When you’re reading the Introduction to an anthology, certain words can set off alarm bells. For instance, an editor’s claim that he wanted his collection to be “eclectic” is sometimes shorthand for “I didn’t want to spend much time on a careful selection process. Pretty much anything I found went in.” If you merely flip through the Contents pages of The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood – with 37 pieces divided under such headings as “The Stars”, “The Music and the Music-Makers” and “Ringside Views” – you might be tempted to level this charge at Jerry Pinto.
Once you get down to reading these excerpts, though, you're reminded that few people know the pulse of the true Hindi-movie enthusiast better than Pinto does; there’s little arguing with his claim that these pieces jointly reflect Bollywood’s “all-inclusive, opportunistic, outward-looking” identity. Were the subject of this book anything else, it would be difficult to imagine a reader who would be equally interested in two essays as tonally different as Susmita Dasgupta’s scholarly “The Birth of Tragedy” (in which Amitabh Bachchan’s career arc from rebellious anti-hero to symbol of order is discussed in terms of Dionysian and Apollonian values) and Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s shabbily written and edited trifle “Marrying Hema” (sample sentence: “This was the time when Dharmendra went out of his way to explain it to the industrywallahs, that people was reading more than they are expected to”). But a full-blooded lover of Hindi cinema can embrace both these pieces, and the many others that fall somewhere in between.

This assortment of previously published writings includes Kishore Kumar’s brilliantly surreal 1985 interview to Pritish Nandy (“I tried to dig a canal all around my bungalow so we could sail gondolas there...Why can’t I hang live crows on my wall?”) and R K Narayan’s almost equally surreal account of his experience as an irrelevant onlooker during the filming of his novel The Guide (“I began to realise that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations”). Mukul Kesavan’s essay on the “Islamicate” roots of Bollywood (“Urdu didn’t simply give utterance to the narratives characteristic of Hindi cinema, it actually helped create them”) rubs shoulders with Naresh Fernandes’ poignant journalistic feature about a real-life Anthony Gonsalves and other Goan musicians who had an impact on Hindi-film music. Javed Akhtar discusses screenplay-writing in an engrossing interview with Nasreen Munni Kabir, and in a short story by Salman Rushdie we meet a rickshaw-wallah with Bombay dreams. Khushwant Singh is mildly haughty about Bollywood stars while Bhisham Sahni describes his brother Balraj (today acclaimed as one of Hindi cinema’s first great actors) having to shake off his stiffness before the camera.

Most of the pieces mentioned above are very well written, but in other cases literary quality is beside the point. And on at least one occasion, banal writing is the point: the “Fiction” section includes a dreary excerpt from Khwaja Ahmed Abbas’s novelisation of Raj Kapoor’s film Bobby, which (going by Pinto’s note accompanying the piece) seems to have been included to demonstrate how flat such an endeavour can be compared to the actual experience of watching the movie. Reading the excerpt, I couldn't help recall Rishi Kapoor's expressive face register embarrassment, mild alarm and anticipation in turn during the birthday-party scene, and the words on the page seemed clunky and inadequate in comparison.

It’s natural to read such a collection in fragments rather than linearly, and this allows one to discover, in quick succession, essays that provide contrasting takes on the same person or incident. Thus Madhu Jain notes that “people forget Lata Mangeshkar was a sensual being and not just a disembodied, ethereal voice” (and that “she was the only woman to make Raj Kapoor dance to her tunes”), but Ashraf Aziz in “The Female Voice in Hindustani Film Songs” suggests that “Lata’s laundered voice appeals to the spirit rather than the senses – she infantilized the female voice”. And as if that weren't enough, Dada Kondke presents a pleasingly improbable view of the singer as Annie Oakley. (“Placing the gun on her shoulder and looking at the reflection in the mirror, she started drilling more holes into the tin can”.) But what the pieces reveal about their authors is often equally striking: note how a respected writer like Saadat Hasan Manto can display a bitchy and voyeuristic side when writing about a Bollywood figure (in this case Sitara Devi, portrayed as a sexual predator constantly sucking the life-blood out of the men who came under her spell).

Some of the excerpts are from high-profile publications such as Anupama Chopra’s Sholay book (the chapter that begins with the frisson-creating “Sholay flopped”), but there are also little treasures that you’d be hard-pressed to find in print these days. One of my favourite inclusions is from Vinod Mehta’s 1972 biography of (and unabashed fanboy ode to) Meena Kumari, which suggests a rare form of intelligent yet personal writing on popular Hindi cinema that I had little idea existed at the time; it made me want to rush to a rendezvous with Mumbai’s raddiwallahs (which is where Pinto got the book from). I particularly enjoyed the way Mehta refers to the deceased actress as “my tragedienne” and “my heroine”. Anyone who has ever had similarly proprietary feelings about a Bollywood star or film will find The Greatest Show on Earth hard to resist.
[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. An old post about Pinto's book on Helen is here]

Steve Williams, Tiger Woods‘ former caddie, is back in the news again, this time for his use of racially insensitive language to describe his ex-employer at HSBC Champions in Shanghai.

Williams received a mock award at the ceremony, “Celebration of the Year”, for his “famous” TV interview after golfer Adam Scott won the Bridgestone Invitational in August, where he said:

“I have been caddying for more than 30 years now and that is the best win of my life. A lot has been said and it is great to back it up. I back myself as a frontrunner as a caddie and I have won again.”

At a HSBC Champions dinner, Williams was asked to go on stage to make a few comments about the interview he was “awarded” for, saying, “It was my aim to shove it right up that black asshole.”

After British tabloids ran the story, Williams took to his website to apologize for his statements at the ceremony, saying his remarks were in good fun, and not intended to offend anyone.

“I apologize for comments I made last night at the Annual Caddy Awards dinner in Shanghai,” he wrote. “Players and caddies look forward to this evening all year, and the spirit is always joking and fun. I now realize how my comments could be construed as racist. However, I assure you that was not my intent. I sincerely apologize to Tiger and anyone else I’ve offended.”

Do you think Williams went over the line, or do people need to relax over his relatively tame comment?

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Tiger Woods’ former caddie makes racist comment about his former employer is a post from: The Inquisitr

Zach Holman, Don’t Give your Users Shit Work: “The last thing I want to have to worry about is continually micromanaging another facet of life.”

The Linda Lovelace biopic is picking up steam again, after one actress was booted from one project and replaced by another actress, before that Linda Lovelace movie was put on the back burner and another sprung forth in its place, like a regenerating penis that throbs in the presence of cash.

Here are the five women variously associated with the two Linda Lovelace projects so far.

So, here's the order of events: Lindsay Lohan was once attached to the first Linda Lovelace project, but the producers of that film realized that Lindsay Lohan was Lindsay Lohan so they replaced her with Malin Akerman. However, that project -- still technically alive -- is now being pushed to the background by a new Linda Lovelace biopic which originally had Kate Hudson attached, but Kate Hudson got pregnant, so -- according to rumor -- they were eyeing Olivia Wilde.

But not anymore. Now Amanda Seyfried is in negotiations to play the porn star turned anti-porn advocate. Meanwhile, Peter Sarsgaard is in negotiations to play Chuck Traynor, who was Lovelace's classy manager, husband and pimp.

Lovelace, of course, began her career as a dog f*cker (literally, as she starred in a bestiality film called Dog F*cker) before she gained fame in Deep Throat, one of the first porn films to feature anal. I think she also built baking soda volcanoes in her mouth. Or something. Anyway, after several bad choices, a bout with drug addiction, and a divorce from Traynor -- who she claimed forced her into pornography at gunpoint -- Lovelace joined the feminist anti-pornography movement before later succumbing to injuries from an automobile accident.

Pretty harrowing life.

I have to say, actually, that out of the five women in contention to play Linda Lovelace, Lindsay Lohan might have been the most appropriate choice, while Amanda Seyfried would've been the last woman to come to mind.

(Source: Variety)

Third-party commenting engines like Disqus, Facebook Comments or Intense Debate make it easy for you to enable commenting on any website /blog but there’s one downside – some of these commenting engines are implemented in JavaScript and hence search engines may not be able to read /index the comments that visitors are writing on your web pages.

In other words, your web pages will rarely get any SEO boost as comments are rendered in JavaScript within an <IFRAME> and hence the text is not visible to search engines.

That seems to have changed recently at least in the case of Google. [Update] This was later confirmed by Matt Cutts - "Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JavaScript to index some dynamic comments."

Googlebots, or the spiders that crawl web pages,  are now reading Facebook comments on websites just like any other text content and the more interesting part is that you can also search the text of these comments using regular Google search.

To give you an example, here’s a comment from Robert Scoble that he has previously written on a TechCrunch page using the Facebook comments system..

..and here’s the same comment available through Google web search. You can in fact use search queries like “commenter name * commenter title” (for example – “Robert Scoble * Chief Learning Officer at Rackspace”) to discover all comments that he or she may have written on various websites that use the Facebook comments platform.

If you have so far avoided using Facebook comments on your website /blog just because of the SEO factor, you may want to reconsider your decision now.

However I am not too sure if Google would pass any juice to any of the website links that some people may be dropping in your comments. Also, moderation of Facebook Comments is all the more important now as the comment text is part of the page content itself and you don’t want to be in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines just because of those angry comments that do not use very civilized language.


This story, Google Begins Indexing Facebook Comments, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 31, 2011 under Facebook, SEO, Internet.

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In case there was still any doubt about the long-rumored “GDrive’s” existence, a page now appearing on Google’s search results offers a pretty clear indication that something is going on. On Writely.com – the online word processing service Google acquired in 2006 –  a test page is now appearing with a title that reads “test page for Platypus (GDrive).”

Well, there you have it.

Currently, the full title of the search result reads “Writely – The Web Word Processor – test page for Platypus (GDrive)” and the URL is www.writely.com/BasePage.aspx. Of course, when you click through, the link takes you to an error page of sorts, with a message reading “Unknown action. Please check the URL and try again.”

It should be noted that the www.writely.com domain itself redirects to Google Docs.

Platypus, for those unaware, was the codename for GDrive used internally at Google until it was killed off in 2008. But recent findings have hinted that Google Drive is making a return. For example, in September, MG reported that code found in Chromium (the open source Web browser which serves as the testing ground for Google Chrome) referenced the non-public URL drive.google.com.

Later that month, a screenshot from a presentation at a Google-sponsored event showed something that looks very much like Google Drive, complete with text that even reads “My Google Drive.”

From MG’s earlier reports, the forthcoming service is essentially a rebranding of Google Docs with an accompanying desktop software component, similar to Dropbox. When exactly Google will finally launch Google Drive, after years of waiting, is still unknown. But at least we know they’re working on it.

Thanks Dan Behun

Curating eclectic interestingness from culture's collective brain

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet because screenshots can be easily faked. Sometimes these fake images are for pure fun – like you putting your picture on the cover of TIME magazine, sometimes they may be deceptive.

My favorite is Wall Machine – a service that lets you you create fake screenshots of Facebook walls and other Facebook related activity - like X is now a friend of Y or Z changed their relation status on Facebook. Every part of that screenshot can be customized including the conversation text, the profile images and you can have as many comments on a Facebook post as you like.

Another service – iFakeText - lets you make screenshot images of text messages exchanged on an iPhone. Just enter the text of the SMS conversation in a proper format and generate the screenshot – see example.

I also like Fake Tweet Builder for creating screenshot images of Twitter conversations that may or may not have happened. The screenshots of individual tweets look extremely real - see example – and you may also use customize the profile pictures, the name of the Twitter client and how many times a particular tweet has been retweeted.

Ticket-o-Matic lets you print boarding passes of any popular airline, Fodey generates newspaper clippings while Expense Steak creates PDF receipts of restaurant bills and office supplies for a given amount. When you print these receipts on paper, they’ll look real but there’s little potential for misuse as they carry old dates.

Finally, if a web form makes it mandatory to fill the street address or the phone number, use this website to generate random data for putting into that form.


This story, The Internet of Fake Screenshots, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on October 31, 2011 under Screenshots, Internet.

We're all familiar with the overzealous father who believes he's discovered a hidden talent in his son, and then goes overboard in his attempts to cultivate—some might say, exploit—that talent.

One thinks of Earl Woods, the golf dad who paraded his son Tiger before television cameras at the tender age of 2; or the pathetic, pageant-crazed mothers on TLC's shameless "Toddlers & Tiaras."

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HBO
Budhia Singh at rest in 'Marathon Boy.'


Marathon Boy
Nov. 3 at 8 p.m. on HBO

Now, HBO brings us a similar tale of paternal ambition and self-delusion. "Marathon Boy," a remarkable, haunting and at times disturbing documentary by former journalist Gemma Atwal, tells the story of Budhia Singh, a slum boy from Orissa, India, and his coach and adoptive father Biranchi Das, who runs a local orphanage and judo hall.

Mr. Das buys Budhia out of servitude—his impoverished mother had sold him at the age of 3 to a peddler for 800 rupees (about $16)—cares for him at his orphanage, and soon discovers he has a "gift" for long-distance running.

Incredibly, under Mr. Das's tutelage and before the age of 5, Budhia runs 48 marathons, followed by a torturous 42-mile run in 93-degree heat that nearly kills the boy. This Herculean feat brings more fame and media attention to Budhia and Mr. Das, but also attracts greater government scrutiny. Child-welfare agencies become involved. And it soon becomes clear that Mr. Das, who has by then adopted Budhia, has lost all perspective on what is good for his son and what is good for his own celebrity.

India's extreme poverty and sprawling slums contribute to the drama. But the main conflict here is in the heart of Mr. Das. His desire for Budhia to be the "No. 1 marathon runner in the world," to bring honor to their native Orissa and to garner the fame and recognition that has eluded Mr. Das and his humble orphanage, becomes all consuming.

The film begins with Mr. Das waking Budhia early on the morning of a race, the sixth half-marathon he's run at the age of 3. "Today's the anniversary of the birth of Orissa's pride, Madhusudan," says Mr. Das. "Budhia will run in his honor." This is significant because Madhusudan Das (1848-1934), the Indian patriot, poet and advocate for Orissa's poor, was everything Mr. Das dreams of becoming. But the dazed look on the boy's face as his coach stretches his tiny legs is unsettling. He seems more Mr. Das's puppet than his child. "I have run longer distances than this," says Budhia, "so I will easily cover it."









HBO
Budhia Singh on a run in 'Marathon Boy.'

At the starting line, Budhia is treated like a religious idol or even a kind of demigod. Throngs of people gather to see him and touch him, to watch him run. "Nobody overtakes Budhia!" shouts a race organizer. "Everyone must follow from behind!" The heat is sweltering, and sweat pours from the boy's little body. As he begins the 13-mile run, his coach rides alongside on a bicycle, keeping his speed up. "The kid has such an abundance of stamina," says Mr. Das. "He is 100% determined. He is inching toward perfection."

We later learn that Mr. Das discovered Budhia's talent for running after punishing him for swearing at the orphanage. Since Mr. Das never strikes the children, "he punished me by making me run," says Budhia. "I started running at 6 a.m., then Sir left for some work." When Mr. Das returned at 1 p.m., the boy was still running in tight circles in the orphanage's dirt courtyard. "I was stunned," says Mr. Das. "Then suddenly the idea of creating an Olympic marathon runner struck me."

With fame comes money, and Mr. Das announces to the media that "some senior associates have decided to set up a trust in Budhia's name, to help him achieve his Olympic goals. All the money that is pledged will be spent on Budhia's welfare with utter clarity and transparency."

But as Mr. Das solicits funds for the trust, the Orissa state government becomes more involved. "The recent media frenzy surrounding Budhia is merely a publicity stunt," says Minister for Child Welfare Pramila Mallik, "orchestrated by Biranchi [Das] to earn himself name and fame."

As the controversy grows, Mr. Das enters Budhia in a May 2006 race from the holy Jagannath Temple in Puri to the city of Bhubaneswar, a distance of 42 miles. As in past races, Mr. Das rides alongside Budhia on a bicycle, instructing him to run straight and maintain his speed. Incredibly, the 4-year-old completes the full 42 miles (averaging an impressive 5.75 miles per hour), only to be forced by Mr. Das to run nearly two more miles to a stadium where he will be celebrated and greeted by dignitaries.

But the little boy can run no farther.

The images of Budhia's collapse are disturbing to say the least—eyes rolling back in his head, his body limp, convulsing from dehydration. He's handed over to the care of an army doctor and whisked away in an ambulance. That doctor tells the filmmakers, "Had I not been there, he would have certainly died." Sickeningly, Mr. Das later brings the boy to the stadium anyway. Once there, Budhia vomits repeatedly and, unable to speak, gestures madly for water.

A week later, the Orissa state Child Welfare Committee forbids Budhia from running in any races whatsoever until the age of 11. Enraged, Mr. Das does not recognize the committee's authority and challenges the Indian government at any level to deny him his right to coach his "son."

Allegations of abuse and torture from Budhia's birth mother lead to Mr. Das's arrest. The charges are later dropped and he is released. But the boy is returned to the custody of his birth mother. Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding Mr. Das and his obsession with Budhia's running leads to a tragic end for Mr. Das, the orphans who depend on him, and his family.

Whatever his faults, there's little doubt that Mr. Das improved the lives of dozens of slum children. As he says early in the film, "Everywhere in Orissa you find small kids washing dishes in roadside eateries. Five-year-olds are breaking stones all day in quarries. Six-year-olds are cutting firewood and selling it on the streets. Many even die on the streets. Nobody cares for them.... I can't say for certain that I've helped elevate them in society or that their destiny would have been different. But I'm doing what I can."

