The crowded building’s not on fire. After an exhaustive investigation of the top 100 Facebook apps, the Wall Street Journal didn’t find any serious privacy violations. While sensationalizing the dangers of online privacy sure drives page views and ad revenue, it also impedes innovation and harms the business of honest software developers. Reality has yet to stop media outlets from yelling about privacy, and because the WSJ writers were on assignment, they wrote the “Selling You On Facebook” hit piece despite thin findings. These kind of articles can make mainstream users so worried about the worst-case scenario of what could happen to their data, they don’t see the value they get in exchange for it. “Selling You On Facebook” does bring up the important topic of how apps can utilize personal data granted to them by their users, but it overstates the risks. Yes, the business models of Facebook and the apps on its platform depend on your personal information, but so do the services they provide. That means each user needs to decide what information to grant to who, and Facebook has spent years making the terms of this value exchange as clear as possible. The sub-headline for the WSJ’s article is “Many popular Facebook apps are obtaining sensitive information about users—and users’ friends—so don’t be surprised if details about your religious, political and even sexual preferences start popping up in unexpected places” but it’s not until the 10th paragraph that it mentions that apps “obtain” this information through a detailed data permissions process . Also, Facebook apps have been able to ask for this data since 2007. Wouldn’t it already be “popping up in unexpected places” by now if that were actually true? When you go to install an app, you’re first shown a description of what the app does, what data it needs such as your email address or your friends’ photos, and you’re able to select who can see your in-app activity. If the app requires more than biographical information and the option to publish to your wall, it has to show a second screen listing every type of data or ability it needs. It’s probably the most privacy-sensitive process for granting access to personal data on the Internet. You can’t have apps that show you local concerts or let you send birthday cards to friends if the app doesn’t know your location or when your friends’ birthdays are. The WSJ and other media often harp that apps ask for more user data then they need. That’s actually against Facebook’s policy, and it hurts developers anyways as each additional permission they ask for reduces install rates by 3% . Users are not breezing past long lists of permission requests. They notice, and in fact are clearly turned off by apps who appear greedy for data. Indeed, friends can provide your data to apps without you being notified. But you can limit or shut that off if you want, and most people wouldn’t want a constant barrage of notifications about a friend who can already see your data accessing it through an app. After its commendably deep analysis, all the WSJ could come up with was that a few small startups use unapproved ad networks to monetize their apps, and don’t properly spell out their privacy policy in writing. Facebook set the bar high by voluntarily establishing the approved ad network program and privacy policy requirements to provide users with additional protections. This makes enforcement a challenge, but Facebook roots out offending apps through a three-tiered system of automated detection, a human team, and the ability for users to flag violations. It’s not that Facebook “occasionally isn’t enforcing its own rules” as the WSJ says, it’s that with 7 million constantly changing apps on its platform, it’s not always immediately aware of more benign infractions like those the WSJ found. There are real data privacy concerns out there , but most stem from users making too much data about them publicly available. I think it’s irresponsible for Facebook to default new user privacy to public for everything from photos and status updates to current city and work history. Controversial mobile apps like “Girls Around Me” can use this public data to enable some shady activity, but that’s different than the apps we’re discussing where we and our friends provide our private data. The fact is that businesses have been requesting personal information from their customers for hundreds of years. How do you think the Wall Street Journal knows where to deliver your newspaper? It asks for your home address. Facebook actually prohibits apps from selling this type of data to other companies — something print publishers have long been known to do. That’s why your home mailbox is full of junk. By drumming up privacy concerns, mainstream media is holding back the future and the companies trying to bring it to us. Yes, change can be scary, but it can also be beneficial. We’re seeing cumbersome necessities of offline business like filling out contact information cards by hand get streamlined into a few clicks as they move online. But forget that. This adjoined WSJ article walks you through deleting all your Facebook apps and turning off the platform entirely so you never have to bothered with useful services again. Here’s a concrete example of what we’re missing out on because of this fear. Last year, Facebook wanted to allow applications to ask for your mobile phone number and home address. With permissions apps could