Video-Sharing iPhone App Limits Users to 1-Minute Clips [22Sep11] - 0 views
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If mobile video sharing is to follow in the footsteps of its more desirable mobile photo-sharing cousin, which application will users want to use to shoot, share and discover video clips? It’s too soon to tell, but startup Klip joins the fray and is now vying for your video attention. The startup released its application for iPhone on Monday with a focus on letting users share super-short 1-minute video clips — on Klip or with Facebook, Twitter and Youtube — and helping users discover clips from friends or other users based on topics of interests. “Klip re-invents the way consumers experience the world by organizing mobile videos in real time and by connecting consumers with the people and the topics that interest them,” the company says.
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Google hidden 'Ad Preferences' page reveals what privacy-row search giant thinks it kno... - 0 views
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IT has been said that Google knows more about what you like than your own partnerNow the search giant has given a glimpse on just how much information it has collected - and who thinks you are.But it seems the famed Google algorithms are far from infallible.
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And people taking advantage of the facility that allows the public to view what kind of consumer Google thinks they are have been amused to find themselves listed with the wrong age and even sex.Nevertheless, the knowledge that Google works so hard to profile its 350m account holders is bound to intensify the debate about privacy which flared up again this week with the announcement that the company was going to start tracking users across all of its sites, including YouTube.
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The detailed personal 'profile' sums up many of a user's interests, along with age and gender.Google builds a detailed profile by harvesting the history of its account holders' visits to sites in its advertising network.But your age and gender are decided by those of other Google users who have visited the sites you visit, leading to the mistakes
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New Methods - Measurement of Word of Mouth Marketing 10/04/01 - 0 views
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A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing Assessing its impact as well as its volume will help companies take better advantage of buzz. APRIL 2010 • Jacques Bughin, Jonathan Doogan, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik
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Exhibit 1: Word of mouth is influential throughout the consumer decision journey. Exhibit 2: By looking at impact as well as volume, marketers can measure the effects of word-of-mouth messages more accurately.
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Consumers have always valued opinions expressed directly to them. Marketers may spend millions of dollars on elaborately conceived advertising campaigns, yet often what really makes up a consumer’s mind is not only simple but also free: a word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source. As consumers overwhelmed by product choices tune out the ever-growing barrage of traditional marketing, word of mouth cuts through the noise quickly and effectively.Indeed, word of mouth1 is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would. And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands. Register to read this article.
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Transaction Systems Architects reports third quarter results - 0 views
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Transaction Systems Architects, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSAI), a leading global provider of enterprise e-payments and e-commerce software, announced today that revenue for the third quarter ended June 30, 2004 was $72.5 million, a decrease of two percent over the same quarter last year.
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Net income was $18.7 million, or $.49 per diluted share, which includes a net one-time tax benefit of $10.6 million, or $.28 per diluted share. This net one-time tax benefit is attributed primarily to certain tax restructurings and associated tax elections related to the Company's MessagingDirect Ltd. subsidiaries. Net income of $18.7 million, or $.49 per diluted share, compares to a net loss of $1.9 million, or a net loss of $.05 per diluted share, which included a goodwill impairment charge of $9.3 million, for the third quarter of fiscal 2003.
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For the third quarter of fiscal 2004, revenues were comprised of software license fees of $37.5 million, maintenance fees of $23.1 million and services fees of $11.9 million. The Company's recurring revenue was $45.5 million, or 63 percent of revenue, and non-recurring revenue was $27.0 million, or 37 percent of revenue. Recurring revenue consisted of monthly license fees of $20.2 million, maintenance fees of $23.1 million and facilities management fees of $2.2 million.
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Police open up to social media - 0 views
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PC Ed Rogerson is on Twitter. He is one of about 20 or so police officers that have turned to the micro-blogging service. “It works on a far more local level than the force-wide Facebook group,” he said. “It’s local to Harrogate and our problems.” Some of his messages, or tweets, contain advice for residents. On occasion he announces an arrest. Others are just to let people know that, while they were out, the police were on patrol. “People do not see us so they do not think we are there,” he said. North Yorkshire police are among the few forces using social media. Its Safer Neighbourhood teams use it to send out messages and it has reserved a page that will soon become its presence on Facebook. “Posting a message on Twitter warning about a spate of burglaries in an area is a similar concept to pinning up a poster on the local parish council noticeboard.” “Doing either in isolation might be fine, but by doing both we can spread that warning even further.” Read more at news.bbc.co.uk
Social media 'could transform public services' - 0 views
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Social media could transform the NHS and other public services in the same way that file-sharing changed the music industry, a conference has heard.Growing use of tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, offered an opportunity to reinvent services, delegates heard. “It’s happened to the music and travel industries and it’s going to happen to public services,” said Dr Paul Hodgkin, founder of the Patient Opinion site that organised the MyPublicServices conference. He said that conversations about people’s experiences with public services were going on all over the web and needed to be taken into account.“This is about turning things upside down so the thing that looks like a deficit, your experience, becomes the gift you have to give to other people.” “I’m not sure that the government can re-engineer itself from the inside out,” he said. “It’s going to take the demands of people to force it into shape.” Read more at news.bbc.co.uk
PayPal tests NFC payments app - 0 views
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PayPal is testing an NFC mobile payments application at two stores in Sweden while it continues to look for ways to expand access to its payments services.
