites, is big data even worth the attempt?

It turns out, yes.

Big Data Tools Work For Small Data, Too

One of the easier ways smaller businesses are taking on big data is seeing the general value of data analytics no matter how big or small the data set is. That message is practically a non-brainer: business owners are scanning the headlines every day and getting excited about applying data to their decision-making process.

Social media is one quick way to implement big data within a smaller business. Used and analyzed properly, the information from social media can give any business instant feedback that's far more robust and immediate than those old-fashioned comment cards.

"Every time we perform a search, tweet, send an email, post a blog, comment on one, use a cell phone, shop online, update our profile on a social networking site, use a credit card, or even go to the gym, we leave behind a mountain of data, a digital footprint, that provides a treasure trove of information about our lifestyles, financial activities, health habits, social interactions, and much more," wrote former Tivoli CEO Frank Moss in his 2011 book The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices.

Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS)

Using big data can go beyond mining social media as a juiced-up form of the comment card. Big data can also be integrated with existing business practices to improve and expand day-to-day operations.

It's becoming pretty well-known that big data and fast data analysis are being used by large hotels and chains to improve their yield management processes. This kind of infrastructure is typically beyond the reach of smaller hotels, inns and bed and breakfasts. It's probably overkill anyway: while a big hotel near Orlando, Fla., area might see 75 room pricing changes per day, a small independent lodging in a less-volatile market might only see a couple of price moves daily.

But that doesn't make the need for a smaller inn to adjust to local market changes any less important, says Erik Hovanec, CEO of LeisureLink, which specializes in providing yield-management as a service to smaller hospitality locations.

One of LeisureLink's clients is a 120-room property outside Myrtle Beach, SC, that "is great at hospitality, not necessarily at IT." Hovanec described. Using his company's service, the property is able to tap into information about local Myrtle Beach hotels and see real-time pricing information on other properties and make adjustments accordingly.

This is exactly what the larger hotels and chains have been doing for a while. But now this service is available to smaller, mid-market establishments. Typically, a large hotel or chain might invest $30-$40 million just to increase their yield management from 90% to 95%. Hovanec boasts that since LeisureLink's service is often the first real step into automated yield management for smaller hotels, their efficiency in yield management can rocket from 20% to 80%.

Can Big Data Work For Every Business?

At some point, any company considering a big-data approach needs to consider the one basic question: is there information out there that will help improve the business? If there's a yes in there, then a search for a big data solution might be worth the effort.

It's not that we really need another another "as-a-Service" acronym, but thanks to the use of Internet-based Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS), you don't have to be a giant enteprise to play any more. These days, there's a good chance that someone out there will have the information you need or can help you find it.

Image Courtesy of Shutterstock

What A Facebook Social Search Engine May Look Like

When it comes to search strategy, Google and Facebook both seek to give users the best possible result. While Google will continue to trust technical data over social data, though, Facebook is likely to stake the success of its search engine - and perhaps the entire company - on a new kind of search that puts social context first.

Mark Zuckerberg told the TechCrunch Disrupt conference earlier this month, "Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have." His words set off a maelstrom of speculation that the company was about to - finally - go toe-to-toe with Google in search. Coupled with the company's dismal stock performance since its initial public offering in May, Zuckerberg's comments have persuaded many observers that a Facebook search engine will be available sooner rather than later.

But it could be an entirely different search engine than that of Google and the myriad copycat competitors that have tried to dent Mountain View's massive market share. While Google crawls the Web and combines what it finds with your search history to find the best result based on your query, Facebook search engineers would probably try to customize search results based on everything the company knows about your preferences and those of your friends.

'Facebook's value . . . is the enormous set of data they have about you,' said Christophe Henner, a social media manager focusing on Facebook technologies for X-Prime Group, a French Web technology firm. 'Facebook would focus on improving search results not based on a page by itself - incoming links, authority and content - but on its social context: Did one of your friend engaged with the website or with this specific page?'

Facebook As A Decision Engine

For Facebook search to succeed, it needs to be more than a site that simply says 'Your friend liked this sushi restaurant, so maybe you will too.' Eric Silver, founder of content management system maker WebKite, said Facebook will use a complex analysis of its social graph to push you toward the decision that's best for you.

'The way search has evolved, we're seeing engines that are focused on delivering tailored results or helping users to make decisions,' Silver said. 'Google is getting their toes wet by offering credit card comparisons at google.com/advisor, but I think we'll see something more powerful and comprehensive from Facebook. Facebook will be able to learn from your decisions and the decisions made by peers to better answer search questions and provide results that users want.'

Another way to think of Facebook search is to see it as a problem-solving engine, according to Ben Romberg, social media director at search marketing firm Tug Media. Zuckerberg's remarks 'suggest that search terms will relate to problem solving, or asking a wider audience as well as your friends to generate information: 'I'm looking to buy a new computer, anyone have any suggestions?'' Romberg said.

Bonding With Bing?

It's unclear whether Facebook would end its partnership with Microsoft, which has been using social data from Facebook to improve its search results (and thus differentiate its search results from Google's). Facebook could leverage Bing's head start in attacking Google's market share, but it may also view Microsoft as a competitor or see Bing as more a hindrance than an asset.

Microsoft itself seems not to have a bead on Facebook's direction. Even as it continues to tout Bing's partnership with Facebook, it continues to work on So.cl, a social search engine.

'Facebook would need a lot of time before its index would be big enough to provide a good service,' Henner said. 'Microsoft can't get the upper hand alone, and Facebook needs a little push forward before being able to compete with Google.'

Your Favorite Shows On Netflix? Not Anymore

Everyone has that mindless TV show they watch to unwind in the evening. Mine was Pawn Stars, the reality TV series hit about a family-run pawn shop. Then, last Friday, Netflix removed Pawn Stars from my life without warning. I ditched my TV back in college and I haven't been tempted to own one since... until now.

What happened? Netflix's right to broadcast A&E's 800 hours of content expired. While Pawn Stars still airs every Monday night on cable, I no longer have access to it because I'm one of those cord cutters who relies on Roku to watch my favorite shows via Netflix and Hulu. The show might come back if negotiations work out between the two media companies. Then again, it might not.

The sudden removal of Pawn Stars, along with A&E's entire catalog, is nothing new. In fact, things like this happen all the time. Earlier this year, for example, Netflix lost 8% of its content when its deal with Starz expired. The Starz shows, while horribly pixelated, comprised some of Netflix's best offerings including one of my favorite romantic movies, The Illusionist.

Netflix doesn't seem to have a problem with this. "A number of titles expired today, that is true, but we have titles coming on and off all the time," said Netflix spokesman Joris Evers on Friday to the Hollywood Reporter.

Evers casual acknowledgement of how unstable the relationships his business depends on really wouldn't be so insulting if I, as a paying customer, knew beforehand about titles being removed, or coming. I only had a couple episodes of Pawn Stars left to watch before I would have been caught up to the current season. If I had known the titles were being removed, I would have sat down and watched them all before the expiration date.

When I flopped down on my couch last Friday night all ready to hear Rick laughing at some ridiculous offer made by a customer before I went to bed, I was met with a significantly sparse Netflix page. At first I thought Netflix had been hacked. I had to seach Google News to find out what happened. To date, Netflix has yet to release an official statement on the deletion of 800 hours of content.

Netflix attracts customers like me by offering a catalog of worthwhile shows. If those shows can disappear at any moment, it fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship. Perhaps Netflix thinks its safe to add and drop content at the drop of a signature and keep customers in the dark about the resulting disruptions. After all, the company has few competitors. Frankly though, I'm ready take my business elsewhere.

Selasa, 25 September 2012

For Startups, Timing Trends Really Does Matter - Except When It Doesn't

To learn about the impact of properly timing a trend - or of missing one - we asked 8 successful young entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) for their experiences. And we also got their advice on how to perfectly time your business:

1. Missed Opportunities Open New Doors

It was 2011 when we started building a platform for social media. By then, Buddy Media had already raised over $90 million, Wildfire announced that they had over 10,000 customers, and companies like Vitrue and Involver were the industry titans. Some potential investors told us we were late to the party. However, in hindsight, and especially in light of all of the recent acquisitions of the aforementioned, I believe we had a core advantage to really plug into the 'second wave' of social, which has the potential to be even more disruptive than the first. We were able to speak to people who were already using a social media platform and figure out what needs still weren't being met. By staying small and nimble, we were able to quickly adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of social media. - Abby Ross, Blueye Creative

2. Revisit Past Failures

There's no lack of ideas that were 'before their time.' Many business models that failed in the early 2000s are now incredibly successful because now, the timing is right, the technology is here, and it's easier than ever before to achieve scale. As an example, my company SitePoint tried selling eBooks back in 2000 and no one bought into it. It was a complete and utter disaster and forced us to print and ship physical books ' which sold like hot cakes. The reason is simple, people were still getting used to the idea of shopping online, and paying for digital goods was still a foreign concept to many. Fast forward a few years, with the iTunes revolution, Kindle and iPad, and all of a sudden, eBook sales are trending sharply upward every year. - Matt Mickiewicz, Flippa and 99designs