have notified you by text message when friends were nearby, or let you instantly fill out shipping information for e-commerce purchases. But instead, the media went crazy, sure it would lead to waves of SMS spam and home invasions. Politicians started bleating against the options to, and Facebook had to retreat. Now we still can’t choose whether to grant Facebook apps information that on and offline marketers ask us for all the time. So instead of human connection and faster shopping that could help the economy, fear trumped innovation and we got no improvements. It’s time we start thinking critically about what makes us uncomfortable. If there are serious dangers that aren’t being policed, let’s shut them down. But if something scares us just because it’s new, let’s weigh the risks against the benefits, and put down the pitchforks and torches. [Image Credit: Luke Romyn ]
Posts Tagged ‘time’
Selling Digital Fear
Posted in Software Tools 
Tags: Companies, facebook, friends, Internet, location, media, Mobile, screen-shot, street, street-journal, time 
Comments OffPinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is founder of Commonred and Startup Grind . Follow him on Twitter @derekjandersen . Over the past 12 months, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing some of the Valley’s best entrepreneurs and investors at Startup Grind . People like Naval Ravikant , Kevin Rose , Tony Conrad , MG Siegler , Jeff Clavier , and others have inspired us with stories and trials they have overcome to get where they are. In February we hosted Pinterest co-founder (and now officially CEO ) Ben Silbermann in Palo Alto. He is one of the most humble entrepreneurs I have met in my seven years in Silicon Valley. The story of Pinterest’s founding is more valuable to me than most startups because it is a reflection of what a lot of founders who regularly read TechCrunch go through in the everyday startup grind. Pinterest’s founders are smart guys, but they’re not prodigies. The product is huge now, but no one liked it when it launched. They weren’t well funded and for a very long time. These are things that normal, non-rock star entrepreneurs like me (and maybe you) can relate to. Founder Background Raised by doctors in Des Moines Iowa, Ben assumed he would follow the same path as his parents. He attended Yale University starting in 1999 and soon realized that he didn’t want to be doctor. After a consulting gig in Washington DC, he headed to Silicon Valley in 2006 to join Google working in customer support and sales. “I felt the story of my time was happening in California,” he said. “I didn’t have a specific plan I just wanted to be closer to something that felt really exciting. Google was the first company I worked for that was thinking really big.” As a non-engineer at Google, Ben felt there was only so far that he could go in that culture. He kept talking about doing a startup but it was his girlfriend (now wife) who pushed him saying, “You should either do it or stop talking about it.” After leaving Google he spent time working at places like the Hacker Dojo, and every coffee shop in the valley. Sound familiar to anyone? To Pivot Or Not To Pivot Four months after launching, Pinterest only had 200 users. Ben has said their product was “in stealth mode but not because we wanted it to be.” The first major pockets of users were in Iowa and Utah and the company wasn’t on any radars in the Valley. It didn’t pop in California for the first year and a half. Ben believes the typical market fit philosophy for technology of having to get early adaptors on board is no longer required. There was no press coverage on the site, but the early users really liked it, and more importantly they used it a lot. “The site grew by the same percentage (40%-50%) every single month. It’s just that the number started so low that it took a while to get going.” The team attempted to raise money, but the non-engineer driven founders had little success. Despite dozens of meetings with “everyone” in Silicon Valley. Most passed on the deal. They worked with a lot of engineers most of which weren’t near the Facebook and Google level of talent they’re getting access to today . Remarkably the Pinterest team maintained their original vision despite the Valley’s pressure to be successful quickly or pivot (aka: admit failure ). Pinterest’s early traction wasn’t positive. But the Silicon Valley culture and community of being helpful and not giving up kicked in to push the team to keep pressing forward. While feeling the pressures of possible embarrassment if he had to go to Google to ask for his old job back, Ben never seriously considered giving up. Focus On Product Much of what you see on the site today was in the product at the very beginning. They were one of the first sites to do the grid-like layout and they over invested in design. They spent months working on it. “We were obsessive about the product. We were obsessive about all the writing and how it was described. We were obsessive about the community. I personally wrote to the first 5,000-7,000 people that joined the site.” Pinterest was about getting you offline to do all of these things you’re talking about online. Pinterest was also integrated with Facebook from the very beginning. All the founders were aligned on building something that they were really proud of. “I think we knew from the beginning that we were building a very different kind of product.”
