Sabtu, 30 Juni 2012
ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch: Barnes & Noble
The Basics
Barnes & Noble was the king of the book superstore. In the early 1990s, the company revolutionized the book industry by going big, wiping out the little guys with economies of scale. At the end of the decade, as Amazon lured users with its online logistics edge, Barnes & Noble clawed back to a strong second spot with streamlined operations and an online push.
And when e-readers hit the market, Barnes & Noble had the foresight to launch its own device, the Nook, while its closest competitor, Borders, sold third-party devices. The decision worked for Barnes & Noble, which built the Nook into a nearly $2 billion business, while Borders has stumbled into bankruptcy.
In April 2012, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft entered into an agreement to create 'Newco,' a Nook-centric company that would combine educational and digital business lines, and create new, complementary products. Microsoft reportedly paid more than $300 million up front for a 17.6% stake, pledging an additional $300 million over time.
The Problem
Barnes & Noble is a one-trick pony in an industry full of device, platform and content convergence. For the most part, Barnes & Noble has remained a bookseller, and that narrow focus has relegated the former goliath to a bit player.
Microsoft's infusion of cash into 'NewCo' after yet another quarterly loss has helped the company deal with amped-up competition from the Kindle Fire and other e-readers. Still, like another prominent Number Two player, Barnes & Noble's financial woes have forced the company into an unbalanced relationship with its Seattle benefactor. Microsoft gets a physical presence and access to the growing educational market ' a traditional Apple stronghold. Barnes & Noble almost certainly gets pressured to build a low-margin Windows-based Nook, so Microsoft has something to compete with the Kindle Fire and the new Google Nexus 7 tablets.
Physical bookstores are dying, and content sales are becoming more device-dependent. Google and Amazon have deep enough pockets to aggressively market loss-leading tablets. Barnes & Noble doesn't. Microsoft does, but who knows if it will cut its losses and run if the going gets rough - or if it decides to focus on Windows tablets like the Surface. For Microsoft, the education market is just a nice-to-have. Barnes & Noble doesn't have that luxury.
The Players
Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch gets digital retail. He's run e-commerce for Palm, Gifts.com and HSN.com, and unlike the Riggio brothers (Founder and Chairman Leonard and Vice Chair and former CEO Steve), Lynch isn't hamstrung by an emotional attachment to paper books. He also understands the opportunities of Barnes & Noble's physical stores, like linking book reviews into Nooks via NFC chips. He has a rough road ahead, but Lynch may be Barnes & Noble's greatest asset.
The Prognosis
The Nook, as an entertainment and collaboration device, is not on par with competitive tablets. That may be fine for consumers who just want to read e-books, but over time it's likely to lose out to inexpensive yet full-fledged tablets. With Newco, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft might have a shot at capturing a solid chunk of the nascent educational e-book market, but they'll have to demonstrate success relatively quickly or Microsoft could decide the push isn't worth the effort. Barnes & Noble may not fold anytime soon, but it's on a path toward increasing irrelevance.
Can This Company Be Saved?
Absolutely, but it's going to take a lot of work and a bunch of luck. Google's new tablet will hurt Nook's direct sales, and Barnes & Noble will need to find new ways to get users into its ecosystem - for example, aggressive bundling of devices with textbooks. The company's future may boil down to how much help Microsoft chooses to give. If the Surface and other products promote the Nook store, and if Microsoft cuts a licensing deal for low-cost Nook devices with the power to challenge Google, Barnes & Noble has a decent shot at long-term survival. If the competition gets ugly and Microsoft cuts and runs, as it has before, Barnes & Noble will likely fade away. Even if Lynch plays all his cards right, he might still lose the game.
DeathWatch Victims So Far
Research In Motion: Things are hurtling downhill even faster than expected. Massive losses - more than 11 times worse than expected - and new delays in its Hail Mary BlackBerry 10 operating system update have made the company's dire situation even harder to ignore.
HP: No change in status
Nokia: No change in status
38 Studios: No change in status
U.S. Trying to Extradite Brit for Sharing Links
In 2007 when O'Dwyer was 19, he created TVShack.net, a small website frequented mostly by Brits which acted as a crowd-sourced search engine for film, documentary and TV show content found on the Web. Users would post links to the content, some of which was illegally uploaded to the Internet, but the site itself did not host any videos; it was more of a forum like Reddit than a video platform like YouTube.
When sent a takedown notice for linking to copyrighted material over the three years the site was active, O'Dwyer said he deleted the offending post. That wasn't good enough because in 2010, when O'Dwyer was 22, he was arrested in his Sheffield Hallam University dorm room by two local police officers, and two Immigration and Customs agents from the United States. O'Dwyer was charged with copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
The U.S. deemed the $220,000 O'Dwyer made from advertising revenue on TVShack illegal and is currently trying to extradite him to the U.S., where he could receive a sentence of 10 years in a maximum security prison. In comparison, O'Dwyer's case was investigated by British authorities and dropped, as linking to content is not illegal in the U.K. and is considered protected by free speech.
In an op-ed in The Guardian, Wikipedia founder Wales called O'Dwyer the 'human face' in the battle of big content producers versus the general public. Unfortunately, O'Dwyer is the example Hollywood seeks to make in its fight against online piracy, even if its chosen example didn't pirate any content in the first place.
Visiting TVShack.net today reveals the domain has been seized by the U.S., and the site now automatically redirects to an anti-pirating spot emphasizing lost jobs due to content piracy. However, the allegory in the YouTube video - of a man giving away DVDs for free on the street - doesn't fit O'Dwyer's alleged crime: While O'Dwyer's website revealed the location of content which may or may not have been uploaded illegally, he didn't actually hand out pirated content to users for free.
This fact has not been lost on the #SaveRichard campaign, an online campaign seeking to stop O'Dwyer's extradition to the U.S. started by O'Dwyer's mother Julia, a nurse to terminally ill children. Wales threw his support behind the campaign on June 24, in the form of an Op-Ed urging readers to sign a change.org petition, which at press time had 170,000 signatures.
Joining Wales in supporting the #SaveRichard campaign is the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, which called the whole thing 'absurd'; Irish comedian and writer Graham Linehan, who called the case 'blood boiling' on Twitter; British Labor Party politician Keith Vaz; Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron, who called the affair 'ludicrous'; and Labor MP Tom Watson, among others.
As U.K. resident Mrs Fong pointed out on Twitter in the wee hours of June 25, 'If we go down this road, we could in theory extradite almost every U.K. citizen for laws broken in other countries around the world.'
Jumat, 29 Juni 2012
Pinterest: The Next Social Frontier for Music
Just as early-adopter bands and artists flocked to Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, some are experimenting with visual bookmarking on Pinterest. Conventions are emerging as those brave enough to dive in head-first experiment with different approaches.
The most obvious way musicians are using Pinterest is as a collection of visual artifacts from across the Web. This includes everything from photos of recent gigs, artists they admire or gear they love playing with to visual art that matches their music. This approach is akin to the way bands have used Tumblr.
Alanis Morissette uses Pinterest both as a promotional vehicle for her own work and as a way to connect with fans in a more meaningful way. That includes not only a scrapbook of personal photos but also a pinboard dedicated to sharing favorite quotes and a board titled "Alanis Recommends" containing mostly self-help books. These features add a personal flavor to her social media presence, something Pinterest is uniquely positioned to help facilitate.
