Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Almost All Consumers Now Use Web for Buying Decisions

from Silicon Alley Insider by Henry Blodget

Avenue A | Razorfish surveyed 475 consumers across "all demographics" in July. The findings show the usual divide between what the loud techno-elite minority cares about, as compared to the quiet mass-consumer majority:

Only 60% personalize home pages
47% never share bookmarks
44% never use RSS feeds
65% never use tag clouds
Almost all read the "most popular" or "most emailed" items on sites

Video: Big

67% regularly watch videos on YouTube, etc.
95% have watched online videos in the last 3 months.
49% have uploaded online videos in the last 3 months [shockingly high--almost makes us discount all findings, or at least conclude that this is a highly web-literate and young consumer sub-set].
85% have watched online movie previews in last 3 months.
71% have watched a TV show online in the last 3 months [ more than we would have thought].

Online Music, Photos, Blogs: Pretty Big

42% regularly purchase music online
41% use photo-sharing sites
70% read blogs regularly

Online research when making product selection decisions: HUGE

92%+ use the web when making product buying decisions (research, reviews, retailer location, price comparison, etc.)
54% start their product research at a search engine
14% start it at a comparison shopping engine
30% start it at an e-commerce or retailer site
55% rely on USER REVIEWS most when choosing products
21% rely on EXPERT REVIEWS most.
After product selected, most important criteria when choosing where to buy are PRICE (38%) and SITE REPUTATION (38%)

Mobile data services: Small

68% never use mobile phone to listen to music
76% never use mobile phone to watch video.
64% never use mobile phone to check headlines.

Rainbow Moments - Colored Flame Candles

Source: http://cubeme.com/blog/2007/09/13/rainbow-moments-colored-flame-candles/
September 13th, 2007 by Hans

Blue and white flames are so yesterday, the candles from Rainbow Moments burns in a fun and colorful way by using a non-toxic mix of citric acid crystals and other minerals instead of the traditional wax.

Link Via [Coolhunting]

Pirates Bay House by Stuart Tanner Architects

Source: http://cubeme.com/blog/2007/09/26/pirates-bay-house-by-stuart-tanner-architects/

September 26th, 2007 by Chantal

"Live in a house" designed by Stuart Tanner Architects — this particular Pirates Bay home is one of the most peaceful homes I've ever seen. The building's dramatic gesture toward the ocean is tempered by a more intimate dialogue with the rear of the site, thus symbolizing a bridge transition between wooded glade and open ocean vista. Passive heating and cooling through cross-ventilation, on site waste water management, rainwater harvesting, and exterior sun screens are some of the more impressive architectural components that make the project green.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday, October 01, 2007

Is Favorit a Digg killer?

from TechCrunch by Mike Butcher

Fav.or.it is tiny start-up based in a small office an hour’s drive from London. But this “feature rich community-based feed reading system” is about to unleash a wholly original take on reading blogs and news feeds which could see it face-down even the social bookmarking giants like Digg and the newer kids like CoComment.

[Note: this is an edited version of a much longer post which appears on TechCrunch UK]

Favorit brings together blog reading and replying into one simple web application. Its innovative web interface is designed to allow users to let users read any kind of RSS feed, cut-up, mashed-up with other feeds or “sliced” in any kind of way.

homepage

It’s also is a classic Web 2.0 startup which will attempt to solve one of the web’s most frustrating issues, i.e. the separation of reading RSS feeds from being able to comment on the post. Admittedly any blog post is only a click away from a user being able to comment on it. But imagine being to comment, Twitter-like, under a feed and not even have to care about filling in your name, email, etc. Just comment, save and carry on reading. Having witnessed it myself at an exclusive demo, I can confirm that this is what Favorit is capable of.

Favorit will this week launch a private beta based on a submitted database of 10,000 blog feeds. (The site is exhibiting at two events in London, FOWA and mashup demo).