Posted in Software Tools Tags: derek-andersen, product, really-exciting, silicon, startup-grind, startups, time, university, valley, Writing Comments OffHow The IPO Ruined Google
Editor’s Note: Ian Lurie is CEO of Portent Inc , an internet marketing agency that he founded in 1995. He co-published Web Marketing All-In-One for Dummies , where he wrote the sections on SEO, blogging, social media and web analytics. He also wrote Conversation Marketing: Internet Marketing Strategies. I’m a Google-phile. Or at least, I was. Lately, my gut’s felt a bit wobbly every time someone mentions the big G. Page, Brin and company have lost their focus. Once, they helped us all find the stuff we needed. Now, they spend their time in slap fights with Facebook. It’s almost like the Googlers are no longer in charge at Google. That’s because they’re not. The Google IPO put the company’s fate in the hands of investors. And it’s ruined the company. IPO-bashing is popular right now. But I’m not just jumping on the bandwagon here. The evidence is pretty damning: Pre-IPO, Google was laser-focused on being the best tool on earth for search-and-discovery, and they appeared unstoppable. Post-IPO, the company has lurched from one social media debacle to another. Google’s total victory Google owns search. According to Search Engine Land, Bing still only holds 15% market share. Google? 66%. That’s a mind-boggling lead when you consider the money Microsoft has poured into promoting their search engine. Put an average apartment complex next to the Empire State Building. That’s the difference between Bing and Google. Google has the closest thing to total victory they’re likely to get. The also-rans don’t compete with them—they compete with each other. And everyone’s an also-ran. How Google makes money Google makes its money with their pay-per-click network, Google Adwords. Advertisers purchase clicks, one click at a time, in a modified, keyword-based auction. The Adwords model is brilliant. Correctly implemented, it’s a money-generating machine for everyone involved, including Google. In 2011, Adwords accounted for at least 95% of the company’s income. But it has its limits: In an Adwords model, clicks are your inventory. When you run out of inventory, your revenue stops growing. That’s OK. You can make incremental gains by getting more clicks, and you can get more clicks with better, more ubiquitous search tools. The IPO trap But post-IPO, incremental revenue growth isn’t enough. Stock prices are emotional, and incremental isn’t exciting. If you want shareholders to love you, you have to make them a lot of money. That means dramatically outperforming last quarter’s numbers. In 2011, Google earned $103 million per day. That’s a staggering amount, particularly if you’ve got shareholders clamoring for you to crush your past numbers. To do so, Google will have to find an entire new line of business: A new source of advertising revenue to match Adwords. Or, they’ll have to find a massive new venue in which to place Adwords. Ironically, Google’s penalized by their success: They’re so dominant in search that they must go far, far outside their expertise to maintain their share price. IPOs force a company to forever outperform past results, no matter how miraculous. That’s where Google is, right now: Pushed to surpass total victory in their space, they have to move on to an entirely different one. Suspicious timing Google didn’t attempt to create their own social network until Orkut. That was early 2004, just before they filed for their IPO. At that point, the pressure was already building to find a new way to generate shareholder value. How’d Orkut do? Do you remember it? Didn’t think so. Sidewiki? Failed. Friend Connect? Gone. Google Wave didn’t even get past testing. Now we’ve got Google Plus, which is showing some of the worst engagement numbers of any major social media site. Success is beside the point I think Google Plus has a lot of strengths. It could succeed. But even if it does, the social media red herring so distracts Google from search that the giant will become vulnerable, for the first time. And understand: Search generates Google’s dramatic revenue numbers. Not social media. And make no mistake: Google’s work in social is compromising their search supremacy: They’ve ended their ‘firehose’ agreement with Twitter. That agreement allowed them to deliver near-real-time results from one of the internet’s biggest social networks. Now, they don’t get instant access to Twitter posts. In addition, Google’s started showing Plus posts in search results. That works if Google Plus reaches critical mass, where most Google users are also Plus users. But that’s not currently the case. By stuffing Google Plus posts into search results and excluding Twitter/Facebook results, they’re cutting off two huge content sets, and replacing them with a smaller, less relevant one. That is not good for the relevance of their results. So, even if Google Plus survives and grows, it’s unlikely the benefits to Google will outweigh the costs. And Google wouldn’t be doing this, I think, if not for their shareholders. What’s next? Google is now beholden to shareholders. They can’t change that. What they can do is stop pandering, and start leveraging their greatest strengths: They own two of the largest search engines in the world: Google and YouTube. They know more about information discovery than any of their competitors. They have a dominant e-mail toolset in GMail. They have the biggest information corpus in the world. They have a mountain of cash. It’ll be hard to do. Shareholders get excited about social media, not about a better search tool. But for shareholders and Googlers alike, real success will come from strong, sustainable growth. And that depends more on growing their strengths than struggling against their weaknesses.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: google-plus, googlers, internet-marketing, ipo, Marketing, Microsoft, Orkut, Search, search-engine, search-engines, social, time, world Comments OffFrom Team Player To Coach = From Entrepreneur To CEO
Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Scott Raskin , who is the President and CEO of Mindjet . Prior to Mindjet, Raskin was President and COO of Telelogic and VP of Sales and Corporate Development at Nexgenix. For entrepreneurs, navigating a career through the Valley can be a lot like competitive sports. Similarities include locker room leadership, a shifting playbook and ongoing onslaughts from opponents. What is perhaps the most important likeness to highlight, however, is the requisite sense of what your place is in the game. Know Your Role: Player, Player-Coach or Coach The differences between each role in a company and team are substantial, and shifting between them requires a lot of adjustment, sacrifice, and changing skill sets. Players focus on their own performance while coaches manage for peak performance of the team as a whole, and player-coaches do a little of both. I’ll give you a personal example: I initially found my place as a player on a Sales team. I moved into pure coach mode when I was promoted to VP of Sales, and then split my time between coach and player when I transitioned into an entrepreneurial startup. When I became the CEO of a later-stage tech company, it was back to coach mode. As a Salesperson it was completely hands-on — I worked out my own methods for how to win at my position. As an entrepreneur, I had to find a balance between that approach and providing the guidance, leadership and direction for others to hone their preferred techniques. As a VP and today, a CEO, my vantage point is at its widest, making my primary responsibility to recognize and provide for the needs of my team. This includes strategy, training, the right tools, and ensuring that each individual knows their position, and how it fits into the bigger picture. Know When (and When Not) to Change Positions The player-coach position — a.k.a. the entrepreneur, in this case — is the easiest place to get stuck in this process because you get the best of both worlds. You get to be a part of the game and you get to exercise some control over it. While this method usually works great for startups, scaling a business requires more definitive responsibilities — ones that require skill sets that often don’t translate from one position to the other. A common mistake I’ve seen during my time in the workplace, for instance, is when a top performing sales person moves into management expecting to experience the same degree of success. But just because someone is a great individual contributor on the field doesn’t automatically mean that they’ll make a great coach, and it works the same way in the office. Each position requires different skills, a different mindset, and a different disposition. Even with experience in the trenches, the transition takes significant adjustments. Don’t do yourself a disservice by trading in a great player for a subpar coach. Coaching a Good Game It took a lot of time for me to recognize that if I wanted to be a good leader, I was going to have to give up employing a lot of the skills that got me to that point. Letting go of that hands-on mindset is something that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with, and that struggle can often lead to retaining counterproductive practices in a new position. After all, nobody wants a boss who’s constantly stepping in and doing their job for them because they think they can do it better. And no boss can truly bring scalable leverage to their business if they’re too distracted with completing tasks that aren’t even theirs. Selflessness is required to be an effective leader. Instead of being the best, you have to bring out the best. When you’re the boss, the greatest scenario is to look around and see your team functioning efficiently not because of your personal skills, but as a result of your guidance, leadership, motivation and support. Case in point: Tony Hsieh. After a player role at Oracle and a player coach role at LinkExchange, he took that experience into the CEO seat at Zappos and shaped an entire business around the values and vision he’d developed along the way. The company was pulling in $1.2 billion when it was sold to Amazon in 2009, and is still consistently recognized for the success of its culture-driven strategy. If a truly high-performing team is what you’re after, acknowledge the changes that have to be made along the way and, in the end, play the game as a coach would: Motivate and support each personality, accept the challenge that is helping people do more than they believed possible, support risk, and remember to have fun. This will instill confidence in your employees and help them get into peak condition for optimal performance. That’s the trick — to have the patience and foresight to bring out the best in people. With that in play, you can build a scalable organization and the sky’s the limit. Image Credit: John Iacono/Sports Illustrated