Beyond Pictures: Sound and Video
Despite its roots, Pinterest is no longer just about imagery. It also happens to be a good way to share sounds and videos, a fact that makes it increasingly appealing to musicians looking to promote their work. Music videos from sources like YouTube, Vimeo and others can be embedded directly into Pinterest pages and, not unlike Twitter or Tumblr, can be "repinned" by others, creating the potential for content to go viral.
Last week, the site officially integrated with SoundCloud, a partnership that makes Pinterest an even more natural fit for bands and musicians. Until now, the most effective way to share a song on Pinterest was to pin a YouTube video containing the track. This new feature simplifies things a bit and provides an additional avenue for distributing audio files.
Yoko Ono was quick to take advantage of SoundCloud support. The artist and wife of the late John Lennon uses the feature to embed new songs as well as audio clips from radio appearances. The "SoundCloud" board on Ono's account includes everything from music recorded with her late husband to a recent episode of a radio program on which Ono appeared with her son Sean Lennon. Her Pinterest account also serves as a home to past visual art projects, writings and activism-related links.
Music outlets like The Fader, HypeBot, VH1 and MTV have also jumped on the Pinterest stage. Record labels are also using the service to promote artists and new releases. Many labels create boards specific to popular artists in their roster, effectively giving those artists a semi-official presence on the site without requiring them to manage it. This approach offers less opportunity for deep engagement with fans, but it's a start.
Success Is Hard to Measure
As popular as Pinterest is becoming generally, for musicians it's still a realm of early adopters. Relatively few artists have official accounts on the site. Even Amanda Palmer, who is often noted for effective use of Twitter and other social platforms, hasn't pinned anything.
How can an artist know whether Pinterest is paying off? Success can be difficult to gauge. Certainly, artists with a large following on Pinterest should expect to see an increase in video views, listens and click-throughs to related media and articles. For smaller acts, the payoff may not be as dramatic at first. In either case, metrics don't exist that would help artists and managers determine the effectiveness of a particular strategy. Did pinning those new tracks from SoundCloud help get them heard by more people? Maybe, but neither SoundCloud nor Pinterest offers analytics granular enough to know for sure.
Pinterest doesn't yet have a huge community of bands and musicians, but features like SoundCloud integration will likely encourage more to take advantage of the service. What it does have is a sizable - and growing - user base, something artists would be wise to tap into early.
Out Of Nowhere, TripAdvisor Becomes One of Facebook's Biggest Apps
The growth has been particularly rapid this past week. According to AppData, TripAdvisor's Facebook app was the top gainer across Facebook last week with 6.2 million new MAU. That's a 25% gain in just one week.
TripAdvisor is one of my favorite travel websites. I use it to choose hotels, before I travel. That's because it has a vast database of user-generated hotel reviews and its ranking system is slick and dependable. Also, unlike Orbitz, TripAdvisor doesn't penalize me for using a Mac.
TripAdvisor released its first Facebook app back in June 2007, called "Cities I've Visited." This is the very same app that now attracts 31 million monthly active users, although now it's simply called TripAdvisor (a separate app called Cities I've Visited still shows up in Facebook's search, but it re-directs to the TripAdvisor app). TripAdvisor integrates onto your Facebook Timeline and automatically shares your activity.
Is the user growth related to TripAdvisor's "Instant Personalization" feature, which it introduced in 2010 as an official partner of Facebook? Instant Personalization means that TripAdvisor uses Facebook data that you've made public - such as your name, profile picture, gender and networks - to serve you a personalized experience. The key is it doesn't require your permission to do this. Even if you don't have a TripAdvisor account, if you are logged into Facebook then you will see reviews from your friends and other "personalized" information on TripAdvisor.com. There are seven other companies in the Instant Personalization program, including local reviews site Yelp and Microsoft's Bing search engine.
While this shows that TripAdvisor is a close partner of Facebook, Instant Personalization doesn't explain the sudden ramp up of TripAdvisor's Facebook app. Neither does a new app it released last week, called Local Picks. That app, which provides dining recommendations, is TripAdvisor's second on Facebook. But it's a separate app and so it doesn't impact the statistics of the TripAdvisor Facebook app.
So what is (literally) up with TripAdvisor's Facebook app? InsideFacebook suggests it is "due in part to a Facebook Sponsored Stories campaign to re-engage users." In other words, TripAdvisor has been advertising on Facebook. If this is the main reason for TripAdvisor's jump on Facebook, then it must be considered an amazing return on investment!
It may also be that it's summer in the U.S. and Europe, so people are using TripAdvisor more and socializing their travel on its Facebook app.
We're going to have to appeal to the wisdom of the crowds on this one. Let us know in the comments what you think has caused TripAdvisor to suddenly become one of the most popular apps on Facebook!
Why You Can't Escape Social Media Marketing Any More
If you're using HootSuite, you now have access to post to photo-sharing app Instagram, presentation-focused SlideShare, document-focused edocr, and engagement app Zuum.
Social Media Arms Race
The addition of the new networks gives HootSuite more ammunition in its ongoing battle with similar platforms like TweetDeck and Seesmic. But for Mark Holder, HootSuite's director of integration programs, it's not about some sort of arms race for social media channels, which he calls 'apps.'
'I wouldn't say that it's about who has the most apps,' Holder told me. 'Of course you need to have the core important apps in there ' Twitter, Facebook and the like - but for us, it's about helping our users better engage with social media for their business.'
Social Media Marketing Is Big Business
Social media marketing is no longer a trivial business. HootSuite has a reported 4+ million users who monitor and contribute to multiple social media services. Inbound marketing, which is the business-friendly term for using social media as a marketing tool, has become a standard element of almost all business marketing plans.
Inbound marketing is no small potatoes, either. Some experts recommend that every business should allot some $115,000 to $200,000 annually just to social media management. With all of that money floating around, it's little wonder that software vendors are fighting to dominate this market.
One Network Still Missing
This business focus might be a reason why there's one particularly noticeable absence from the HootSuite collection of apps: Google Plus. Although HootSuite has been integrated with Google Plus Pages since last November, users still don't have the capability to manage general Google Plus accounts from HootSuite.
It's a line of thought that Holder doesn't agree with, insisting that Google Plus is on the HootSuite map.
'We're currently working with their teams to intregrate Google Plus,' Holder said. 'We just can't provide a certain date.'
Where Will the Marketers Head Next?
If anything, the decision to include Google Plus Pages before standard Google Plus accounts makes sense, since it is businesses and power social media mavens who typically use Pages within Google's social platform. It confirms that HootSuite's focus, and indeed the focus of many social media software firms, is right where the money is.
If that's the case, then look out for more marketing efforts on Instagram, SlideShare and the rest of the apps in HootSuite's collection. If HootSuite is reading the social media tea leaves right, those services are where the inbound marketers are heading next.
Kamis, 28 Juni 2012
Top 10 Tech Moguls Who Could be James Bond Super Villains
No, the uber nerds we really want to emulate are the guys with awesome technical chops and even more awesome lifestyles. The goal is to work hard and play even harder - to create great stuff and make big bucks while driving a Ferrari to work and dating supermodels in the evening.
