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Another Beta Down: Doorbell’s Sales CRM Is Now Commercially Available |
 Doorbell, the first product from Candian startup Smibs, is now commercially available after over a year of private and public beta testing. The service is "sales software for non-sales people" meant to help small businesses complete sales tasks without having to assign dedicated personnel to the role, and competes with other CRM services like Highrise.
The service has changed pretty significantly since we first covered it last June. The most obvious change is a complete UI redesign, which ditches the drab colors in favor of something much sleeker and more intuitive. Founder Peter Urban says that the site has a strong emphasis on using AJAX to decrease load times and increase efficiency, and has adopted more of a webtop control panel. The site has also added a new feature that allows you to 'attach' Emails to certain contacts by including a special Doorbell address in your mail client's BCC field, and will be adding more social features, like the ability to monitor your contacts' Twitter conversations, in the near future.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:55:12 +0000) |
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My Secret Circle: A Secure Social Network for Tween Girls, Me |
So this seems like a good enough idea. It's called MySecretCircle and it's basically it's a closed social network for girls. You and your buds buy a USB key that acts as your login. It autoruns under Windows and OS X and brings up a photo and journal sharing system that only allows certain people access to your daughter's personal info.
In theory and in practice this is great. It ensures your tween doesn't connect with creeps like me. Kids can only connect with friends that have their private key - no one else exists in the site except for Sabrina Circle, the Tom of this candy-pink MySpace.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:39:36 +0000) |
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Pandora (And Other Internet Radio) Has Officially Been Saved |
 After two years of uncertainty, Pandora's future has finally been secured.
For those not familiar with what was going on, basically the streaming rates for Internet radio were in danger of being raised to levels that would have made it very hard for companies like Pandora to stay afloat. But a resolution has been reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tells us.
"Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates," Conrad says.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:31:36 +0000) |
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Someone Needs To Stop Tripping Over The Power Cord At Rackspace |
 As much of the web seemed to notice this morning, several sites running on Rackspace's servers went down. Yes, again.
For the second time in 8 days, a power outage interrupted service at one of its data centers. And again it was the Dallas center that was effected. This time however, Rackspace was able to get things up and running fairly quickly, and more importantly, communicated well through its blog and Twitter throughout the downtime.
Still, it raises the question, why do power outages keep taking down a service that so many rely on? They have backups in place, so what's going on?
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:23:18 +0000) |
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Kazaa Still Kicking, To Bring HD Video To The Pre? |
Seriously, we're just as surprised as you are. Not only is Kazaa somehow still in business, they're also trying anything they can to set themselves apart from all the other digital music retailers you'd rather use instead of them. Now the property of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Kazaa is setting its sights on bringing HD movie downloads to the masses (well, the masses that use Kazaa), and the Pre is where they've decided to make their stand.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:56:24 +0000) |
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Google Apps Standard Edition Findable Again |
 Last night we reported that Google had stripped all references and links to the free version of Google Apps from the landing page for the product. New users had just one option - to sign up for the Premier version and pay pay $50 per user per year after a 14 day free trial.
Google responded, saying “In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.”
Translation: they are trying to get more users to pay by making the Standard version harder to find. In that they succeeded brilliantly, but were obviously a little overzealous in hiding it.
Google just emailed to say that a link to the Standard version has been added back to the landing page. And they reiterate that they have no plans to kill the product, they'll just make users play a version of Where's Waldo to find it. (Ok, they didn't really say that last part about Waldo).
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:27:23 +0000) |
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Feedburner Founder/CEO Dick Costolo To Leave Google |
 It's always hard to hold onto those pesky entrepreneurs after you acquire their company - the best ones always get restless and bail. Feedburner cofounder and CEO Dick Costolo will be leaving Google within the week, we've confirmed.
Costolo and his team, based in Chicago, joined Google two years ago when Feedburner was acquired for $100 million. Like some other Feedburner employees he has moved on to other projects within Google. He currently reports to Neal Mohan, an exec in the Ads group, as the group product manager for social ads.
