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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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:
Here’s an interesting question: can independent music services such as Spotify, Pandora, and MOG survive long-term? Or are they doomed for failure? That is a question many people (and investors) are wondering. It’s a good question too. The terms that music services have to agree to in order to have access to a record label’s catalog have long been unknown (due to strict non-disclosure agreements), but that has recently changed as more insiders have started to talk.
For quite some time, I have been wondering how bad the deal terms are for music services such as Spotify and Pandora when negotiating with record labels. And now, after reading an article on GigaOM, it is apparent that the deals these companies are signing are horrific (at least for them) and that the terms will significantly impact each firm’s profitability. However, unfortunately for Spotify, MOG, Pandora, and the rest, they need to sign-on as many labels as possible if they want any chance of being successful (or well, popular) because customers will go to the place where they can find and listen to the music that they want to hear.
As the Facebook IPO nears and the new Twitter redesign is being rolled out to users, in the company’s latest attempt led by Jack Dorsey to monetize the site and take on Facebook, there has one date that I have been thinking a lot about. The date? June 18th, 2003. It probably doesn’t mean anything to you unless you knew what you were looking for when you went to go look it up but it is an without a doubt a very important date on the Internet. Why? Because it is the day that Google announced Google AdSense.
If you are not familiar with Google AdSense it is a self-serve advertising network for publishers. Publishers (such as myself) can sign-up for AdSense and implement a piece of code on their site and generate revenue from clicks on the advertisements (publishers get a [small] percentage of the revenue earned by Google for each click). This is huge for publishers because it allows them to earn revenue without having to worry about securing advertisers themselves which is especially helpful for smaller to medium sized websites. Now back to the point at hand.
I ran across this video today and thought “I have to share this with everyone.” I have to share it not because it’s Steve Jobs but because we need more people who think this way. While it’s clear that there are still people out there who do think this way because we’ve had several awesome startups launch in the past few years, we must not become complacent.
There will always be things to invent or tweak or improve, but in order for that to occur we cannot just accept things are the way they are. This is the way entrepreneurs (should) think. However, I would like to extrapolate on one thing regarding what Steve said, you don’t need to necessarily start a company or be an “entrepreneur” to use this approach/thought process the most valuable employees think in this way too and you should always be looking for ways to make yourself indispensable to a firm.
Here’s to the crazy ones — the ones that will change the world.
I want to let you in on a secret — come closer, closer… Ok. Stop. Want a great way to drive traffic to your website? There is a way and it doesn’t require any type of special skill set or knowledge, in fact, all you need is good (preferably awesome) content. So now that I have your attention and you have your content ready, here is what you need to do: signup for StumbleUpon, or login if you created an account a long time ago and forgot about it.
StumbleUpon is one of the Internet’s first social sites for sharing articles, images, websites, etc. It allows you to “Stumble” through different submitted content based on your inputed “likes.” It also is a great way to drive traffic to your own content because unlike sites such as Digg and Reddit where it often frowned upon to submit your own website content even if it’s awesome, StumbleUpon will embrace any content provided it’s good. I like to call StumbleUpon one of the Internet’s best kept secrets, not necessarily because it’s not popular — it is very popular, but because it seems like a lot of people have forgotten about it with the explosion of sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and now Google+.
A few months ago, I watched a video interview with Ren Ng, the founder of Lytro, a new kind of camera company. When the video interview was over I had to pick my jaw up from the floor because what I had just saw was truly awesome and potentially very disruptive to the entire digital camera industry. What’s so special about the Lytro Light Field Camera? It uses “light field” technology which allows the camera to capture the entire light field which means it takes in all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space. This is very different from conventional camera’s that capture a single plane of light and allows for a very cool feature that only the Lytro can provide — the ability to focus and/or re-focus on anything in your photo even after it has been taken.
The Lytro camera also sports an interesting new camera design, its small rectangular design will probably be foreign to many but it’s super lightweight, weighing in at just more than 7.5 oz. It also features instant turn-on so you can quickly snap photos. The small form factor will definitely be useful for portability purposes as well and it comes in two sizes: 8GB (colors: graphite and electric blue) and 16GB (colors: red) priced at $399 and $499 respectively. There are some current limitations, the software that allows you to modify the images after the fact is currently only Mac compatible but they are working on a Windows version.
Today, I’m very excited to announce that my business partner Devon Zdatny and I are launching a public beta for new website/community that we hope will become the central hub for Facebook Cover Photos. The site, which is aptly named, FB Cover Pix is geared exclusively for uploading, exploring, and sharing cover photos that can be used on Facebook’s new “Timeline” profile design.
The goal is to become the premiere destination for Facebook covers. In order to help achieve this goal, we spent a lot of time on development and ideas to differentiate the site from other sites of a similar nature. While this is a public beta and we are still adding features and fixing bugs, we encourage you to test out the site and provide any feedback you have via the contact page. Also, feel free to spread the word!
Yes, Twitter is a conversation platform but that doesn’t mean you need to sign-off every time you are leaving. It isn’t AIM. Seriously, if you are going to bed then go, we won’t be worried if we don’t hear from you for 8 or 10 or even 12 hours. We’ll start getting worried around the 24 hour mark though.
2. The Welcome DM
Words cannot describe how much I loathe this one. I hate it so much, I will actually unfollow you if you use one of these welcome direct messages. I followed you because I found you interesting, obviously, if I find you interesting I’ve read at least a few of your tweets and most likely even checked out your bio and website if you list one, therefore, anything you could possibly say in a 140 character direct message is 1.) unnecessary and 2.) annoying and spammy.
Twitter is currently experiencing some employee shakeup, since late July Twitter has either been clearing house or losing talent such as Loren Brichter (developer of Tweetie, acquired by Twitter), Mike Abbott (VP of Engineering), Sean Garrett (Head of Communications), and most recently Pam Kramer (VP of Consumer Marketing). Even some investors are heading for the door, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures left his seat on the board back in September. Now, I should also note it is bringing in new talent, too, but it is pretty clear that the outflow of employees is currently greater than the inflow.
So what is going on at Twitter? Jack Dorsey.
Clearly, Jack is the only common denominator here, since his return, there have been several employees leaving. However, let me be clear — this is not necessarily a bad thing. People who joined Twitter before Jack came back did so because of the management team at the time and the direction they were looking to go. Which means that Jack’s vision for Twitter is obviously different from previous managements, hence the exodus.
You may recall a letter written in April 2010 by Steve Jobs titled “Thoughts on Flash” in which Jobs denounced allowing Flash to be used on the iPhone for several key reasons including the lack of “openness,” the fact that most of the content on the web (including most videos) are fully functional on the iPhone and iPad, the fact that Flash is slow and resource intensive and drains battery life, and the lack of “touch” functionality being that Flash was built on the premise you would be using a mouse to interact with it.
Many people examined the letter by Jobs under a microscope looking for things that weren’t there and some even believed it was only a matter of time until Flash was allowed on iOS. Well, today, this debate has been settled. Adobe announced today that it will be discontinuing the development of Flash for Mobile devices to focus more of its efforts towards HTML 5 (a standard supported by Apple).