Think it can't be done? These 10 super geeks are doing the things we wish we were doing instead!
Google Play: Developers Make More From In-App Purchases Than App Sales
Google Play engineering director Brad Yerga disclosed the news in an afternoon session here at Google I/O, where Google announced it had surpassed 20 billion app downloads in total at its morning keynote. All told, there are more than 600,000 apps on the Play Store, with more than 1.5 billion downloads per month. Those figures still lag Apple, which claims that of the 650,000 separate apps included in its own app store, users have downloaded 30 billion.
Google announced the Google Play brand last year, which encompasses both its app store, e-books, music, and movies. Google's Android platform is also the world's largest in terms of smartphone market share, giving Play a proportionally large share of the world's consumers.
Although the United States still represents the largest market for Google Play app downloads, more and more overseas customers are downloading apps as Android aggressively expands overseas. About 67 percent of Google Play revenue comes from overseas markets, Yerga said; besides the United States, the largest Play markets are Japan, Korea, Germany, than France, he said.
From April 2011 through April 2012, app revenue from Japan and Korea increased fourteen-fold, he said. To drive this further, Google announced a new version of its app development console, which taps into Google Translate to automatically translate the description and name of an app into a foreign language, like Korean.
Part of the reason for Google Play's international success has been embracing foreign purchasing customs. For example, customers in Japan and Korea virtually demand the ability to purchase real-world items from their phones, Yerga said.
But the real moneymaker, Yerga said, has been the "almost magic combination of carrier billing and in-app billing," Yerga said, that has appealed on an international level.
"This has baen a huge breakout for Google Play, for developers, but users have embraced it as well," Yerga said of the in-app purchase option.
Simply adding in-app purchases to the API has allowed developers to develop creative ways of monetizing their games, Yerga said, allowing so-called "freemium" and "paymium" models to succeed. For example, developer TinyCo., developer of "Tiny Village," said that Android delivered the most revenue per user of any app store, as users downloaded the free app, then purchased virtual items.
Another developer has begun offering a one-time, discounted upgrade to the full version of the app after the user plays a demonstration version for 30 minutes or so. And developers like FarSight Studios have released "DLC packs" of new pinball tables for their app, Pinball Arcade.
The next chapter of Google Play's app monetization story will be subscriptions, allowing users to automatically charge their credit card for additional or supplemental content. "No matter what the game, you can still get the benefits of a subscription," Yerga said,
Apple has offered in-app subscriptions since February 2011.
Rabu, 27 Juni 2012
Top 10 Geeks We Envy
No, the uber nerds we really want to emulate are the guys with awesome technical chops and even more awesome lifestyles. The goal is to work hard and play even harder - to create great stuff and make big bucks while driving a Ferrari to work and dating supermodels in the evening.
Think it can't be done? These 10 super geeks are doing the things we wish we were doing instead!
Microsoft: The Method to Its New Meanness
When Microsoft developed the Surface tablet, it did so in Apple-like secrecy ' outdoing Apple, for once, at that particular game. It's been clear for years that Microsoft wanted its software on a tablet, but hardly anyone expected a tablet designed and manufactured under the company's own brand. Even the hardware manufacturers, which have devotedly churned out machines running Windows for decades, claimed they were in the dark.
Those manufacturing partners must have been especially surprised by the revelation that Microsoft would be manufacturing its Surface tablet ' or more likely, contracting the manufacturing to Pegatron, a Taiwan-based company that also manufactures Apple iPads. Surface tablets will be branded with the Microsoft name and sold through Microsoft's site or in stores owned by Microsoft. This is exactly what Dell, HP and others didn't want to hear from Microsoft right now.
Just as surprised are the millions of owners of devices running Windows Phone 7, the mobile operating software Microsoft launched in late 2010. When Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8 last week ' again, to positive reviews - those early Windows Phone adopters discovered they will need to buy a new phone if they want to run Windows Phone 8. Their old OS will get an upgrade to a new version of Windows Phone 7, but it's likely to leave out a lot of version 8's best features.
Software developers, however, won't have as much trouble with the move from Windows Phone 7 to version 8. Not only will apps already written for existing phones run on Windows Phone 8, but the same software kernel will be used for tablets, PCs and smartphones. Windows 8 was conceived with developers in mind, given their importance in attracting new consumers. Older consumers, however, don't seem so important.
For PCs, Windows 8 will run on many machines that currently run Windows 7, but anyone who bought their Windows PC before June 2 will have to pay the full price for the OS, likely to be $199 if previous versions of Windows are any indication. Those who waited until after June 2 to buy a Windows PC will pay only $14.99. If you bought your Windows PC more than three weeks ago, you're also out in the cold.
Many of the companies and consumers Microsoft is treating so cavalierly are ones who have been loyal to the company and its operating software even as PC sales have struggled. But that's the problem: Windows revenue has been growing around 0.4% at an annual rate. At Apple, iPad revenue has been growing 132%.
To get anywhere close to Apple-like growth, Microsoft decided, it has to act more like Apple. So it retooled Windows Phone from scratch. But that meant leaving existing Windows Phone customers in the lurch. And to take on the iPad, Microsoft chose ' wisely ' to make its own tablet, seeing how Dell, HP and others have stumbled. But again, that meant cutting its longstanding manufacturing partners out of the process.
As in decades past, Microsoft is jerking others around. Only this time, it's not rivals and software developers - it's longstanding partners and loyal customers. Then again, Microsoft isn't the same company it was a decade or so ago. It's not the biggest player in the personal-computing industry anymore. Instead, it's struggling to catch up with the current leader, Apple. It's fighting to become an innovator in a software industry that's rapidly changing. And right now, its hard work may be ready to pay off.
But Microsoft's bid to remain relevant to the future of personal computing comes with a price, one that many people will remember from high school: If you're going to run with the cool kids, sometimes you have to cut your uncool friends loose.
Selasa, 26 Juni 2012
Facebook Email Change Suggests Shareholders Are More Important Than Users
As the world's biggest social network, Facebook was generating daily headlines before last month's disappointing initial public offering. But the post-IPO headlines have taken on a different tone: They tease new products, new services and new partnerships. They seem more focused on the bottom line than the user experience. As we predicted the day Facebook filed its IPO, the company now caters, at least in part, to shareholders.
Facebook would never admit it, but the company seems to be doing just that. It is taking a machine-gun approach to public relations, announcing a steady stream of initiatives, apps and product hints, hoping that one (and preferably several) will hit. So far, none of the headlines has silenced long-standing investor concerns about the company's ability to diversify revenue beyond targeted banner advertising and prove that it can monetize its mobile platform.
Not a Gmail Killer Then, Not a Gmail Killer Now
Facebook launched its personalized email addresses in 2010. At the time, we were told it would be a 'Gmail killer.' That didn't happen, in large part because - and there's no delicate way to put this - Facebook's messaging system is awful. It's clunky and filters messages from strangers into a 'shadow' inbox that is easy to miss. It can't be searched the way Gmail can, nor can message be filtered, sorted or saved. If you never got around to setting a personalized vanity address for your Facebook profile, your Facebook email address is a random string of numbers @facebook.com.
Put another way, there is no compelling reason to use your @facebook.com address. Except for one: Now Facebook is forcing you to use it.
"Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me," Gervase Markham, the blogger who first noticed the change over the weekend, said. "In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?"
You can, of course, go into your profile and change it back to your preferred email address. But for now, the default setting is to list your @facebook.com address. That means if someone uses Facebook as a white pages search to find you, the message they send you will go to your facebook.com email address.
Facebook wouldn't say when the decision was made or how it was addressing criticism that it was changing users' default email addresses without their consent. But a spokesman told the Chicago Tribune that the company had been switching user email addresses since April, when it made changes to its service terms.
'Ever since the launch of Timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own timelines, and today we're extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address,' spokesperson Andrew Noyes said in an email to the newspaper.
Shoving Users for the Sake Of Shareholders
The latest Facebook push is the most dramatic in the post-IPO string of announcements, but it fits a familiar theme. Realizing that user growth is reaching an inevitable slowdown, the only way for Facebook to grow advertising revenue over time is to get users to spend more time on the site. Forcing you to check email is one way to do that.
What Facebook needs to worry about now is alienating its users and thus effectively undermining its own strategy. If you start to feel like you're being forced to use the service, you may stop using it altogther. And that's not good for shareholders or users.
Hadoop Needs Better Bridges to Fulfill the Big Data Promise
Beyond Basic Tools
Basic tools exist, of course: Since Hadoop came into being, simple commands like Hadoop Copy have enabled a very straightforward and slow way to get data into Hadoop. And there's Apache Sqoop, which is built expressly for getting data within a relational database management system (RDBMS) in and out of Hadoop.
But Sqoop has limitations of its own. It works, but it uses low-level MapReduce jobs to accomplish the work, which introduces a lot of complexity and (since MapReduce is done in batch jobs) time to data import and export jobs. It might be possible to take the time, of course, and dump your data into Hadoop just the once, but that assumes that Hadoop will be completely replacing your data storage infrastructure.
This is the near-forgotten side of big data: properly placing Hadoop within existing infrastructure so data is stored cheaply, but still quickly accessible for analysis. It is here that data integration tools must play a role as the bridge between existing data stores, analytics and business intelligence tools on one side, and Hadoop on the other.
Pervasive Software is a recent entrant to the Hadoop space, but not to the field of data integration: The Pervasive Data Integrator is no stranger to those who move in data circles. Earlier this month, the Austin-based company announced a Hadoop edition of its product that enables users to roll data from more than 200 sources into Hadoop's Distributed File System (HDFS) or HBase, the Big Table-type NoSQL database that runs atop Hadoop.
A Visual Approach
Unlike Sqoop, Pervasive uses a visual approach to integrating data.
'It's a mapping problem,' described Pervasive CTO Mike Hoskins, detailing a story of how even in development, one of Pervasive's developers was able to perform an off-the-cuff data integration of 50,000 rows of data from an Oracle database to Hadoop in seconds' and that included the time it took to visually map tables in Oracle to Hadoop.
'He just mapped the tables, set the filters and constraints, set the target and clicked go,' Hoskins said.
Hoskins has a vested interest in talking up Pervasive, of course, but his company's software is part of a growing class of data integration software geared to work with Hadoop and its ecosystem of big data tools. Among these are Talend's Open Studio and Enterprise Data Integration products, as well as Pentaho's Kettle.
Data integration tools like these will make transitioning to Hadoop a lot easier up front, along with extracting data for further analysis with tools outside Hadoop. And they will be necessary if Big Data is to fulfill its promise of making it easier to understand the meanings and patterns hidden in complex information.
Spotify Radio Nudges Millions of Listeners Toward Paying for Music
This is a smart move for Spotify, which previously offered functional mobile apps only to paying subscribers. Mobile access to the company's all-you-can-stream music library still requires a $10-per-month subscription, but the free mobile radio offering inches millions of users closer toward paying up.
The difference between streaming music on the desktop and on mobile devices is a significant one. The ability to take music anywhere is a huge boon to consumers. That's why it's the chief selling point of premium subscriptions on services such as Spotify, MOG and Rdio. Paying users not only skip the ads, they can take an enormous library with them in the car, on a jog, to a party or just about anywhere they go.
With Spotify Radio for mobile devices, the company liberates its nonpaying customers from the desktop and gives them a taste of what the mobile service is like. Naturally, it has limitations: Songs are broken up by audio ads, and tracks can't be played on demand. It costs $10 per month to free oneself from those particular shackles. To make the paid service even more alluring, Spotify offers users a 48-hour trial period of its premium subscription.
If the strategy is meant to drive more users into the service's mobile experience, it appears to be working. Spotify has been the fifth most popular free app on iTunes for several days, beating out Instagram. And a radio-enhanced update to the Android app is expected within weeks.
Streaming Music's Precarious Future
Spotify makes money from advertisements directed at nonpaying users, but ultimately its success hinges on its ability to convert those people to paying subscribers. Earlier this year, the company hit 3 million subscriptions, driven in part by its U.S. launch and subsequent integration with Facebook.
More recent numbers haven't been made available, but if the company's strategy pans out, efforts like this will help boost paid sign-ups even further.
Spotify Radio is available as part of the service's existing iOS app. For now, the feature is available only in the United States.
Senin, 25 Juni 2012
Does Every Startup Need a Slogan?
'Having a great slogan is absolutely critical,' says Rich Davis, founder of Slogan Slingers, a crowdsourcing site for slogans and taglines. 'In some ways I think it's even more important than a logo, because everyone has a logo. Not every [new] business is savvy enough to leverage a really smart slogan.'
A good slogan can help you stand out from your competition. 'If you have a slogan that conveys a simple, powerful message while your competition just has a logo, you have the advantage in standing out and winning over your target audience,' claims Davis. The right slogan can change how you're perceived both externally and internally, he adds, citing the 'Think Different' campaign as an example. 'It represented the cornerstone of Apple's entire brand. It was their philosophy in two words. It guided every product they developed and every decision they made.'
What Makes a Good Startup Slogan?
Good slogans are not always obvious. 'Research shows that cookie-cutter slogans have no impact,' says Davis. 'They're quickly forgotten, and basically convey a general lack of passion within the organization. It's the opposite of branding. If you care about your image, it's worth investing the time in getting a slogan that stands out. If your slogan isn't elevating your brand, you're making a mistake by using it.'
So what makes a good slogan or tagline? Davis says it must have some basis in emotion. 'Good slogans get you to feel something about a brand or even about yourself that you didn't before.' The slogan can also tout a key benefit in a memorable way. 'The Energizer Bunny campaign and their catchphrase, 'It keeps going and going and going'' is great example of this.'
In today's Web-oriented world, do you need to worry about SEO or keywords when creating your slogan? 'Taglines really do not impact SEO in any tangible way, unless sites continually link to you with your chosen tagline,' says Ben Fisher, the Social Media Marketing Dude. 'One benefit to a keyword-rich tagline would be if the line was in plain text under the logo and displays as part of the site description.'
'You have website headlines, metadata, blogs and back links for SEO,' Davis agrees. 'Your slogan should transcend all that.
Davis warns that there are no set rules for slogan success. 'Like a hit song, blockbuster movie or any creative product, there's no specific formula for producing a timeless slogan. A lot of times on our site, a contest holder will see a slogan entry that is nothing like what they were originally envisioning but they instantly realize they've found 'the one,'' says Davis. 'That's the magic of the creative process. There are basic elements a great slogan should possess, but the rest comes down to the writer's imagination.'