Costolo has no plans for his next job/startup. But something tells me that in a few months we'll be hearing about his next venture. He turned $8 million in venture capital into a $100 million payday. More than a few venture capitalists will be taking him to lunch at their first opportunity.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:58:35 +0000) |
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Goodbye, Printed Blog |
 Remember the Printed Blog? It was a newspaper - on actual glossy paper - that would syndicate posts from the Interwebs. Josh Karp founded it six months ago and he ran through 16 issues and 80,000 copies - all on his own dime. And now it's dead.
The paper was published and distributed in Chicago and raised quite a bit of breathless prose from folks like the NYT and BusinessWeek. As far as I know we appeared in the magazine/paper once or twice, which was nice to know.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:53:46 +0000) |
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You Put Your Aardvark In My Twitter (Bonus: Interview With Founders) |
Yesterday we sat down with two of Aardvark's founders, Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, to get an update on the company and learn about today's integration of Aardvark into Twitter.
Aardvark is a question an answer service with a twist. Instead of services like Yahoo Answers where the anonymous masses try to answer your questions (resulting in mostly spam), Aardvark sends questions to your social graph via email, SMS, instant messaging, etc. Your friends answer your questions (restaurant suggestions, things to do in Paris, whatever). Most questions are answered within 5 minutes.
Last week the service opened up for Facebook users. Today they integrate with Twitter. For now, the integration only includes asking questions - if you add @vark to the end, Aardvark picks it up and adds it to your account. In future versions, they may try to integrate responses from Twitter directly into Aardvark as well.
I spoke with Max and Damon at length about the Twitter integration as well as the service in general now that it has been tested by beta users for the last few months. The video and transcript (provided by SimulScribe, it's not perfect but they are fast) are below:
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:45:05 +0000) |
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Google Finally Peels The Beta Label Off Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and GTalk |
The beta days are over at Google, at least for some of its most popular applications. As we predicted two months ago, Google is finally taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and GTalk today. And it is about time. For instance, Gmail, which launched five years ago and is by far Google's most popular non-search app, is already older than many startups.
Gmail is now one of the leading email services and can no longer hide under the cover of a beta label. Over the past year in the U.S. alone, according to comScore, Gmail has grown 48 percent to 36 million unique visitors, quickly gaining on AOL Mail (40 million uniques, down down 6 percent) and Windows Live Hotmail (46 million uniques, down 1 percent) to grab the No. 2 spot after still-safe Yahoo Mail (98 million uniques, up 13 percent). Worldwide, Gmail had 146 million visitors in May, about half of Yahoo Mail's and Hotmail's numbers, and about three times bigger than AOL Mail.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:52:04 +0000) |
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GSM Palm Pre Hitting O2 and Movistar In Europe |
We're all quite excited here to find out that O2 and Movistar will get the Palm Pre in GSM form, opening the phone up to unlocking, hacking, and all sorts of molestation. UK, Ireland and Germany will get the phone on O2 and Spain will get it from Movistar. When, you ask?
Christmas.
That's right: by the time Palm pinches off the GSM Pre Apple will have probably released iPod Touches with cameras and the HTC Hero, an Android phone that I wouldn't kick out of bed for eating crackers, will be dancing on the Sprint Pre's grave. It's like Palm wants to fail.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:45:01 +0000) |
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Match.com Acquires People Media For $80M In Cash |
 Online dating service and IAC property Match.com is getting into the highly-targeted subscription dating game with the acquisition of People Media, which it is taking off the hands of publicly traded PE firm American Capital and a host of other investors for $80 million in cash.
The deal includes the purchase of about 27 targeted dating sites with a combined 255,000 paying subscribers, including BlackPeopleMeet.com, BBPeopleMeet.com, LDSPlanet.com, SingleParentMeet.com and SeniorPeopleMeet.com. People Media, founded in 2002, had $11.6 million of EBITDA in 2008 and quotes Jupiter Research as saying the combined revenues of the targeted dating service business are expected to reach $1.2 billion worldwide this year.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:14:28 +0000) |
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Mozilla Aims To Centralize All Open Web Tools In One Directory |
 Mozilla says there's no central index for tools built to help web developers do their jobs (and/or hobby projects) better, so it set out to build one of its own. Located at tools.mozilla.com and dubbed the Open Web Tools Directory, the organization is taking a swing at building the most extensive and comprehensible index of tools that modern-day web developers can use.
