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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According to Ryan Block over at gdgt, Amazon’s new tablet set to be announced this Wednesday is in fact built by the same people who built the RIM PlayBook. How is that the case you ask? According to Block’s sources, RIM originally outsourced a substantial amount of the hardware design and production of the PlayBook to Quanta, which is a company that builds, and sometimes helps design, hardware for name brands.
And when Amazon decided to do an Android tablet, the team at Amazon known as called Lab 126 (the Kindle team) apparently chose not to take on the project and focus their efforts on working exclusively on next-gen E-Ink-based devices. This left Amazon’s executive team without an experienced team to build the device. So what did they do? Amazon turned to Quanta.
When Google announced that their AdSense service, the ad platform used by thousands of advertisers and implemented on countless websites throughout the Internet, was going to add the +1 button for social recommendations on advertisements, I was initially very critical of the move. Sure, Jeff had previously made a very good point when writing about the need to build social features into modern advertising on the Internet, but I myself was still very skeptical about the whole concept. I mean, while I realize that online advertising is an important component that allows the Internet as we know it to exist, but I simply could not see how “social” advertising would take off and why any user would waste their time with socially built ads knowing that all they were doing was helping Google and its advertisers.
But after thinking about it a bit more, I have personally come to the conclusion that the +1 button in advertisements is going to be a killer feature. Not only do I think that this new feature is going to pay off for Google, but in the long run I think that everyone will be able to benefit from this new feature, including Google’s advertisers and even end-users like you and me.
Have you ever wanted to customize your Mac OS X menu bar? Tired of the transparent white menu bar at the top of your screen? Perhaps you want a sleek black menu bar. Well, good news. Now you can have one.
MenuBarFilter is an extremely lightweight app with only one purpose. It changes the color of the OS X menu bar from white to black. In my experience you need to make sure you disable the “Translucent menu bar” feature in the System Preferences under “Desktops and Screen Saver” in order for it to work properly. That being said, it is also worth noting it’s still kind of buggy. Now, it won’t break your Mac (that I’ve seen) and is still being developed so it will probably continue to improve. It is also open source and works on OS X Lion.
This week at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company announced several new features including its realtime sharing functionality, subscriptions, deeper integration with content, and its brand new profile design which includes the new Timeline. It’s clear that these changes represent the future of not only the social network, but social in general. It is also clear that people are now sharing more than ever before.
The new profile design (screenshot below), which is nice, encourages more sharing and deeper Facebook integration into your life. While the changes are far from subtle and will most likely cause an uproar from the 750+ million active users that are using Facebook, these changes are probably for the best. Something I believe the masses on Facebook will discover once they end up using the new Facebook for a while.
The other day I came across an article that immediately caught my attention. The article discussed the fact that RIM’s BlackBerry product line has begun to fall behind in the business mobile sector. While I’ve been pretty critical of BlackBerry devices in the past, this article has definitely given me a bit of a new perspective on things. The article focuses around the concept that BlackBerry’s market share in corporate and business environments has fallen below both iOS and Android combined.
What this means is that even though iOS and Android are (slowly) catching up to and beginning to threaten BlackBerry’s presence in businesses neither mobile operating system has been able to beat BlackBerry’s presence as of yet. And with the productivity and functionality of employees being ever so important to businesses, I honestly think that it’s somewhat shameful that neither Apple nor Google have been able to, despite all of their innovations and shiny new bells and whistles, become a real challenger to RIM’s BlackBerry platform in the enterprise world.
Considering Microsoft’s on-off history with releasing successful operating systems it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft’s success with the Windows platform from here on out (in a world where Apple is thriving and consumer-focused Linux distributions are popping up like advertisements for Internet Explorer users) rests on their ability to make another successful release this time around. Of course, I’m pretty impressed with Windows 7 as it is and believe that Microsoft has made a very solid comeback after the miserable failure that was Windows Visa, but when it comes down to it Microsoft is really facing quite a bit of competition now and in order to hold its position as a driving force in the software industry they’re going to not only meet the current standards in operating systems but rather blow everyone away.
