Monthly Archives: March 2006

Microsoft mixes software for business ‘mashups’

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Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the line continues to blur between Office-like tools and programs that house businesses’ more formalized, or structured, data.

“Applications are changing in their architecture,” Gates said, speaking at the Convergence 2006 trade show here.

Gates said that much of the work in Microsoft’s Business Solutions unit consists of helping workers more easily traverse the boundary with other software, as well as connect to Internet-based data. “We’re taking the best elements of the online world, where we are seeing mashups,” he said. Mashups are hybrid software that combine content from more than source, such as real-time traffic reports and a map, and present them in a Web site.
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Google experiments with map ads

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Google is adding graphical advertisements to maps on its local search site, foreshadowing the use of its pop-up balloons for various types of information and activities, an analyst said Monday.

Greg Sterling, managing editor at The Kelsey Groupsaid Google representatives told him several weeks ago that the company plans to let businesses add advertisements and logos to the mapping balloons that appear on Google Local.
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Big day for RSS on Windows

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Talk about a one-two punch. NewsGator launched new versions of both their Outlook add-in, now called NewsGator Inbox, and FeedDemon, a desktop RSS client. The company has also completely redesigned their pricing to address customer concerns about the subscription model they adopted in the previous release. NewsGator founder Greg Reinacker, announcing the new releases on his blog yesterday wrote:

“And finally, as of these releases we’ve made good on our promise to abolish the subscription model as you used to know it. Now, you can buy FeedDemon or NewsGator Inbox (and soon NetNewsWire) for $29.95, and you’ll get a free year subscription which includes value-added services such as synchronization (and lots more to come). At the end of that year, you can choose to renew your subscription if you wish for $19.95. But if you choose not to renew, your software will continue to work forever – just without the online-specific features.”

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Google’s market lead widens

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Google is increasing its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft in the U.S. Web search market while a rebranded Ask.com is inching up, according to the latest statistics from ComScore Networks.

Google’s domestic market share rose to 42.3 percent in February, up from 36.3 percent a year earlier, ComScore said.

Yahoo’s search market share in the United States fell to 27.6 percent from 31.1 percent a year ago, while Microsoft’s MSN fell to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent and Time Warner’s America Online fell to 8 percent from 8.9 percent.

IAC Search & Media’s Ask.com, which unveiled a new brand and interface last month, rose to 6 percent from 5.3 percent.

Analysts predicted continued gains for Google and Ask.
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How Digg.com is democratizing the news

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When I sat down with Kevin Rose in his loft-style offices south of Market Street in San Francisco, I must admit I felt a tingle of anticipation. It wasn’t just that Rose was a founder of Digg.com, the “social news” website whose remarkable growth has made it one of the most buzzed-about startups around. Nor was it that Digg had reeled in a $2.8 million round of financing from an A-list assortment of investors including Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network, and Marc Andreessen. No, what set my pulse racing was the pair of labels attached to Rose in the press release announcing the financing: “media visionary” and “technology visionary.” I mean, how often do you get to meet the next Nicholas Negroponte?
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Adidas +10

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Martin has been helping out with the new Adidas campaign and pointed me to a mini site he’s been seeding. The site, dedicated to football is also about the release of the new Predator Absolute shoe. A Flash animation takes you on a tour through the features of the shoe (I never knew there were so many parts in a football shoe!) and after the tour, you’re invited to reassemble the shoe against the clock yourself.

Other sections of this branded site are the ‘players’ which features 5 screens where in every screen a part of the powers of the player is revealed and illustrated in an original way.

The ‘TV room’ features commercials, player interviews and behind the scenes edits. It’s pretty fun the see, so you’ll definitely have to check this section. There are 7 commercials. All of them are funny. Concept: twelve international players go through the streets of their cities looking for a dream team to compete against.
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SEO = PR (Again)

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The Web 2.0 Awards: Well-executed link bait development (PR to you and me) courtesy of SEOMoz. Look, press releases! Comes complete with vacuous phrases like “the Web 2.0 Awards help define the emerging area known for fusing new technology and social expression, empowering users to do more with the Internet”.

Sure to get many Web 2.0 bunnies linking up as many probably weren’t on the web for the ye-olde running-a-web-awards-scheme-tactic the first time round. Very Web 1.0, I’m sure we all argree.

Will work well (for a little while) for Web 2.0, and other tech buzz topics. Less well for, say, selling loans 🙂

YouTube Under Pressure

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YouTube is suffering heavily under it’s popularity. Recent changes have made many users turn against this video-sharing service which no longer allows clips that are longer than 10 minutes, thus forcing creative artists to edit and cut up their own homemade movies into shorter parts. This damages the project as a whole, and makes it very hard to experience a project as it was meant to be experienced. Many users I used to know on YouTube have seen their enitre video archive been deleted without any warning. Others have just lost their interest and stopped uploading clips. The disclaimers have become omnipresent and very precise to cover YouTube against uploaded copyrighted material from television broadcasts to sitcoms.
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