If only he had maintained that noble goal, to "elevate them in society," perhaps his destiny would have been different as well.

By Renu Pokharna

Every time I hear the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Dangling Conversation,” it reminds me of the many conversations I hear when I visit conferences on poverty eradication: the “dangling conversations” and “superficial sighs’ about development.



Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
It is meeting season in New Delhi, but the time, expertise and money could be better spent elsewhere argues Renu Pokharna.

Picture The Claridges hotel in New Delhi. A hall with beautiful crystal chandeliers, chairs wrapped in white with yellow silk ribbons, fine china layered with cucumber sandwiches cut to perfection and served with black coffee. The rustle of starched cotton saris from Fabindia, oxidized tribal trinkets, and graceful smiles on the faces of women who discuss the many theories of development and debate the latest statistics on poverty. Bearded men in elegant kurtas and kolhapuri slippers have a quiet smoke in the corner as they plan the filing of a public interest lawsuit or discuss ways to improve a proposal to get more funding from an international foundation.

I always see a contradiction when I go to these conferences. Yes, I enjoy the feel-good conversations as much as anyone else there and am easily tempted by the buffet dinners and the pomp and elegance of the NGO circuit’s many get-togethers.  But I also am aware that these are the result of a structural change in the NGO universe in India that in many ways is unwelcome but is just as dramatic as any that globalization has brought to Indian industry in the 20 years since the 1991 liberalization threw open the doors to foreign influence.

Earlier, it was the Aruna Roys and Anna Hazares working out of villages where they lived with the locals for many years and worked together with them. I was fortunate to work with Aruna nani’s organization, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, last year for a month and loved every bit of it. MKSS’s office to this day is a cluster of huts and rooms and a newly constructed hall in the village of Devdungri in Rajasthan where volunteers first learn to live like a villager and bond with them before starting work.

MKSS has been at the forefront of getting the Right to Information and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme implemented. With outreach and influence like that, one would expect a swanky office with colorful posters and cubicles, not a mud hut managed by the villagers and surrounded by a cactus fence.

Today, the NGO world has been swamped with “professionals” armed with development degrees from the world’s most elite institutes who expect to work in a more corporate-like environment, complete with vending machines, air-conditioned conference rooms and plush offices.

No harm in that except that the money for salaries and operational expenses goes through the roof, leaving little left to be spent on the poor. Glossy yearbooks, conferences, business-class air travel and fancy accommodation have all added to the rising budgets of many NGOs in India.

Of course, I partly also blame some of the foundations who pour money into these organizations but do little to follow up on where the money is being spent.

Once, while I was working in microfinance, we tried to introduce the concept of sanitation loans – money given to poor women to construct toilets in their houses. To build this concept, we decided to take on a consultant who knew this area well and who had worked at the World Bank and many international aid agencies. So, I called him up and explained what we needed. He gracefully accepted to help us. Out of courtesy, I asked if we should pay him some honorarium. To which this person who was talking to me about building toilets and issuing 10,000-rupee loans to poor women responded: “I normally get paid 25,000 rupees a day but of course I don’t expect you to match that!”

I know the usual argument is that NGOs need to be more professional so creating a business-like environment with business-like compensation for business-like expertise is worthwhile. But why can’t one be a professional like Medha Patkar or Baba Amte?

I am not promoting that everyone go to the village and work. My concern is what I call the conspicuous consumption of funding which is not our own. This affliction is often found at the very same NGOs who criticize the government for not spending taxpayers’ money effectively.

Legal arguments aside, morally the money spent by NGOs is also not theirs. In the case of donors that are arms of national governments, it belongs to those nations’ taxpayers. Or it might be shareholder money if it is given by a company’s Corporate Social Responsibility arm.

There is a need for we who call ourselves development workers to introspect. Before we fill out our grant document, let’s ask ourselves some questions. Do we really need to organize that art show for awareness? Will the music concert and the charity walk make a difference? Are we really talking about “inclusive development” when we don’t even invite the people we are trying to help to our conferences or ask for their input?

Can we not then perhaps decide to just go to a municipal school hall, sit in it, discuss the issues at hand, and wrap up whatever we need to in a day without the picnic?

Renu Pokharna works with the Education Department in the State of Gujarat. The views expressed are her own.

Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

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3 key points you need to know about Facebook Timeline, gleaned from two previous "lifestreaming" products: FriendFeed and Memolane.

Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.

So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.

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Steve Jobs once famously said, quoting Picasso, that "good artists copy, great artists steal." Sure enough, as with most game-changing things on the Web, Timeline is not an original invention by Facebook. Although Timeline wasn't directly stolen from anyone, it was clearly influenced by FriendFeed and Memolane.

One of the strongest inspirations for Timeline came from within Facebook itself, in the form of a startup it acquired in August 2009: FriendFeed. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, FriendFeed was a social media aggregator that was much beloved by Web geeks.

FriendFeed was always far too geeky for mainstream users, however to his great credit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spotted its potential. At the time Zuckerberg called FriendFeed "a simple and elegant service for people to share information." (emphasis ours) Well, two years later and it just so happens that sharing information is a key reason why Facebook is introducing Timeline.

Yes, Facebook's Timeline is ostensibly focused on an individual's personal history - kind of like an online diary. But that's really just a front for the real purpose of Timeline: to expose your entire content history to your friends and public subscribers.

It's not just the sharing that's key, it's making that content more social. ReadWriteWeb did one of the earliest interviews with FriendFeed's founders, Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, in February 2008. Something that Buchheit (who in the past had created Gmail for Google) said back then is more relevant than ever today, with Facebook's Timeline. Buchheit said that FriendFeed was "trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content." (emphasis ours)

So that's key point number 2 about Timeline: Facebook expects to make that content more social. That goal is supported by other Facebook initiatives this year, such as the real-time updates ticker and automated sharing from apps like Spotify and Washington Post.

Let's move now to a startup that wasn't acquired by Facebook, but which earlier this year launched a timeline service that is very close to what Facebook introduced later in the year. That startup's name is Memolane and we gave it a favorable review in January.

After Facebook announced its Timeline, Memolane CEO Eric Lagier tried to differentiate his service as a "Timeline of Your Life (more than just your Facebook posts)." Regardless of how Memolane is different from Facebook Timeline, he hit the nail on the head with his point that "time is the perfect tool to organize social media."

That's key point number 3 about Facebook Timeline: it organizes a lot of your social media activity, at least that which occurs on Facebook or on its third party partners like Spotify.

Incidentally, you have to feel for Memolane. An 800-pound gorilla just sat squarely on its little niche of the Web. Memoland is rather ominously "down for maintenance" as I write this, although its Twitter account reassures us that it is "preparing for some exciting things coming your way" this Tuesday. Here's hoping Memolane innovates itself into an exciting new direction with the timeline concept, because of course we love scrappy startups here at RWW.

Lifestreaming is Going Mainstream
There were many other products that Facebook probably took inspiration from for Timeline. Nokia Lifeblog and Six Apart's Vox are two that come to mind (to see how times have changed, read our mid-2006 analysis comparing Vox with Facebook). But the key points are clear from FriendFeed and Memolane:

Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
That's because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).

The over-riding lesson from Facebook Timeline is that lifestreaming is going mainstream. At the beginning of this year, digital design consultancy Fjord predicted this would happen: "in 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They'll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online."

Of course Fjord wasn't to know that Facebook would implement Timeline and effectively position itself as the center of a huge trend. Which is what Facebook Timeline has done and why Facebook - and lifestreaming - is going to be very big.

Discuss

PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: After the advertising blitzkrieg to mark Rajiv Gandhi‘s birth and death anniversaries, and the death anniversary of his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru earlier this year, Union ministries and Congress-led State governments and departments have once again splurged heavily to mark Indira Gandhi‘s death anniversary today.

In the 12 newspapers surveyed, there are 64 advertisements of various sizes, amounting to approximately 31½ published pages to mark the assassination of the former prime minister on this day, 27 years ago.

In contrast, Vallabhbhai Patel, the late Union home minister, whose birth anniverary too falls on October 31, gets 9 advertisements in the same 12 newspapers, amounting to 3 published pages. While there are multiple advertisements for Indira Gandhi, no paper has more than one ad for Patel.

The breakup of the Indira Gandhi ads are as under:

Hindustan Times: 22-page main issue; 9 Indira Gandhi ads amounting to 4¼ broadsheet pages

The Times of India: 30-page issue; 13 ads amounting to 6¼ broadsheet pages

Indian Express: 22-page issue; 9 ads amounting to 4 broadsheet pages

Mail Today (compact): 36-page issue; 3 ads amounting to 2¾ compact pages

The Hindu: 24-page issue; 8 ads amounting to 4 broadsheet pages

The Pioneer: 16-page issue; 7 ads amounting to 3¼ broadsheet pages

The Statesman: 16-page issue; 4 ads amounting to 2 broadsheet pages

The Telegraph: 22-page issue; 5 ads amounting to 2½ broadsheet pages

***

The Economic Times: 26-page issue; 3 ads amounting to 1½ pages

Business Standard: 14-page issue; 2 ads amouning to 1 page

Financial Express: 20-page issue; 1 ad amounting to half a page

Mint (Berliner): 24-page issue; 0 ads

This computation is only for 12 English newspapers; many other English papers have been left, as indeed has the entire language media which are more numerous than the English ones, several times over.

Among the 13 advertisers wishing the dear departed leader are the ministries of information and broadcasting, commerce and industry, steel, women and child development, health and family welfare, human resources development, development of north east region, and social justice and empowerment.

The state governments advertising their love are those of Rajasthan, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh. Besides, most newspapers carry an advertisement inserted by the Congress party.

All told, so far, this year, tax payers money have been spent in buying 265 advertisements amounting to 132 published pages in the 12 newspapers.

Last year, on the 19th death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi, the historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in an edit-page article in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

“A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that on May 21, 2010, perhaps Rs 60 or 70 crore were spent by the taxpayer — without his and her consent — on praising Rajiv Gandhi. Since the practice has been in place since 2005, the aggregate expenditure to date on this account is probably in excess of Rs 300 crore.”

Also read: Rajiv Gandhi death anniversary: 69 ads over 41 pages in 12 newspapers

Jawaharlal Nehru death anniversary: 24 ads over 11 pages

Rajiv Gandhi birthday: 108 ads across 48 pages

Filed under: Issues and Ideas, Media Tagged: Business Standard, Churumuri, Financial Express, Hindustan Times, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mint, Rajiv Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha, Sans Serif, The Economic Times, The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Times of India, Vallabhbhai Patel

*Sensitive content. Readers discretion advised. Keep away from children and adults under 18 years of age*

India is to porn what America is to Cricket. From BDSM videos with women hitting each other with brooms to weirder stuff, Indian porn is and has been the ICL of the porn industry. Our ‘We gave the world Kamasutra’ argument has also lost its weight. Vatsayana would have been terribly disappointed with how we’ve handled our intellectual property as far as sex is concerned. Our Indian roots are distinctly visible on our porn sites considering the fact that once upon a time, all Indian porn sites had a maternal/paternal relationship in their title. In a post-DPS-mms India, thanks to camera phones and streaming porn, Indian have rediscovered their ‘Kamasutra’ genes and are constantly contributing to the world of porn, a stronghold of our japanese brethren. Economic development(Thank you, Manmohan ji), mobile phones and cheap internet and Deodorant ads have ushered in an era of erotic reform. No longer is the Indian public holed up in Internet cafes, worried about webcams and police raids. The laptop is the new internet café and surfing porn(and creating it) has never been easier.

However, during all these years, dismal and promising, Indian erotic stories have been a beacon of hope, the silver lining. From ‘Manohar Kahaniyan’ and naughty digests sold around bus stations to Savita Bhabhi and erotic literature, we’ve come a long long way. But our imagination, fueled by the hindi titles James Headly Chase novels, has resulted into this vast universe of erotic accounts of an ordinary Indian life. So while sex and talking about sex continues to be a taboo topic in the country, the interwebz and blogverse are brimming with imaginative accounts of horny Indians. Thanks to the Poonam Pandeys and naughty ad agencies of the country, the imaginations of these authors are being regularly fuelled and replenished with adult fodder.

But as promising as it sounds, the content that this battery of writers is churning hasn’t evolved as expected. We are as far from good erotica as Nigeria is from world domination. Not only that, our national erotic content has now become homogenous to the extent of classification. Let us look at five kind of erotic story writers who have found a Priyadarshan’s-climax-scene-like formula for erotic stories:

 

- The Traveling Salesman kind:

This is a special variety of erotic story writer whose characters always have sex in public transport. They make out in trains, in buses, aeroplanes, taxis – even Mumbai local trains(Frankly speaking, I did get a lot of action the last time I boarded a Mumbai local train but that wasn’t exactly erotic). So while the rest of the country struggles to have sex even after marriage, this particular kind manages to have coitus with perfect strangers. Not only that, their stories sound like tourism advertisements. Sample these:

- Bus to Hubli

- Trivandrum Super Fast

- Joyful ride to Kolhapur

- RAC Pleasure

- Crowded Chennai Bus

- Thrissur Ernakulam KSRTC Bus Journey

In fact the last one is a search result for people looking for ‘Thrissur Ernakulam KSRTC Bus’.  Now I can understand titles like ‘RAC Pleasure’. Getting a Tatkal ticket is actually orgasmic, even if you get an RAC. But ‘Crowded Chennai Bus’ is simply taking it too far. I am glad they didn’t mention bus numbers – Hot ride on 19B, Sizzling journey on 21H. In their stories, these guys are always achieving the impossible: Having sex under shawls, in train bathrooms(where even your bladder refuses to perform the necessary tasks), on the last seats of a bus. For them, even the sky is not the limit.

 

 

- The Pinnochio

The Pinnochios are the worst of the lot. They lie. What do they lie about? Sizes.

A male protagonist in a Pinnochio’s story will have a  manhood the size of the Grand Trunk road. The female lead will have the figures that’d put Barbie dolls to shame. These guys will subtly introduce the size of the organ in a sentence. Be it a mild nudge like – ‘and I took out my tool(11 inches of it)’  – or more direct approach – ‘my 27.6 inch organ was waiting to be introduced’, size is an integral part of their story. In fact they dedicate the first few paragraphs of their story to generating combinations of variants of 36-24-36. Then they’ll casually throw in references to the size once in a while, more than the number of times you’ll find ‘Global Exposure’ in an IIPM ad. If their accounts were to be believed, India’s under-garment ergonomics would need major restructuring. Their stories sound like God used a CNC machine to carve their organs. No wonder half of them call it ‘My tool’.

 

 

- The TMI guy:

The TMI(TOO MUCH INFORMATION) guy writes about everything but sex. His erotic story can include anything from socio-political commentary to the list of apps on his smartphone. These guys believe that the Right To Information act stands for providing as much information as possible in a story. Sample this:

“I was little poor in Mathematics even though I got 87.5 marks for S.S.L.C.”

“That deep navel was my weakness after watching the film Rathinirvedam, which is released in 1978,many years before my birth.”

"I got lot of good boys and girl friends every one was very much fond of scientific thoughts in medicine as we disscus in our lessure time. I found most of my boy friends are interested in doing experiments in female body they always read books related to femenine body experiments by scientist in old ages "

“Now, an 11KV current is going through my body”

“While we were going around in that big compound, she used to pick jasmine flowers from the bottom of a jasmine tree”

“I had three aunts, who have 2 daughters each so, I had 6 sisters-in-law all are of my age group. 4 of them from north India and 2 from Andhra whose names are priyanka, neha, pooja, Kajal, sridevi and sriya (all names changed”

Their stories are like the print version of an Ashutosh Govarikar movie. Or that really long sms you had to scroll through only to discover a sad joke at the end.

 

- The Shake-spheres and Subhash Ghais:

Shake-spheres are closet playwrights. Their stories are actually full length plays with acts and characters. Each character is often disguised as an alphabet(for privacy concerns ofcourse). So their stories sound a lot like alphabet sex. Sample:  ‘While B stood in a corner watching us, I pulled A into bed’. Their stories are the most unreadable because by the time you’ve learned the names of the characters, the story ends.

Subhash Ghais, on the other hand, write very engaging stories. Alternatively known as The Emoticons, the Subash-Ghais have a thing for drama and enunciation. Their stories are so articulate, you can almost hear them. It is like a transcript of a phone-sex session. Popular words include ‘oooh’, ‘aah’, ‘umm’, ‘uiiii’, ‘uff’ with numerous variations by capitalization and adding vowels. On certain occasions, regional words are also employed to indicate unity in diversity.

 

- The Analogist:

Contrary to what you are thinking, Analogists are people who come up with brilliant analogies while describing an act of sexual intercourse or features of the human body. There analogies may not be as awesome as the 25 Worst Analogies Ever, but they come really close. Really, really close.

Sample these:

- “Oh, Balu! It is big like a big ping-pong ball”

- “Something smelt like cooked rice water”

- “You are slim and your complexions are superb like a mixture of milk and vermilion”

- “..like a flag between his thighs”

- “Her innocence was like `Sridevi’ in the movie `Sadma’….”

