Apple Sells 7.4 Million iPhones In Most Recent Quarter. Wonderful. That means we can expect another 200,000 mostly useless branded apps by end of this year
Are iPhone Apps Headed For Oblivion? Great article on the current state of the iPhone App ecosystem and it’s effect on how consumers have low price expectations for any app
Judge: No Royalties For Music Industry Each Time A Ringtone Plays. Great use of taxpayers dollars to determine the obvious
Google Claims Android Adoption Is About To Explode. It’s looking more and more like the next gen Mobile OS wars are going to be Android vs. Apple
“@Drew” Twitter Handle is up for grabs to the highest bidder. Proceeds will go to the Livestrong Foundation and Drew Carey has promised to pay $1 million if he gets 1 million followers by years end… Still think Twitter provides no value?
Are Google & Microsoft in talks with Twitter to license their real time search feeds? And, why isn’t Twitter in talks with Google to monetize their search results?
Verizon And Google Form Strategic Partnership (to finally bring decent handsets to Verizon customers)
The iPhone Finally Gets Flash Apps – But Not Flash Websites. Flash based websites are on the way out on the web so do we really need them for our mobile experience? Don’t think so.
It’s not often an internet fad is resurrected but Inappropriate Music for Movies just won’t go away – and I for one am glad it keeps going. Initially started on Something Awful and with latest go around via Mentalfloss blog, these mashups definitely show how impactful music is on our overall film viewing experience. Not to be confused with mashups involving movie trailers, the latest fad has people overlaying “Inappropriate Music” on famous scenes from movies that drastically alter the context of the scene. You can find a full list of them on YouTube here. One of the most popular is from The Shining below and you have to love Google’s contextual advertising on the video
Though I couldn’t embed it due to the embed option being turned off, my favorite so far is the Inappropriate Music used in this scene from the Dark Knight. Though it takes awhile to get to the music (at 1:14) you won’t be disappointed…
So, on 6/3/09 Microsoft launched their latest and greatest search engine “discovery engine”, Bing.com. The term “discovery engine” seems to be very popular these days, as “Simpsons did it”Twitter used it back in April. But that’s neither here nor there, theft is the highest form of flattery they say. The previous two sentences probably isn’t news to you, Bing.com ads are everywhere thanks to an $80 – $100 million ad spend this year. So, I decided to check in with compete.com, to see if all those dollars are actually driving traffic. As you will see below, they are. One month in business and Bing is over 1/3rd of the way to Yahoo and Google’s traffic numbers.
Now, obviously, effectively monetizing that traffic brings a whole host of questions that the compete.com data can’t provide answers too, so we’ll just avoid it for now. But when you look at that data below, it’s interesting to see that yahoo and google’s traffic didn’t dip. That is, Bing’s 50 million unique visitors didn’t seem to really affect anyone else’s traffic. Which raises the question in my mind: Are people actually using (and going to continually use) Bing.com? Now, perhaps the Ask.com’s of the world are the ones losing out, but perhaps Bing’s traffic is “just looking”. That is, the media raised awareness, and people are checking out the site, but at the end of the day habits are not being changed. We know people love Google. Could it be that they don’t see anything special about Bing? That there’s no real differentiator and subsequently no reason to leave Google? Admittedly, that’s the experience I had when checking out Bing.
So what did you think of Bing? Do you think people are converting? When the media dollars stop (or slow), will traffic plummet? I’d love to hear your thoughts…
As a child, growing up in suburban Washington D.C., I can remember some of the rules we were taught to avoid predators. Sure, there are the obvious ones like don’t talk to strangers, but there were also the less obvious ones (at least to me as a child) like “don’t wear jerseys or athletic jackets with your name on it, because predators could pretend to know you.” Predators, it seemed, were everywhere and they wanted to do terrible terrible things to me. Then the news came out that statistically, a predator is most likely to already know the child (and vice versa). Thanks to my neurotic family, I grew up fearing everyone.
As I watched social networking take hold (in particular Twitter), and people become more and more comfortable with putting essentially their entire lives online, my old neurosis started to twitch a bit. But what about the predators? Of course, MySpace and Facebook have a documented history of working to keep registered Sex Offenders off their networks. Sadly though, I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The first time my radar seriously went up, was a few months back when @SuzyWelch (author and wife of former Super-CEO Jack Welch) tweeted about where she and Jack were going that night. Mind you, for Twitter, that type of content is very much in the “norm”. Now, perhaps the fact that I had recently seen a Discovery Channel show (or maybe it was on National Geographic) about how successful executives are targets for kidnappers influenced my immediate thinking. Or, perhaps it was because the last six movies in my Netflix queue had been Die-Hard-esque type action movies. None the less, my immediate thought was: wow, that is some risky behavior. Since then, I’ve always been somewhat amazed that there hasn’t been a Twitter related tragedy. I mean, if 30 million or so people use the site, statistically, some of them have to be d-bags.