The first thing you'll notice when you visit the website is the unorthodox - and relatively confusing - design, as you can tell from the screenshot above.
Explains Ben Galbraith on behalf of the Developer Tools team on the Mozilla Labs blog: (after the jump)
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:27:19 +0000) |
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China Blocks Access To Twitter, Facebook After Riots |
 Following last weekend's deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China’s central government has taken all the usual steps to block citizens from accessing foreign web services: aside from crippling Internet service in general, the authorities have blocked Twitter, removed unapproved references to the violence from search engines and has now apparently moved to bar its citizens from accessing Facebook from most parts of Mainland China just now. Two weeks ago, the government had already blocked just about every Google service, including communication tools like Gmail, Google Apps and Google Talk.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:41:12 +0000) |
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Hear That? It’s The Sound Of Your New Hearing Aid, The iPhone |
 Back in 2007, Amy Tenderich wrote about the need for Apple to share its renowned industrial design and user-friendliness with the medical device community. Her plea wasn't necessarily for Apple to get involved in the field, but rather for it to help device manufacturers innovate and produce devices that people might actually want to use. As it turns out, Apple may be be joining the fray anyway: the iPhone, with its App Store and recently-added support for third party peripherals, may soon become an extremely powerful medical tool.
We've still got a ways to go before we start seeing glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available for $9.99.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:03:09 +0000) |
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Finally, A Decent Website To Browse Android Apps: AndroLib |
 Ever tried finding applications for the Android platform on the web rather than from your handset? Don't even consider using the regular web version of Android Market - Google's official app directory - on your computer's browser: it has no search (irony much?), no categories, no community involvement like comments, ratings and reviews, and it's only available in English for now.
In other words: it sucks.
As a reporter lacking an Android-powered phone but with a great interest in the platform, it sucks even more. Sometimes I need to know which applications in a certain category are available for Android, what people are saying about them, what versions a certain app is at, and so on. Until now, I used Cyrket for that, a third-party directory that provides me with most of the functionality I need for doing a bit of research about Android apps. But the website is slow, regularly returns errors and doesn't provide a decent filter between paid and free apps, so the experience was usually below par.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:32:49 +0000) |
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Push Gmail Comes To The iPhone — Through An App (If It’s Accepted) |
 You'd think on a phone that can do as many cool things as the iPhone, push email through one of the world's most popular email services, Gmail, would be one of them. But for some reason, Google and Apple haven't turned on the functionality for Gmail accounts on the iPhone. Sure, you can get push email through MobileMe, Yahoo Mail or Exchange, but basic Gmail users are basically out of luck. Until now, maybe.
Let me be clear, I'm still not certain that this app will even be approved for the App Store. But if it is, it's pretty awesome.
It's called GPush; it's a very simple app that uses the new Push Notifications in the iPhone 3.0 software to ping your iPhone every time a new message comes in. Yes, not only is it push Gmail, it gives you Gmail with notifications. While you might think that could be annoying, it actually works quite well.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:59:07 +0000) |
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Palm Pre To Hit Europe By Christmas With Telefónica |
 There were a few leaks and rumors about this last week, but now it's been officially confirmed that the Palm Pre will launch exclusively with mobile network Telefónica, initially in four major European markets. Spain, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany will get the device first - which will be a GSM version - on the O2 and Movistar networks, just before the winter holidays. Pricing has not been announced.
This is something of a coup since, at least in the UK, Telefónica-owned O2 already has the iPhone deal, thus making it the sole arbiter of two of the hottest phones right now. OK, the Pre maybe isn't as hot as it was pre-launch, but it remains to be seen how European mobile obsessives will react to the handset.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:24:53 +0000) |
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Think About it. Do You Really Want An HD Camera In Your Phone? |
 There's some buzz right now about the iPhone 3GS and other phones being capable of 720p recording, or perhaps even 1080p if they use the newest sensors. Wow! The future is here! 720p video built right into your phone! But here's the thing: would you rather have HD video recording implemented very badly, as it must be with the limitations of mobile phones, or would you rather not have it at all and have capacity for more battery life or RAM? Because there's no way that video is going to be watchable, except as a low-bandwidth stream, and if that's your idea of 720p
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:20:15 +0000) |
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ZooLoo Is A Social Network That Basically Never Wants You To Leave |
 Since you see it every time you open your web browser, a good start page is key. Google has a pretty good option with iGoogle, which is highly customizable. But as social networking continues to rise in popularity, an increasing number of people just have something like Facebook as their main page. ZooLoo is kind of like iGoogle meets Facebook.