- “The girls walked and moved like athletic girls, not girly girls”

- “Her nose is the classic Indian nose, with a hump like a fertile camel”

- “The blade like sharpness of the situation eased and I took the benefit”

- “Heather’s body moved like a female gymnist in slow motion”

- “Like the bisector which our teacher taught it had a channel which was dark between her triangle”

- “Both of them cuddeled up like spoons”

- “thigh shining like a polished granite surface”

- “They were looking like 2 antennas on her lovely melons”

- “With his erect c**k standing like the leaning tower of Pisa”

- “were almost 50% out of my tiny wet bra and could be clearly seen like daylight”

- “All I could see was her outline, like a shadow in the darkness”

- “she looked at me like a deer startled by headlights”

 

While feminine organs are mostly compared with fruits and vegetables, the male ones end up being compared with mechanical objects. In fact, breasts have been compared to a strange assortment of things like Coconut, Mango, Peach, Grape, Peanut, Mid-sized Papaya, Button, Sky Scraper, Hills and Mountains, Pyramid etc. Occasionally, there is a wildlife reference too – “Her breasts were like two small hare” or “They were looking like tigers & tigress arousing each other”

You can also tell the occupation or hobby of the writer from some stories. For example, this guy – “as she played my **** like a fine old violin” – has some musical inclination. You can also identify that majority of these stories are written by engineers when you read comparisons like:

- “..simultaneously between my fingers like fine-tuning the knob to regulate the level of mechanism of her motion”

- “He uses it like a pneumatic drill”

- “The soft, warm skin was like an electro-magnet”

- “I was pumping like a steam engine.She was now making noise like Ha! Ha! Ha! with each of my mighty push”

Khurmi-Gupta has never been put to better use.

 

So that’s the Indian Erotic stories in a nutshell. These categories can overlap and you may find all the five types together in one story. You may[…]

Dear toast, How come it takes forever for you to turn golden brown, but 0.5 seconds for you to burn? Sincerely, wishing I liked the taste of charcoal...

Excited to see what’s next for Siri.

Tweet Tweet Ever have a conversation with someone who, every two minutes, picks up their phone to check for messages? Ever been at a party and watched someone’s eyes dart around behind your head while you’re talking? The answer to both questions is most likely ‘yes’ and in addition to [...]

Hi Dave and Fred,

Dave, I’ve been away from your RSS for a while now. Heck, I’ve been away from blogging. But I’ve been thinking about what you told me when I visited you in New York. You weren’t going to read me on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook. Why? You like reading RSS (you should, you helped bring it to the world).

Fred, you told me that I was nuts to give up my blog (I told you I had left it for the better engagement of Google+). You told me that it is dangerous to not own a place with your own name on it, on servers that you — at least in theory — control. Didn’t think it was gonna work out for me to post my content solely on Facebook or Google+ (both of which now have blog-like features and feeds).

I pushed back, noting that the ability to gather engagement is way off the charts on Google+ and, even, on the revamped Facebook (about a month ago Facebook added a new feature, called subscribe, so people can subscribe to my feed there without being my friend and they also gave us the ability to post long posts).

I also told you about Flipboard and how it’s changed my reading behavior. No longer do I use RSS-only news readers. Today I can see Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, RSS, Facebook and much more aggregated together in Flipboard.

Now Dave doesn’t like the paginated world of Flipboard. I imagine he won’t like Google’s Propeller (a tablet-based competitor to Flipboard), that’s rumored to be coming this week, or whatever Yahoo is doing, or whatever Feedly, AOL, Pulse, Flud, CNN, is doing.

I still remember the day when Dave first showed me how he likes reading blogs. He likes a simple feed where new stuff shows up at the top of the page, or, even better, in his outliner (for those who don’t know, Dave invented a lot of outlining technology that most of the industry has long forgotten about, but Dave still likes reading, and blogging, in an outliner where most of us just read Facebook or Twitter).

But something happened over the past few weeks that’s gotten me reenergized about RSS. What is it?

Well, Google, in its new “focus on Google+” strategy, has announced that it’s dropping some features from Google Reader. Mostly the social stuff.

Now THAT is interesting! One reason why I left Google Reader (and RSS) is because Twitter and Facebook just became dominant in the world of news. For instance, look at my Twitter news feed of news articles from major news brands around the world. Stick that into Flipboard and you have a world-class newspaper that NOTHING can match.

This change in Google Reader is going to be very interesting to watch. Yes, I see that lots of people are up in arms about this change (funny enough, I read that on your own blog at Scripting.com).

Lately Dave you have come into a number of different conversations. The famous Silicon Valley investor, John Doerr, yesterday, told me he found your writings to be as interesting, and smart, as ever. He’s not the only one who’s said that lately.

So why this note. I’ve decided to live most of my life “inside Mark Zuckerberg’s and Larry Page’s trunk.” It’s a damn nice trunk, too.

Acutally, I see it more of a dark force. It sucks all data toward it. Both Facebook and Google are like black holes.

I’ve decided to live on the dark side of the force, inside the black hole.

Why? For a few reasons:

1. I don’t have a business model to protect. I just need to be where Rackspace’s customers, and potential customers, are. Increasingly that’s inside Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ (yesterday at Y Combinator’s Startup School person after person came up to me and talked about a post or two I’ve made on Google+ or Facebook).

2. I don’t care whether my words, or videos, survive into history. Heck, the first few years of my blog, from 2000 to about 2003 aren’t available anywhere anymore and that hasn’t really caused me too much pain.

3. Everyone knows multiple places to find me, so I don’t care that one company could delete me anymore, either. Remember when Facebook deleted me for about a day? Well, now, if they tried that it would just help out Google+ (and vice versa). And if both of those got together, I still have my blog. Heck, even if the entire social media system decided to try to block my words I’d find a way to communicate. Now my rolodex is good enough that I’d be able to get airtime even on old-school pro media.

But I keep coming back to what the value of RSS is. Dave, you nailed it when you said it travels through firewalls (in other words, those put up by governments, like in Iran and China).

And, there ARE some things I want you both to read, even if you decide never ever to set foot into the black holes of Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

So, I’m going to start participating in the RSS world again. Maybe just as letters to you two. See, one reason that my blog has gone dormant is I just was having more fun inside the dark force of publishing. RSS isn’t as addictive, nor as social, nor as conversational anymore and that’s where I’ve chosen to live my life.

This is why the new Google Reader strategy intriques me. Sometimes I want to write a long ass piece where I don’t need to interact so much. Heck, I might even turn off comments here. Might even become, hate to say it, anti-social here, since there are so many better places to have a quick, real-time, low-friction, conversation amongst friends (both Google+ and Facebook are serving that for me, far more than here).

To Fred Wilson: I’d love to unpack where you think the investment opportunities are in the new modern publishing world.

My own feeling? Developers really like the new Facebook “verbs” platform, but they see the value flowing only one way: toward Facebook. They are waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to make his verbs platform two way: their data goes into Facebook and Facebook writes checks, or pushes advertising back out through those verb interfaces.

If that happens I can see lots of startups getting on Facebook’s bandwagon and it might even justify some of the valuations we’re seeing for companies like Color, Path, etc.

I’d also love to hear if you think there’ll be an investment opportunity around companies that focus on RSS again (or, better yet, decentralized identity technologies). I’m starting to think that there might be and if I’m thinking that, it’d be interesting to hear if you are thinking the same thing.

I’m thinking that way because I’m meeting more and more people who don’t have a social graph, don’t care to have one, and, even, are actively not participating in Facebook or Google+ because they are scared of what those companies are doing with the data. They have no such fears around RSS and that’s why getting rid of the social features over on Google Reader might actually be a good thing!

Anyway, thanks for listening. This was mostly a way to get my blog’s pipes unclogged, so sorry for running on a bit.

Your friend, Robert.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit, an biannual event at which members of the Ubuntu development community gather to lay out a roadmap for the next version of the Linux distribution, will take place next week in Florida. As usual, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth will start the event with a keynote.

According to an early report from ZDNet, Shuttleworth will announce plans to bring Ubuntu to smartphones and tablet computing devices. The company says that it has been discussing the plan with hardware partners for the past 18 months. No specific hardware vendors have been named yet and there is presently no concrete timeline for product availability.

Canonical’s focus for the first half of 2012 will be stabilization and improving the platform for the enterprise desktop. As we previously reported, Ubuntu 12.04—scheduled for release in April—will offer an extended long-term support period for business users. After the 12.04 release, the focus will reportedly shift towards mobile.

Ubuntu’s new Unity shell will play a key role in Canonical’s plans to bring the Ubuntu user experience to smaller screens. The platform already has preliminary tablet support, including experimental functionality for touchscreen-based window management. It seems likely that the Qt-based Unity 2D experience will serve as the mobile implementation. The Qt Quick user interface design framework is well-suited for building touch-friendly mobile experiences.

Although few details about the Ubuntu mobile platform are available now, more information will likely surface on Monday during Shuttleworth’s talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.




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The Zetas—a Mexican drug cartel believed to be responsible for numerous beheadings, murders, and acts of mayhem—got on the wrong side of the hacker collective Anonymous after allegedly kidnapping one of their members in Veracruz. Now Anonymous has issued an ultimatum: Release our man by November 5, or we'll expose your identities, addresses, and allies. More »

Even at the very end, Steve Jobs was capable of being amazed.

In a moving eulogy, published in the New York Times today, Jobs’ sister Mona Simpson waxed about her relationship with the former Apple CEO — from the fairy tale call announcing she had a millionaire long-lost brother, to his death-bed.

And his final words were oh so fitting, as Simpson writes:

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Jobs was never very close to his biological mother, but later in life he formed a strong relationship with Simpson, now also known as a renowned author.

“Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me,” she wrote. “For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.”

Simpson’s eulogy is a moving read — not just because it’s from a sister mourning the loss of her brother, but because she eloquently paints  Jobs’ approach to work, life, and love as something we should all aspire to. “He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere,” Simpson wrote. “In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.”

Filed under: VentureBeat

It can be tempting to push for consensus from a wide team in a creative project. Yet in design, consensus makes no one happy. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington shared this perspective:

“There’s a saying I love: “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” A variation is “a Volvo is a Porsche designed by committee.” When there are too many cooks in the kitchen all you get is a mess. And when too many people have product input, you’ve got lots of features but no soul.”

Democracies don’t work in product development. Neither do unhappy compromises or peace treaties. We need to be leaders that make unpopular calls to keep an idea focused. Otherwise, we end up with a lack of a vision, internal inconsistencies, feature creep, and uninspired products.

“Product should be a dictatorship. Not consensus driven. There are casualties. Hurt feelings. Angry users. But all of those things are necessary if you’re going to create something unique. The iPhone is clearly a vision of a single core team, or maybe even one man. It happened to be a good dream, and that device now dominates mobile culture. But it’s extremely unlikely Apple would have ever built it if they conducted lots of focus groups and customer outreach first. No keyboard? Please.”

In 2006, the Microsoft design team put together the following teaching aid for Microsoft marketers. The parody video, “If Microsoft Designed the iPod Packaging”, leaked, went viral, and became a cautionary tale for all marketers.

One size never fits all. One size fits none.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

 

 

Tweet

Only by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, though, reports the Guardian.

It has everything to do with the energy that goes into storing data on your e-reader.

Your e-reader has a finite amount of electrons inside of it, which it rearranges when you download a new book. The amount of energy require to keep those electrons in position changes, however.

John Kubiatowicz, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, explained in the New York Times that because energy has mass, your Kindle picks up weight as you load it up with books.

But like we said up top, the weight is beyond trivial -- a billionth of a billionth of a gram.

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Halloween is coming up soon, and if you want to dress up like an Angry Bird, you’re running out of time. It’s too late to buy a costume online (and many of the best Angry Birds costumes are sold out anyway), so you might have to resort to making one yourself. Here are some ideas to get you started.

We found some of the best examples of Angry Birds costumes — many of them graced numerous Halloween parties last year, and then we added at the end of this gallery a quick peek at the commercial versions of Angry Birds costumes you might be able to find in local stores or use as a starting-off point for your own ideas.

So take a look, get out those arts and crafts tools and sewing machines (or see if you can find somebody who’s good at that sort of thing). Good luck, and stay angry (but with a smile on your face)!

Not pissed off enough to be an Angry Bird? Here are even more Halloween costumes.

More About: Angry Birds Costumes, Halloween
For more Entertainment coverage:Follow Mashable Entertainment on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Entertainment channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The No. 2 free app on Apple’s app store is Cut the Birds by SolverLabs, which is a mashup of two really popular iOS games: Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Sure, they are not “exactly” the same, but play the game for a couple of minutes and you quickly realize why the app is getting angry reviews. I am just surprised it slipped past the Apple censors.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProMobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunitiesMobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

It is often said that everything and the opposite is possible in India, and so it has been shown today. Just a year after the Indian government’s humiliating and appalling preparations and administration of Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, the private sector this afternoon delivered a spectacular Formula 1 Grand Prix race on time, efficiently, and without any mishaps.

.

With a crowd of 95,000 and an international television audience said to total 150m, Sebastian Vettel (left) continued his winning F1 streak by driving his Red Bull Renault to victory at the end of a 90-minute 307km race.

Warnings about excessive dust blowing (and stray dogs walking) onto the new Buddh track in Noida, a Delhi satellite city, from nearby arid farmland did not materialise.

A rush in the final weeks to complete and tidy up the site appears to have worked and Vettel, along with other drivers, praised the track.

This showed what can be achieved when India’s bureaucrats stay largely out of the picture and politicians, probably taking a cut, allow the private sector to perform.

As is inevitable in India, there are stories of shady dealings, controversies, political rivalries and damaged egos. There is also serious concern about the way that the poor were ousted from their land to build the track and allied developments over the past year or so, and about low wages paid to the construction workers.

The Jaypee construction group which built and runs the race track has close links with Mayawati (presenting the trophy above), the egotistical chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, which includes Noida – though the race has been seen as a Delhi event and a Delhi success, it is actually a success for one of India’s poorest states that is known more for corruption and lawlessness than business success and efficiency.

photo: Gurinder Osan - AP

The Jaypee group and other companies manage to straddle these potential contradictions. Jaypee housing and other projects linked to new highways that are also linked to the Buddh track (right) were at the centre of mass protests earlier this year against the transfer of land for business purposes.

Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to India’s ruling dynasty, hit the headlines when he joined the demonstrators in May, protesting at the low levels of compensation that had been paid. As a result, Mayawati has had to amend the government’s land compensation policy and there have been court rulings blocking the use of some land for housing.

An article in Delhi’s Caravan magazine estimates that Jaypee will have made up to $30m in revenue from tickets, but will make a $35m loss on the race itself after sanction fees and other operational costs are paid – plus the $200m cost of the track itself. It suggests that while the track could turn in a profit within three or four years”, its real profits will come from real estate development. Sameer Gaur, a senior Jaypee executive and son of founding chairman Jaiprakash Gaur, has said that the group has around 1,500 acres of real estate to develop, which it obtained from the UP government on favourable terms.

.

Jaypee has had front-page newspaper advertisements (right) this week for luxury housing with associated hotels and sports city that it is planning alongside the track at Jaypee Greens where the F1 teams have been staying in a golf resort.

There have also been criticisms about the price of tickets ranging from $55 to sit on the grass to $22,000 for corporate boxes that are way out of reach for the vast mass of Indians, as were concerts by Lady Gaga and Metallica  (the latter was abandoned).

But it is inevitable in a country like India that there will be such disparities. Jenson Button, a British McLaren driver who came second today, has said that coming to India was “difficult” for the drivers, who had been stunned at the living conditions visible outside their luxury hotels. “You can’t forget the poverty in India. It’s difficult coming here for the first time, you realise there’s a big divide between the wealthy people and the poor people,” he said.

Anand Mahindra, one of India’s top industrialists who runs an autos-based group and is an avid tweeter, commented on Twitter today: “The F1 is a turning point. I see Indians becoming the most car-crazy&car-knowledgeable people on earth.. Now, let’s build those roads.”

And also, he could have added, let’s make sure that in future the private sector is given the chance to build and run India’s potential success stories. If bureaucrats and politicians had not stupidly decided for prestige reasons to locate the Commonwealth Games in the middle of Delhi instead of a place like Noida, and had not handed it over to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, that could have been a success too. The possibilities are endless, if only governments are prepared to paint themselves out of the picture.

Mayawati, who loves grandiose projects,  runs a corrupt state in UP and that casts a stigma over all that she does. However, the success of the Grand Prix raises an uncomfortable question – is it better to have international success on Mayawati’s terms or the Commonwealth Games type of humiliation allowed by India’s Congress-led government?