Turning feeds into slices

Favorit approaches the issue of reading RSS feeds with the concept of ’slices’. Each post in a feed is categorised and tagged. By choosing a category, tag or rank (or a combination of each) the user can filter what they are reading in a more efficient manner than the normal ‘hose’ effect of having to laboriously wade through hundreds of blog posts in hundreds of feeds.

Comment posting with an API Based on PHP and the Zend Framework, Favorit will launch an API during the public beta enabling it to hook into many more blogging platforms to allow it to send comments back to the sites. Founder Nick Halstead hopes the API will create an ecosystem outside of Favorit.

Now of course there is a glaring issue here. Sites thrive on traffic. But by removing barriers to commenting, Favorit potentially creates a faster turnaround of comments to blogs, and especially blogs at the end of the ‘long tail’.

Tracking attention beats voting Because Favorit uses Javascript it will gauge how long you read a post and what you did before during and after. This data is invaluable both for advertising targeting and for data mining, and its far more sutble than Digg’s voing system. Eventually the site hopes to rank as many as a million blogs in order of attention.

Because it will track what people actually read, Favorit will be a far more accurate reflection of what is popular online than Digg, which everyone knows is increasingly subject to gaming. Although Halstead went to great lengths with me to emphasise that Favorit is a different animal than Digg, there is no getting away from the comparison. And it’s quite clear that capturing attention meta-data beats ‘voting’ hands down.

A blogging platform as well?! Favorit is not just going to be a feed reader. It is also a blogging platform. By creating a subdomain, such as ‘gadgets.fav.or.it’ users will be able to write their own posts into the system. Using this, they can pull in their feed from their blog as well as post directly into Favorit. Any comments on the Favorit subdomain blog then appear back at the original blog.

Since it’s all widget based, users will be able to ‘pimp’ their Favorit blogs with a set of widgets - many form outside suppliers - which Favorit will build into the system. But you won’t be able to access the underlying HTML or CSS.

Here’s where the revenue comes in. Favorit plans to share advertising revenues with users who create these subdomain blogs.

However, controversially, a user could create a subdomain site with someone else’s feed.

If the Nike subdomain pulls in everything there is to know about Nike, Google could be among those knocking on the door given the usefulness of this data. But so could the lawyers. Because of its simplicity for reading and commenting Favorit has the potential to open up feed-reading to a wider audience than perhaps other aggregators have done so far. And could well disrupt older ‘voting’ style social bookmarking sites.

iWon Gets a Makeover

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

iWon, the site owned by IAC that attracts people with the promises of instant prizes, is revamping it’s look, going from a very 1.0 portal to a Flashy, casual-games site, complete with spinning wheels, slots, and lots of bright colors. The games are also now going to become widgetizable so they can live on people’s Facebook or MySpace pages. (And you thought you could avoid the shrill marketing come-ons just by avoiding the site).

iWon’s business model is to lure people in with cash prizes, get them to play online games like Sudoku, Slots, or Solitaire, and show them ads. Games can also be created specifically for ad sponsors.

This was iWon 1.0:

and here’s iWon 2.0:

I can’t decide which one’s lamer. Still, iWon needed to do something. According to comScore, its monthly unique visitors dropped from 5.2 million last year to 2.2 million in August. Although average time spent on the site shot up from 33 minutes a month to 53 minutes, that’s what you’d expect as the casual visitors tired of the offerings and the only ones left were the hardcore iWannaBeWinners. In beta testing, the new site has already proved to keep people playing five times longer than before. But is it the same people over and over again, or will the makeover be able to attract enough new visitors to turn things around?

NetBank Joins The Deadpool

from Techcrunch by Duncan Riley

NetBank, one of the first online banking startups and a survivor of the first web bubble, was closed Friday after intervention from the US Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

NetBank had been in trouble for some time with failed mortgages and serious operating deficiencies. The service, which floated at $12 a share in 1997 hit a high of $249/ share in April 1999 until settling to a price of $15 a share in mid 2004. The company was delisted from the NASDAQ on August 3 this year and last traded at $0.068 on the OTC board on Friday.