Can Crowdsourcing Help?
Davis owned an ad agency before starting Slogan Slingers late in 2010 when crowdsourcing entered the marketing fray. 'I thought, 'Oh man. If someone ever uses crowdsourcing to generate slogans, that will totally kill an entire service category of my business.' So I said to myself, it might as well be me.'
Slogan Slingers lets companies look for feedback and ideas about their slogans by putting the project out to thousands of professional writers. Companies choose a set price and provide as much information as they want on the type of slogan they need and for what purpose. Once the slogans start coming in, the business can give feedback to fine tune the pitch.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
RWW Recommends: The Best Mobile RSS Reader
RSS in a nutshell:
RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' and it allows you to subscribe to the updates of a website. Look for a little orange button (see our header bar for an example), click it and then save the address into your favorite RSS Reader.
In order to make a single recommendation that will be useful to as many people as possible, we applied the following criteria:
- Must be cross-platform, which at minimum means it works on both iOS and Android.
- Should have granularity of control, meaning you can easily access all of your feeds and folders.
- Even though Twitter and Facebook haven't usurped the RSS Reader, the modern mobile RSS Reader should integrate with the leading social services and help filter out their noise.
- Must hook into Google Reader. Since Google Reader is the dominant desktop RSS Reader, it's therefore the most common place to subscribe to feeds. Google allows mobile apps to access Google Reader subscriptions and it's become an essential feature for a modern mobile RSS Reader.
With those criteria to guide us, there was one mobile RSS Reader that stood out...
Our Recommendation: Feedly
In addition, Feedly gives you a nifty way to subscribe to topics - through its "Essentials," a curated list of popular topics like 'Cooking' and 'Design.'
For the river of news fans, Feedly has the option to view your feeds chronologically.
Feedly integrates with Twitter and other social media, allowing you to share your finds. It also enables you to browse your Tumblr subscriptions, which is a nice touch since RSS isn't the primary way to keep track of Tumblr blogs (Tumblr promotes its own internal "follow" subscription model).
Feedly is available on both iOS and Android, as well as being a browser plugin for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Feedly was ranked 4th in our list of the Top 10 Feed & RSS Technologies of 2011 - behind only Twitter and Facebook.
Spoiled For Choice: Other Recommendations
If you're looking for a mobile RSS Reader, we recommend you try Feedly first. That said, there are many different flavors of mobile RSS Readers and a lot of it will come down to your personal preferences. So if Feedly doesn't taste quite right to you, here are some alternatives that may satisfy your RSS appetite:
Reeder was popular in the informal poll I conducted on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. It's iOS only, so if you're an iPhone user then it may be a great option for you. Compared to Feedly and Pulse, Reeder is fairly vanilla and not very colorful. However it makes up for that with an easy-to-read interface and excellent integration with social media. Many people love Reeder (including our own Jon Mitchell), so give it a try if Feedly doesn't work out for you.
If you're an Android user, then Google Reader offers a popular app that connects very well with other Google products (like Google Reader and Google+). It's not available on iOS, however the mobile browser version of Google Reader is more than adequate - although Feedly, Reeder and other iOS apps offer a better user interface for Apple users.
Flipboard made its name as an iPad app and to this day it remains my favorite RSS Reader on that device. I also use it daily on smartphone too. It doesn't have all of my feeds, just my favorite folders in Google Reader. So it's more of a complement to Feedly, than a direct competitor. Flipboard recently became available on Android too.
Finally, if you want something a bit different, my6sense has taken a unique approach to filtering. It attempts to guess what you want to read, by automatically filtering your feeds.
We hope you find that one of these smartphone RSS Reader apps will suit your needs. Let us know in the comments what you think of our main pick, Feedly. Or if you have another personal favorite, tell us what's special about it.
How To Use Facebook's Newest Stalking App
As Ryan Patterson, the Facebook engineer who developed the app during a hackathon, told TechCrunch, 'the ideal use case for this product is the one where you're out with a group of people whom you've recently met and want to stay in contact with. Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange contact information with multiple people with minimal friction.'
The product is being released at a time when online advertising studies are strengthening the argument that so-called weak ties are more effective at spreading a message through social networks than messages passed from people's closest friends and contacts. The tool, which is informally known by the working title Friendshake, has already been suggested as being the perfect tool for conferences and networking events, suggesting that Facebook may be looking to move more firmly into the business networking arena currently dominated by LinkedIn.
How To Use (Or Not Use) Find Friends Nearby
The app, which is available online as well as on Facebook's Android and iOS versions, is opt-in. That's something of a rarity for new Facebook products, but given how sensitive the information being shared is, it makes sense that Facebook would avoid the usual privacy backlash it faces whenever it launches a product that automatically shares your data.
While logged into Facebook, you also log into the Find Friends Nearby app. After a few seconds, anyone in your vicinity who also has the FFN page open should appear on the list.
We haven't been able to test it thoroughly yet, for the simple reason that the app is so new (and apparently still in development) that no one came up in the list when we took it for a test run. It's also not clear what range Facebook uses to define 'nearby.'
Minggu, 24 Juni 2012
Weekly Wrap-Up: Microsoft Announces New Windows 8 Tablet, Surface
[Video] Surface vs. iPad: Microsoft's Getting Rusty At Stealing from Apple
Eliot Weisberg did a video mixup that compares Steve Job's initial presentation of the iPad to Steve Ballmer's presentation of the Surface. Played side by side, you can see the similarities. Take a close look at the clothing choices, similar phrases and even the touted features. It's a short video, but definitely worth a look. More
Survey: Tablet Owners Prefer Browsers to Native Apps
Browser or app: Which is a better way to reach readers on mobile platforms like iOS and Android? Publishers and developers haven't been shy about offering their opinions, but what about the people who actually use the devices? Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. More
Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere
Startup accelerators continue to grow in popularity. There are now more than 200 around the world attracting twice as many applicants as they did just two years ago. But there's a dirty little secret: A lot of accelerators are just spinning their wheels. Last year, Aziz Gilani, a director at Houston venture capital firm DFJ Mercury, ran a study of 29 North American accelerators for the Kauffman Fellows Program. He found that 45% of them produced not a single graduate who went on to raise venture funding. More
More Top Stories
Top Trends of 2012: The Consumer Cloud
In 2012 we've seen amazing growth in the Consumer Cloud, meaning cloud computing for everyday users. There are three main categories in the Consumer Cloud: storage, sync and notes. Dropbox, Apple's iCloud and Evernote (respectively) have been the most impressive performers in each category so far this year. More
Nobody Is Using Facebook's Life Events - Not Even Mark Zuckerberg
When Facebook announced Timeline in September last year, a key new feature was the ability to define different types of "life events." Events such as starting a new job, entering a new relationship or getting married, making a home improvement, getting a tattoo. The idea behind Life Events was to better structure Timeline data. Unfortunately for Facebook, very few people are using Life Events. More
How To Track Topics On The Web
It's easy to get obsessed with the super-fast, real-time cycle of online news. But don't forget that the Web is a massive treasure trove of information about any topic. With just a bit of work, you can set up tracking and get regular updates about topics you're passionate about. In this how-to article, we share our tips on topic tracking. More
Why Security Could Be Apple's Greatest Threat
Apple is sitting on top of the tech world. The company has set the standard for smartphones and tablets, tech's biggest growth markets, and the company's Mac sales in the U.S. are growing faster than the industry average. So what could derail the most valuable company in the world? Forget rivals like Microsoft and Google: Apple's biggest threat may come from hackers. These cyber-criminals are upending Apple's carefully cultivated perception that the Mac is more secure than Windows PCs. Hackers smashed that notion in April when 650,000 Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan. More
Retailer's Tax on IE 7 Users Opens New Front in Browser Wars
When Australian retailer Kogan.com enacted a 'tax' on customers using Internet Explorer 7 last week, it may not have been trying to become the poster child for worldwide Web-developer frustration with Microsoft browsers. But the stunt seems to have tapped into a seething undercurrent of animosity for Internet Explorer that could bring new combatants to the ongoing browser wars. More
Reimagining Books: How Citia's iPad App Compares to a Paper Book
Kevin Kelly's book "What Technology Wants" was one of our favorite nonfiction books of 2011. In Richard's April 2011 review, he gave it five out of five stars. It's fitting that Kelly's book is the first to be turned into an iPad app on a new iOS platform called Citia. The result isn't an e-book, though; it's more like a condensed summary of the book's main ideas. So is Citia just a modern-day CliffsNotes, or something more substantial? More
How to Keep Facebook from Recognizing Your Face
Now that Facebook has bought facial recognition vendor Face.com, many users are worried that the giant social network will use the technology to infringe on their privacy. While you can't stop Facebook from grabbing the facial-recognition data, there are ways to limit the service's use of that information. More
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Sabtu, 23 Juni 2012
Is There a Better Way to Evaluate Startup Accelerators?