Photo: Prashant Vishwanathan - Bloomberg

I like Dhoni. He is a no nonsense guy and, like Kapil Dev and Saurav Ganguly before him, a fine leader of men. He is as dignified in defeat as in victory. He was unfazed when England ignominiously crushed us recently, and the Indian team (fresh from winning the World Cup) became the butt of all jokes. He came back and led India to a spectacular 5-0 win in the one-day series against the same England, just to prove cricket isn’t only about winning. It’s a game where defeat teaches you your best lessons so that you can go back and beat the hell out of your tormenters. But what I like most about Dhoni are two other things. One: He speaks little and always to the point. His game talks for him. His decisions, inexplicable and flawed at times, are never defended, rarely argued over. He simply sets things right the next time. More important, he never plays to the gallery and has no desire to be anointed God, neither by his fans nor fawning sponsors. He remains that ticket checker in Kharagpur station who got lucky and made good. And that precisely is his charm. Neither fame nor money has been able to spoil him. In fact, if you watch his ads, you will figure how ill at ease he is before the camera. He’s a man best left alone. To play the game he’s best at.Dhoni sums it all up in his new ad when he says, “Zindagi mein kuch karna hai to large chhodo, kuch alag karo yaar.” Great lines those, in response to a campaign by a rival brand which exhorted us to Make it Large. Yes, you are right. It’s the same campaign that drew a spoof from UB showing a fake Harbhajan getting whacked by his father for making ball bearings the size of gym balls at his father’s factory and asking if he had made it large. Another spoof has just appeared featuring a fake Saif as the Chhote Nawab who despite all the pomp and regalia never quite makes it large, as the real nawab.Dhoni’s right. Any idiot can make it large. All you need is pots of money. The more money you have, the more you can go for scale. The less you need to depend on thinking new, thinking smart. Clever guys, on the other hand, put their indelible stamp on history and show us that innovation is at the heart of all success, not size. Henry Ford could have easily built the world’s biggest bicycle plant. Instead, he launched the car. Steve Jobs spent the best years of his life, not in making Apple the biggest in computers, but in enlarging the domain space and bringing out with the world’s smartest music, phone and communication devices. That’s the constant challenge before clever men and women. To think smart. Not big.But big is what seduces us. It starts, as usual, with the stupidest claim of all. Every schoolboy boasts to others in the locker room: Mine is bigger than yours. Even though every scholar of sex, from Vatsyayan to Havelock Ellis has repeatedly reiterated that size has nothing to do with being a great lover. In fact, big is a joke among the smarter sex. It is never as important as it is made out to be. It is those who can’t afford the best who go for size. The only real yardstick is excellence, how good you are in what you do. And the less you talk about it, the more likely are others to acknowledge it.Picasso was not a great painter because he painted large canvases. Chaplin wasn’t great because he made big films. Mozart was not a great musician because he composed large symphonies. Tagore was not a great poet because he wrote epics. You can't compare the achievements of Boeing and Airbus with the ingenuity of the Wright brothers. Or the achievements of Nokia and Blackberry with the genius of Guglielmo Marconi. All real achievers think new. Not big. That’s why Dhoni’s advice, even though it’s in an ad where one brand is spoofing the other, finds so much resonance. “Zindagi mein kuch karna hai to large chhodo, kuch alag karo yaar.”    That’s why Dhoni is so special.

Reheating pizza in the microwave often results in soft and soggy slices that can't begin to compare to the fresh pie you had before you stuck the thing in the fridge. According to home life blog the Simply Day, you can easily solve this problem with parchment paper. More »

Flipkart has been the poster boy of Indian ecommerce market. They sneeze and the media/blogosphere talks about them. They add a new category and blogosphere talks about them (while their competitors have to resort to traditional PR/marketing mechanics).

But lately, there have been reports of Flipkart’s customer service not up to the mark – the tweets/social media part of it aggravating the entire issue (even though, these issues probably are just 1% of the entire transaction).

And scaling up backend is always a huge challenge, so you have to give in to Flipkart’s audacious attempt to own the backend and ensure a smooth operation.

But there is a problem. And the problem is that Flipkart, it seems is deleting negative reviews of Flipkart on the site.

—————————–

From Woikr,

I recommended flipkart.com to a close friend of mine who was planning to purchase a LED TV. Flipkart.com recently launched their TV and video section and are offering heavy discounts. Based on my advice, he went ahead and bought a Samsung 46 Inches Full HD 3D LED for INR 1,07,420. Since flipkart.com is only delivering TVs in certain cities, he had the TV shipped to his relative’s place in Delhi and his dad would come and collect it from them. So far so good.

Here are the issues that he faced in the delivery process:

The TV was not delivered on the promised date of delivery. His dad drove all the way from a different city to receive the TV only to find out that the it won’t be delivered that day and that flipkart “was going to” inform them at 6pm that day about it. For the record, the TV was delivered within the time mentioned on the product page, but flipkart.com failed to provide correct tracking.
There was a free Shrek 3D Blu Ray scheme going on the TV (from Samsung). Flipkart.com did not deliver the Blu Ray discs with the TV. Instead, he got a call from flipkart.com asking him to specify his choice of Bu Ray discs to deliver. Here is a question – when the offer says “Free set of Shrek 3D Blu Ray titles”, why do you need the user to choose the titles? Just deliver the damn Shrek set!
It has been a few weeks since he placed the order and despite complying with their request and specifying his choice of Blu Ray titles, he has not received the Blu Ray titles yet. What he has gone through though, is the harassment of talking to the flipkart.com’s customer service many times with no results whatsoever. In one of his conversations with them, the customer service person did tell him that he wasn’t supposed to specify his choice of Blu Ray titles. But still flipkart.com failed to deliver either the Shrek set or the ones he chose.
He posted a review on the product page about his experience, which was later deleted by flipkart. They sent him this email:

Here are my thoughts on the whole episode:

People do not go online just to get the stuff they are buying. They are paying the e-commerce site for the product plus the convenience of buying from their home coupled with a smooth delivery process. All of the above are products being sold at the e-commerce site. If retailers think that they are opening an e-shop just to offer another outlet for people to buy their stuff from, they are mistaken. And this is the reason why e-commerce is not picking up in India. And the same reason why amazon.com is hugely successful.
In addition to lower prices, the online shops must offer an awesome customer service & effective delivery system. If I have to go through a series of harassing painful calls with the customer service who is not ready to listen to me, I will rather prefer to pay a few bucks extra to buy peace of mind along with the product that I am purchasing from a local retailer. In this case, flipkart.com won in the first, but failed in the second.
From the whole episode, it looks like either flipkart.com ran out of Shrek 3D box sets, or Samsung had pulled the offer when my friend made the purchase. In either case, they should have called the customer and politely told him the truth offering replacement titles from their library or store credit. Nobody is going to return a 1 lakh rupees TV set because he got a refund instead of the free 3D Blu Ray box set.
I read my friend’s review on the site for the brief amount of time it was there. He clearly mentioned that he loves the TV. He explained what he went through and at no point said anything bad about Samsung or the TV. Infact, he mentioned clearly in the first line that this review is for flipkart’s service. Flipkart.com has to understand that people reading the reviews are not idiots. They could have easily read through the review and decided whether they want to buy the TV or not. Also, when they deleted his review, they also lost any chances of getting a new customer who might have read the part about how awesome the TV is and would possibly have bought it.
As mentioned in my first point, people buy both the product and the convenience from online retailers. And if someone has anything to say about either of them, product reviews section is the place to do so. But flipkart.com fails to understand this. If they feel that product reviews is not the correct section for this, they should build a separate section for flipkart.com’s service feedback. Something similar to a seller’s rating on ebay. And if they are really transparent & offer prompt and efficient customer service, they shouldn’t have any problem in doing so.
Flipkart.com lost a free advertiser. My friend could have advertised flipkart.com to his friends and family had he received a proper customer service. Instead, he will now be telling this story to everyone over dinner. He purchased a TV worth more than a lakh online. How many people do you know would do that? He is from the very generation that is the target audience of e-commerce sites in the whole world, not just India. Losing him as a customer means loosing his friends as perspective customers.

The whole episode is like an air crash. It doesn’t mean that you should stop traveling by air. It just means that the airline messed up in this one off case. Flipkart.com messed up this case. I hope someone in their senior leadership is reading this and takes corrective actions so that this is not repeated in the future.

—————————–

Our take: Of course, Flipkart has the right to delete reviews which aren’t just about products alone. This case was a mixed one with the reviewer reviewing the product plus the buying experience.

But the bigger point is if Flipkart removes a review which has review of product + negative review of Flipkart, then why have such reviews (scroll to Revanth’s review) which also contain product reviews + good stuff about Flipkart’s delivery? After all, a rule is a rule and is a rule.

Why deviate when it contains negative review of Flipkart?

The BIG Question
The big question to the Flipkart team however is whether Flipkart is

1. Selling products.

OR

2. Selling an (online) buying experience?

When the company was started, it was all about the experience, but lately is it just about the product? If it is still about the buying experience, why not have a dedicated section for buyers to share their review of the entire buying experience (or have a more structured review section, collecting points regarding the experience)? The thing is Flipkart needs to go beyond the SEO-centric-model-of-product-reviews and focus on experience review.  As the company scales up, the issues (of delivery failure) will surely crop up, but having a dedicated channel for customers to share the experience will help Flipkart team wade through the scaling challenges.

It’s important to note that:

1. Flipkart is moving to Tier-2, Tier-3 cities.

2. The TV Commercials are all about building trust.

3. Ecommerce = Flipkart, that’s the messaging Flipkart is trying to get across.

All of this is great, but its important to note that these consumers may not be on Twitter/Facebook giving feedback to Flipkart. The product itself needs to mature up to an extent that it is open to reviews on the buying experience. Most importantly, the team needs to mature up to receive negative reviews (and not just feedback) from its customers and work on them.

Curbing negative reviews simply result in bad WoM (Word of Mouth) and to share an experience, a lady in my apartment is now ensuring that nobody buys anything from Flipkart (she bought couple of books on October 13th and hasn’t been delivered yet and support simply failed to resolve her query).

Pumping Positive Reviews?
I believe this tweet by Faisal, founder of Mouthshut says it all:

There is no smoke without fire and its high time Flipkart redefines what it is – a company that is all about selling products or a company that is redefining ecommerce in India. Former is easier, but latter is difficult. Damn difficult.

Please note that this is no statement on Flipkart’s overall delivery service – but these are scaling challenges that the company is probably going through and having an open mind/engaging with customers will just help them while they fix the scaling issues.

Recommended Read: Flipkart Story (Told Unofficially!)

Also: Flipkart Raising $200Mn From Carlyle And General Atlantic?).

» Is Flipkart Deleting Negative Reviews, Pumping Fake Positive Reviews? @Pluggd.in.

MAAAAH!

If you search for “Yelp” on Google from your mobile phone the top paid result, even above the organic result to Yelp.com, takes you to Zagat.  I am only seeing this on mobile searches. While it is a common practice for companies to advertise against their competitors’ names in search advertising, in this case it is Google itself which is bidding for that search term and taking the top spot.  A classy move.

Google bought Zagat last September to shore up its local reviews for Google Places, which is its answer to Yelp.  Google Places and Yelp have a contentious history, with Google borrowing liberally from yelp to help build up its local directory.  Now with Zagat, Google finally has a large corpus if its own review, in addition to the ones people are slowly adding to Google Places.  By redirecting some of the people who are looking for Yelp to Zagat, Google is keeping up its pattern of punching Yelp in the face every chance it gets.

Remember, at one point Google almost bought Yelp back in 2009.  But that didn’t work out, and the gloves have been off ever since.  (Sound familiar, Groupon?)

Google is really hitting Yelp where it hurts.  During an antitrust hearing last September, Yelp revealed that 75 percent of its traffic comes from Google in one way or another. A big chunk of that is from organic search.  If Yelp is not the top spot when someone searches for “Yelp” that could have some impact on Yelp’s traffic.  Yelp might have to respond by bidding on its own name on AdWords.  One way or another, Google’s aggressiveness in pushing Zagat is going to cost Yelp.






Crunchbase





YELP
ZAGAT
GOOGLE






Company:
Yelp


Website:
yelp.com


Launch Date:
January 7, 2004


Funding:
$56M



Another company founded in 2004 by two former PayPal employees.

Yelp is a local reviews website covering the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands; Yelp drew an audience of more than 50 million unique visitors in March 2011.

Yelpers have written more than 18 million local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists.






Learn more





Company:
Zagat


Website:
zagat.com



ZAGAT.com features over 30,000 of the best places to eat, drink, and stay worldwide. The site is published by and based on the renowned 30 years, Zagat Survey (a survey-based restaurant guide).

ZAGAT.com provides access to ratings and reviews for restaurants, nightspots, hotels and attractions in hundreds of cities worldwide. It features menus, photos, virtual tours, updates on the latest openings and closings with ZAGAT BUZZ and connect with other ZAGAT.com members in our bustling Discussion Boards.






Learn more





Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






Learn more

Social networking sites allow us to maintain a web presence long after death
It is a most basic fact of life: we will all die. There are no creams, no pills, no incantations that can change this. However, more and more of us have the opportunity to perpetuate ourselves by the grace of overenthusiastic automated Facebook reminders and the digital archives of identity that we upload with pieces of us.
After we die, we leave behind an estate that tells a particular story of who we were. We have no control over how we are represented, perceived or passed around: the post-death identities of highly public, controversial figures such as Muammar Gaddafi are appropriated for political agendas and images ricochet around news outlets and the web; more popular people such as Steve Jobs are bequeathed elevated cachet offline and on; and the less well-known but just as deserving, such as recently deceased computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, maintain an afterlife among the faithful who cluster around biographies and tributes.
As for the rest of us, pre-web, we'd have faded away pretty quickly. Now, it's possible to have our own public perpetuity. This can be disconcerting to those we leave behind. Many of the stories I've heard about digital death experiences come from bereaved people who are jolted by the activity surrounding a loved one's online profile, or the skeletons that were hidden in an online closet. One person who contacted me about his experience of 21st-century death commented: "It's a very weird thing, Facebook after death: it's a strange, living memorial to which anyone can add and contribute – and which the family cannot control." Social network accounts become windows into the worlds of their former owners, exposing the good and the devastating facts – such as hidden relationships or mental health problems – of a person's life.
Most social network services allow family members to access a deceased loved one's account, to turn it into a memorial page, to archive it or to delete it. This can preserve the online identity as part of the whole person, something that, pre-Facebook, wouldn't have been part of the mainstream idea of "self". Virtual memorials can be a real source of comfort to loved ones. The same commenter told me: "Following the recent first anniversary of [my brother's] death, it was emotional – and not unpleasant – to log back on and see people posting anniversary messages and to see that he was still in the thoughts of so many people."
We are now embedded in online social networks, which means they can be speedy conduits for informing people whose lives were touched by the deceased person. Others told me that, although they'd only known someone online, when they'd heard about their death, they felt compelled to go to their funeral.
Death is big business and there is an emerging industry that wants to help us deal with our digital assets before we die. The fourth Digital Death Day conference takes place in Amsterdam in November, aimed at a motley crew of undertakers, human-computer interaction researchers and social network administrators. It hopes to answer questions about new forms of estate and legacy planning, the implications of the web for end-of-life and after-death care and the ways the terms and conditions of online tools are constructed to take into consideration the end-of-account requirements of their customers.
People are already lining up to advise us on what should and shouldn't be included in a last will and testament, offer hacking services for the bereaved to gain access to locked-down computers and social networking accounts, and flog augmented headstones so grave site visitors can discover more about an entombed person's life by scanning it with a smartphone. Our digital assets are incredibly rich resources, and the archive of emotional and biographical assets that we leave behind is growing every day. Parents document everything about their children's lives and upload it to the web, from first moments to first days at school, and beyond.
Once we have control of our online selves, we continue to pour the minutiae of us into infinitely deep memory books. "I'm not espousing that we chronicle every little aspect of our lives: that would be ridiculous, redundant and boring," says John Romano, one of the authors of Your Digital Afterlife, "but there are things that we value that we put online. And there are times when representation online is the only way that it's stored."
"It used to be the things that were most important to us had tangibility," continues Evan Carroll, Romano's co-author. "Now that we're doing these things digitally, the content – no matter what format it's in – is still important." These are potentially valuable emotional assets, personally and socially, and their worth only truly realised by the people who survive us. For this reason, Carroll and Romano recommend taking a regular audit of what's important – photos, videos, status updates, blog posts, online banking passwords – and entrusting an executor with the details of how to access them.
Death in the age of the web reminds us how much the technology has become part of the fabric of our personal and social identities. Once we're gone, what we leave behind is a rich resource of who we are. We may not survive beyond the release of the next social network, but our inevitable ends are being extended by our digital lives.
InternetAleks Krotoskiguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we’ve focused on three startups with innovative takes on social buying.

OpenSky is a Twitter-style personalized shopping site. LikeBids motivates users to distribute coupons for brands, and MyTab helps users fund trips through their social networks.

OpenSky: Twitter for Curated Shopping

Quick Pitch: OpenSky is a shopping site that is curated by the tastemakers that individual users “follow.”

Genius Idea: A customizable online shopping experience.

Mashable’s Take: OpenSky has cleverly blended recommendations, editorial endorsements and flash sales.

When users sign up, they can chose from a list of about 60 tastemakers to “follow,” including celebrities such as Molly Sims, Padma Lakshmi, Kristin Cavallari, Bobby Flay and Tom Colicchio. Each tastemaker chooses products to recommend to followers and writes a short explanation of why each item was chosen. He or she runs a special on about one item a week that gives followers a 20% to 60% discount on the item.

Since launching in April, OpenSky says that it has grown 50% month over month. The site has about 600,000 users, and its CEO John Caplan, the former president of About.com, seems to be thinking big.

The startup announced a $30 million round of funding this week, bringing its total amount to $49 million.

LikeBids: Group Buying Unlocked by Facebook “Likes”

Quick Pitch: LikeBids distributes coupons through Facebook.

Genius Idea: A built-in motivation for word-of-mouth marketing.

Mashable’s Take: LikeBids users win coupons by Liking them and encouraging others to do so. When a threshold number of Likes are reached, a coupon is emailed to everyone who clicked.