Posted in Software Tools Tags: Business, Entrepreneur, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, Office, oracle, personal, Place, Position, president, Sales, startups, time Comments OffFeast Your Eyes On The First Image Of AT&T’s White Lumia 900
Longtime readers may already know that I have a peculiar fixation on white phones, and I’ll admit that my heart went a-quiver when AT&T revealed that a white Lumia 900 would be released shortly after its black and cyan brethren. For those of who share my particular predilection, take a gander at AT&T’s latest snowy-white handset, which is scheduled to land on store shelves on April 22 with the same $99 price tag. The Lumia series pretty damned handsome in general, but I think the white 900 oozes just a bit more style than the others. It’s a little hard to tell from the photo, but the white 900 actually sports a glossy shell rather than the matte finish used by its more more colorful friends. That means fingerprints abound, though with any luck the bright white color scheme would help keep most of them out of sight. This isn’t the first time a photo of the white Lumia 900 has made the rounds — Nokia couldn’t quite keep its existence quiet back in February, as a photo of the device briefly appeared on the company’s Facebook account before it was unceremoniously yanked. Nokia reportedly offered the white 900 variant to AT&T to sell along with the others, but WPCentral reports that the carrier had turned it down at the time. As someone who appreciates a slew of chromatic choices, I have to thank them for that. [via EverythingWM ]
Posted in Software Tools Tags: actually-sports, AT&T, facebook, from-the-photo, lumia 900, made-the-rounds, Mobile, Nokia, photo, think-the-white, time, white Comments OffFive Tips on Making the Most of Conferences for B2B Marketers
Your business cards are printed, your bag is packed, you’ve got Evernote loaded on all of your devices. It’s time to head to an industry conference such as ISV Con for a great learning experience and some quality networking time. But once you’re there the time goes by too quickly and there are just too many people to meet. So how can conference attendees make the most of the limited time? Try these five tips to get the most from your conference experience: 1. Start Talking and Listening Set your Twitter account to notify you of mentions of the conference and the conference hashtag. By starting your search early, you’ll catch mentions of tweetups or networking opportunities and hear conference news. You might also find attendees to connect with before the show. During the show, your search may tip you off to a great panel in progress or important conference announcements made in real time. Be sure to use the conference hashtag as well. This helps others find and follow you and it makes your tweets visible to other attendees who might not be following you. Take pictures of the panels you attend and post them with the conference hashtag for additional interaction with conference attendees. 2. Be Clear on Your Goals Why are you attending this event? The answer can’t be because you go every year, or because everyone else is doing it. Are you going to learn? Are you going to meet new people? Are you going to make sales? Be very clear about your goal, then create a plan based on that goal. 3. Plan Ahead Yes, you know which sessions you’ll attend and you have the conference app on your phone, but take the time to drill down a little bit more. Besides the big-name people so many folks will be trying to meet, who else will be there that you could have a more meaningful connection with? Are there folks you’ve connected with in forums or groups who are attending? Plan a meet up with them in advance. Plan it for an open time in schedules when people are likely to be less tired like breakfast or a midday break. 4. Know Your Limits You’re there for a limited time, so make sure you’re getting what you want out of the sessions and networking. If you’re in a session that isn’t relevant or interesting, step out quietly and find another one. If you’re speaking with someone who isn’t the right connection, gracefully excuse yourself. If you’re at a conference to learn and make connections, consider skipping the parties in favor of more intimate dinners or lunches. 5. Extend Your Networking after the Show After the show, reach out to the people you connected with. Consider sending a thank you email to a particularly interesting speaker for the great value you found in the presentation. This may work far better than trying to connect immediately after the talk. Search blog posts and forum posts from people who attended the show and leave a comment or add to the conversation. If you’ve found the event to be valuable, apply to be a speaker next year. Don’t forget to take advantage of the early bird pricing and lower cost of travel by booking early. What are your top conference tips?