An interesting comparison can be drawn between NetBank's model and a number of verticals being targeted by startups today. In 96 internet banking was new and the big players were only just starting to roll out internet banking services, and even then they weren't very exciting. Services such as NetBank offered a product suite that was innovative at the time; however the major players saw a demand for online services and eventually caught up. It's not too dissimilar today to the various Google Maps mashup services that have launched, only to find Google 6 months later offering the same features themselves. We've seen it a little bit with MySpace add-ons and I suspect we'll see it with Facebook in the months to come as well.

Existing NetBank accounts have been acquired by ING Direct. NetBank joins the veiled halls of the TechCrunch Deadpool.

Water bridge created with high voltage

from Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

Physicist Elmar Fuchs and his colleagues from Graz University of Technology are investigating why water, when exposed to high voltages, forms this strange liquid bridge as the liquid moves from one beaker to another. They published their research in the Jouranl of Physics D: Applied Physics. The water bridge was cylindrical with a diameter of 1 to 3 mm and spanned as much as 25 mm. From PhysOrg.com:

The group's analyses have shown that the explanation may lie within the nature of the water's structure. Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable, keeping the bridge intact.

Link to Physorg article, Link to the scientific paper (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Firefox: Run Faster Without Rebooting Reinstalling

from Lifehacker by Wendy Boswell

If Firefox has a flaw to get bummed about, it's that it slows down your machine after a few hours of steady computing. Digital Inspiration has a workaround for this that (yay!) does not include any sort of ~~restart~~ reinstalling:

Start Firefox and export your bookmarks as a file on your hard-drive (we'll need them later).
Type firefox.exe - P in the Run box of Windows.
Click the Create Profile button without making any modifications to your existing profile (which is normally called "default")

That should do it; now, when you start Firefox in your new profile, you should be up to speed (get it?). Sure, it won't have all the tweaks of your old profile, but if you're just looking for a CPU break, this might be the way to go. Note: Be sure to check out Gina's post on managing multiple Firefox profiles for further info.

Firefox Running Slow? Make It Fast Again Without Re-Installation [Digital Inspiration]

Image Editing: Resize Images without Sacrificing Content with GIMP or Rsizr

from Lifehacker by Adam Pash

Popout Ever have to crop or resize a picture to fit it better on a web site but end up disappointed with the content you have to lose from the photo? Using a method called liquid rescaling, your pics can be rescaled while retaining almost all of the pertinent content, so you can get the best of both worlds—a smaller image that retains everything you want. If it still sounds a little unclear, check out the video to see this brilliant idea in action.

If you're a fan of the open source image editor GIMP, you can download and install the Liquid Rescale GIMP plug-in to get liquid rescaling results (after you install it by moving the downloaded files into your GIMP directory, you'll see the Liquid Rescale option under the Layer menu). If you don't feel like installing anything, you should try out the Rsizr webapp, which does the rescaling from the comfort of your browser. Both tools are a good deal slower than what you see in the very cool video above, and neither are implemented to the full extent of what you're seeing in the video, but the results are still promising.

Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin Rsizr [via Photojojo]

Clocks: CB2's World Panel Clock is Sci-Fi Sexy

from Gizmodo by Haroon Malik

Our desks are so cluttered we have given up the fight for organization, and that is exactly why we are tempted by CB2's World Panel Clock. The transparent LCD display looks Star Trek awesome and has all sorts of useless information we would otherwise have on our desktops, including time and calendar functions.

As you well know, we are suckers for cool, as you can tell from our fantastic fashion sense...well, CB2's World Panel Clock certainly does have ample flair, with a brushed aluminum base and a slanted transparent display. The timepiece is battery powered, which will saves you adding to your wired disorganization and is available for a reasonable $24.95. The fight against unneeded, largely pointless gizmos is futile—we'll have one over here, please. [Product Page via Technabob]

Mansion: Jelly-fish 45 Habitat Won't Sting Your Pocket Too Much

from Gizmodo by Haroon Malik

If you have fallen a little short of the $50 million price tag for a Poseidon 180, fret not, the Jelly-fish 45 Habitat will set you back only a mere $2.5 million. Bargain! Designed by Giancarlo Zema, the "floating dwelling" comprises five separate levels all connected by a snazzy spiral staircase.