The advantage of distributing coupons this way is that even participants who aren’t particularly excited to spread the word about a discount end up doing so anyway. When they Like the coupon, it’s automatically posted on their wall and friends’ feeds.

LikeBids has also built in a motivation for users who are excited to spread the word. Each coupon has a price attached to it for the person who motivates the most people to Like it by sharing a unique URL.

Right now LikeBids’ offerings are pretty sparse (there are exactly three coupons available: Papa John’s, Kohl’s and Sephora), but the startup has set up a situation that encourages users to promote brands to their friends. If those users indeed appear, that’s an appealing proposition.

myTab: a Social Travel Gift Card

Quick Pitch: myTab aims to make group gifting travel easier.

Genius Idea: A travel search engine that automatically takes into account your budget.

Mashable’s Take: Let’s say you want to go on a trip and it’s your birthday. MyTab hopes you’ll set up an account on its site, and share a link that allows your friends to chip in to its cost by purchasing a virtual currency it refers to as “myCash.”

You can then use a Kayak-like interface to book a flight and hotel based on how much “myCash” you have. If there are leftovers, you can re-gift them to friends.

Although we understand where myTab is coming from — group gift buying is a problem pervasive enough that several startups (and eBay) have developed solutions that make it easier. We fear, however, that this travel-focused solution only makes the process more complicated.

Image courtesy of istockphoto, barisonal

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, bizspark weekend roundup, LikeBids, myTab, OpenSky
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At last, a film that manages to be insulting to Chinese people, South Indians AND videogame characters. I've waited for this all my moviegoing life.
(For something much more elaborate and profound, read this great post by Samit)

Graph by: Unknown
Via: The Sunny Nihilist

YouTube’s ambitions to challenge cable television head-on are getting a big boost tonight: the world’s largest video site is announcing that it’s lined up a slew of new content partners who will be developing shows for the site, covering everything from sports to comedy to music. The news had been rumored for some time, including a report last week in the WSJ.

In a blog post announcing the news, YouTube says its goal with these channels is to “[give] you more reasons to keep coming back again and again”. The post references the so-called “defining channels” born out of cable, like MTV, ESPN, and CNN, and says that the next generation of these will emerge on YouTube.

These channels will start coming online next month (“continuing over the next year”, so some will take a while), and will be available anywhere YouTube is.

There are some big names on the list. But there are still a lot of questions: Will this content really rival the premium production values seen on cable? Will the shows be exclusive to YouTube? And how exactly is YouTube going to tweak the site’s user experience as it looks to shift users from funny cat videos toward these shows (which advertisers will be able to more effectively monetize)?

Here’s a list of content partners that are part of this announcement:

Electus Channel – Pop Culture (name TBD)
PMC PMC Entertainment News
WWE WWE
Young Hollywood Young Hollywood Network
DanceOn DanceOn (Madonna)
Fine Brothers Films MyMusic
Everyday Health, Inc. Everyday Health TV
TakePart™ TakePart™ TV
Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG) Spaces
Uncommon Content Partners The Conversation Channel
Demand Media eHow Home
SB Nation SB Nation
Magical Elves and InStyle magazine Little Black Dress
Hearst Magazines Channel – Fashion & Beauty Channel (name TBD)
Emil Rensing International Channel – Auto (name TBD)
My Damn Channel My Damn Channel: Live
Uncommon Content Partners Taste & Access
Red Bull Media House North America Red Bull
Machinima Machinima
Katalyst Thrash Lab (Ashton Kutcher)
Steve Spangler Science The Spangler Effect
New Nation Networks New Nation Networks
Smart Girls at the Party Smart Girls at the Party (Amy Poehler)
Bedrocket Media Ventures and Full Picture Productions Look TV
BermanBraun theLOGE
The Young Turks Town Square
BermanBraun & Rodale Inc. Vigor
Electus NuevOn – Latin Channel (Sofia Vergara)
Clevver Media ClevverStyle
ModernMom.com ModernMom Channel
Brady Haran DeepSkyVideos
IconicTV 123UnoDosTres
The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal
Pharrell Williams i am OTHER
SoulPancake Productions SoulPancake (Rainn Wilson)
Chopra Media/Generate The Chopra Well (Deepak Chopra)
Clevver Media ClevverNews
The Bowery Presents The Bowery Presents
Clevver Media ClevverTeVe
Seedwell American Hipster
Hearst Magazines Car and Driver Television
Alchemy Networks Alchemy Networks
CafeMom CafeMom Studios
Bedrocket Media Ventures Channel – Comedy (name TBD)
Demand Media LIVESTRONG
Bedrocket Media Ventures Channel – Action Sports (name TBD)
FremantleMedia Channel – Pets & Animal (name TBD)
Big Frame BAM
IconicTV myISH
Electus Channel – Food (name TBD)
Soccer United Marketing & Bedrocket KickTV
Lionsgate Lionsgate Fitness Channel
East of Center Productions LLC YOMYOMF
EQAL u look haute!
Philip Defranco Sourcefed
Meredith Corporation and Meredith Video Studios Digs
Vlogbrothers CrashCourse
Walter Latham Digital Walter Latham’s “Kings of Comedy”
Tony Hawk’s production company, 900 Films, Inc. RIDE Channel
JON M. CHU Channel – Dance (name TBD)
Vuguru & POW! Entertainment Stan Lee’s World of Heroes
FAWN by Michelle Phan Fawn
DECA KinCommunity
Source Interlink Media Motor Trend
The Nerdist Channel The Nerdist Channel
Comedy Shaq Network The Comedy Shaq Network (Shaquille O’Neal)
Demand Media eHow Pets & Animals
Brady Haran numberphile
Cooking Up a Story Food Farmer Earth
Bleacher Report Bleacher Report
TED Conferences TEDEducation
Intelligent Television Intelligent Channel
Pitchfork Pitchfork TV
Vlogbrothers SciShow
EYEBOOGIE POP SPOT
Roadside Entertainment/BAC The NOC
Alli Sports Alli Sports
The Onion Onion Broadcasting Company
VICE VICE
Smosh/Alloy Digital Smosh Animation (name TBD)
VICE Noisey
Knights of Good Productions Geek & Sundry
Mondo Media New Animators
BermanBraun & Rodale Inc. Taste
Varsity Pictures Awesomeness
Black Box TV Black Box TV (Anthony Zuicker, founder of CSI)
IGN Entertainment / Shine Group START
@radical.media Channel – Education (name TBD)
Frederator Networks Channel Frederator’s Cartoon Hangover
monotransistor werevertumorro
Thomson Reuters Reuters.com
Slate Slate News Channel
Maker Studios The Maker Music Network
Maker Studios The Moms’ View
Maker Studios Tutele
Noisey VICE
Iconic Life and Times (Jay-Z)

YouTube and Hollywood, which have been circling each other for years, are finally getting together.

But instead of moving movies and TV shows to the world’s biggest Web site, they’re trying something different: Google is handing out more than $100 million to dozens of partners to create new “channels.”

The idea is to make “professional” content that advertisers will pay a premium to be near, instead of the grab bag of videos that dominate the site and that often sell at very low prices.

This isn’t news, of course: YouTube reps have been holding meetings and auditions for most of the year, led by former Netflix executive Robert Kyncl. And we’ve known about the deal terms, and many of the partners, for some time.

But now the site is finally talking about them publicly and promising that it will start unveiling some of the new programming next month. Some of the channels — each of which will have a couple hours of original programming per week — will feature people you’ve heard of, like Madonna, Jay-Z,  Ashton Kutcher and “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara.

But the channels aren’t all premised around the idea of celebrities and Hollywood per se — just the idea that someone with some idea of how to make good stuff will start making stuff specifically for the site.

For instance, BedRocket Properties, the video start-up backed by the Huffington Post’s Ken Lerer and run by cable TV veteran Brian Bedol, will do four channels, including a soccer-themed channel in conjunction with Major League Soccer, and an action sports channel produced along with Wasserman Media Group.

Another example: IGN, the videogame Web site being spun off by News Corp., will produce a game-themed channel along with the Shine Group, the TV production house recently purchased by News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

It’s worth noting that some of the channels will be run by people who are well-versed in creating Web video — and video for YouTube in particular. Machinima, for instance, which also specializes in game-themed stuff, is already one of YouTube’s most prolific partners, and essentially runs a network within YouTube’s network.

Maker Studios, which is producing three channels, is another outfit that already specializes in YouTube. And Demand Media went public this year, in part because it had figured out the art of cranking out Web videos very, very, quickly, at very, very low prices.

YouTube may not be releasing all of the channels and partners today, perhaps because it doesn’t actually have all of its deals signed yet. And at least one partner told me that some of the mechanics of the deals, like control of ad sales, had yet to be worked out.

That’s hard to imagine, given the amount of time that YouTube has been at this. But it’s also hard to imagine why you’d announce a big consumer-focused deal at the end of a Friday. So, who knows.

We do know the general outlines of the deals, though: Google will advance most of the creators up to $5 million, and in return will get commitments to produce a couple hours of programming a week for the channel. Once the programmers have earned back their advance from YouTube, they’ll split ad revenue with the site. The programming will be exclusive to YouTube for at least the first year of the three-year deals.

What we don’t know is how this stuff will actually work: $5 million won’t go very far if the partners use traditional TV and film budgets, so many of the partners are going to have to supplement that money with investments of their own — and they’re going to have to work on a tighter budget. And just because there’s a bit of Hollywood shine associated with this stuff doesn’t mean that people will actually watch — or, most crucially, that advertisers will pay up.

Google may also try other methods to get high-end video stuff. The company made a stab at Hulu when that video site was on the block. And it has indicated that it’s interested in licensing some content in international markets, where it thinks it can get more bang for its buck.

Steve Martin’s not going to let his one-liners on Twitter go to waste. Instead, he’s going to recycle them for a for-charity book.

The actor/comedian announced the move on his Twitter feed on Thursday:

The title of the book: “The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make that Ten.” Grand Central Publishing, a unit of Hachette Book Group, will publish the book in 2012.

Martin joined Twitter in September 2010 and now has close to 1.8 million followers. Martin’s not the first to recycle tweets into a book. The forerunner for Twit Lit was Justin Halpern, who got a book deal and a short-lived TV show based on his Shit My Dad Says Twitter feed.

Some recent Martin tweets:

“Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gamboled.”
“Got the new iPhone and it keeps saying, ‘you’re a creep.’”
“I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?”
“I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period”
“I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Ellasportfolio

BONUS: 10 Must-Follow Fake Twitter Celebs

Looking for other funny celebrities to follow on Twitter? These accounts aren’t the real deal … but they’re all the funnier because of it.


1. Not Burt Reynolds


Not Burt Reynolds has less followers then most accounts on this list, but with tweets like "When I lose a follower, I just assumed they died. Because let's face it, it's hard not to love me," and "You can call it a mustache, or a hairy set of angel wings," the account's sure to catch fire. Follow this account for tweets documenting what you imagine Mr Reynolds' life would be like.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: shit my dad says, Steve Martin, Twitter

Everyone knows that ghosts say “boo,” but when did they first start using that scary word? And what about ghosts in other parts of the world—do they have their own version of boo?








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Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more information coming at you on the social web (and I am using the term “information” very loosely), another source pops up. First it was just Facebook messages, then it was following people on Twitter, now there’s Google+ and LinkedIn and Instagram and half a dozen other newcomers — all producing streams of activity that compete for our increasingly scarce attention. David Shing, the “digital prophet” for AOL, said this week that he expects unfriending and unfollowing to become a major phenomenon, and I know just what that feels like: a friend unfollowed me recently, and it got me thinking about this attention economy we are living in.

As anyone who follows me through Twitter or any other social network probably knows by now, I am pretty active on a number of different services for a variety of reasons. I don’t use LinkedIn very much — mostly because it feels like a site where you go to post your resume, rather than a place you go to have a discussion with people about something — but I post links there when I have a new blog post, and sometimes check out LinkedIn Today for industry news. I mostly use Facebook for social reasons, to keep in touch with family, but I post links there too. And I am a fan of Instagram for photos, for reasons that Om has described, and have been trying to post more to Google+ as well.

Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?
The result of all this is two-fold: I wind up posting many of the same links — to my blog posts, as well as to photos and other things — to multiple networks, because I don’t know which of them my friends and followers (and potential readers) are using the most. Like me, I suspect many of them use multiple networks for different purposes. And I often re-post links in Twitter, because as Bitly has shown with its link analytics, the “half-life” of a tweet is remarkably short, and so many people may not see it. The other effect of this is that in some networks, such as Google+, I don’t participate as much as I should, and I sometimes get criticized for just posting links and then not sticking around.

I try not to clog up my stream with unnecessary things, and I try to make my activity on any network a mix of professional and personal, with humor and conversation and photos mixed up amid the blog posts and other industry-related things. I think it helps when people, including journalists, are human in that way (although not too human, hopefully). But I can see how my stream could be noisy for some — and it certainly has turned out to be for one friend, who said recently that they were forced to unfollow me. I’m not going to name them because it’s not really important who they are, I’m more interested in their reasons; they said they unfollowed me because:

I’m frankly tired of people who talk about themselves or promote their work. Repetition just makes it worse. Bombarding me with the same content multiple times in multiple channels makes you uninteresting to me.

I was somewhat taken aback by this, I admit. I assumed people would just ignore the tweets or messages they weren’t interested in, as I do when I come across things in other people’s streams that I don’t find relevant. But when I asked this friend to explain, they described something that I thought was probably pretty common for some people — and something that might possibly become more widespread, as Shing described in his recent interview with The Guardian. In effect, this person said their attention was a precious resource, and that I (and presumably others) were wasting it:

Twitter is no different from any medium in this respect – I only follow what deserves my attention. Diluting my attention stream is a great way to tell me that you do not share my concern about allocating it.

Information overload and Shirky’s “filter failure”

I think this is a feeling we probably all have now and then, thanks to what some call information overload and Clay Shirky has called “filter failure.” Maybe we feel it when our inbox is filled with messages that have been sent by someone clicking “reply all,” or maybe when we get inundated with Facebook messages and photo tags, or — on the far end of the spectrum — when we try to follow someone like Robert Scoble on a new social network like Google+. The uber-blogger and social-media maven described recently how his own wife deleted her Google+ account because of the signal-to-noise problem caused in part by Scoble himself.

Facebook has only added to this phenomenon with its new “ticker,” which scrolls by as you watch the page, with every “like” and message and Spotify song appearing and then disappearing. Facebook seemed very proud of its new “frictionless sharing” social apps, but many expressed concern about the volume of noise that would be created — and I think rightfully so. In a way, these concerns are the same as the ones my friend has: where do I spend my attention? There is a finite amount of it, and so at some point we have to choose where to allocate it. I spend less time on Facebook in part because I have too many “friends” there and the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low.

How do we solve these kinds of problems? I don’t really know. Filters such as Circles and Facebook lists — or even a new network like Bill Gross’s Chime, which lets you follow only part of a person rather than everything they post — might be part of the solution, but they also just increase the flow. Do we have to get ruthless with our friend and follower lists, and prune them even if we risk offending someone? Perhaps. All I know is that the problem isn’t getting any better — if anything, it is getting worse.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Lambert Pearson and Kevin Dooley

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Steve Sande and I have been collaborating on "Talking to Siri," an ebook that just recently hit the Kindle store. It's a how-to that will help you get the most done with your Siri intelligent assistant. We're sharing some of our favorite tips with TUAW readers.

Today, we're looking at Siri's Wolfram Alpha integration. You can force Siri to use Wolfram by prefixing your request with "Wolfram." For example, you might say, "Wolfram, what is the square root of 2?" or "Wolfram, graph x-squared plus three."



But there's a lot more that you can do with Wolfram than just math. Here are ten of our favorite Wolfram searches. These highlight the flexibility of this amazing information resource.


Roll a Random Number. Say "Wolfram, random integer." Wolfram returns a random value between 0 and 1000. "Wolfram, random number" provides a 0 to 1 floating point value.

Look up nature facts. Say, "Wolfram, what is the scientific name of a mountain lion?" It's Puma concolor. Rabbits are Leporidae, and Peacocks, Galliformes.

Check upcoming holidays. Say, "How many days until Thanksgiving?" This returns both the number of days as well as a helpful calendar so you can chart out the time until then.

Create a secure password. Say "Wolfram, password." Wolfram generates a difficult-to-crack 8-character password. Scroll down for alternates. If you need a longer password, you can append these together.

Convert text to Morse code. Say, "What is Morse code for horsefeathers?" You'll see the entire sequence laid out for your tapping pleasure.

Check your diet. Say, "How many calories in a small apple?" Wolfram will tell you that there are 75.

Ask out about time zones. Say, "Wolfram, what is the local time in Jakarta?"

Query about your chances. Say, "Wolfram, what is the probability of a full house?" For a random five-card hand, it's apparently 1 in 694.

Have fun with pop culture. Say, "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" or "Wolfram, who shot the sheriff?"

Visualize colors. Okay, I've saved the best for last. If you work with colors, this can save you a lot of time. Say, "Wolfram pound sign E 9 7 4 5 1" (for Burnt Sienna / Tangerine) or "Wolfram pound sign 2 9 A B 8 7" (for Jungle Green). This will also convert the colors to RGB values and look up closely-matching brand colors from Benjamin Moore. Make sure to scroll down to catch all the helpful information.