Posted in Software Tools Tags: after-the-show, b2b, Business, conference, event, intel, lead generation, networking, networking opportunities, parties, People, software marketing, the-conference, time Comments OffThe Single Most Important Element of Your Business Software Website
After more than a decade of reviewing thousands of business software websites, I still come across too many that are missing the single most critical element to their success. In fact, I daresay the vast majority of software websites continue to miss the mark. This is a shame because it is so easy to fix and the impact is enormous. I’m talking about a strong offer! It’s what compels a prospect to complete your form and become a lead that wants to engage with a salesperson. Examples include “Request Free Demo” or “30 Day Free Trial”. A strong offer: Is displayed prominently above the fold on every page of your website. Comes in the form of a button, not a text link. Contrasts with the rest of your website. (The color stands out.) Contains the word “free”. Links to a short form where you capture the person’s name and email. (You can get everything else later.) And you get bonus points if you place a short but great testimonial near your offer to help draw more eyes to it. Why do so many software companies fail to do something so simple? Most software entrepreneurs and executives are not marketers. They are usually computer engineers with an idea for a new product, or sometimes salespeople who identified a market opportunity and then teamed up with an engineer. Either way, developing a high performing website is not their expertise. But what exactly is “high performing”? Business software is more complex and much more expensive than consumer software. This means that the purchase usually requires at least some assistance from a salesperson. Therefore, a “high performing” business software website is designed to generate sales leads. That mainly happens in four ways: An interested prospect emails you after seeing your email address on your website. The prospect calls you. The prospect chats with you via your online chat tool. The prospect fills out an online form with contact details and then you respond. These are all great ways to reach potential customers, but #4, when implemented properly, almost always outperforms the others by a long shot. You may be thinking, “I have an online form on my website and we hardly get any leads from it.” In fact, I see this all the time at Capterra and it’s often because you link to it from a “Contact Us” or “Request More Info” link. You are missing that single most important element of your website! When you get your strong offer in place and tie it to a short form, you will convert a high percentage of your web visitors into sales leads. It’s really that simple. Don’t be one of those software companies that gets it wrong. Now you know! Add those offers and watch web visitors start to convert to leads. Of course, this assumes that you’re attracting decent web traffic – an entirely separate topic that we’ll leave for another day. Michael Ortner is the CEO and coFounder of Capterra , a privately held technology and online media company. Founded in 1999 with the belief that software has the power to make the world a better place by helping businesses accomplish their missions, Capterra is a Web service that helps connect buyers and sellers of business software. Over 5 million businesses use Capterra annually to find and compare virtually any kind of software ranging from CRM and Marketing Automation to Project Management and Training. More than 15,000 software companies list with Capterra, over 1,000 of which have upgraded to one of our pay-for-performance options in order to increase their exposure, drive more web traffic and generate more sales leads. In 2007 Capterra was awarded a spot on the Inc. 500 list as one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States. In 2008 it was named one of the top places to work in the Washington, DC area.
Introducing Dotsies: The Space-Saving Font
When last I met with Craig Muth it was in lovely Columbus, Ohio and he was a down-to-earth hacker working on memorize.com , a site dedicated to making the world a better place. Clearly a useful and noble pursuit. Craig moved to San Francisco a while back, and just sent me an email with details of his latest project: a space-saving font he’s calling dotsies . Dotsies characters are built from five dots which can be on or off. Capital letters are signified with a little dot above the glyph. This allows each character to consume only a single vertical row, making it essentially the perfect monospace font. At this time, dotsies is primarily for the 26 characters of the English alphabet. As Craig observes on the dotsies website, the dotsies font “is significantly more horizontally condensed than normal fonts, letting about twice as much fall within the area of your field of vision that perceives fine detail at any given time.” The website goes on: Since Latin letters (a, b, c, etc.) are optimized to be written by hand, they take up a lot of unnecessary space. Your eyes have to move at a frantic pace from left to right to read. Use screen space more efficiently! Have a more relaxed reading experience! Craziness! I asked Craig how long this took him, and how many iterations he went through to develop dotsies. He claims he’s been nurturing this idea for the better part of a decade, though only just recently put much effort into it. Of the eight or so revisions he’s gone through only two or three are what Craig would call “major revisions”. He claims to be able to read dotsies-formatted text at about 150 words per minute, which is pretty darned respectable. Craig admitted that this is primarily for writing online, though it can be manually reproduced with a slightly higher margin of error. Not content with simply improving the information density of fonts, Craig’s also developed a chorded input method for dotsies. This allows the entire alphabet to be typed using only one hand. The dotsies typing instructions make it pretty clear how this saves time and effort: “each finger never moves off of a dedicated number key (your middle finger never moves off of the ’3′ key, etc.).” Two-handed chorded input is also supported for even faster text entry. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all for innovation. And I’m all for people looking to advance the state of the art. I’m no greybeard staunchly holding on to my Dvorak keyboard layout as the one true input mechanism despite the advent of post-PC computing. But I wonder whether a new text encoding format like dotsies is really what we need? Does it make sense to even continue to concatenate individual character symbols to compose complex concepts like “computer” or “fire-breathing dragon” or “baby in a stroller”? Should we perhaps skip characters and move straight (back) to hieroglyphics or Stephensonian mediaglyphs ? Keep up the crazy innovation, Craig! It’s guys like you who aren’t afraid to push the status quo that make the world better for the rest of us.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: craig, dotsies, dvorak, English, fonts, lovely-columbus, push-the-status, time, world, wtf Comments OffGoogle TV Adds New International Apps, But It’s Still Only Available In U.S.