3. Some Ideas Transcend Timing & Trends

Timing is everything ' if your idea is reliant on time. If you want to create a flash valuation or raise a certain amount of money quickly, then it's of utmost importance. And it's important for tech in general. But I believe that there are other ideas ' rooted in timeless truths ' that are not restricted to a certain epoch or Zeitgeist. If your idea is rooted in one of these things, then timing is far less important. If you're a social entrepreneur fighting for human dignity in a particular area, for example, then it's less critical whether you start today or tomorrow. My personal view is that I want to be involved with an organization that I believe will be important a thousand years from now. If I find an idea worthy of that standard, then I know it's rooted in something essential. - Luke Burgis, ActivPrayer

4. Timing Boosts Your Success Potential

Bad Idea + Wrong Time = Biggest Failure Ever. Bad Idea + Right Time = Total Failure. Good Idea + Wrong Time = Likely Failure. Good Idea + Right Time = Best Chance of Success. Timing is essential. A business can come to market before people are truly ready or after too many market leaders have established footing for you to truly get through the door, but in the end, I still think that a phenomenal idea that is well-executed can survive average or even poor timing. For example, last year, I would have said that the app Path was too late to the social media market, but the company has executed the business in such an amazing way that it no longer matters that it followed Twitter and Facebook. Path scratches an itch that those networks don't, and it does it so well that it is growing like crazy. - Shaun King, HopeMob

5. Start Your Own Trend

Timing is not everything. Some people get lucky but, over time, it is the ones who adhere to proven principles and have enough self-knowledge that continuously succeed. Trends come and go; change is constant. So, to paraphrase Gandhi, be the change you wish to see in the world. Great companies start trends and make movements ' they don't follow others, nor are they solely motivated by their greed to take advantage of fickle market whims. Believe in your own ideas, test your ideas, accept that you're going to fail sometimes ' or maybe a lot at first ' and do it all in your own authentic style. Too often we focus on trying to 'getting it right' within the context of others' point of view. Rather, we should strive to get it right within our own perspective. - Matthew Ackerson, PetoVera

6. Overnight Successes Don't Exist

It often takes longer than you expect for an idea to catch on. What that means is that when you're working on an idea and worried that it's 'too early,' you need to be patient. Grow slowly and conserve cash until the market is truly ready. Many of the best companies start out when only the earliest of adopters are ready for it; with the patience and dedication of learning from those customers, they become prepared for the bigger opportunity that eventually exists. The challenge is keeping your finances tight during that time and seizing every opportunity to grow and learn from the market. Then what you may have been working on for years will suddenly seem like it has the 'perfect timing.' - Jason Evanish, Greenhorn Connect

7. Timing Sure Does Help

I wouldnít say that timing is everything, but it certainly helps. I launched Money Crashers at the height of the recession and that certainly was to my benefit in the beginning. This is the way I look at it: If you launch a business based on a fading trend, youíre unlikely to succeed. For example, if you're looking to start a small business based on the 'daily deal website' business model, you may not have much luck. Some daily deal sites still exist, but many are struggling today. On the other hand, if you come up with a product or service that meets a need people didnít know they had, you can create your own market trend. One example of this is a website called Gradsave. With this website, you can create a way for family and friends to contribute to your child's 529 plan. - Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

8. Don't Depend On Timing

If you're depending on timing to ensure that your company is going to make money, you probably don't have a sustainable business model on your hands. Timing may help, in terms of getting ahead of the competition, but you need to be sure that you've got something that can do well even if the timing gets screwed up. There are exceptions, of course, but personally, I wouldn't want to run a business that is dependent on catching the wave of a particular fad. It's just not going to provide long-term growth. - Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Reputation Defense

A host of firms claim they can protect you and your brand from bad online reviews. But the best approach may be to get your fans to support your reputation for you.

Reputation management is gaining attention in Internet marketing, as brands worry that a disgruntled employee, a competitor or that one customer who caught your business on an off day now have the ability to lasting harm to your company's reputation.

Reputation defenders will do anything from passively monitoring social media to creating paid, positive reviews in order to counteract negative posts - and dominate the first page of search results. (For more insight on how the process works, see Brian Proffitt's post: Inside The Mysterious World Of Reputation Management.)