10 cool things you can do with Wolfram Alpha and Siri originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Since late 2007, an obscure Twitter account has been automatically tweeting a single word every half an hour. The ultimate goal: to tweet every word in the English language. We spoke to the guy behind Everyword. More »

Facebook said Friday it will shut down Beluga, the social text messaging service acquired by the social networking giant in March 2011.

This is not an unexpected move: GigaOM first reported that Beluga’s future was up in the air in August, when Facebook debuted the Facebook Messenger mobile app. The development of Facebook Messenger was led by Beluga’s three-person founding team, Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow. As we wrote then, “It would be a bit sad to see Beluga go, but with the new debut of Facebook Messenger — a fully featured project that has been the top priority for Beluga’s founding team for nearly six months — it would not be especially surprising.”

The end of Beluga is now officially nigh. The company explained the move in a blog entry posted on its website that reads in part:

“Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we’ve decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service. You can keep using Beluga for now, but we’ll be phasing it out over the next few weeks:

Starting November 11, you’ll no longer be able to use Beluga to send messages, but you can still get to your old messages on the Beluga app and website. If you want, you can also download an archive of your pods.

On December 15, the Beluga service will shut down completely, and you’ll no longer be able to access your old pods or messages.”

Facebook Messenger, meanwhile, has been expanding significantly. The company says the app is now available worldwide in 22 languages, and it’s available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry phones.

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Samsung‘s new mobile device lineup will feature flexible screens starting in 2012, the company announced today.

In its quarterly earnings call, Samsung’s vice president of investor relations, Robert Yi, told investors, analysts and press, “The flexible display we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part. The application probably will start from the handset side.”

After flexible-screen mobile phones roll out, the company plans to introduce the same technology for tablets and other devices.

In January 2011, Samsung purchased Liquivista, a strategic acquisition that will allow it to produce the kinds of displays that were announced today. Liquivista made electrowetting display technology, which is used to create mobile and other consumer electronic displays that are bright, low-power, flexible and transparent.

Flexible screen technology was also a focus of Samsung’s in March, when Yongsuk Choi, director of Samsung Mobile Display, gave an overview of the company’s future mobile device plans. At that time, Choi said most of the flexible-display technology Samsung was working on was still in very early stages.

Flexible displays have been on the fringes of up-and-coming mobile technologies for some time. For example, we saw a bendable e-reader from Plastic Logic back in 2008.

More recently, Sony, in particular, has shown some interesting work in the field, demonstrating its first flexible display at CES in early 2009 and showing off advanced, thinner, more flexible displays just last year.

Still, flexible screens aren’t something we’re seeing on the mass market yet; we wonder if consumers will warm to the idea when Samsung takes the wraps off these new devices.

Samsung recently surpassed Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer, shipping 27.8 million smartphones last quarter. Altogether, Samsung’s current share of the smartphone market is 23.8 percent.

Filed under: mobile

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As we wrote about earlier this week, Klout has reworked its algorithms, and your scores have changed. Some have gone up, some down. Despite claiming more transparency with their algorithms, they are still mostly opaque and mysterious. As one of our readers commented, "Klout just pulled a Netflix, taking trust off the table."

So while they tinker with their code, you might want to explore other alternatives that can help you measure your social media effectiveness. We have come up with 17 different services, some free, some fairly expensive. I have tried most of them and will give you my impressions so you can have a head start with your own explorations.

Sponsor

Before I run through the services, let's discuss eight different issues with social media metrics and how the ideal metric should be constructed.

There is no single number that can really be universally useful. It isn't like wining the World Series, where you have to score more runs by the end of the game. There are a variety of actions that you want to examine, and you can win in one area and be off elsewhere. My impression is that we place too much emphasis on the final number without really understanding the reasons for its calculation, as the recent changes in Klout have shown.

You are also measuring two grossly different activities: giving and taking. This is more than just what you post and what you consume, and there are many subtleties to both. Just because you have tons of followers and friends doesn't mean that you listen to any of them, nor they listen to you. And some of us, such as myself, are more givers (in that we are focused on outbound actions) than takers (collecting information from our networks). Or vice versa. The ideal social media metric should understand both directions and make appropriate adjustments.

How transparent is their algorithm, really? By that I mean can you understand how they get the results that you see, and does the scoring make sense to you? Of course, one issue is having something so transparent that the service can be easily gamed or fooled.

Can you examine any time-series? Klout has time series data but doesn't label its axes very well, which can be very annoying. The others don't have as much here as I would like. Sometimes you can understand the algorithms better if you can see how they track you over time.

How much does the service care if your content is original vs. copied? If you most of your Tweets are retweeted content, is that as good as someone who comes up with original thoughts? The ideal metric should take this into account, and most of them have focused in this area, generally because it is easier to measure than some other things.

How many different social networks should be scanned to derive your total score, and how should they be weighed? Klout has done a decent job of expanding their sources beyond Facebook and Twitter, but some of the other services haven't gotten much beyond these two networks yet. Obviously, the wider the reach the better the view into how you are interacting across many networks.

Does the tool provide qualitative suggestions in addition to just scores? The ideal metric should provide insight and suggestions for how to improve your engagement and increase your value to your chosen community. Some of them have overly general suggestions that don't really tell you what you really need to do to improve your use of social media.

Does your audience really, really like you? Often called sentiment analysis, it isn't enough just to retweet your bon mots but approve of your point of view. There are tools that are beginning to measure this too.



So what alternatives to Klout are out there, and are any of them any better at capturing what you should be doing better for your social media activities?

Twitter-only metrics
Twitter Score gives you a single score (I got a 2 out of 10, which seems somewhat low).
TwitterGrader is another service that gives you a single simple score. I don't think the score is very meaningful: I got 97.5 out of 100, and I know I am not that good.
Tweetlevel was built by the Edelman PR firm and it gives some good explanations of its assessments and recommendations, although they could be more fine-grained. It tries to provide historical information but there is no way to manipulate the charts timelines.
Tweetreach shows who retweeted you and some summary stats, and is useful to search across trending topic areas and not just specific Twitter accounts.
TeraMetric Optimizer for Twitter. This gives you qualitative recommendations on what and how to Tweet. It costs $99/month and has a free trial but requires your credit card info up front.

Facebook-only metrics
Booshaka looks at top contributors to your Facebook page

Google-owned metrics
Google has been buying up lots of companies this year, and there are probably others that I missed that are in this space. Here are two important ones:
SocialGrapple has paid accounts starting at $6 a month and going up to $125 a month and is used for really deep dives into Twitter.
Postrank. We have written extensively about them here, which is used to analyze RSS feeds.

Multiple site focus
PeerIndex is probably the closest competitor to Klout and examines three areas: Activity, Authority, and Audience. They cover multiple sites but are slow to update their scores and don't have much in the way of time-series data.
Proliphiq which we wrote about earlier in the month has a wide array of measurements and explanations, trending hot topics and more.
Twitalyzer shows Klout and Peerindex values and costs $5 a month.
How Sociable is more a general search tool across many sites, and it isn't very accurate since it doesn't tie the search to a particular Twitter username.
Empire Avenue has lots of games and points for various activities, but underneath all this frilly stuff is some interesting analysis of multiple social network sites.


Sentiment Analysis tools
We wrote about Viralheat's sentiment analysis for Facebook and Twitter here.
mBlast mPact can monitor multiple networks and provide some sentiment analysis.
Kred.ly is still in limited beta but offers some promise in terms of looking at sentiment for Twitter initially.
Traackr is another sentiment analyzer and at $500 a month is one of the more expensive tools in this list.

Really, all of these tools are somewhat flawed, and we are just beginning to see some consolidation and improvements, such as what Klout is trying to do. And certainly, Google will help here, as they have purchased two companies this year alone in this space. If any of these tools can help improve your social media methods and increase your influence, then stick with what works and what will motivate you to become a better participant in this genre.

Discuss

There's an ongoing business axiom that defines customer service: "the customer is always right."

Publicly, this may be the proper posture. People like Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos and the author of the best-selling business book, Delivering Happiness) built his first business on making customers happy (the company was LinkExchange - which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million) and pushed the concept even further with Zappos (the online shoe store), which was also sold (but this time to Amazon was over one billion dollars). That being said, there are instances when the customer is not always right. In fact, let's be honest: sometimes the expectations of consumers is so far beyond the pale that anything the company does to try to please them will be met with grumbles and complaints.

The majority of customers simply want value.

They want their products or services to do what it says it will do - reliably. In this day and age, the challenge is that brands are being held to task in the online channels. Any individuals can complain in text, images, audio and video, instantly and for free online for the world to see. If you're in line at your favorite retailer and you're wondering why they don't open up a second cash register, you're just a tweet away from holding that company responsible for their store policies. The other day, I was reviewing the Facebook page for a major airline and there was one complaint that stood out: "I'll never fly with you again! I was stuck at the security line for over two hours!" What does security have to do with the airline? (Answer: nothing). Have you ever been on TripAdvisor (the popular online destination that rates hotels)? You'll see a constant stream of one and two-star reviews where individuals complain about things like a lack of chocolate on their pillows or not enough channels available on their TV (while at the same time commending the hotel for having a nice staff, clean rooms and a cheap rate - the main reasons the majority of people would chose a hotel).

Are we quickly devolving to the sad state of: "you can only please a few of the people some of the time"?

The evolution of customer service and brand loyalty is a topic that has captured the imagination of Fred Reichheld for over twenty years. In 1996, the Bain Fellow published his first book, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. Recently, Reichheld (along with co-author, Rob Markey) published a newly updated version of his 2006 seminal book, The Ultimate Question (now titled, The Ultimate Question 2.0). So, just what is the ultimate question that every business should be asking...

"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?"

If your company is doing well (and this doesn't mean you have to be perfect), your customers become your brand champions. They become the evangelists. They become the marketers. They are the ones who get your ideas to spread. "It turns out that people won't enthusiastically recommend your business to a loved one unless you have treated them in a very special way," says Reichheld via Skype. "It goes beyond the brand and loyalty. Social Media has made the model more apparent to businesses, but the roots of this concept go all the way back to the bible. It goes back to the idea that a name and a reputation are worth more than silver and gold. We created the Net Promoter Score system around the ultimate question to help businesses know - day by day - whether they are building their reputation or diminishing it."

Big or great?

While the simple and immediate feedback loop of deploying the Net Promoter Score (a system that allows customers to grade a brand on a scale from one to ten with a few, short questions) has been adopted by many businesses, the final results also empower a brand to think differently about the types of customers that they can be successful with. "There is no brand that is right for everyone," continues Reichheld. "A brand should be working very hard to make sure that the people who are buying their product or service are the people who it was intended to be sold to. They need to have a very clear focus. This means that when they get a Net Promoter Score of a nine or a ten from a customer, it's because they picked the right customer and they are appreciated for what they have to offer. Sadly, what we see historically is metrics around 'bigness,' meaning how many customers or how many units sold? What we should be looking at is a metric around greatness, not bigness."

So, is the customer always right?

"I don't think that the customer is always right any more than I think that the employees are always right or that a shareholder is always right," conceded Reichheld. "You do owe it to your business to understand the root cause of the feedback and what implications it has on your decision making, prioritization and your actions. But, there are criminals out there that are your customers. You want to keep those customers away. Not just from your cash registers but from your employees too, because they are abusive and they make life hell for everyone in your business. The Net Promoter Score is based on the golden rule that we should treat others the way we would want to be treated in their shoes, but it takes a lot of deep thinking to do this right. It's not superficial. Think about what actions a business takes when it gets a zero or a one score? The business should dig in to figure out what's wrong, try to fix it and understand how it feels to be in the customer's shoes, but it doesn't always mean that they are the right customers for your business."

The complete audio conversation between Reichheld and myself will be published this coming Sunday (October 30th, 2011) as episode #277 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast.

The above post is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Companies should focus on greatness, not 'bigness: ' author.

Vancouver Sun - The customer is (not) always right.




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At Gawker, Brooklyn-based journalist Caitlin Curran explains how you could quickly go from being part of the downtrodden 99% to being part of the "no, really, unemployed and utterly fucked" contingent: your boss could see a photo of you holding up a sign at a protest and fire you the next day. Ms. Curran is the woman in the photo above, feature in two previous Boing Boing posts. As she explains, my post here was part of the story of how she lost her job over her participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests:

The next day, Boing Boing co-editor Xeni Jardin posted the photo as the site's Occupy Wall Street sign of the day, the post circulated around Tumblr, Friedersdorf himself saw it and wrote about it, as did Felix Salmon at Reuters, who called me "one of those protestors that photographers dream of" and the sign "true, and accurate, and touching, and grammatical, and far too long to be a slogan, and gloriously bereft of punctuation, and ending even more gloriously in a mildly archaic preposition."

Beyond that, Salmon noted, the sign's internet notoriety showed that there was something about it that resonated with people. Which was really the whole point of why we made the sign, and of Friedersdorf's piece.

I thought all of this could be fodder for an interesting segment on The Takeaway—a morning news program co-produced by WNYC Radio and Public Radio International—for which I had been working as a freelance web producer roughly 20 hours per week for the past seven months. I pitched the idea to producers on the show, in an e-mail.

The next day, The Takeaway's director fired me over the phone, effective immediately. He was inconsolably angry, and said that I had violated every ethic of journalism, and that this should be a "teaching moment" for me in my career as a journalist. The segment I had pitched, of course, would not happen. Ironically, the following day Marketplace did pretty much the exact segment I thought would have been great on The Takeaway, with Kai Ryssdal discussing the sign and the Goldman Sachs deal it alluded to in terms that were far from neutral.

I hope that Ms. Curran is hired by a news organization with a spine, and soon. You can follow her on Twitter.
(thanks, Susannah Breslin)

This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The CEO's Role in Fixing the System.

I recently heard that the only group held in lower regard than corporate executives in the United States is Congress. Wow! Think about that. What a terrible blow to business. And yet, I'd argue that it's our own fault. By serving narrow self-interests, we — the business people of this country — basically facilitated this mistrust. We have been purveyors of our own doom. There's a reason the Occupy Wall Street movement was hatched and a reason why its message is growing more pervasive.

The shine on corporate executives has been more than just tarnished by the economic events and hardships of the past three years. It's all but gone. Too many corporations view their role as extracting profit ("hit the numbers!," "deliver the bottom line!") from society as opposed to viewing profit as a byproduct of delivering a valued service over the medium and long term. A stock pop on the heels of the release of monthly sales results contributes little to customers, employees, or communities, and yet that is exactly what all too many corporate executives are focused on and live and die by.

Given that we — the business people of this country — are responsible for our bum rap, I think we're also responsible for restoring its luster.

Enter new approaches to capitalism &#8212 some are calling it conscious capitalism or enlightened business. I'd call it simply "enlightened self-interest." This notion of a conscious and long-term approach to value creation — when put into proper application — serves long-term shareholders extraordinarily well and has the capacity to favorably reshape the public's perception of corporate America. It is built on the fundamental premise that every business has a deeper purpose than merely short-term profit maximization and, more importantly, a responsibility to all of its stakeholders (customers, employees, vendors, investors, community). With such a model, profit is merely the byproduct of delivering something that serves society and a broad range of stakeholders.

When I go to the ATM, I'm usually required to make a deposit before I make a withdrawal. I'd argue it's the same in business. We have to spend less time figuring out how to extract economic value from our stakeholders and more time creating what is valuable to them. Doing so is what ultimately creates long-term value.

There are countless and creative ways in which companies are beginning to do exactly that. I find an experiment that the Panera Bread Foundation conducted to be an interesting example.

About two years ago, we began noodling around this idea of leveraging Panera's core skills to affect positive — heck, lasting — change in the communities in which it served. Panera operates some 1,500 bakery cafes nationwide. We've been opening two cafes every week. Our belief was that the national scale of our operation provided Panera the opportunity to turn that core competency against a societal ill and uniquely make a difference in addressing the food insecurity in this country. We continued to kick the tires on this idea and decided: we were going to tackle an issue by skill and sweat equity rather than, say, hand-outs or day-end product donations, which Panera had been doing, and continues to do, through its Dough Nation program.

This revelation manifested itself in true bricks-and-mortar form as a Panera Cares Cafe in a St. Louis suburb — a non-profit, community-based, pay-what-you-can iteration of our established, commercial Panera, LLC cafes. Today, we are three cafes strong. The ultimate hope is to open one in many of the markets Panera serves. We call them community cafes of shared responsibility.

These cafes are virtually indistinguishable from a Panera — same menu, same comfortable environment, same friendly people. Instead of prices, however, we simply suggest people leave their fair share. In lieu of cash registers, there are donation boxes. Every guest is on their honor and every guest is welcome, whether or not they can leave a monetary contribution.

Though Panera Cares is still somewhat of an experiment, our three community cafes have proven to be sustainable thus far. As well, we expect to serve as many as 1 million people in these three cafes and to add additional programs to benefit the community.

My point is this: Corporate America will both serve its shareholders and strengthen its reputation when it finds ways to use its expertise and core competencies, as well as its scale, to be truly conscious citizens. Imagine if more large corporations were more active in trying to address social needs locally.

For every vital service now being provided by a not-for-profit or government entity in this country, there is almost certainly a large corporation with the skills, experience, and scale to vastly improve and increase the capacities of those organizations.