Google today announced another step in the build-out of its Google TV service: it is adding several new international channels in the form of apps to the Google TV platform, aimed at those who live in the U.S. but are missing content from home. Among them are a mix of entertainment and news services, including al-Jazeera, the Chinese-language PPTV, the IslamBox collection of channels, Yupp TV (another aggregator, this time of Indian content) and Japan’s Crunchyroll. But while it is going international on one level, it is not on another: still no definite dates on when Google plans to launch its service outside of the U.S. “We’re looking to roll out internationally through the course of 2012,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. But no specific timings beyond that, or the specific reasons for why is has not done so yet. “We don’t break out the reasons why, but we do want to make sure that users everywhere get the full experience, so we want to make sure we work towards that,” he said. He also did not specify which markets might be the first to see roll-outs of the service outside of the U.S. To get Google TV, Google currently lists two options : either buy a special Sony Internet TV, or a set-top box from Sony or Logitech that you use with your own Internet-enabled TV. Sony in January said that it didn’t expect to offer its Google-TV-enabled devices in the UK, at least, until September. That was already a delay on earlier estimates which had put it at an autumn 2011 arrival. There could be a number of reasons for the delay, from supplies to getting international rights sorted out for the video and other content. That has been one of the key issues with the international expansion of other IP video services, such as Hulu. At the moment, Google TV says it has thousands of apps for the service — basically, everything in Google Play (nee Android Market) that doesn’t require touchscreens, location or other mobile-only features — but in terms of apps that have been optimized for Google TV itself, there are 150. Today’s list in full: PPTV: HD cinema blockbusters and TV dramas from Asia, as well as anime series, variety shows such as Taiwanese Idol and China Super Girl, and live sports and financial news. IslamBox: more than 40 live TV channels and over two thousand hours of video on demand in four different languages from around the world, including the Islam Channel from UK, Express News from Pakistan, Peace TV from India, Bridges Television from USA, Huda TV from Egypt. Yupp TV: more than 80 channels available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Punjabi languages. Raaga: South Asian music from more than 200 music labels from the region in almost 20 languages including Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and more. Crunchyroll: Japanese anime and Asian drama. Euronews: web app that publishes news every 30 minutes covering the day’s top world, sport, business, lifestyle and breaking news in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. Al Jazeera: the English version, not the Arabic edition.
Google To Release New Ice Cream Sandwich Update For Nexus S
I don’t blame Nexus S users for feeling a bit forgotten — for a device ostensibly meant to be on the cutting edge of Android updates, the Nexus S hasn’t had much luck on the Ice Cream Sandwich front . If Engadget’s sources hold true though, that may all change very shortly. According to them, Google is once again preparing to make the Ice Cream Sandwich update available, and it’s expected to drop within the “next few weeks.” Google initially pushed out the update in mid-December 2011, but issues with battery life and the occasional sketchy wireless connection eventually caused them to stop pushing the update to users. At the time, Google said the update was paused so they could “monitor feedback,” and many users were ultimately without a way to upgrade. There were still ways to get the update going, if you were lucky. T-Mobile Nexus S users could download the update and install it manually, but anyone who didn’t feel up to the task were plumb out of luck. Sprint customers working with Nexus S 4Gs have actually had it even worse — while their GSM brethren at least got a crack at downloading the update, Google has been quiet about an update for the CDMA/WiMax variant since day one. Thankfully, their patience is finally being rewarded — that is, if they haven’t bit the bullet and loaded up a custom ROM already.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: cutting, ice cream sandwich, make-the-ice, mobile-nexus, nexus, nexus s, occasional, patience, the-occasional, their-patience, time Comments Off