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PayPal has been experimenting with NFC for a while and recently incorporated NFC into the latest version of its Android app to enable peer-to-peer payments with two mobile phone users tapping their phones together to transfer money between them. The NFC payments app test is running in conjunction with two Swedish retailers and the Swedish developer Accumulate over a five day period.
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“There has been some confusion out there,” said Anuj Nayar, director of communications for PayPal, San Jose, CA. “We are not anti NFC.
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Wikets, The Social Commerce App With $1.5M In Funding, Rewards Users For Recommendation... - 0 views
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In September, Wikets, Inc., announced it had raised $1.5 million from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, to build a new iPhone application that allows users to rate products and share those recommendations with friends. Today, the app has gone live in iTunes.
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At launch, Wikets lets you recommend products from its featured partners and from 60 major retailers, including iTunes (music and apps), Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Best Buy, The Home Depot, Wine.com, and others, as well as any place you can pull up on Yelp or Foursquare. You can also scan a product’s barcode, if you choose.
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The resulting product is deceptively simple. You make a recommendation, optionally share it with friends via Facebook or Twitter, and then get rewarded in the form of points that can be later turned in for gift cards at online merchants.
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Twitter and the Global Brain - 0 views
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In fact, judging by Twitter’s Trending Topics, the re-tweeting process does not point to either good, or important content. Of course, it may not be right to assume that a global brain will be smarter, and real significance will be lost in the tsunami of celebrity drivel.Amplify’d from docs.google.comBut recent evidence in neuroscience shows the truth is actually an interested twist on this idea - a twist that could have important implications as a model of how global consciousness could emerge from real-time social media like Twitter.In reality, synapses are modified according to a rule called Spike Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP). In a nutshell, STDP says that if two neurons fire (= spike) in rapid succession, the connection from the one that fires first to the one that fires second will be strengthened.users could be automatically steered towards following folks who are the first to post content that will interest them - towards those who are considered the ‘thought leaders’ you might say. And content creators who work hard to be the first to find and tweet interesting content will be rewarded automatically with a growing list of followerscontent generators on Twitter will compete to be the first to create good content or break important news
Peer 1 launches Zunicore, a new cloud service. - Cloud Computing News [07Nov11] - 0 views
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Peer 1, the hosting provider, has joined the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines the elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those many would consider more akin to a Platform-as-a-Service.
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For example, instead of a virtual machine, a customer buys a “resource pool” that they can customize to fit their needs, as opposed to buying a small, medium or large virtual machine.
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The company also offers auto scaling, a feature more common in Platforms-as-a-Service such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure or Heroku. However, the service is pay-as-you-go and deployed on demand. It includes a dashboard that functions as a fuel gauge for compute resources that shows IT pros when to spin up additional resources.
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Window into Google's Monopoly Maneuvers: More Internal Skyhook Emails [11May11] - 0 views
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The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions." But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.
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When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database. If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."
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Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service. With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.
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Facebook Updates Open Graph, Lets You Share EVERYTHING You Do [22Sep11] - 0 views
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Facebook Updates Open Graph, Lets You Share EVERYTHING You Do Steve Kovach | Sep. 22, 2011, 1:53 PM | 3,626 | 3 A A A x Email Article From To Email Sent! You have successfully emailed the post. inShare30 See Also: Eight Fascinating People You'll See At IGNITION THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Microsoft Could Play Kingmaker In Potential Yahoo Sale Facebook Users Are About To Riot Over Massive
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Facebook announced the latest addition to the social graph. Instead of "liking" objects, you can participate in events. That means watching movies, going on trips, reading a book, whatever
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Everything shows up in the new ticker, the real-time update list in the upper right corner. Zuck says this will make it possible for people to develop social apps based on the acitivities people do. Starting with media: movies, music, news, books, etc.
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Mobile banking trends to watch out for in 2012 - Mobile Commerce Daily - Banking - 0 views
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Mobile banking will continue to grow next year across a multiple fronts. Not only will more banks jump into mobile with optimized sites and application, but financial institutions will also build their existing mobile programs with a variety of new services.