But Steve Goldner, head of social media marketing agencies MediaWhiz and Ryan Partnership, says he advises clients to avoid online-reputation companies. Instead, Goldner tells companies to focus on building a loyal customer base that will defend your brand - and always be prepared for the occasional PR crisis.

The Do-It-Yourself Approach

In many cases, individuals and small firms may be able to manage their reputations without hiring a firm. After author Emily Caprice Candler was arrested on prostitution charges, and her mug shot started pushing reviews and marketing links for her book down in search results, she reached out to reputation-defense companies. They quoted prices in excess of $5,000.

'I'm an individual, not a major company. That seemed extreme to me,' Candler said.

So, she did her own reputation defense, using the techniques described to her by the reputation defense companies she interviewed. One month later, Candler said, all but one of the problematic sites was gone from top search results.

She set up a LinkedIn page and other social-media profiles to dilute negative search results. She started a blog and issued a press release, then posted a video promoting her book on Vimeo. In some cases, she paid small fees - totaling less than $1,000 -to the mug-shot publishers to have her photos removed.

Don't Hate The Haters

Of course, you need to be cautious when addressing negative reviews and links. 'Our experience suggests that there is no cookie-cutter solution,' explains Steve Wyer of Reputation Advocate. 'We have yet to see this approach sustain the results that clients anticipate.'

Wyer's advice for businesses looking at negative reviews is to stay positive. In almost every instance, an aggressive rebuttal will look defensive. 'Our experience is that, in most cases, this approach only antagonizes the attacker and this, in fact, can escalate the online conversation, accusations and attacks.'

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

How Journalists Are Using Pinterest

[WizardRSS: unable to retrieve full-text content]

Pinterest is quickly finding its way into the social strategies of media organizations large and small, even as the company itself is still figuring out its business model. Here's how they're using the virtual scrapbooking service. (This is part two of a four-part series on how journalists are using social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter.)

For a publisher, Pinterest's chief advantages are twofold. First, it engages readers in a new context, one that is uniquely visual. It also turns out to have big potential in the traffic-driving department.

Senin, 24 September 2012

Why Aren't Entrepreneurs Developing Innovative Solutions For Renters?

There are some 40 million rental units in America today. And that segment is growing fast as more Americans choose to rent instead of own in a tepid real estate market. While some technology providers have come to the rescue of landlords and prospective tenants, much opportunity remains.

With home prices down 34% from their July 2006 peak, resulting in more than $16 trillion in vaporized household net worth, you can't blame Americans for wanting to move on with their lives. That typically means renting a home or apartment, as fewer Americans now believe that owning a home is better than renting, 63% today, down from 89% in 1996:.

That trend has fueled a rental market with the tightest demand in 10 years. Leading the U.S. rental market is the tech-heavy San Francisco Bay Area, with San Francisco rental prices up 15% and Oakland, Calif., up 11%, as of June 2012.

But tenants and landlords know that finding and renting a home or apartment is not a simple process. The finding part has been made easier with the emergence of Craigslist as the default mother of all U.S. rental listings. Yet the procedure of applying for a rental and getting your application approved remains arduous. Thankfully it's now being addressed by a few savvy technology providers.

Online Applications

Landlords of multi-unit apartment buildings or home properties can now use a service from Santa Barbara-Calif.-based RentApp. As its name implies, this online service is designed to simplify the rental application process. Once a free account has been set up, a landlord can create a rental application by selecting from a menu of customary items, such as financial information, pets, etc. RentApp makes money by collecting fees from screening tenants, which start at $10 per 'screen.'

Once an application has been created, prospective tenants are sent a link to fill out the online application and RentApp can collect application fees, if a landlord has been set up with credit-card processing (a cumbersome process that screams for a Square-like solution). Landlords who have applied for background checking can then automatically screen each tenant. But background- and credit-checking require an on-site visit by an Experian representative, yet another tedious complication.

The good news for prospective tenants is that there's no paperwork involved and applicants do not directly divulge social security numbers to landlords - adding an extra layer of security protection. Welcome to the 21st century!

Chicago-based startup RocketLease also offers online application creation, submission and screening, plus it lets landlords create an online property listing that applicants can use to review a rental offering and submit their application.

But when I tested their service I discovered that not only did RocketLease not actually have the iPhone app portrayed on its home page, it also prominently displays a landlord's email address on its listing pages, which could lead to spamming. RocketLease has assured me that it will begin cloaking email addresses this week.