As the capital markets have evolved in the last several years, accelerators have taken on an important role in attracting, qualifying and supporting innovative startups that may otherwise have a difficult time getting noticed by potential users, partners and investors. One can readily make the argument that the rapid expansion of these programs has been appropriate, as market disruptions caused by technology are creating real opportunities to better serve businesses and consumers.
"Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere" argues that most startup accelerators are failures because very few of their graduates go on to raise venture capital or stage successful exits. But those metrics don't tell the whole story.
Startup Exits Are Great, but There Are Other Positive Outcomes
Many ventures that work their way through accelerator programs create value in other ways. They can serve as a stepping stone to the next venture, they can lead to finding jobs at other organizations that can exploit the same product knowledge or expertise, or they can remain bootstrapped until they get the value proposition or business model right (what, no funding?). Furthermore, most accelerators have cropped up in the last couple of years, which makes exits a questionable metric, given that it takes four to six years for the average M&A exit, and eight to 10 years for the average IPO.
Is the "Quality Gap" of Accelerators Reality or Perception?
Top-tier accelerator programs such as YCombinator, TechStars and DreamIt (disclaimer: I'm a venture partner) have done an incredible job of building an impressive group of portfolio companies. They have been great role models for the industry at large, but a bit more perspective is required to fully appreciate how broadly value creation is, and will be, playing out. Older programs have the benefit of having more companies in their portfolio as well as greater maturation for these companies. Since the majority of programs have surfaced in the last 24 months, it's a bit like comparing apples to oranges. In addition, as accelerators build their brands and market themselves more effectively, they will be able to attract their share of the talent pool. How awesome is it that we've seen programs like the Ark Challenge pop up, where the focus is to retain the local talent and leverage competence in areas such as logistics and retail?
Given the Objectives of Accelerators, How Do We Measure ROI?
While achieving ROI is certainly an objective for accelerators and is important in assuring sustainability, there are other objectives that drive their formation as well. Typically, local entrepreneurs are catalysts in funding and operating a program, in large part because of their community ties, as well as their interest in "giving back." So the ROI is not purely economic. That said, there's increased interest on the part of institutions - including corporations, venture firms and hedge funds - to explore how they can get more involved with these startups on the ground floor.
The next several years will be very exciting for accelerator programs, and they are likely to be standard fare across many more geographies and industries. Like the gold rush of the 1800s, the early settlers have seen early returns. But make no mistake about it, there's lots more gold in them hills.
Join in on the great conversation around these issues that the original post sparked on Hacker News.
The State of Online Music Discovery
Automated Recommendation: Last.fm, Pandora and The Echo Nest
The dominant approach is to use the power of data and algorithms to understand the relationships between songs and listeners. Last.fm, Pandora and Echo Nest are the most established players in this field.
It has been awhile since Last.fm grabbed headlines the way Spotify and newer upstarts do today, but the service still offers one of the best music discovery tools out there. It monitors an individual's digital listening habits - from mobile devices to desktop players, even tracks streamed from the browser - and compares them to the demonstrated preferences of other listeners. The CBS-owned service provides an open API that developers have used to build all kinds of apps and mashups. It has remained relevant by weaving in as many other products and services as possible. Last year's Spotify integration, which brought the Last.fm user interface and functionality directly into Spotify's desktop client, is a perfect example.
Longtime Last.fm competitor Pandora is another veteran that still deserves recognition, even amid competition from newer entrants such as Slacker Radio and Songza. Pandora's Internet radio service uses a complex, partially human-informed algorithm that relates songs to one another. Its Music Genome Project goes deeper than simple artist-to-artist matches based on listening habits. It drills down to specific musical characteristics, from tempo to whether or not the song has an electric piano solo. This granular, detail-by-detail matching of songs makes for one of the most effective semi-automated ways to discover music digitally. Whereas Last.fm is great at surfacing unfamiliar artists, Pandora does a better job of suggesting unfamiliar songs.
Earlier this week, Spotify took aim at Pandora by launching its own free Internet radio service. Unlike Spotify's core streaming service, the new offering is available to nonpremium users via their devices. Spotify Radio is powered by The Echo Nest, which fuels dozens of music apps, including Clear Channel's iHeartRadio. With over five billion data points about artists and songs, The Echo Nest analyzes more data than Pandora, and it applies more automation involving data mining, acoustic analysis and machine learning. The resulting track-to-track transitions can be less sonically consistent than what Pandora comes up with, but it rivals Last.fm when it comes to artist discovery.
Social Recommendation: Friends Know Better Than Machines
As effective as these automated suggestions can be, it's still hard to compete with recommendations from people you actually know. That's why many music services are plugging into Facebook's social graph and integrating with Twitter.
This area of music discovery is still maturing, however. Last year's deep "frictionless" Facebook integrations with Spotify, Rdio and other streaming services created more noise than new favorites. Spotify's log, posted to Facebook, of individual listening behavior revealed what friends were listening to, but it didn't hint at why they should care. Meanwhile, the "group listening" trend that exploded last summer let users congregate in virtual rooms and take turns DJing tracks for one another. Represented by Turntable.fm, this category may not have lived up to its initial hype, but there's still plenty going on in this space. Soundrop, another group listening app, is built directly into Spotify.
Songbird uses data from Facebook likes and connections to pull appropriate audio from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud. The company aims to capitalize on what it perceives as the limitations of services like Pandora by relying more heavily on the social graph. Songbird does a really good job of pulling relevant artists from a Facebook profile, but it's not great at presenting new content. The service has some growing to do, but the hype surrounding it isn't unwarranted.