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Much of the interest in mobile banking is being driven by consumers, who tend to interact more with a mobile banking solution than they do Internet banking. On average, customers use a mobile banking app three times per week and only use traditional Internet banking two times per week, according Malauzai Software.
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“We see a demand for mobile via the application and text messaging,” said Jim Simpson, vice president of information technology at City Bank Texas, Lubbock, TX, which has over 30 locations across Texas.
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Update: Facebook Has A Mobile Card Up Its Sleeve In Addition To Advertising | paidContent - 0 views
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For as long as Facebook has been running its Facebook Credits program—the virtual currency that users can redeem on games and other content peddled through Facebook’s network—it has been letting users top up those Credits using their mobile phones. It does this in partnership with companies like (reportedly) Boku and (definitely) Zong, the payments company bought by eBay’s PayPal last year. Users can also top up their Credits via PayPal and credit cards.
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It’s not known how much, exactly, is purchased via the mobile channel today, but it is an example of how mobile is actually already driving significant revenue for Facebook. “Facebook Credits make a lot of money through mobile phones,” enough that Zong was “growing very fast last year” because of Facebook purchases, according to Frederic Court, a partner with Advent Venture Parnters, one of the VCs that backed Zong before the eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) buy.
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This is because while sometimes the mobile payments were actually more expensive than a PayPal or credit card transaction, they are often a lot quicker to do, especially if you are in the middle of a game. And, as with other mobile-based payment options, they appeal to those who don’t have or want to enter card details.
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The End of Social Media 1.0 Brian Solis [29Aug11] - 0 views
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I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.
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The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing. eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.
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Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity: - Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide. - Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide. - Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world. Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.
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US Virtual Goods Market To Hit $2.9 Billion In 2012, With Facebook Games Maturing, Mobi... - 0 views
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The overall market for virtual goods in the US is headed towards $2.9 billion for 2012, according to the Inside Virtual Goods report. That’s up from $2.2 billion this year, and $1.6 billion in 2010.
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Virtual goods on Facebook are continuing to comprise more than half of that, going from $835 million in 2010 to $1.2 billion this year to $1.6 billion next year. The gains each year are around $400 million, which means growth is going from 50% down to around 35%. While the report doesn’t break out company-specific numbers publicly, Zynga’s pre-IPO filings indicate it made more than $300 million last quarter. Assuming that number stays around the same, look for Zynga to continue to its historical dominance with about 75% of the Facebook virtual goods market.
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Mobile has also been coming into its own in the last 18 months, report co-author Charles Hudson tells me. The report estimates that mobile virtual goods (for games only, not including other digital media like iTunes songs) made $350 million this year, and will grow to $500 million next year.
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8 Mobile Marketing Trends You Should Track In 2012 | Business 2 Community - 0 views
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With 2012 fast approaching along with it comes new mobile marketing opportunities that your business should follow as you consider efforts to spread the word about your brand and products and services through mobile.
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Mobile Visitation Grew 200%
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2011 has been a breakout year for growth in mobile visitation. It featured a steep rise in text messaging, smartphone purchases and mobile advertising. Corporate use of mobile websites grew 210 percent in the last 12 months!
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Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World's Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing [06Jan11] - 0 views
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The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth, reports Kevin J. O’Brien in The New York Times.
American Express Now Lets You Swap Rewards Points For Zynga's Purple Cows | TechCrunch - 0 views
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American Express and Zynga are teaming up to make it easier than ever to turn your money into virtual cows, tractors, and whatever else the folks at the multibillion dollar social gaming company can cook up. And this time, it doesn’t involve actually forking over cash — at least, not directly.
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You see, American Express is now allowing its customers to exchange their ‘membership rewards’ points for virtual goods and/or ‘game cards’ that can be redeemed for Zynga’s in-game currency. These points are earned as American Express customers use their cards — the AmEx site says that you get one point for “virtually every dollar you spend on your Card.”
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In addition to these virtual goods, users can buy game cards, with denominations starting at $2 for 200 points and running up to $50 for 5000 points (you can get both physical and virtual game cards). Do the math and you’ll notice that this is 100 points for every $1 of in-game credit. This works out to 1% of your spendings, which is a pretty standard ‘cash back’ amount seen in credit card rewards programs (some programs will do better than 1% for certain items, like hotels).
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Facebook to blame for panic surrounding mysterious Tourettes-like iillness in rural New... - 0 views
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Facebook and YouTube could be to blame for the spread of the mystery Tourrette’s-like illness that is blighting a town in upstate New York. Doctors said that symptoms are being ‘reinforced and magnified’ because victims of the bizarre condition are uploading videos of themselves onto social networking sites to appeal for help. They argue that when other people in the town of LeRoy view the videos, they are unconsciously mimicking what they see and spreading it around.
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