Digital Leases

Moreover, no existing service - and that includes other new-age outfits like E-Renter, which handles tenant screening but offers no online application submission service - lets one manage the entire rental process, in particular lease creation, submission and signing, plus rental payments.

To create a lease, many National Association of Realtors NAR agents rely on services like zipLogix, which is able to generate PDFs that must be filled out by hand, i.e. non-fillable PDF forms. But this service is not available to individual parties. Popular legal services, such as Nolo or Rocket Lawyer, offer leases that can be tailored to each landlord's state - but none offers online fillable lease services.

Once a lease has been laboriously created, you can have it electronically signed by using Adobe's EchoSign, which requires that each signatory field is manually specified. (Competitors to EchoSign include DocuSign and many others.) For rent payment collection, landlords have to rely on yet another service, like PayYourRent: or RentPayment.

Overwhelmed yet? Now you know why I agree with Sequoia Venture Capitalist Jim Goetz that it's shocking to see how few entrepreneurs really focus on building products for businesses.

Considering that there are 40 million rentals and 223 million computers users in the U.S. with no easy way of applying and qualifying for rentals, you can't blame me for ranting against the lack of common-sense application development in America. While there are certainly outfits addressing the rental market with tech-based solutions, my experience suggests that the playing field falls far short of what's needed.

As a landlord you should not have to visit half a dozen sites to get a unit leased. Rental apps should be downloadable to a tenant's mobile phone, filled in and signed directly from wherever they are. I know that day will come but it's not here yet.

Submit your ideas to help revolutionize our software industry at our ideation engine and here's hoping that your next rental experience is a seamless one.

Guest author and public speaker Michael Tchong is the founder of Social Revolution, a San Francisco-based change agency, which seeks to transform the future through innovation and reinvention. Michael also founded four other startups, including MacWEEK and ICONOCAST, and authored Social Engagement Marketing, an easy-to-navigate guide to the world of social media. You can read his earlier ReadWriteWeb posts here.

Do You Really Want to Subscribe to Microsoft Office? Yes, You Might

For the first time this fall, consumers will have the choice between subscribing to Microsoft Office as a service - Office 365 - or buying a traditional license for the productivity software. The decision isn't simple: you'll pay less upfront for a subscription, but you may be allowing Microsoft's hand in your pocket for the rest of your days. for the rest of your days.

Consumers who want to upgrade their Microsoft Office software this fall have to ask themselves a hard question: "Do I want to subscribe to Office like I would a magazine - or continue to buy it like a book?"

If you want to subscribe, Microsoft is more than willing to help you out. For the first time, consumers will be able to buy an Office 365 subscription, paying for either a home or small business edition of Office for a one-time annual fee that covers five PCs or Macs. And you could end up paying just $1.66 per device per month for a continually updated piece of software.

If at any point down the road you decide not to pay anymore, however, Office goes away. And for the customer who's not all that convinced that Microsoft offers compelling reasons to upgrade from generation to generation of Office, that might be the best bet. Instead, you can buy the traditional 'packaged' copy of Office, trading a higher up-front price for a perpetual license.

And, this time around, there's a third aoption: if you buy a Windows RT tablet, Microsoft will throw in the core Office apps - Word, PowerPoint, Excel and the oft-overlooked OneNote - for free.

It's a decision that consumers should start thinking about, with the launch of Windows 8 due in a month's time. Microsoft hasn't said when the final version Office will be available, but users can download the preview version from Microsoft's website.

The Pricing Puzzle

Microsoft is offering three versions of the traditional Office suite: Home & Student ($139.99), Home & Business ($219.99), and Professional ($399.99). Each version can be licensed by either one Mac or PC, forever, except for the Professional version. That's PC-only.

On Office 365, Microsoft is offering two versions: Home Premium ($99.99 per household per year) and Small Business Premium ($149.99 per user per year). Note the italicized terms, as they're significant. Each household that buys Office 365 Home Premium can install it on some combination of 5 Macs and PCs - that's where the $1.66 per month per device figure is taken from. Small businesses pay by user - that's just under $300 per year for two, and on up from there.

The average consumer, then, will probably choose between either Office Home & Student, Office Home & Business and the Office 365 Home Premium subscription.

To Wes Miller, who covers Office for Directions on Microsoft, consumers will have to ask themselves three questions:

How often do you upgrade your version of Office?
How many machines will you buy it on?
And will you buy a Windows RT machine?

For enterprises, these aren't trivial questions; Directions holds a two-day 'boot camp' on Microsoft's Software Assurance, which provides many of the same benefits as Office 365, including automatic, free version upgrades and multiple languages.