When you set up your ZooLoo account, you are given a dashboard which contains customizable widgets just like iGoogle. But you'll see along both the top and bottom of the site elements that lead you to the more social aspects. Along the bottom, is your Facebook-style chat bar and options area. At the top of the main page you'll find the tools to control your site and manage your media (pictures and videos).
And the key two words in there are "your site." ZooLoo clearly wants to give you everything you want, so you never have to leave your ZooLoo. You want to watch YouTube videos? You can browse and watch them from in ZooLoo. Hulu videos? Same thing. Maybe you want to go read some news on popular tech blogs like this one? Again there's a series of widgets you can install so you can do all of that without leaving.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:25:02 +0000) |
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What The Hell Happened To The Free Version Of Google Apps? |
 The free version of Google Apps is history. The current sign up page makes no mention of the previously free Standard edition. Instead, new users get a 14 day free trial, and then must pay $50 per user per year after that trial. Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use.
Earlier this year we reported that the usage caps were being squeezed by Google over time for Google Apps, from 200 users down to just 50. When the service first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.” A paid version first appeared in 2007.
Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, commented on our post that talked about the decreasing number of users allowed for the free version, saying that the cap reductions were needed to keep resellers happy, adding "There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” - we have no plans whatsoever to do that."
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:01:35 +0000) |
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No Second Life, Twinity Wins $6m For Real Worlds |
 Virtual worlds can be pretty dull when nothing you see there is recognizable as anything remotely real-world, which is perhaps why Twinity has such confident investors. The virtual world which re-creates the world's cities for real-looking avatars to wander around, has closed another round of financing from existing investors to the tune of 4.5m Euros ($6.26 million).
Twinity's owner Metaversum, which has taken a totally different tack to the likes of Second Life, won the backing from existing investors. In Twinity, members use real profiles and realistic-looking avatars. A virtual Berlin has won plaudits from users, while more cities are planned.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000) |
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OWLE: A Mount That Turns Your iPhone 3GS Into A Mobile Video Workhorse |
 We've made no secret of our admiration of the iPhone 3GS's video capabilities — Apple has managed to integrate a video camera that's both easy to use and surprisingly high quality into an already-stellar device. But for all its merits, the iPhone 3GS suffers from being, well, a phone. No matter how good the phone's video quality is, it's still prone to shakiness as its director moves around. And while the microphone may be high quality, its position at the bottom of the phone definitely isn't ideal recording whatever you're pointing the camera lens at.
Fortunately, an answer is on the way for all you mobile videographers. A new startup called OWLE (Optical Widgets For Life Enhancement), is currently working on a mount that should resolve most of these issues. The mount, which you can see in the images and videos below, gives you a much more stable way to hold the phone, making it much less prone to bumps and shakes. The mount also improves your recording quality by including a 37mm camcorder lense and a front facing microphone, which plugs into the phone's headphone/mic jack. There's also planned support for external lighting and power. All in a package that could slip easily into a backpack or laptop case. In short, this is exactly what you need if you frequently use the iPhone for video.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:04:46 +0000) |
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What The Hashtag: Your Guide To Enigmatic Twitter Hashtags |
There's been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter's trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. This weekend's "Moonfruit" and "GorillaPenis" trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren't easily recognizable and aren't current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there's little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren't necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem.
What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.
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| (Published: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:30:37 +0000) |
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iPhone App Prices Fluctuate As Developers Adjust To OS 3.0; Nav Apps Gain Pricing Power |
Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.
Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:14:49 +0000) |
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Can Sears Help OpenID Go Mainstream? |
 It's one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it's another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share information about products and services without the need to create a separate account.