Food banks serve a vital function, but they are often disorganized and inefficient. Yet there are huge national retailers with vast experience in procuring, moving, and delivering goods, including perishables. The nation's largest home builders, construction companies, and industrial designers could vastly increase the humanity, efficiency, and capacity of our community homeless shelters. \

Consider key competitive advantages companies hold. For instance, what might a Google do with the world's best search algorithms? Could it play an integral role in homeland defense? How about Apple's prowess in design? UPS's and Federal Express's for transport? There is no dearth of expertise to be passed on.

You need only look to Zucotti Park to see that big business is taking it on the chin from citizens who are at best weary and at worst completely mistrusting. Rethinking why our respective organizations exist and then contributing what we do best as businesses, directly to the communities, could rehabilitate perceptions of big business and capitalism as being wrong, evil. Businesses should not be stigmatized for or bashful about making money if they are conscious about their place and purpose in society.

All leaders have a lens through which they view success and accountability. You often hear CEOs say that their first obligation is to their shareholders. I agree, but shareholders are served best when CEOs focus on serving the range of stakeholders involved in a company first. We have to remember that public companies are chartered to serve our society, not simply the shareholder. In the end, long-term shareholder value is delivered when companies relish their broader role. Today we call it conscious capitalism; tomorrow a new term will emerge. Whatever the name, we need more of it.

Earlier this year, a situation arose with a few friends wherein there were 2 spare IPL tickets worth Rs.3,200 because a couple of their friends backed out just one day before the match. In spite of their desperate attempts till [...]

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Restaurant guide Zomato in a recent post on its blog has revealed that the highest user adoption for its mobile app comes from Blackberry users, followed by Android and iPhone. Zomato’s apps are also available on Nokia, Blackberry playbook and Samsung’s Smart TV devices. It also revealed platform wise analytics based on internal download and usage tracking data for daily downloads, average visits per months, time spent per visit, number of restaurants viewed per visit, reviews per visit, and average length of reviews.

The analytics indicate that a lifestyle app such as a food/restaurant guide like Zomato is popular in terms of downloads on Blackberry, which could also be because of the platform’s reach. Note that the entry price barrier for Blackberry devices is much lower compared with iOS. The cheapest Blackberry device costs less than Rs 10,000, while the cheapest iOS device costs around Rs 20,000. However, in terms of user engagement, iOS users are the most active and use the app more often, browsing more listings. We’re also assuming that Android is more popular than Nokia/Symbian since Zomato chooses to showcase numbers for the platform.

- Downloads per day: According to Zomato, the highest number of organic downloads i.e without counting ad links and app store promotions, come from Blackberry, followed by Android and iOS.

- Average visits per month: iOS users are the most active in terms of using the app, followed by Blackberry and Android.

- Time spent per month: Android users spend the highest amount of time browsing inside the app, followed by iOS and Blackberry, which implies that Blackberry users spend less time per visit.

- Number of restaurants viewed per visit: iOS users browse through more restaurants compared to Android and BlackBerry users. This also means that they choose or skip restaurants more quickly. Blackberry users browse less number of restaurants.

- Number of reviews per visit: iOS users tend to post more reviews, however, this analysis was relative and since Blackberry has the largest installed base, more reviews are posted by users of Blackberry devices.
*Reach India’s Digital Industry Decision Makers: Advertise on MediaNama. Contact sales@medianama.com. For more info, click here.

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's
fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the
truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her
clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of
shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even
close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards
away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's
a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have
your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say,
or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you're drawn for no good reason to
girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of
course. Sometimes in a restaurant I'll catch myself staring at the girl
at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can
insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type.
Much as I like noses, I can't recall the shape of hers - or even if she
had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It's
weird.

"Yesterday on
the street I passed the 100% girl," I tell someone.

"Yeah?" he says.
"Good-looking?"

"Not really."

"Your favorite
type, then?"

"I don't know.
I can't seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or
the size of her breasts."

"Strange."

"Yeah. Strange."

"So anyhow,"
he says, already bored, "what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?"

"Nah. Just passed
her on the street."

She's walking
east to west, and I west to east. It's a really nice April morning.

Wish I could
talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself,
tell her about myself, and - what I'd really like to do - explain to her
the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side
street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something
sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when
peace filled the world.

After talking,
we'd have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel
bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality
knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance
between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach
her? What should I say?

"Good morning,
miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?"

Ridiculous. I'd
sound like an insurance salesman.

"Pardon me, but
would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?"

No, this is just
as ridiculous. I'm not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who's going
to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple
truth would do. "Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me."

No, she wouldn't
believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry,
she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you're not
the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation,
I'd probably go to pieces. I'd never recover from the shock. I'm thirty-two,
and that's what growing older is all about.

We pass in front
of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is
damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can't bring myself to speak to
her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp
white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She's written somebody a letter,
maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her
eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she's ever had.

I take a few
more strides and turn: She's lost in the crowd.

Now, of course,
I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long
speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The
ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It
would have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't you
think?"

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and
the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially
beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely
girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that
somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect
girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually
happened.

One day the two
came upon each other on the corner of a street.

"This is amazing,"
he said. "I've been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this,
but you're the 100% perfect girl for me."

"And you," she
said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I'd pictured
you in every detail. It's like a dream."

They sat on a
park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour.
They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100%
perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your
100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and
talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts:
Was it really all right for one's dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when
there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the
girl, "Let's test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other's
100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without
fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones,
we'll marry then and there. What do you think?"

"Yes," she said,
"that is exactly what we should do."

And so they parted,
she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they
had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have
undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect
lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible
for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves
of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both
the boy and the girl came down with the season's terrible inluenza, and
after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of
their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the
young D. H. Lawrence's piggy bank.

They were two
bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting
efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling
that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven
be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer
from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery
letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes
as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with
shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful
April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was
walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery
letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street
in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very
center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered
for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their
chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow
of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the
clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other,
disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don't you think?

Yes, that's it,
that is what I should have said to her.

Hi everybody.

I’m Rich. I work at 10 Yetis PR Agency. (‘Hiiii Rich’, you say in a soothingly choral sort of way).

And I’m an addict. (You clap empathetically, looking at me with a knowing approval and compassionately tearful gleam in your eye).

Read more on Are you addicted to early adoption?…

By way of Raymond Johnson, the best statistics multiple choice question ever written on a chalkboard. Try not to think too hard. [via]

Excited to see what’s next for Siri.

@ haha.nu

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Probably my biggest fear with moving from Reader to Plus is that it will likely move away from the inbox concept. I know +Alan Green doesn't like that -- I read his shared items on Reader! You know, the ones that won't exist in a week -- and I really know +Dave Winer doesn't like it. Great for them. The awesome thing about feed readers is that they don't have to all behave one way.So you pull sharing out of Reader and move it to Plus. The Plus model of view content puts things in a Stream -- a specific, accurate metaphor, since it's always moving. New stuff is always at the top. There's no designation between read and unread.It's great if I'm plugged in constantly. It's a nightmare if I do not check it every day, because the always-moving nature of the Stream means I'm always going to miss something important.I didn't say it won't be in the Stream. I said I'll miss it. It won't stand out. I won't know it was added unless I read all the things.So I can organize what I follow into folders, and some things take priority, others get Marked As Read."But if you go from email to something adaptive or curated--"Nope. Stop. You're assuming I like the same things every day. You're assuming that you can read my mind.You've got a shitload of data on me, but you don't know when I fall off my bike, bust my ass and don't want to read about bicycles today. But you think I do! So bicycles is what I get, and I throw you across the room.But folders in Reader? I wanna read about bicycles, and I have 100 unread things about bicycles, and I open that folder and 20 are my favorite bicycles blog! Yay! I don't want to read about them? Click folder, Mark All As Read."So what, 1000+ unread items in Reader on something you like isn't a nightmare?" Mark All As Read, done. I won't miss anything important."But you just overrode your point about Plus! It'll be a big stream of stuff that doesn't stand out."But it will stand out. If it's important to me, and it's actually good, my friend*s* will have shared it. Friends, plural. One person shares it, eh, depends who it is. Five share it over a day, a week? Holy shit, I'd better read that!No equivalent in Plus. Plus buries who and how many share an item; Reader made it visual, unmistakable.And don't even get me started on Comment View. Plus might as well hide things being shared if there's no comments."Now wait a damn minute, you just said--"--that I look at shares. I do. Shares indicate shared interest.But comments? COMMENTS FROM MY FRIENDS ABOUT THINGS I'VE SHARED OR OTHER FRIENDS HAVE SHARED ARE REMARKABLE. EVERY TIME. EVERY. TIME. I will drop what I'm doing to read new comments in Reader.Plus, Facebook, Twitter? It could give a shit less about what my friends say about other things. It wants me to know what they said about themselves, what they did today, what their relationship status is, what games they played today. It'd rather ask me why I haven't posted a photo of my cat to the internet lately, so Plus can get those usage numbers up and boast how much "content" people are creating. It'd rather ask what I ate for breakfast or if I'd like to tag something about #whattrendingstupidshita19yearoldwrotetoday so I can get REAL-TIME FIREHOSE OF UNCURATABLE RANDOMIZED SHIT UPDATES about it so it doesn't have to make an effort to deal with content from which Google might not exclusively profit.Fuck that! My friends are trying to have a goddamned discussion and you're standing between us showing us photos of ourselves and trying to get us to talk about trending topics!I COULD GIVE A SHIT LESS. MY FRIEND IS TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING I'M INTERESTED IN. SHUT THE FUCK UP.--One of the funny ha ha great things we say about the few dozen people who make up our group of friends on Reader is that we're the Google Reader Party. But that's a misnomer. A party is what Google Reader is. It's us talking about awesome stuff."OH! OH WAIT! Plus has this Hangouts thing where" no you shut the fuck up right now.I am old in internet terms. I am thirty years old. My friends are older. We work too much and decompress in weird ways, at weird times. I have trouble waking up before 9 a.m. Christine gets up at like 5 fucking o'clock a.m. Ashley goes to bed at 9 p.m. We don't Hangout. We need something asynch. We need something like... email. Hey, my original point, there you are.Google Reader is was the best asynchronous social network ever made. It's the closest thing to a party that 25 people, all on totally different schedules, can swing. "Now" didn't matter. "Who" barely mattered. Sharing 3,000 items a month or 30? Didn't matter.Reader, somehow, some way, became the best possible way for people who can't stand talking about themselves to communicate with each other.Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus -- and shit no they haven't, and it doesn't look like they will -- the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can't remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can't efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.You can't sit back with a drink and catch up on discussions that don't have to be carried on right fucking now or they're gone forever in Plus.Reader did it so, so well. It was an ugly motherfucker. It broke early and often, it never joined the API craze even as its never-documented and barely acknowledged reverse-engineered API went on to power who only knows how many web and mobile apps. It was held together for months, if not years, by one or two developers whose names are maybe even lost to history now.Somebody else can swing in here and grab this niche now that Google's flushed it. Not rolled it into Plus, but flushed it gone.Or maybe everything will be perfect and fantastic! In which case someone at Google FOR GOD'S SAKE *WOULD YOU FUCKING HIRE SOMEONE TO COMMUNICATE THIS SHIT TO US WHO IS NOT A GODDAMNED DEVELOPER AND CAN SAY "PAGE WITH YOUR SHARED ITEMS ON IT" INSTEAD OF "LINK BLOG" I MEAN SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK IS A "LINK BLOG" *

There is a massive chip war going on right now between the market leader Intel verses upstart ARM Holdings.

ARM today disclosed technical details of its new ARMv8 architecture, the first ARM architecture to include a 64-bit instruction set.

The ARM architecture is unique in its ability to span the full range of electronic devices and equipment, from tiny sensors through to large scale infrastructure equipment. The new ARMv8 architecture will expand the reach of ARM processor-based solutions into consumer and enterprise applications where extended virtual addressing and 64-bit data processing are required.

ARM processors are ideal for smartphones and computing devices that require superior power management which now includes data center servers.

Just yesterday Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal wrote that Steve Jobs Wanted Intel Chips for the iPad but chose ARM.

According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Steve pushed for Intel processors in the iPad. With the focus of small faster cheaper, heat and power management becomes the biggest obstacles for the chip makers. Whoever cracks that code for mobile and datacenters wins the war. Right now Intel holds 90% market share and ARM is pushing at them hard.

Here is what Don Clark reported.

Intel at the time was developing its low-powered Atom chip, which Jobs favored, Isaacson writes. Intel CEO Paul Otellini was pushing hard to work with Apple on the tablet, and Jobs was inclined to trust him.

But Tony Fadell–then a key leader of Apple’s design efforts, now at the startup Nest Labs–was adamant that the iPad needed the even lower power consumption of chips based on designs from ARM Holdings. He felt so strongly about the matter that, during one meeting, he placed his Apple badge on the table and threatened to resign over the matter, according to the biography.

Jobs eventually relented. Indeed, Apple became such a zealot for ARM that it began designing its own chips based on the technology, using an engineering team acquired by buying the startup P.A. Semi.

The biography also includes some sharp criticism by Jobs of Intel, at least beyond its high-performance microprocessors for PCs. Intel, Jobs said, had wanted to do a “big joint project” with Apple to do chips for future iPhones but was not selected.

“There were two reasons we didn’t go with them,” Jobs said, according to the book. “One was that they are just really slow. They are like a steamship, not very flexible. We’re used to going pretty fast. Second is that we just didn’t want to teach them everything, which they could go and sell to our competitors.”

Isaacson includes Otellini’s rebuttal to this account. The real issue, Intel’s CEO told him, is that Apple and Intel couldn’t agree on chip pricing. The companies also disagreed on who would control the design–another example, the author concludes, of Jobs’s compulsion to control every aspect of a product.

Elsewhere in the biography, Isaacson recounts how Jobs and Otellini had gotten to know each other in the 1990s when Jobs was struggling to sustain his second company, NeXT, and “his arrogance had been temporarily tempered,” as Otellini put it. Later, at Apple, Jobs pushed for the pivotal move in 2005 to start using Intel chips for the Macintosh, after years using the PowerPC technology promoted by IBM and Motorola.

Chip pricing in those days was also a key issue, with Jobs wanting better terms than other computer makers, the biography discloses. Jobs and Otellini would take walks together above the Stanford University campus, starting with broad pronouncements by Jobs about the evolution of computing. By the end of the walk, Jobs would be haggling over price, Isaacson writes.



Processor Wars – Intel Under Seige From ARM – Even Steve Jobs Chose ARM over Intel is a post from: SiliconANGLE

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Facebook is getting complicated. The social network just introduced the category of "trusted friend," not to be confused with the prior categories of "close friends," "acquaintances," "restricted" buddies, and authorized stalkers. Trusted friends are like super-friends. They have special powers! More »

The Google+ social network has expanded its feature set with new analytics visualizer, in-browser photo editing and a page to see what’s popular on Plus right this second.

Laura Chavez, a 60 year-old New Mexican, was drinking and playing a nice game of Monopoly with her grandson and her boyfriend, Clyde "Butch" Smith. When Chavez suspected Smith of cheating, she sent her grandson to bed and proceeded to hit Smith over the head with a bottle and then stabbed him repeatedly with a kitchen knife. More »

Another batch of Microsoft patent applications have trickled into public view, and these ones may be even cooler than the last bunch. They describe “flinging gestures,” interaction with 3D virtual objects, and even throw it back a bit to describe a new email view format.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Grasp Simulation Of A Virtual Object
Applied for back in April of 2010, this patent application outlines something strikingly similar to some of the technology we saw in Microsoft’s video portraying their version of the future. It describes user input on a 2D surface, which is then simulated as direct contact with a virtual 3D object. Said virtual 3D object is meant to move or be manipulated based on the user’s physical input.

In the video from this morning, users were able to input gestures without ever touching the device, as shown when the traveling businesswoman draws a heart into thin air, which is then translated onto the screen and relayed back to her kitchen wall. Perhaps this patent is a bridge between what we have now and Microsoft’s envisioned future, but either way I hope this one makes it to reality.

Changing Power Mode Based On Sensors In A Device
The next patent application on our list was filed for much more recently — in July of this year — and is basically meant to make it easier for us to turn on handheld computing devices. You know, since pushing a button is too strenuous. The patent outlines a way to power on a device, whether it be a mobile phone or a tablet (or any computing device you can hold, really), by holding said device in portrait orientation.

The patent discusses certain specifications that must be met in order for the function to work, like the degree at which the device must be held, or the amount of time the device must be held that way before it powers on. We’re glad to see it, too, as it would be totally annoying for a tablet to turn on each time it was in portrait orientation. The patent also covers a device that can perform this magical portrait boot action, along with the method by which one would do so. Way to cover your bases, Microsoft.

Email Views
This April 2010 patent application is a bit old-school, or at least it feels that way compared to a day full of both lofty and modest future predictions. But it may make my least favorite mode of communication — and MG’s least favorite thing ever — just a bit more bearable.

The patent describes a way of formatting your email view into different categories, rather than a list of names and subjects. The system would interpret the content of emails, and filter them into certain categories, like from friends, from family, videos and images, documents, invitations, and missed IMs. From there, the user has multiple interface options through which they can view their inbox in varying layouts.

The technology described is in no way revolutionary — Google’s been combing your email content to target ads for years, and their Priority Inbox is pretty similar, too — but it may add a little “delight” to the email experience, which is something Microsoft seems to aim for.