As simple of a concept as this is, I recently read a very interesting and thought-provoking article on ComputerWorld that discusses how Windows 8 will affect Microsoft’s Windows Phone line; a mobile operating system that despite being incredibly promising simply hasn’t gotten the traction in the mobile industry that we’ve seen with Apple’s iPhone and iOS or Google’s Android mobile operating system. So the question is poised; will Windows 8 help Windows Phone’s presence in the mobile industry.
It’s no secret that Bing, the Microsoft search engine that came about after “Windows Live” search (itself the successor to MSN search), hasn’t been carrying its weight for Microsoft. Not only is the venture as part of Microsoft’s web services division not brining in profit, but Microsoft is actually forking out billions of dollars every year just to keep the struggling search engine above water. Now, I must say that Microsoft has done a fairly good job in getting Bing off the ground, and the 14% market-share that the search engine has grasped isn’t something that we should be looking lightly at.
But in all honesty, what good is a 14% share of the search engine market if Microsoft isn’t able to tap into its user-base and generate a revenue? I mean, it’s not like Microsoft – a profit-seeking company – is maintaining and investing in Bing just to do it. They want to be a driving force in the online search arena and they want users to flock to their site just like users flock to Google today. But for what it’s worth, even with the effort that Microsoft has quite obviously put into making Bing the best it can be, I really do think that it’s gotten to the point where the company is spinning its wheels with what everyone knows is a failed venture.
It wasn’t too long ago that Google implemented the +1 button for web pages and websites. It was also indicated at the time that the +1 button would be integrated with ads as well. Well today is the day. Google’s AdSense team just announced that the +1 button will appear with some AdSense display ads which appear on websites around the web.
I’d also like to point out that I called for this change in advertising back in 2009. If you will remember I wrote an article in March 2010 about the future of advertising in which I specifically stated that ads should become more social.
Well, ladies and gentlemen the future is here.
You can read the email that was sent to publishers below:
With everything in our day-to-day lives having become focused more and more around our connection and utilization of the Internet in the last few years, there’s not a single part of me that thinks Netflix – the online streaming service that started its venture with DVD-by-mail service – would still be around today had they not implemented streaming service over the Internet years ago. Even as someone who doesn’t spend a ton of time watching television shows or movies, I must say that I can really appreciate the convenience of queuing up a show instantly and watching it right then and there without having to run to one of the few remaining DVD rental stores or waiting for a DVD to arrive in the mail. And in a world that caters to instant gratification, Netflix’s Internet streaming is, I think, the key component that has allowed them to be successful up to this point.
That said, television and movie streaming isn’t flawless. Netflix has had downtimes in the past which have proven to be more than frustrating for users who put their faith in the availability of Netflix’s services. Beyond that, streaming simply isn’t for everyone, and with so many areas not having access to stable and fast Internet connections there are a lot of users who simply cannot fathom streaming an entire movie over the Internet. And in reality even when everything is fine and dandy and users are capable and willing to stream from Netflix, the chances of all the movies an individual wants to see being available on Netflix is next to nothing. I mean, when I was a Netflix customer it seemed as if any remotely recently movie was only available on DVD or BluRay and never via streaming.
Google is an awesome search engine, there is no question about it. It’s useful for finding information on the web about basically anything you can think of. And, it is also getting better at keeping its users safe from malicious websites. Google’s Safe Browsing technology will not only label sites that it thinks are dangerous (malicious) in its search results but also notify and warn you before actually loading the page. The Safe Browsing technology is even built-in to the Google Chrome web browser so any site in Google’s “potentially malicious” site database will be initially stopped from loading in Google Chrome unless the user chooses to bypass the warning.
But now, you start getting emails from visitors saying that Google is saying your site contains malware and is being blocked. What do you do? Well, fortunately, the very same technology that is blocking your website from loading in people’s browsers is also useful in finding and fixing the malware problem on your site. The steps below are generalized because every site is different. Your site may require a slightly modified approach.