Customers will also get access to special offers and coupons in return for their participation in the community.
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:17:57 +0000) |
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Once Again, Twitter Trending Topics Polluted By Spam (Or Not) |
Really curious to find out how this is done exactly, but someone somewhere has managed to change a real trending topic on Twitter - #MrsSlocombe - into something childish, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Strangely enough, when you do a search for the less appropriate trending topic, not a single result pops up (for now).
Update: ok apparently it's a legitimate trending topic (see origin here, it was meant as a tribute to British comic actress Mollie Sugden on the occasion of her death, so fans, celebrities and Brits in general started to tweet it) but Twitter is just blocking search results from appearing (which is good). Update 2: I'm not 'pro-censorship', but in this particular case it's understandable behavior on Twitter's behalf, period. I'm sure they didn't mean to interrupt or ban tributes to a deceased person.
This may seem like something mundane at first glance, but many people (including reporters worldwide) track Twitter trending topics for breaking news, and it worries me that they can be manipulated.
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:59:17 +0000) |
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Worldwide, Russians Spend Most Time On Social Networks (comScore) |
 comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of the planet (or the biggest slackers at the office, depends on how you look at it). The study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average, at the same time - once again - confirming Vkontakte.ru's leadership in terms of popularity with 14+ million monthly visitors.
To put that level of 'engagement' in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:34:16 +0000) |
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Twitter’s Popular Facebook App Has Been Broken Or Exploited For Days. |
 Twitter has long had an official Facebook application that allows users to update their Facebook status with tweets. It's quite useful for those of us who don't want to have to spend all day updating multiple services with the same messages. The app has over 250,000 monthly active users. But if you're not already one of them, I have bad news: You're not allowed to use it.
For the past several days, anyone who has tried to install the app has been greeted with the following message:
Error while loading page from session test
There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of session test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:28:15 +0000) |
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Agenda For Real Time Stream CrunchUp (And Third Wave of August Capital Party Tickets) |
Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here). We've been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways. The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general. We'll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.
Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning. An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes. In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away. But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.
The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more. Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business. By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation. Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.
I hope you can join us to see for yourself. Below is the (almost final) agenda:
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:48:05 +0000) |
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YouTube Increases File Size Limit To 2GB, Now Allows Direct HD Embeds And Links |
 While not every tweak to YouTube's system deserves a post, this one is pretty significant, though very straightforward as well. First, the 1GB file limit for YouTube videos has been doubled to 2GB; this is a boon to many users who have been uploading high definition content more than a few minutes long. Ten minutes of 1080p footage can easily exceed a gig, especially if you've been editing it and weren't careful about re-encoding. A 2GB limit should soothe that particular pain.
Next, the update now allows for direct linking to HD streams, as well as easy embedding of same. While it wasn't impossible before now to get an HD video by default on your page, or to link right to one, it required a little work. But now YouTube has apparently decided that they are ready for the bandwidth shock as thousands and thousands of users default to HD instead of SD — increasing the average amount of bits being sent by a huge amount.
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:30:37 +0000) |
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Microsoft Starts Officially Tweeting |
 It's Twitter day at Microsoft, apparently. Not only did the software giant announce that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results, the company actually started officially using Twitter today.
To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large presence on Twitter before through its various departments/products/services, but now it's using the main /microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it. That should change, fast.
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| (Published: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:59:03 +0000) |
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Bing Keeps Its Foot On The Gas, Adds Tweets To Results |
 Bing is something of a rarity for Microsoft these days: It's a product that actually has good natural buzz. And for good reason too, it's a solid product. For certain queries, it seems more useful than even, yes, Google. (And not just porn queries.) And Microsoft isn't squandering away this opportunity, it's keeping its foot on the gas, today attacking what is perceived to be Google's weakness: Real-time search results.
While that's a little misleading — Google actually does have plenty of data that gets into its system almost immediately — what everyone seems to mean by real-time results these days is Twitter results. And that's exactly what Bing is adding. Kind of. As it notes on its blog:
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| (Published: Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:30:54 +0000) |
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| ( Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/TechCrunch ) |
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