Not to be outdone by its social media elders, Pinterest is getting into the music discovery game as well. While the site is better known for sharing photos and other images, it's also used to post music from sources like YouTube and SoundCloud. It's not yet a major driver of music discovery, but considering its rapid growth, artists experimenting with Pinterest probably won't regret it.
Tastemakers and Human-Fueled Curation
The automated, social media-fueled approaches have their strengths, but they're by no means perfect. Computers alone are not likely to crack the music discovery nut anytime soon. As it turns out, we still need human brains to do some of the listening and interpretation that goes into music recommendations. That's why Pandora's algorithm works so well and why Songza has such promise. Both services, to varying degrees, rely on human intervention to help curate and cross-reference songs.
This need for human insight is why music blogs remain one of the most popular ways for people to discover new albums. The founders of Shuffler.fm are well aware of this and built their music-aggregating "audio magazine" to pull tracks from a wide selection of influential blogs. The result is a huge collection of genre-oriented channels featuring new and popular songs, curated by a virtual panel of Internet tastemakers.
When Spotify launched its third-party app platform late last year, it included services like Last.fm and MoodAgent, which analyzes and recommends music based on the mood it conveys. But it also launched with editorial partners like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and We Are Hunted, emphasizing the important role that human critics still play.
Algorithms and APIs can do amazing things. But at the end of the day, determining what music - as well as art, movies, books and other media - people will like still requires human beings with real ears connected to real brains. The future of music discovery will rely on both.
Facebook's Zynga Alliance Demonstrates Its Threat to Google
As the news website Inside Facebook first noticed, Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories now appear on Zynga.com looking just the way they would on Facebook itself. It's the first outside site on which Facebook ads have appeared. The day Facebook rolls them out on the rest of the Web will be a dark one for Google.
Google's indexing of the Web is so complete that it can also provide relevant ads on sites themselves. Website owners are happy to run Google's AdSense ads, which help them generate revenue, letting Google match its most relevant advertisers to the content of the site.
But the key here is the definition of that word relevance. Ads only generate money if they're relevant. As long as Google is the way we search for things, its definition of relevance matters. But if Facebook can make its ads more relevant than Google's, even on sites other than its own, then Google is in trouble.
Google's test of relevance is whether you've found what you're looking for. Google knows where you are, what you've searched for before, and some things about your browsing history. If you use Gmail, it knows what you talk about there. It's also starting to get better at understanding what your words mean. But those are just vague signals it can use to deduce things about you.
The best thing Google has to go on with its ads is what you're searching for right now. If you're searching for "cheapest hotels in Vegas," that's a pretty good clue. But not all our searches are so obviously about buying things. How does Google know what ads are relevant in that situation?
If Google knew more about you, who you are, what your family is like and your real likes and dislikes, it would be able to fill in the blanks. But it doesn't. Try as it might with Google+, Google doesn't yet have a good picture of the people on the Web.
Facebook has the clearest picture there is.
As Dan Frommer showed in April, a comparison between Facebook's and Google's ad creation tools speak volumes. Google's tool just asks you to crank out keywords to help it match your ads to people's searches:
But Facebook's tools ask for rich, specific, personal details about the people you want your ad to reach. And Facebook knows these things about people because they willingly tell Facebook about themselves. In their profiles, relationship statuses and likes, Facebook's users have given it a gold mine of advertising data.
For now, that only makes for relevant ads on Facebook itself. They're good for revenue, but they're not Google-level good. Even if the ads are personally relevant, people aren't going on Facebook to shop (or click on ads). They're going to talk to their friends.
If Facebook launches an off-site ad network, that will change. Even if people use Google to search for things, the sites they find could be showing Facebook ads, and those could potentially be far more relevant than Google's AdSense ads. Suddenly, Google - an advertising company for all intents and purposes - will be delivering traffic into Facebook's advertisers' laps, sucking life out of its own business.
Zynga Is Just a Prelude
The new ads on Zynga.com don't represent the stealth launch of a Facebook Ad Network, at least according to official sources. In fact, as Josh Constine at TechCrunch reports, this agreement was laid out in Facebook's S-1 documents before it went public, so it should come as no surprise. It's a revenue-sharing agreement between Facebook and Zynga, its longtime partner in all manner of time-wasting games, and they both insist that's all it is.
Facebook's PR statement is this:
"We have had a close relationship with Zynga for a number of years and we think we can deliver value to Zynga and to the people playing their games by showing the same ads that they see on Facebook. We will not be showing ads on other sites at this time." (emphasis added)
It may not be here "at this time," but Facebook's ability to track its logged-in users around the Web is well known. If, as industry watchers have long expected, Facebook launches an ad network for other sites, it would quickly upset the balance of power on the ad-supported Web.
Jumat, 22 Juni 2012
How People Communicate on Instagram
The culture of Instagram images is far different from Facebook, which is focused around comments and likes from friends who are in the social circle.
Facebook offers personal information about users (birthday, gender, hometown, current town, relationship status and more), while Instagram includes little more than a user's name, profile pic, how many photos they have posted and number of followers. The decreased level of social pressure in this space actually makes it easier to start a conversation.
"Unlike Facebook, image sharing on Instagram is not about connecting with long lost friends or making plans for the weekend," says Dye. "The experience revolves around the quality and creativeness of the image. That, combined with the fact that not everyone is on Instagram (unlike Facebook), provides the feeling of a more closed community in which you have a little bit more anonymity."
Instagram does not allow for private messaging between users either. Depending on the Instagram user's settings, every comment or like is either visible to the public or completely private. Users can choose to watch from the sidelines too, if they prefer. Unlike other mobile photo-sharing apps, it's impossible to share Instagram images with a select group of friends or followers.
Instagram is a fascinating way to get to know what types of images other visual thinkers are drawn to.
"In short, Instagram has created a strong social networking site that focuses strictly on the art of photo sharing and visual engagement," says Dye. "It's really about taking a photo and allowing it to become an object of value to other individuals."
Where To Find Hi-Res Wallpapers To Fit the New MacBook Pro Retina Display
Read more: Apple's New MacBook Pro Is the Best Laptop You Can Buy - But You Probably Shouldn't Buy One
RWW's Eliot Weisberg shares his impressions of the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
InterfaceLIFT is a longstanding wallpaper site with a great selection, and it now has retina-ready options.
WallpapersWide.com is one of the best and broadest retina wallpaper sites we've found. It has tons of categories and thousands of pages to choose from.
Here's an entire site dedicated to high-resolution wallpapers of varying quality.
If you already have a retina MacBook Pro, you've already got these, but here are Apple's retina-sized Mountain Lion wallpapers.
Tomas Laurinavicius has a great blog post of 40 very high resolution wallpapers to peruse.
And we found two retina-ready Flickr galleries that will probably be of interest:
- Space photos
- Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 wallpapers
And, of course, you can always search Google for retina display MacBook Pro images.
These aren't exactly wallpaper, but we found an amazing gallery of renaissance paintings in super-duper-high-definition that is a great way to show off the new machine's visual excellence.
Finally, check out this gorgeous, navigable 26-gigapixel image of Paris. If you go full-screen, you can grab whatever part you want for a retina background.
How To Set Your Wallpaper
Once you find a hi-res image you like, you can crop or resize it in Preview (the built-in imaging application) to 2880-by-1800 pixels. Just make sure the image you're starting with is bigger than that, because increasing the size of the image will make it look nasty on that retina display. If you don't want to bother cropping, you can also just set larger images as "centered" when you select your wallpaper in your Desktop & Screen Saver system preferences.
Apple's New MacBook Pro Is the Best Laptop You Can Buy - But You Probably Shouldn't Buy One
Read more: Where To Find Hi-Res Wallpapers To Fit the New MacBook Pro Retina Display
At first glance, the new MacBook Pro with Retina display doesn't look that different from a standard 15-inch MacBook Pro. A closer look reveals a slimmer body and lid, with no optical drive.
But as soon as you open up the device, the amazing 2880-1800 display sucks you into its world. Unlike the Retina displays on the iPhone and iPad, the MacBook Pro screen has the scale to truly envelop your field of vision.
The high-contrast screen's 5.1 million pixels make text appear noticably sharper and more readable than other screens. And with truly high-res images, it's like looking into a window. The more you look at it, the more the level of detail seems to open up. You don't want to just look at this screen - you want to move in.
The downside? Many low-res Web images suddenly look terrible, all jaggy and blurry. It's like when TV went HD and everyone could suddenly see how ratty all those old shows were.
The new machine's specs are equally impressive: An Intel quad-core Core i7 processor with speeds up to 2.7GHz, up to 768GB of fast SSD storage (no more poky hard drives), and support for up to 16GB of RAM. The Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics card has 1GB of dedicated memory.
In my testing, all that hardware translated into smooth, fast operations on everything from launching programs to manipulating large images. And while others have reported battery life issues (Apple rates battery life at 7 hours), I found the new MacBook Pro easily ran for the better part of a day in intermittent use - about as long as a 13-inch MacBook Air.
Put it all together, and you've got the best personal computer I've ever seen.
But - you knew there was a but, right? - the new MacBook Pro is not for everyone - or even most people.
For one thing, this is no MacBook Air. At 0.71 inches thick and 4.46 pounds, it's slightly more svelte than a standard 15-inch MacBook Pro, thanks to a thinner screen and the lack of an optical drive. But it's much heavier and bulker than the Air or other ultrabook-style laptops. That matters for people who drag their computer with them everywhere they go.
Other folks - fewer and fewer, though - will miss the things the device leaves out: the DVD drive, the ethernet port and a power connector that's incompatible with other Mac models (apparently, the old Magsave connectors wouldn't fit). Sure, there are external devices and adapters to mitigate these issues, but they ruin the computer's beautiful lines and portability.
If portablity is a key concern for you, this is not your ideal solution.
$3,500? For a laptop? In 2012?
The big issue, though, is cost. Prices for the MacBook Pro with Retina display start at a hefty $2,200, and a fully tricked-out version clocks in at a whopping $3,449.
That's nearly $3,500. For a laptop. In 2012.
I remember an era when laptops routinely cost $2,000, but I had hoped we'd moved beyond those troubled times.
While the new MacBook Pro may not be overpriced for what you get, the vast majority of computer users simply don't need this kind of power. Unless you're doing serious video processing, image manipulation or some other computing-intensive tasks, this machine is expensive overkill.
Do you really want to pay a four-figure premium just to look at pretty pictures? That's not entirely fair, of course, but the real question about the MacBook Pro with Retina display is whether the benefit it brings to your particular situation is worth the cost - especially since Retina displays will eventually find their way into more mainstream laptops.
If you really need the MacBook Pro's Retina display capabilities now, go ahead and bite the bullet and buy one. If you absolutely have to impress your geeky friends, this'll do the trick. If money is not an issue, there's no question that this is the computer you should own. Whatever the reason, you won't regret having it - except maybe after you've schlepped it through the International Terminal for the sixth time in eight days.
But for most people, the MacBook Pro with Retina display is not exactly a practical choice. In a year or so when the price comes down, sure, but not yet.
RWW's Eliot Weisberg shares his impressions of the new MacBook Pro and offers tips on where to find wallpapers worthy of its Retina display.
Kamis, 21 Juni 2012
How To Track Topics On The Web
Google Alerts
Let's forget the 'S' word for a minute: Social. You just want to track the latest news about a specific topic, so how do you do it? Easy, you set up a Google Alert.
Go to Google News and input your search. As an example, I'll use a topic that I'm particularly interested in: finding a cure for diabetes. At the bottom of the page, you'll see a link to "Create an email alert for [...]".
Select the type of results you'd like and the email delivery frequency.
Interestingly, you can create an alert for "everything" - which includes not just Google News, but Google's all-powerful search index. However you won't see the "Create an email alert for [...]" option on Google.com, you'll have to go to Google News or another of the Google content types.
If you use an RSS Reader or personalized start page (such as Google Reader or My Yahoo!), then you can save the RSS feed for your search there. Look for the little orange RSS icon in the footer of your Google News results page.
Social Options
If you want a more social approach to topic tracking, Google+ and Twitter are your best bets.
1. Google+
Search for your topic in Google+ (Google's social network, which you get automatically with a Google account). You'll see a red button on the top-right, inviting you to "save this search."
To check on your saved search regularly, go to your Google+ homepage and select the "More" drop-down list in the sub-menu. That displays a list of your Google+ circles and saved searches.
There are some great content options with a Google+ saved search. Click on the drop-down list that by default states "Everything". You can then choose to narrow your search to Google+ posts, from your circles, and more.
The one downside to using Google+ saved searches is that you will need to remember to manually check it, because there is no notification system.
2. Twitter
You may not be aware that you can also save a search in Twitter, with or without a hashtag. Go to the Twitter homepage and enter your search query. You'll see a list of the latest tweets that may be relevant (the results are based on keywords). Note that you can also do an advanced search, for example searching for an exact phrase.
Although Twitter makes it obvious how to save your search, it's far less obvious where you find your saved search for later reference. It's not in any of the menus. You have to click inside the search box again to see your list of saved searches. This is very unintuitive, but you'll get used to it.
If you're a regular Twitter user, you probably use at least one of the various desktop or mobile clients - such as TweetDeck for desktop and the official Twitter iPhone or Android app for mobile. Most of these products enable you to access your saved searches (for example, select 'Add Column' in TweetDeck and then 'Search').
3. Facebook
You may be wondering if Facebook is of much use for tracking topics. It is, to a degree. You can search on Facebook and you may see some results from people or pages you follow, but there is no mechanism to save your search. You can also subscribe to relevant people and 'like' pages on the topic, as well as subscribe to public topical lists. For more information about using Facebook to track topics, read this separate article.
Niche Communities or Specialist Services
There are lots of smaller, niche communities where you can keep track of your topic. For example, I belong to a diabetes social network called Tu Diabetes. I can track news about potential cures there.
Probably your best bet for niche communities these days is Reddit, which has many sub-communities. For example there's one for Diabetes, which had some useful information in it when I checked today. You can then subscribe to the sub-community and check it as often as you like.
Other options include Q&A websites like Quora, bookmarking services like Delicious and specialist search or RSS Reader services like Regator.
If you have any other suggestions to track topics on the Web, please leave a comment.
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