Klout recently announced that it raised a new round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins as the company prepares to make a big splash in 2012, but does your Klout score matter? I look at the future of Klout and the impact it may (or may not) have on the individual.
Want a quick and easy way to sell digital content online? Look no further then Gumroad. Gumroad is a web service that allows its users to sell digital content such as music, blog posts, graphics, website designs, and more with the click of the mouse.
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The sidebar of a website is an interesting place and one that should given some serious thought while designing or modifying your site. Unfortunately, many people just associate the sidebar as a place to stuff advertisements. While it is true, the sidebar is a common place for advertisements, people who are serious about building a great website should see the sidebar as more than just an “adbar.”
The way I view the sidebar is as an extension of the pages content. It needs to compliment what the visitor is looking at in order to be the most effective. An effective sidebar should have a purpose and the purpose shouldn’t be finding ways to display the most advertisements and make as much money as you can from onetime visitors. The best sidebars are ones that retain, engage, and monetize visitors. And then do it again the next time the visitor comes back.
I expect 2012 to be an interesting year in tech for several reasons, but the one I want to discuss today is the Facebook IPO. The Facebook IPO is coming and it will have a huge impact in the tech industry but not for reasons you may think. According to a former in-house Facebook recruiter, the IPO will create thousands of millionaires, granted, they will need to wait out the vesting period before selling their stock, but make no mistake there will be plenty of new millionaires when it’s all said and done.
Why does it matter? It matters because a lot of the people who will be cashing in are engineers — the very people who built Facebook and implement all the features will now have a lot of money at their disposal. While some of them may be planning to buy a nice house or sports cars or fun trips, the more entrepreneurial spirits are most likely planning their next big project.
In just one week from now, music streaming service, Spotify will have been in the US for six months. Spotify launched in the US back on July 14th and opened its doors to music lovers with unlimited free access to streaming music (with the occasional ad). However, the music is about to stop or well be extremely limited for users unwilling to shell out the $4.99 per month for desktop access or $9.99 per month for mobile access via its app.
The new free limitations are as follows: 10 hours of streaming per month and you are only allowed to play individual tracks at most five times per month. What does this equate to song wise? Well, say the average song is 3 minutes that’s 20 songs per hour or roughly 200 songs per month that you will be able to listen to for free. As someone who loves to work with music in the background that can go pretty quickly.
Klout recently announced that it raised a new round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins as the company prepares to make a big splash in 2012. According to the post by Klout CEO, Joe Fernandez, the company has already made significant investments in both engineering and infrastructure and plans to use this new funding to “continue to provide the most accurate and transparent measurement of influence.” He then goes on to say, that another goal is to make it clear why it pays to have Klout.
While it’s great that Klout wants to provide an “accurate and transparent” measurement of influence, let’s be real — it will never be completely transparent. It can’t be. If it was, competitors would jump at the opportunity to copy it. Klout will not be disclosing how its algorithms work the same way Google doesn’t. And really, that’s fine but the whole “we are for transparency” bit, at least with regard to how scores are calculated, is simply not true. So save that act and start working on ways to convince me (and everyone else) that Klout really matters.
Want a quick and easy way to sell digital content online? Look no further then Gumroad. Gumroad is a web service that allows its users to sell digital content such as music, blog posts, graphics, website designs, source code, and even t-shirts with the click of the mouse. Simply signup with your Twitter or Facebook account (or using Gumroad’s own system) and you will be on your way to selling and making some money.
So how does Gumroad work? Users are required to have their own distribution system for the items they are selling on the service, while Gumroad functions as the payment platform. The fact that people must have their own distribution system in place helps prevent people from selling things that they do not own the rights to. Granted, it is not a perfect solution, however, it seems to be working thus far and will be interesting to how this potential issue plays out longterm.
According to StatCounter, Google Chrome has continued to pick up market share in the browser wars through December. Chrome went from 15 percent market share a year ago to 27 percent share in December 2011. A trend that I believe will continue as it catches up to (and eventually surpasses) Internet Explorer in market share which is currently at 39% according to StatCounter.
But why has Google been so successful with Chrome? How come Mozilla couldn’t penetrate the market as quickly? Both very good questions. There are a few factors that I think have played into Google Chrome’s success.
We may soon find out how much a tweet or Twitter follower costs in dollar terms. An interesting lawsuit filed by PhoneDog Media L.L.C. against Noah Kravitz, a former blogger for PhoneDog.com, is expected to go to court next month. The dispute? Twitter followers.
While working at PhoneDog, Noah tweeted under the Twitter handle PhoneDog_Noah and over that period of time amassed a following of over 17,000 people. Now, despite coming to an agreement with PhoneDog that allowed him to keep the account provided he changed the handle (it’s now @NoahKravitz) and tweeted things occasionally that PhoneDog content, the company is suing him for $340,000 or $2.50 per month for each individual follower (for eight months).
Here’s a hot topic: competitors or scammers bidding on your company’s trademark in search results to be at the top of the results in the sponsored links section. Is this illegal? The answer may surprise you: it’s not. And as long as traditional search engines are making billions in search ad revenue you can guarantee they will continue to fight (or settle in many cases) with any company that sues them for allowing other third-party advertisers to use that company’s trademarked term(s) for the competitors benefit.
This isn’t a new issue — it has been going on for years. Most recently, a close friend of mine and the CEO of Malwarebytes wrote about his company facing this very problem. Unfortunately, the competitors are doing more than just using his company’s trademarks, but are also using deceptive practices to lure users into downloading the competitors product by thinking they are downloading Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.
So what is a company supposed to do to protect itself from competitors bidding up its trademark and sitting at the top of the results in the sponsored links section?
The introduction of new programs or software often has the effect of fundamentally changing the way we interact with long-established ones. The Street View program turned Google Maps from a resource for directions into a photo gallery of the world. YouTube MP4 converters turned a video website into a legitimate music source. And, now, the Timeline redesign has turned Facebook from a traditional social media site into a more encompassing life scrapbook or autobiography.
The Facebook Timeline is an overall of the website’s regular user profile. In the old profile, the most recent status updates, pictures, and wall posts appeared at the top of the screen. To see a post from several months or years ago, a viewer would need to do a good deal of scrolling and searching. The Timeline changes this by adding a sidebar on the left side of every profile. The sidebar lists off all the years during which that profile registered activity. A viewer needs only to click on a year if they want to see pictures or wall posts from that time. Read the full story »
I have a great holiday giveaway to share with everyone! BestTechie has teamed up with discount software website BitsduJour.com to giveaway $2,000 worth of professional graphics software from SmithMicro, the makers of software titles such as Poser, Manga Studio, and Anime Studio. It’s super easy to enter and if you enter during the special BestTechie Exclusive pre-release announcement (from today until Monday) your chances of winning are doubled! How awesome is that? Enter now!
To make matters even better if you share the giveaway with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or via email and they win, you win too! Here is a list of the applications (all are Mac and PC compatible) that you can win:
