Posted at Gawker
by Adrian Chen
A social media genius at Bing decided the tsunami was a good way to boost their brand recognition on Twitter. This morning Bing tweeted: “How you can #SupportJapan -For every retweet, bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100K.” More »
Posted at TechCrunch
by Devin Coldewey
This is a rather disturbing turn of events. Federal Magistrate Joseph Spero has approved a request by Sony to subpoena the hacker GeoHot’s web host, as well as YouTube, Google, and Twitter, for identifying information on anyone who has accessed, commented, or viewed information relating to the hack. At best this is lazy on Sony’s part and irresponsible on Magistrate Spero’s, and at worst it is a deliberate and malicious wholesale violation of privacy.
The pretense for this wildly overreaching action is that Sony needs this information to prove the case should be tried in San Francisco, in federal court and close to Sony’s headquarters. And why do they feel it should be? Because that’s in Sony’s terms of service. This after another judge noted that by Sony’s standards, “the entire universe would be subject to [her] jurisdiction.”
Posted at TechCrunch
by Matt Burns
The rumor mill got one right. Amazon just launched the instant streaming service for Prime subs. The service opens up “5,000 movies and TV show at no additional cost” to those who pay for the Amazon Prime membership. Yep, if you happen to have a free or even trial account, the content isn’t available for you. Sorry, fellow freeloaders, it’s time for us to pony up the $79.99 a year for access to the shows and 2-day shipping on your Amazon orders.
The service rolled out this morning and seems to work as advertised. Click the button and it starts playing. However, I can’t seem to dig up if the new Prime free streaming content is available on 3rd party boxes. It doesn’t show up on my TiVo or Roku yet. Chances are though these devices haven’t got the memo yet and an update will open the gate to the free garden.
Posted at TechCrunch
by Leena Rao
White label daily deals platform and TC Disrupt finalist ChompOn is releasing some interesting data today comparing the value of shares, Tweets, likes and follows in the context of e-commerce. Using data from the sites that it powers daily deals for, ChompOn examined the conversion rate and action for deals shared on Facebook and Twitter.
According to the startup, the value of a Facebook share is $14 and the value of a Tweet is $5. For shares and tweets, ChompOn was able to directly attribute sales to the original action and took the total revenue attributed to each action and divided it by the total number of shares/Tweets. ChompOn is working with 50 partners including Blackbook Magazine, JDeal and the wine vertical of flash sales site Beyondtherack, to power Groupon-like crowdsourced coupons.
By comparison, ChompOn says the value of a Facebook like is $8 and the value of a Twitter Follow is $2. For likes and follows, ChompOn estimated attribution by looking at traffic references and subtracting out purchases made through shares/Tweets as well as purchases made through direct traffic. Of course this data is a bit tenuous and anecdotal. And it’s important to note that this analysis does not capture the long-term value of customers over time.
We’ve seen other data that shows the higher value of a Facebook share over a Tweet. Eventbrite recently reported that a share with Facebook friends results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales whereas a Twitter share is only worth $0.43.
As we wrote back then, Facebook and email most closely match your real friends. In the context of events, this produces better conversions. But it’s interesting to see that in terms of commerce, Facebook again provides a higher value than Twitter in terms of conversions.
Posted at TechCrunch
by Robin Wauters
We knew Zynga’s Facebook game CityVille was a hit if the company ever had one (and it’s had several already) but the growth that it is displaying is simply mind-blowing.
We’ll kick off by pointing out that the game was released on December 2, 2010, which is less than a month ago.
The company subsequently reported that in the game’s first 24 hours on Facebook, over 290,000 people had already played CityVille. A few days later: 3 million daily active users. And while you turned your eyes away from the screen for a few minutes: bang, 6 million active users.
Last week, the Sim City-esque game logged about 61.7 million monthly active users, effectively eclipsing its other hit game, FarmVille. Today, CityVille is at close to 72.5 million monthly active users, which means that it has already outgrown FarmVille (which boasts roughly 57,4 million monthly active users) by more than 25 percent.
CityVille isn’t just the biggest game on Facebook, it’s now the biggest game on Facebook with one hell of a margin.
For the record: we got the numbers straight from the application pages, as AppData’s stats on monthly active users appear to be a tad outdated at the time of writing.
And just for the heck of it, here are the current usage stats for the other “Ville” games:
FrontierVille: 30,468,070 monthly active users
PetVille: 8,394,142 monthly active users
YoVille: 6,232,611 monthly active users
FishVille: 4,969,283 monthly active users
No wonder Google investor John Doerr famously said Zynga is probably his VC firm’s best investment to date. Its growth is simply astounding.
Posted at Pluggd.in
by sinha
WeRead started as a Facebook app (launched by uGenie*/was started as a part time project) and later converted to a full fledged online network, enabling users to discover/recommend books using existing socionets like Facebook, Orkut etc.
Flipkart has announced that they have acquired WeRead from Lulu. Earlier, Lulu (which acquired uGenie) had certain plans for WeRead, but nothing substantial has come out of it (the plan was to use WeRead as a marketing channel for self-publishing authors of Lulu).
To give you certain context, uGenie founders have already quit Lulu/WeRead around 2-3 months back and Lulu’s Bangalore office was shut down in August 2010.
As far as Flipkart’s interest is concerned, this is a contextual service – i.e. discovery of books via online networks (WeRead boasts of 3 million readers and 60 million books added by the users); plus all the ‘Buy’ links (from WeRead) will now point back to Flipkart (points to Amazon otherwise).
* – The Facebook app was built by Mekin (and other colleagues). Mekin now works for Flipkart.
Recommended Read: 2010: The “Dabangg’ Year for Indian Internet Startups
Posted at TechCrunch
by Leena Rao
We know that online holiday spending is reaching highs this year, as consumers are looking to the web for deals this season. To date, comScore is reporting that $27.46 billion has been spent online, which is a 12 percent increase versus the same period of time last year. This past week ending December 17, reached $5.15 billion in spending, which is an increase of 14 percent.
In fact, four individual days this past week surpassing $900 million, led by Green Monday (Monday, December 13) with $954 million and Free Shipping Day (Friday, December 17) with $942 million.
It looks like more retailers are using free shipping as an incentive and consumers are responding positively to this trend. comScore’s data shows that sales on Free Shipping Day increased by 61 percent thanks to retailers promoting the deal. The company says that more than 1,500 online merchants offered free shipping this year, including Amazon, Walmart and others.
Each of the past five weeks has seen free shipping on at least half of transactions, while that benchmark was reached only once during the 2009 season. For the five-day week ending with Free Shipping Day, the percentage of transactions with free shipping reached 52.7 percent, up 12 percent from last year.
In terms of actual categories, spending on Computer Hardware is at the top of the list with a 25 percent increase versus last year. Interestingly, comScore says that purchases of handheld devices (such as Apple iPads and e-readers) and laptop computers are most popular and is driving this sales growth. Consumer electronics came in second, growing 22 percent; followed by Books & Magazines (up 21 percent), Computer Software excluding PC Games (up 16 percent) and Toys (up 15 percent).
While we won’t know the final tally of overall spending this holiday season, all signs point to online retailers seeing healthy sales. Total spending is expect to rise 11 percent to $32.4 billion this year, so we still have a few billion to go. It’s always a good sign to see record breaking Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales; but it’s even better when consumers are continuing to spend following these peak days.
Posted at ReadWriteWeb
by Alex Williams
Amazon Web Services (AWS) importing VMware images is a bit like the Hotel California. You can check in but you can never leave.
That’s VMware’s view about AWS importing VMware virtual machines. Without any real export features, AWS is locking in customers that want to extend its virtualized infrastructure to a public cloud environment.
Matthew Lodge is senior director of cloud services for VMware. We caught up with him this week to talk about VMware’s approach and how it differs to AWS.
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Lodge referred to Tom Bittman, a Gartner Research analyst who says that security and performance are two of the top concerns around public cloud infrastructure.
That, in a nutshell, is a distinct way that VMware differs from AWS.
Hybrid is what VMware sees as its next push. In making the move to import VMware virtual machines, AWS is recognizing a significant market opportunity. It’s also a testament to VMware’s dominant place in the market.
But George Reese sees some issues with both AWS and VMware’s methods. Reese is the founder of EnStratus, a cloud management service that helps companies extend their data centers to the cloud. He says the AWS import method is too low level. He said to us via Twitter that it would be similar to an app running on its own separate motherboard. That motherboard would then have to be ported from one server to the next.
The better alternative is to be portable to the application layer and run your application on any virtual machine on your target operating system.
Lodge says that VMware offers its customers security and control when moving to the cloud.
In a blog post this past August, he wrote:
“Another important area that we heard about time and again was security. Consequently, security is a key part of vCloud Datacenter services. There are three parts to this: the security of the cloud infrastructure itself, the applications running in the cloud, and the access and authentication rights for cloud users within your organization.
You told us it wasn’t enough that the infrastructure and apps are protected; security teams and auditors need to be able to verify and document it too. To deliver on that, vCloud Datacenter service infrastructure has to meet a strict set of physical and logical security controls, with all logs available for inspection by third party auditors. We developed a control set derived from ISO 27001 and consistent with SAS70 Type II for that purpose, which our service provider partners implement.
We also took advantage of the new vShield Edge and vCloud Director “follow the app” virtual security, which provides a full stateful firewall (again, the logs are available for audit), virtual Layer 2 networking, and full Layer 2 network isolation. As a result, security policy and implementation automatically follow the app, regardless of where it lands physically. (There will be more on this in another blog post.)You also get full role-based access control, authenticated against your own enterprise directory so that you have the kind of access and authorization security you’re used to.”
AWS, Lodge maintains, has a virtual firewall that does not provide a high level of security. You can’t see into it if there is an attack.
“They do not get logs out of the firewall,” Lodge said. “If they’re being attacked they can’t see the logs to see if they are actually getting attacked. They can’t see what happens.”
AWS maintains its network is secure and there is lots to show for that being true. But the situation changes when you start moving virtual machines.
We’ll get more into that in an upcoming post about virtual networks and the emerging awareness that networks require. Lodge and a host of others have a lot of insights into the topic that is worth exploring.
The bottom line: VMware is offering a far more sophisticated service than AWS but the flexibility and pricing for the AWS service makes it a compelling alternative to the VMware approach.
There are a lot of other players in this space, too. EnStratus is a world-class cloud management service. Rackspace is making its own mark by acquiring Cloudkick.
The new year? Our bet is the cloud will become far more transparent. The difference is that by the end of 2011, this will all be far more familiar to companies and perhaps a lot easier to implement, too.
Posted at TechCrunch
by MG Siegler
Back in August, when Google launched Priority Inbox for Gmail, we praised it. And rightfully so. It took many of our nightmare inboxes and turned them into dreams. Well, okay, let’s not get crazy. But it did make them more manageable. And now Google has so stats to share to prove it.
When looking at the median numbers, Google has found that Gmail Priority Inbox users spend 43 percent more time reading “important” emails versus “unimportant” ones. But even more impressive is the overall stat: Priority Inbox users spend 15 percent less time reading email than Gmail users who don’t have it turned on. That’s actually pretty staggering.
Google also used their post on the matter tonight to showcase a small but interesting new feature. Now, if you hover over the “important” indicator on an email, Gmail will tell you why they think it’s important. It could be because of the people messaging you, or the content of the conversation, among other reasons. This transparency is helpful, for example, in showing exactly why Gmail keeps placing some spam email in my Priority Inbox.
Google also says that Priority Inbox should now respond faster to your manual corrections. Again, that should help with some poor categorization issues.
Priority Inbox still isn’t my dream of a Gmail Lite, but it’s a start.
Posted at www.techflash.com
John Cook on Monday, November 22, 2010, 11:59pm PST
iPhone | Northwest | Seattle | Wireless
Buses stuck on the 520 Bridge. Photo via Mike Koss.
We’ve been hearing horror stories all night of Seattle area commuters who’ve been stuck in traffic for hours as an unusual November snowstorm hit the Puget Sound area. The icy roads caused plenty of havoc on the roadways, but the storm also rendered one of Seattle’s most popular transportation-related iPhone applications virtually useless.
OneBusAway, which displays real-time information for King County Metro bus routes, was not able to display accurate bus arrival and departure times today after King County shut off the data feed that tracks bus locations.
It may seem counter-intuitive to shut off a feed during a big storm, a time when bus riders rely on accurate transportation information to safely get from point A to point B. But Brian Ferris, creator of the OneBusAway app, says that the tracking technologies don’t work properly when buses are moved onto alternative routes.
“Why would they pull the real-time feed in conditions where you’d probably agree that it would be extra useful?” Ferris writes in a blog post. “They do so because the current tracking system for King County Metro buses doesn’t work well when buses are on adverse weather reroute.”
That’s an unfortunate scenario for bus riders, some of whom were stranded in the cold hoping that buses were on the way.
“OneBusAway claims that everything’s hunky-dory with the 5 and the 358, which sounds implausible. Anyone know for sure?” wrote one Twitter user who was waiting for a bus in Seattle.
In his blog post, Ferris notes that outdated technology on King County buses makes it especially difficult to track bus locations when weather turns nasty.
The position of each bus in Metro KC is not tracked with GPS, but rather with a decidedly lower-tech approach. Each bus is outfitted with a device that can radio the current odometer reading for the bus back to a server. If we know the odometer reading when the bus starts its route, we can periodically monitor the real-time odometer readings to determine how far along the route the bus has traveled. This gives us an estimate of position and from there, an estimate of how early or late a bus is. This is how http://mybus.org works and OneBusAway is just a fancy front-end to MyBus.
The problem comes with buses on adverse weather reroute, or any type of temporary reroute. When a bus goes on reroute, the physical route changes and the odometry calculation based on the original route used above is no longer accurate. In a perfect world, we would know when a bus is on reroute and adjust to its new route. Unfortunately, there is currently no automated way for handling this situation.
Of course, the problem could easily be resolved by tracking buses with GPS systems. But in an email to TechFlash, Ferris said a GPS bus tracking system is probably at least two years away from being implemented.
“Realistically, we’re still years from a solution that can give you an accurate picture of the transit network looks like in conditions like these,” Ferris wrote.
In the meantime, Ferris said he’s working on real-time, machine readable service alerts about cancellations, detours and delay which can be delivered to devices in “smart ways.”
And, in a follow-up blog post titled “The Snow Came Too Soon,” Ferris writes that he’s been working with King County Metro over the past two months to get adverse weather routes placed in the app.
“The good news is that we are making a lot of progress, but the bad and somewhat obvious news is that I didn’t finish in time,” Ferris writes.
[Twitpic photo via Mike Koss]
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mckoss and 2 more liked this Like Reply Reply Please at least reclaim a little of your integrity and change the title of this piece.
I thought that was pretty clear in the story, and the links to Ferris’ blog posts which provided a lot of insight on the issue.
I agree that Ferris was open and informative about what went wrong. The story was not meant as a damnation of his service or him, but as an explanation as to what went wrong and why OneBusAway didn’t work yesterday.
Here’s more from Ferris’ blog post:
“I know of a lot of you are probably frustrated that OneBusAway is pretty much useless (no real-time, no snow reroute info) on a day when you need it most. I’m pretty frustrated too, if only because I have been working with King County Metro and other agencies over the past couple of months to try to get adverse weather reroute information into OneBusAway.”
Thanks for the comment.
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“How an iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 app failed bus riders during Seattle snowstorm.”
Seems a little clunky to me. Headlines are certainly an art, and it takes real skill to try to nail down effective ones.
I appreciate the feedback.
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Regardless of which app you may be using (including Google Map’s public transit routing) none of the apps had accurate information as to what the status of given (snow) routes were. Announcements of route closures (such as no service to Fremont and Wallingford) were not set apart or easily accessed by non-Twitter users.
In fact, the ‘Alerts’ functionality found on the King County Metro site was actually a link to a PDF of the snow routes – and provided no real-time information for travelers. After watching a lot of the back and forth today, it’s clear to me that the crowd-sourcing of information via SMS, Twitter, Facebook and email turned what was a nightmarishly-freezing public transit disaster into a manageable crisis.
Having years of experience in the custom web application industry, I’m interested to know how we could create a crowd-sourced, city-wide emergency broadcast system. Syndicate tweets, facebook posts, emails, sms messages and RSS/XML feeds from websites. Many of my coworkers who left at 5p and made it home in a timely fashion credited following a few folks on Twitter along with having IMs or phone calls with people sitting at computers (who can more readily and decisively search for content at a desktop than someone with a mobile device).
As a result of yesterday and today’s weather, several companies have allowed employees to work from home or have had ‘snow days’ and closed offices. Apart from personal time lost, what has been the projected productivity time lost (cost) due to weather and poor planning/accommodations/communication on the part of King County?
**Full disclosure: I should mention I personally use OneBusAway when travelling from Downtown Seattle to Ballard, it’s quite handy and accurate enough where I have no complaints about the application. And my commute last night (in total) 3 hours waiting for or on bus routes, 2 hours pushing cars and traffic out of major intersections and 1 hour walking from end of bus route home. Lastly, some of my co-workers were stuck on buses to the east side for over 7 hours, some not getting home until 1am or later (not including walk from bus stop to home).
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Our buses have antiquated tracking systems because it’s more “economical.” Shortly after I moved to Washington state, there was a “Public Initiative” that cut auto licensing fee’s. The sponsor, Mr T. Iman, was hailed as a hero for cutting wasteful taxes. Almost immediately public transit had to be cut in every corner of this state. Most people shrugged and said, “I don’t use those services regularly anyway.”
So here we are years later with a minor emergency and people are frustrated because the, “service they don’t use regularly,” does not have modern GPS tracking.
Once again clever programers and leading edge technology are hamstrung by the shortsighted actions of “we the people.” D’ oh!
Regarding our “public servant’s” at every level, they can only work with what we provide because they are working for us with what “we” provide. (And that “we” includes our mega-corporations who continue to do everything they can to pay as little tax and demand as much profit as they can.) Even in the face of three decades of failing economic policy new political hucksters get elected on the promise of walk across some body of water and deliver the impossible for no cost. So far the only “walking on water” I’ve seen involved a ferry… or cruise ship.
Maybe what we need is an “app” that informs the ignorant of the ramifications of their actions. I would call it “ActualNews.app” or something like that. B. Franklin would be proud.
Light rail, on the other hand, works. SoundTransit responded by curtailing its growth.
Real leadership is needed. Real public transit is needed. Unfortunately, we the people will have moved to a more functional city by the time it comes on-line.
Since KCMetro is so behind the ball, I think OBA should start using the data from their own users to crowd source the GPS data they need. Each time a OBA user boards a bus, it could transmit the accurate time of departure and track the buses location during the entire rider’s trip. There wouldn’t even have to be any more complex UI in the app as you could detect the different speeds of the user as indication that they actually boarded.
I talked to Brian about this last summer at an Android mobile meet up. I wish he had more resources to work toward this.
BTW, I was lucky enough to exit the bus without having to wait for the above pictured jack-knifed bus to clear. My fellow passengers on the #255 probably had to wait many more hours waiting for help to arrive to clear 520.
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Please remember this day when you vote in the next election. Hire a Mayor who understands that roads and transit are actually important.
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Jeetu Mirchandani