Then, this week, two things caught my eye that point towards the fact that the d-bags are starting to feel safe, and starting to get active. The first, was an article on Mashable about a man who tweeted that he was leaving town on vacation, and also tweeted details during his trip. When he came back, his house had been burglarized (or is it “burgled”?). Coincidence? Potentially, but still… it should be enough to give you pause. The second example, I watched unfold in my Twitter stream this morning. A woman I follow Tweeted about an upcoming trip to a city in Canada. Soon after, she evidently received a private direct message from a follower telling her that he wanted to “F@*k her” while she was in town. She didn’t actually know this person, not in the “real world”. And, her subsequent Tweets clearly articulated how violated she felt. She even cancelled her trip because of this guy’s douchery.
So, what’s the moral of this post? Should we all dump our social networking profiles? No, of course not. But the examples above should serve as a wake up call to all of us. Nearly all of us have been guilty of being too comfortable online, too trusting. Protect your info people. Be cognizant of who (potentially) has access to it, and what they can do with it if they have a predatory mindset. The items you tweet are out there, for public consumption. What additional information can people find out about you with a few strategic Google searches? Sadly, we all have to err on the side of caution these days. If your tweet gives you even a moments pause, just don’t send it. The technology is out there, and we can’t rely on the Twitters, Myspaces, and Facebooks to completely protect us. Quite simply, they can’t. There needs to be some personal responsibility.
So, what do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I came across two quotes about innovation this week while reading various online articles. They come from a couple of tech company CEOs, and the fundamental differences in philosophy stood out to me so I thought I would share:
“If you don’t continue to innovate people are going to shift interest elsewhere. We need to continue to innovate a lot more rapidly than we have been.” – Owen Van Natta, CEO, MySpace
“You can’t plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it you can jump on it and you can make a difference.” – Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
So, any wonder why Google is taking over the world and MySpace is seemingly praying that their freefall stops on its own? Myspace’s philosophy is all very “Office Space”. You can almost hear Van Natta around the office: “Yeah, um, I’m gonna need that innovation on my desk tomorrow at 9 a.m. sharp. Mmmmkay?”
Now, in all fairness, Van Natta is new to the MySpace gig, but I think Google’s track record speaks for itself. In my opinion, trying to mandate innovation just breeds fear and paranoia in an organization. Even if the end result is a product that’s “okay”, you truly don’t end up getting the best out of your employees/teammates. You don’t get true innovation. You get… “usable stuff”. But what do you think? Can corporations successfully mandate innovation, or are they better served creating an environment/culture that’s conducive to innovating?
From GigaOM, is an article on why Google is concerned that Facebook and Twitter have emerged as an alternative to Google’s dominate search engine. The concern stems from Twitter and Facebook’s ability to tap into and display real-time content. The article is definitely worth a read and I thought the analogy that Google is a library and Facebook/Twitter is a cafe (as both pertain to discovering information) a perfect analogy to the evolution of real-time information on the web:
“Google’s search engine has thrived because PageRank uses democratic algorithms that tracked page links. By contrast, real-time discovery engines like Twitter and Facebok use a more dynamic kind of democracy, linking to content that users finds worthwhile. As a result, content on the web is splitting into two basic models, and understanding this distinction makes clear why Google’s centralized role is being threatened.
Simply put, it’s the difference between discovery and search, between the “Now Web” and the “Then Web.” Here’s a more specific analogy: In college, most of us spent a lot of time in the library but also in a social hub like the campus coffee shop. One was a place for digging up information, the other a more dynamic, conversational setting, where ideas were casually exchanged. Google has been the web’s library: archival, organized and oriented around research. Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are coffee shops: instantaneous, conversational and oriented around discovery.”
Google rocks the launch of their Chrome browser with 11 Short Films on YouTube. The shorts highlight the browser’s features with a unique interpretive presentation that captures the attention of the Internet generation. They are fine examples of a smart and stimulating way to educate and entertain.
We Are Organized Chaos (WAOC) is Zugara’s (www.zugara.com) interactive marketing and advertising blog where we’ll be featuring some great projects and discussing upcoming trends in the digital world. Work — good and bad — will be critiqued. Hope you’ll enjoy reading our insights and thoughts on interactive.