For a single user with a single PC, the answer is pretty simple: unless you want that quick-and-easy upgrade path that Office 365 offers, choosing between Office Home & Student and Home & Business is the only decision necessary. Basically, the difference is Outlook: Home & Business has it, Home & Student doesn't. If Outlook is worth an additional $80, you're done.

Adding more devices to the mix, plus Office 365, complicates things. On the other end of the spectrum, a household with five Macs and PCs (and that needs Office on all of them) will pay about a total of $700 for Office Home & Student installed on all five devices. That's $200 more than a five-year Office 365 Home Premium license, which covers those five PCs. Here, Office 365 is probably the way to go, from a financial sense.

If you're somewhat in the middle - with three devices, say - features may help sway your decision. Three office Home & Student licenses will cost about $420, a little more than a four-year Office Premium license. Three Office Home & Business installations will cost you $660.

And why is that $660 figure important? Because Office 365 gives you Outlook and Publisher and Access for free. Microsoft is so eager to push you toward subscriptions that it is pricing them more cheaply than the Home and Business version, and tossing in the two extra applications on top of that. Again, that's Microsoft pushing you toward the subscription model.

Office 365 also offers a number of conveniences, including 'Office on Demand,' or the ability to stream a virtual version of Office to a PC you're borrowing or don't actually own. And documents are automatically saved to Microsoft's cloud storage, SkyDrive, which you can also access on virtually any Internet-connected device, including mobile phones. For that matter, Office 365 will eventually land on mobile devices as well, although Microsoft hasn't said when.

What Subscriptions Mean for Microsoft?

Why is Microsoft pushing subscriptions? Wall Street.

'We're seeing all signs pointing toward Microsoft's subscriptions not only trying to look but be more appealing outright to consumers than buying an outright software package,' Directions on Microsoft's Miller said.

Instead of the spike-then-decline, spike-then-decline buying patterns that accompany new product launches, a recurring revenue model offers Microsoft a more consistent revenue stream. More importantly, it also gently reinforces the notion of paying for Office as a service, Miller said, rather than as a product, ingraining the habit among consumers.

'It makes for nice, flat-to-gaining revenue year over year, recurring, and it makes the business run more efficiently,' Miller said. 'It's definitely in Microsoft's best interest.'

That's different of course, from the question of whether it's in your best interest.

For Microsoft though, its critical to find out how many people will sign on to the new Office 365 model, and how many will still want the comfort of a perpetual license to avoid having to keep shelling out for Office - albeit with the latest upgrades - for the rest of their lives. A user who may have been turned off by the new 'ribbon' design, for example, may prefer to hold on to his older copy of Office and just use that. According to Miller, Office 2013 is one of the more compelling upgrades, with integrated SkyDrive backups as one of the killer features of the software.

In fact, look to the number of Office 365 subscriptions being one of the questions that will interest Wall Street most in the quarters following the product's launch. For along with magazine subscriptions, cell phone contracts, antimalware licenses and hosted storage, more and more companies are trying to convince you to pay them regularly, and forever for all kinds of software. Microsoft just wants in on the gravy train.

ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch: Video Game Consoles

Modern game consoles are much more powerful than yesterday's Pong-pads, but their setup and business model remain virtually identical to the Ataris and Colecovisions of yore. But all of that's about to change - this coming generation of game consoles will be the last to resemble anything you remember.

The Basics

In 1972, television maker Magnavox introduced the Odyssey gaming system for just under $100. It lacked sound and color, and relied on primitive plastic screen overlays to display backgrounds, but it ushered in a Golden Age. Five years later, Atari released the 2600, which IGN called ''the console that our entire industry is built upon.'' The Atari 2600 popularized game consoles, making the home gaming industry a multibillion dollar industry almost overnight. By 1982, the Atari 2600 was generating $2 billion in yearly revenue, with the competing with Colecovision and Intellivision systems also performing well.

Perhaps inevitably, the boom made publishers sloppy, and game quality started to slip. Lousy games, overproduction, a tight economy and heavy competition from PC gamess combined to derail the console industry in the infamous Video Game Crash of 1983. Two years later, Japan revitalized the industry with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The NES (IGN's #1 console of all time) offered more polished graphics and sound, more versatile controllers and much more quality control than previous systems. The public ate it up, and the gaming industry has bought tens of millions of consoles and hundreds of millions of games ever since.