Throwing Gestures For Mobile Devices

Don’t let the title of this patent application fool you — there will be no phone throwing over at Microsoft, or anywhere else hopefully. Applied for in July, the “Throwing Gestures” patent describes a way of jerking your phone around to perform certain actions, including switching from one image to the next and closing applications. Like the “Changing Power Modes Based On Sensors In A Device” patent, Microsoft has also included a device which would use this technology.

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t include any images of the actual flinging motion in its patent application, so that’ll have to be one for our imaginations to figure out. I imagine people walking down the street waving their phones around like they’re throwing frisbies, but I guess that’s no stranger than the masses of people now having conversations with their brand new iPhones.

Note that these are only applications and have not been granted as yet.

[via Microsoft-News]






Crunchbase





MICROSOFT






Company:
Microsoft


Website:
microsoft.com


Launch Date:
April 4, 1974


IPO:

NASDAQ:MSFT



Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured.

Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market.

Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...






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Google made Google+service available for Google Apps users earlier today with much fanfare, but for me personally it was very disappointing.I have two google apps accounts which I use regularly - one for my gaming blog, one for my work - apart from my gmail account. Now google gives me the option to transfer all me activity to one of my apps accounts which is a moot point.Sure, there might be a lot of people who would love this feature but I expected the search giant to follow a more comprehensive approach when rolling out their social networking feature for google apps accounts. I thought I would be able to access my same google circles no matter what email id I logged in to, now that I can login to multiple gmail and apps ids.Facebook lets you enter your 'other email ids' and lets you login with any one of them. I thought this was a brilliant feature, since I would be alerted of any attempt to reset password of my Facebook account on all email ids. I though Google would follow a similar approach given the number of gmail ids that are hacked for various reasons. If there is a way to connect these email ids it's through G+, so if my gmail id is hacked I can easily recover them from my apps account instead of having to remember things like the day I opened my account and 20 most contacted people (which includes people I haven't been in touch for a while by the way).Instead Google goes ahead and tells me that I can import all my contacts and circles to apps account which doesn't help me all all. Doesn't Google see the amount of info that is waiting to be used if the accounts are integrated? How about automatically creating a circle for people who use email on the sub-domain let's say *@gamebashing.com and are in my inbox instead of going ahead with such a shortsighted approach?Google... are you listening?PS: I clicked on the share button/link on the top blogger bar above this post, but I didn't see a way to share it to Google+. What the hell Google?

Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. However, Google today announced some significant updates to its social network, Google+, among them that Google Apps users can now sign up for G+ — the integration is finally live.

And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called “Playback”. Or at least one might claim this as its genesis, with the feature having its roots in-house, as opposed to some sort of reaction to Facebook’s much bally-hooed timeline that launched this September.

Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users “re-live” the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. Check out Google’s blog post here.

In other words, Ripples is a “visualization tool for public shares and comments”, which users can access by simply selecting the “View Ripples” option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.

From there, Google+ pops open a new tab, where users can see the activity in a nifty graphical interface, zoom in on particular events — seeing the innerconnectedness of it all. The diagram shows the post spreading across the network as other users share the post, with arrows “indicating the direction of resharing” and the circles within circles representing the “resharing sequence” with the larger circles indicating the heaviest sharing (and sharers), according to the Ripples description.

Users can also see a feed of who shared the post as well as click play on a moving timeline that shows one how quickly the post spread and to what extent it has been shared over the days, months, weeks, and years.

The intention here, according to Google’s blog post, is to “rekindle that initial excitement” when one shared their post and to get a better understanding of how the post is flowing across the network and just what kind of reach and collective viewing it was (and is) getting.

Google says that Ripples is still experimental and is looking for feedback on how it can be more informative and “more awesome”. But so far, so good. And, just to make one thing clear: Yes, Google did name this feature after me. Thank you, Google.

But the interesting thing here is how similar Google Ripples is to Google Wave’s “Playback” feature, which allowed friends to get caught up on what everyone else in a wave has already been talking about. This was essentially like rewinding the wave to see what happened in the past, with the ability to watch it progress through its many changes. Playback allowed users to jump around and see all the edits sequentially as they progressed in time to take some of the confusion out of the feature-brimming communication platform.

Another notable update announced today is the so-called “Google+ Creative Kit”, which in part is a bit like a suped-up version of Instagram filters. Creative Kit allows a deeper way to edit one’s photos on G+, enabling users to sharpen their photos, add text, crop, rotate, resize, or overlay that vintage look now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram. (Or as one commenter and Google engineer has pointed out, Creative Kit seems to be the native integration of Picnik, a photo editing startup Google acquired last year.) According to Google, all you need to use Creative Kit is “an idea”:

In the spirit of Halloween, Google has added some limited-time, “spooky” features to Creative Kit and is launching a photo competition (through the end of October), in which users can share their frightening photos on Google+ with the hashtag “#gplushalloween”. A panel of celebrity judges will pick their favorite photos and prizes may even be awarded. Though we’re checking on that last bit.

Ripples, Creative Kit, and Google Apps integration are certainly notable enhancements to the Google+ platform, especially as the latter has been a much-called-for and needed feature for the millions of Google Apps users. Photo editing features are a bonus, too, considering Google+ users have added more than 3.4 billion photos to the platform since launch. While basic photo editing tools have been available, Creative Kit takes Google+’s editing options to the next level.

And, in terms of further narrowing the gap between itself and Facebook, Ripples is a natural addition for Google+ as a content sharing medium. Both Ripples and Facebook’s impending Timeline are both unique visual ways of presenting our social data. Timeline will essentially allow users to replace their profiles with chronological scrapbooks, tracking your “most important” photos, content shared, apps, and so on back to the day you were born (for photos), or joined Facebook for everything else.

Ripples has a slightly different use case, as it is designed to give users a visual look at the ripple effect of their content sharing, the directionality of that sharing, and the popularity of a given topic. Both are nifty visual features, but whereas Timeline seems to have the potential not only to change your Facebook and social footprint at a deep level, Ripples doesn’t quite get there. It has the potential for a nerdgasm as a cool data visualization medium, which Google rocks in spades. But, really, the question becomes: How much will you actually use Ripples? And, since, in the end, it’s all about money, which has greater value for brands and future monetization?

For more on these new Google+ features, here’s the blog post.






Crunchbase





GOOGLE
GOOGLE+
GOOGLE WAVE






Company:
Google


Website:
google.com


Launch Date:
July 9, 1998


IPO:

NASDAQ:GOOG



Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






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Product:
Google+


Website:
plus.google.com

Company
Google


A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google.

Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users.

“Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists

“Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar

“Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users

“Huddle,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles”

“Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once

Each Google+ user can replace his...






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Product:
Google Wave


Website:
wave.google.com

Company
Google


Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009. Google announced that they would discontinue new development on Google wave in August 2010.

In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing,...






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The e-publishing startup wants to turn out thousands of how-to volumes a month

Despite advice to the contrary, Meg Whitman announced today that Hewlett-Packard will not spin off, sell off, fold, spindle, or mutilate the company’s Personal Systems Group, the division responsible for manufacturing PCs. Instead, PSG will remain part of the company, at least until such time as HP management changes their minds again.

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG,” Whitman said in a statement. “It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees. HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

After a couple months of waffling, the decision comes too late for the survivors of HP’s Palm acquisition. But despite the missteps of HP’s now-pilloried former chief executive Leo Apotheker, the Personal Systems Group has retained the lead in personal computer sales, with $40.7 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2010.





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Ellimistopher

 

 

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Is the iPhone more data efficient than its Android rivals? Sprint CEO Dan Hesse says it is.

During an earnings call Wednesday, Hesse claimed iPhones use about half the network resources required by Android handsets, a feature that weighed heavily in the carrier’s decision to add Apple’s device to its portfolio.

“There is a misperception that our launch of the iPhone will increase the load on Sprint’s 3G network and require us to spend more 3G capital,” Hesse said. “The reverse is true. iPhone users are expected to use significantly less 3G than the typical user of a dual-mode 3G, 4G device. Even adjusting for more total new customers being added to the network, we believe they will put less load on our 3G network than they would have if we did not carry the iPhone.”

In other words, Sprint believes the iPhone is so data efficient that it will help the company continue to offer unlimited data plans for its smartphones — even following the debut of iCloud, whose services are presumably on the data-heavy side. Evidently, Apple’s strict network efficiency requirements, which prohibit apps from pinging networks as often as those on other operating systems, and the iPhone’s ability to quickly offload data onto Wi-Fi goes a long way toward reducing network congestion.

So the iPhone will likely be a big boon for Sprint, though one that’s not without risks. The carrier says the device’s benefits won’t exceed its costs until 2015. And in the meantime it may need $7 billion in new financing to cover up-front and network costs related to it.

With thanks to Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs got the last word on his remarkable life. But will Apple's founder be as fortunate extending his enterprise legacy? Apple's leadership — the Tim Cooks and Jonathan Ives — will step up to realize the vision of their late leader. But that's this year and next. What about in three years? Or five?

The greatest threat to Steve Jobs's legacy isn't competition from Google, Amazon, Facebook, or some young hippie from Yangshuo; it's his board of directors.

Jobs himself feared this. "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands," Jobs told Isaacson. "But now it's being dismembered and destroyed. I hope I've left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple."

Leaving a charismatic legacy is one thing; leaving behind a board with wisdom, judgment, and entrepreneurial courage is quite another. Hiring insanely great executives is not like bringing on supremely perceptive directors. Stubbornly mercurial founders are not famous for building strong boards. They chafe at oversight. History suggests that well-governed, publicly-traded firms that have been run by their founders encounter profound problems after the founder dies. Organizational stresses, strains, and cracks concealed by reality distortion fields intensify with the founder's passing. Board competence — as much or more than successor CEO capabilities — determine how well cultural values and leadership legacies endure or ebb away.

HP's unhappy governance example requires little review. The firm's boardroom antics have contributed little positivity to shareholder, employee, or customer confidence. David Packard and William Hewlett — more modest and circumspect than the Jobs who admired them — would likely be displeased to see how the company they cofounded succeeded more in spite of its board than because of it.

The eponymous Walt Disney Company faced comparable challenges when its founding genius died. So did Edwin Land's (who Jobs also admired) Polaroid. Founders are a special breed. So are their boards. They may contain a constellation of all-stars, but all too frequently, the whole proves significantly and shockingly less than the sum of its parts. The death of a strong founder betrays the weakness of a supine board.

This is a hard leadership challenge. Steve Jobs's choice was, for the first time in his professional life, to make himself as openly, authentically, and honestly transparent as possible. He was revealing to the point of viciousness in his characterizations of colleagues and rivals. No one reading Jobs's quotes and comments could doubt where Apple's creator — and re-creator — stands as a business leader and technological visionary.

Apple's board should emulate his example. They should openly, authentically, and honestly be transparent about what aspects of Jobs's vision and values they will enshrine in their oversight and which ones they may downplay as Apple moves on without its founder. As fiduciaries responsible to shareholders and stakeholders alike, they should publicly disclose how they will hold themselves accountable for these efforts. Indeed, does Apple's board see its role as simply assuring the company and its management complies with the law? Or does this board recognize that a great deal of the firm's economic value derived from product, service, talent, and innovation ecosystem emphases that go beyond 10-Qs and 10-Ks?

Jobs's Apple — like Hewlett and Packard's HP, Disney's Disney, and Land's Polaroid — is a company where operational excellence unmoored from world-class governance can swiftly drift into the mediocrity of B+ innovation that briefly wins market share but never hearts and minds. It is no small irony that Disney itself acquired Jobs's Pixar — and put Steve on its board — in no small part to invigorate the company's creative energies, technologies, and insights. Who will be doing that for Apple's board?

Executive succession is always a challenge. Some companies &#8212 IBM after Akers, ExxonMobil, and DuPont — handle it particularly well. But Apple is undeniably a special case, and its board undeniably has a special challenge. Apple's board should have the courage and integrity to both acknowledge that and publicly articulate how it plans to rise to meet it. After all, they're overseeing the sequel to their founder's book.

The term “open source server” just
took on a whole new meaning. This morning at an event in New York,
Facebook director of hardware design and supply chain Frank
Frankovsky announced the creation of a foundation to guide the
Open Compute Project (OCP)—an
effort initiated by Facebook engineers to bring the benefits of
an open-source community to the problems faced in building
efficient “Web-scale” data centers. Facebook, Intel, AMD, and
Asus also have contributed intellectual property to the project,
including motherboard and blade server specifications.

The OCP was launched by engineers at
Facebook as a result of their experience in trying to build a
highly efficient data center in Prineville, Oregon. The
Prineville data center is the most efficient in the world in
terms of power consumption, using 38 percent less energy than
Facebook’s existing data centers and costing 24 percent
less. With a power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.07, only
seven percent of the power brought into the facility is used in
the data center’s overhead and cooling. But getting there
required Facebook’s engineers to custom-design servers, power
supplies, battery backup systems, and server racks to accommodate
a simplified power distribution system—using 480 volt
distribution to reduce loss, rather than stepping it down—and
minimize cooling requirements.






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One of the most frequently asked (and smartest) questions about the supposedly forthcoming Apple television is: Why does it need to be an actual TV set? Why can’t it just be an accessory like today’s $99 Apple TV thing?
That line of thinking generally goes like this: If the Apple TV remains an inexpensive add-on device, more people could buy it for less money, and Apple could get more users. Then, in theory, it could potentially disrupt the TV industry — the content and distribution side, that is — more effectively.
Plus, who wants to buy another new TV already? Many people just bought one within a few years to upgrade to HD. And isn’t the TV itself just a giant monitor, which Apple’s software can easily take over via an external box? (You can listen to Instapaper’s Marco Arment articulate something along these lines in his most recent podcast episode.)
That’s a fine argument, and it has been a decent way for Apple to practice its living room “hobby” so far. But here’s why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television set:
Apple sells complete experiences, not just devices.
That’s everything from the box it comes in to the status and emotion that owning and using one of its products provides.
There’s not much special about plugging an Apple TV box or Blu-ray player or game console into your HDTV, turning the TV on with one (obnoxiously complex) remote control, toggling over to the right HDMI input, and then resuming with the Apple remote.
Watching Apple TV on an off-brand display is the equivalent of running Mac OS on a Dell laptop. It works, but it’s not as magical. Apple sort-of tried this with the Mac mini — hook up your old PC monitor, keyboard, and mouse to this tiny new Mac — but I don’t think it converted as many people to the Apple brand as, say, the cool all-in-one MacBook.
Apple wants to be your primary interface.
Right now, the Apple TV box is aiming for “input 2″ on your TV — most people still reserve “input 1″ for their cable or satellite box. (Believe it or not, the average American still watches more than 5 hours of TV per day.) If you have a game console, maybe Apple TV is even input 3 or 4 — if your TV even has that many hi-def inputs. This was smart on Apple’s part, because for most TV watchers, today’s Apple TV box is still only a part-time solution.
But long-term, Apple probably wants its TV platform to be “input zero.” That is, the first thing you see when you turn your TV on. The only thing you need to watch video, make FaceTime calls, download apps, play games, and maybe even use Siri to order a pizza. The only remote control you need. The heart and soul and brain of your living room.
Importantly, the opportunity is growing for Apple — and Google, Microsoft, and others — to become the primary TV interface, as more cable companies test and deploy IP-based TV service. (Meanwhile, the first Google TV device already aimed for “input 1″ and flopped. But it had a bunch of problems, not just being too early to market.)
Apple sells tightly integrated software, hardware, and services.
Let’s say Apple wants to enable FaceTime calls and Siri voice controls in the living room. Is it going to sell you an iSight camera/mic add-on to stick on top of your Vizio and run another cord into your Apple TV box? Is it going to rely on your having another camera and mic — say, on an iPhone or iPad — handy at all times?
Or is it going to make the most gorgeous HDTV imaginable with a built-in HD camera and amazing speakers? Over the long run, my bet is on the latter. It’s not like the 27-inch iMac is even very far away from that!
Selling TVs could be the better business.
Recall that Apple makes its profits by selling hardware, not by selling apps or iTunes rentals.
It may be harder and take longer for Apple to sell 10 million television sets at $1,000+ than 10 million set-top boxes for $100. But the opportunity for Apple to generate several hundred dollars in gross profit per device is greater than it is on the existing Apple TV, where profits are probably in the tens of dollars per device. (And competitors like Roku are driving market prices down.)
So far, the Apple TV set-top box is not enough of a business for Apple to even break it out as its own category. But selling high-end televisions could potentially become a multi-billion-dollar business for Apple.
Don’t expect anything crazy.
Expectations seem to be insanely high for this device, and they shouldn’t be. Apple rarely leapfrogs — it usually just makes great products using the Apple formula.
The iPod wasn’t actually that different of a concept than existing hard drive-based MP3 players — it just had a novel and simple user interface (the wheel), better software, a neat name, and Apple’s intangible cool-factor. The iPhone, yes, was a complete leapfrog. But the iPad mostly applied Apple’s formula to the tablet format that had existed for years.
An Apple television may not look or work that much different than today’s TVs. (Then again, it might — I have no idea.) But Apple’s combination of hardware design, software and platform depth, services like iCloud, a novel user interface like Siri, and the overall Apple experience could set it apart from today’s TVs.
And that’s what’s so attractive about the idea — and why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television, and not just more set-top boxes.
Previously: Here’s how Apple could finally put the “TV” in Apple TV

Michael DeGusta:

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States1 up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device – be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch – as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty – well, not for Android users:

Wow. That’s all I got for that one.

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