The console business model hasn't changed since. Every 5-7 years, hardware vendors release new, dramatically more powerful dedicated gaming systems. The vendors subsidize these consoles, breaking even or losing money on each sale, in order to gain wider distribution than competitors. Over time, they turn a profit through a handful of 'must-have' in-house titles and licensing fees from third-party publishers. The market supports two-to-three major players at any one time, and Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have ruled the roost since 2001.

The Problem

Nobody's really happy with the current console scene. Consumers worry about backwards compatibility and format wars, so sometimes wait for years to buy new systems. Microsoft and Sony worry about selling enough titles to justify their hardware costs. Publishers spend way too much money for the tools and rights to produce games for multiple platforms. Samsung and Apple want in on the action. Something has to change.

There are plenty of industry experts who feel the console era is over, but most of them attribute that to one particular threat or another. To Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, that threat is the trend toward casual gaming. To Sony/GaiKai's David Perry, it's cloud-based games replacing consoles. The truth is a bit of everything.

Let's start with Yerli's point about casual gaming. A 2011 ESA study revealed some interesting statistics:

55% of gamers play games on their phones or handheld devices
Puzzle, board games, game shows, trivia and card games represent 47% of the total market, while action, sports, strategy, and role-playing games (the bread-and-butter of console gaming) account for only 21%
Non-traditional formats (downloadable games, digital add-ons, in-game purchases, mobile games, etc.) accounted for $5.4 billion in 2009 and $5.8 billion in 2010

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Console hit Call of Duty still generated several times the revenue of Angry Birds in 2011. But Angry Birds cost much less to make and distribute. That's one reason game publishers aim to widen their scope beyond hardcore gamers.

Cloud gaming, meanwhile, is already a big enough threat to convince Sony to buy in for $380 million. Latency on all but the fastest connections makes cloud gaming a non-starter for hardcore games right now, but by the time we're ready for a Playstation 5 in 2020, that barrier will likely be history.

The Prognosis

By the time the XBox 720 and its ilk have worn out their welcome, we'll have seen a complete shift in the way we buy our games, and how we think about the hardware that plays them.

1. Death Of The Discs The company that invented the Blu-Ray considered dumping it from the Playstation 4. That's a pretty good sign that version 5 won't have an optical drive. Physical media will go away, for good reasons. Discs are easy to lose, difficult for publishers to regulate, and ' most important ' easy to resell. Resold software generates nothing for publishers that would like nothing better than to make every player a customer.

2. Free-to-Play Goes Hardcore If discless consoles shut out rentals and resales, something needs to fill the void for the try-before-you-buy crowd. Enter Free-to-Play (F2P), the payment model that already dominates social gaming and Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). A model that provides a baseline tier of free services (or in Ouya's case, a set of several free levels) could expose new games to millions of new customers and dramatically reduce buyer's remorse. We're already seeing in-game purchases generate serious money in hardcore games, and that trend will only grow.

But Free-to-Play has a major downside. It destroys the current model of hardware subsidies paid back by large, up-front game costs. Without a guaranteed subsidy, every system sold will have to pay for itself. That means either dramatically higher up-front costs or dramatically less complex hardware.

Raising prices too high would lock out families and teens, and invite competition with more versatile and upgradable PCs. Dumbing down the box would work fine for cloud gaming, but high-end local processing would suffer. Expect to see a fragmentation in hardware offerings to meet these needs, and don't expect the Big Three to keep making all the hardware themselves.

3. 'Playstation' Becomes A Spec. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft will continue to cut deals with cable companies, set-top-box providers (including Apple), and television manufacturers to embed special gaming processors in their devices. We might even see hardware tiers. For example, an Apple TV might be 'Wii Streaming Certified,' but the latest Nintendo fighting game might require a compliant PC, or a box with more oomph. This would leave plenty of room for everyone in the ecosystem to sell different combinations of hardware and bandwidth, and where there's potential profit, there's industry excitement.

Look for Sony to try to beef up its TVs with exclusive Playstation content, while Microsoft inks deals with everyone else. In the words of Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe, the Big Three become 'more like movie studios for video games.'

4. Tablets Are The New Consoles If you're going to build a seamless, cross-platform entertainment system, you might as well go all the way. Android will be a major gaming platform, with or without the Big Three, even if Ouya fails. Microsoft's SmartGlass is already hinting at where this trend is going. By 2020 it wouldn't be surprising if the remaining video game titans all had proprietary virtual machines running on Android that would stream each company's cloud gaming service and allow at least some level of local execution for downloadable games.

Can This Technology Be Saved?

The Crash of 1983 wiped console companies off the map, but that was an extinction event. This is an evolution, and all the players see it coming (Microsoft more than the others). Today's gaming giants are resilient, and they'll adapt. It may be possible that the Big Three or their minions will continue to offer a higher-cost hardware bundle - much like Microsoft plans to sell the Surface as a flagship product -but given the economic direction of the industry, innovation is more likely to manifest in a novel controller or a software layer that could be used by multiple hardware and OS configurations. In 2020, your TV may very well be your console.

Previous Technology DeathWatches

Blu-Ray

QR Codes

Company Deathwatches

For an update on our baker's dozen of company Deathwatches, check out ReadWriteWeb DeathWath Update: The Unlucky 13.

Minggu, 23 September 2012

Weekly Wrap-Up: BitTorrent Booming, Social Books, Smart Traveling Without A Smart Phone

File sharing lives on despite multiple attempts to terminate with extreme prejudice, how the Web is affecting just about everything we do with books, and the benefits of traveling overseas without a smartphone. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

BitTorrent Downloads Booming - And Benefitting Musicians

A new report from UK analytics firm Musicmetric pegged the U.S. as the world's leading downloader of music via BitTorrent. It's the stuff of Recording Industry Association of America nightmares: Despite industry efforts to shut down BitTorrent tracker sites, the frenzy of file sharing continues. And - surprise! - recording artists are embracing illegal downloads as just another way to do business. BitTorrent Downloads Booming - And Benefitting Musicians.

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

Want to have this wrap up delivered to you automagically? Subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email.

Minggu, 30 September 2012

My Week With Android, Or Why I'm Buying An iPhone 5

More Top Posts:

Apple Riot Aftermath: iPhone 5 Factory Remains A Powder Keg

How To Buy A Smartphone: Which Is Better, Android or iPhone?

Why I Love Apple's Facebook Integration

Apology Accepted, Apple. Now Get To Work, Google.

Facebook's Next Privacy Issue & How To Opt Out

The Flipside Of BitTorrent - Why Many Musicians Still Hate It

5 Reasons Steve Jobs Would Have Liked His New Statue

For Startups, Timing Trends Really Does Matter - Except When It Doesn't

The Key To Social Network Success: Rip Off Pinterest?

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up

Sabtu, 29 September 2012

Three Obstacles

Resource Management

Assessing Possible

Jumat, 28 September 2012

Mentorship

Education

Needs

See also: How Journalists Are Using Google+

Kamis, 27 September 2012

Pay-For-Play Or Overzealous Algorithm?

Advertisers Get Some Preferential Treatment

(For more on Wikipedia controversies, see Why Wikipedia Doesn't Belong In The Classroom and Why Wikipedia Does Belong In The Classroom.)

The Pitch Of Gibraltar

Money? Yes. Scandal? No.

The Benefits Of Being Famous

Every Which Way But Loose

Is Your Startup A "Winner"?

Make Sure The Stars Align

Rabu, 26 September 2012

The Evolution Of The Comment Card

Big Data Tools Work For Small Data, Too

Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS)

Can Big Data Work For Every Business?

Facebook As A Decision Engine

Bonding With Bing?

Selasa, 25 September 2012

1. Missed Opportunities Open New Doors

2. Revisit Past Failures

3. Some Ideas Transcend Timing & Trends

4. Timing Boosts Your Success Potential

5. Start Your Own Trend

6. Overnight Successes Don't Exist

7. Timing Sure Does Help

8. Don't Depend On Timing

The Do-It-Yourself Approach

Don't Hate The Haters

See also: How Journalists Are Using Instagram

Senin, 24 September 2012

Online Applications

Digital Leases

The Pricing Puzzle

What Subscriptions Mean for Microsoft?

Why is Microsoft pushing subscriptions? Wall Street.

The Basics

The Problem

The Prognosis

Can This Technology Be Saved?

Previous Technology DeathWatches

Company Deathwatches

Minggu, 23 September 2012

BitTorrent Downloads Booming - And Benefitting Musicians

More Top Posts:

The Social Library: How Public Libraries Are Using Social Media

Smart Traveling Without A Smartphone

How The Big Six Book Publishers Are Using Social Media

Why Wikipedia Does Belong in the Classroom

Update: Microsoft Patches Internet Explorer Security Bug That Could Have Affected Millions

Finding The Perfect Startup Co-Founder

15 YouTube Videos That Changed The World

Facebook's 2012 Slide Looks A Lot Like MySpace's 2008 Demise

Apple's iOS 6 Maps App Falls Short In Early Reviews

Subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up