The floors are split into cheesy zone-titled areas including study, night, day, guest and viewing quarters. Though, if you purchase the floating mansion, you may abide by whichever nomenclature you wish. The viewpoint stretches 3m below the surface and looks jellyfish-like fantastic. The colossal seat-in-the-sea stands 10m high and 15m wide. Now, if I manage to roll out one hundred posts in 24 hours, Blam promises me a tour of his Jelly-fish 45 Habitat—game on! [Product Page via Ballers Guide]

Speechless: AT&T Lets You Talk, But Limits What You Say

from Gizmodo by Mark Wilson

AT&T has revised their Terms of Service in a manner that should horrify the consumer public. Usually such updates screw the customer subtly, but AT&T's new adjustment ironically pulls freedom of speech directly from those using AT&T's service to speak. In short, if you slam AT&T, they can pull your service:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes...(c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

Of course, AT&T has overlooked one important fact about their TOS: they can't cancel a customer's service who will no longer do business with them anyway. Changes in TOS are often a loophole out of your contract. And if I were an AT&T customer, my choice would be pretty clear. [TOS via morningpaper]

Intel fleshes out 45nm Yorkfield launch details

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

It's been quite a while since we've heard anything from Intel on the Yorkfield front, but that looks to have changed in a hurry, with the company now busting out a whole slew of specifics on the forthcoming processors. First up is news that Intel will be releasing an "Extreme Edition" of the 45nm quad-core processor on November 12th, well ahead of the January 2008 launch for its decidedly less-extreme counterparts. Helping the processor (dubbed the QX9650) earn that designation is its top of the crop 3.0GHz clock speed, along with 12MB of L2 cache, and an extremely hot 130W TDP rating, not to mention a price just shy of $1,000. If that's all a bit too extreme for you, you'll also be able to get your choice of 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, or 2.88GHz models, each of which scale the TDP rating down to a more manageable 95W, with prices running $266, $316, and $530, respectively. Even further on down the line, Intel's announced details on three dual-core Wolfdale desktop processors, which clock in at 2.66GHz, 3.0GHz, and 3.16GHz. No word on a price for the low-end model just yet, but the 3.0GHz and 3.16GHz are apparently set to run $183 and $266, respectively, with a mid-range 2.83 GHz version expected to eventually round out the lot, according to DailyTech. As if that wasn't enough, Intel's will also apparently be slippig out a 65nm 2.4 GHz dual-core Conroe processor dubbed the E4600 on October 21st, although there's no word on what it'll cost.

iPhone 1.1.1 "bug" unleashes music over Bluetooth

from Engadget by Paul Miller

The iPhone 1.1.1 update has a hidden little surprise for y'all: Bluetooth audio streaming is now available off of your iPhone for whatever you darn please, meaning you can finally listen to music from the phone wirelessly. Oddly enough, this "function" has been unleashed by a Visual Voicemail bug that leaves Bluetooth audio on even after you've left the Voicemail interface. Of course, it's only mono audio, and the audio keeps playing out of your built-in speaker -- if you plug in headphones to cut off the speaker you'll lose Bluetooth streaming as well -- but it's nice to see Apple forking over some "should have been there in the first place" functionality accidentally to go along with all that stuff of the same ilk 1.1.1 took away from us.

Read

Sony Drive XEL-1 OLED TV

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

It's here friends, Sony's Drive teaser is none other than their 3-mm thin, 1,000,000:1 OLED TV, just announced official with a December 1st Japanese retail date. The 11-inch SonyDrive XEL-1 set features a 960 x 540 pixel resolution, terrestrial digital tuner, 2x 1W speaker, and HDMI, USB, and Ethernet jacks in a package measuring 287 x 140 x 253-mm and 2-kg (3.3-pounds). How much? Well, ¥200,000 or about $1,740 -- That's about $160 per inch of OLED. Rich indeed, but so it goes for first generation technology.

Gallery: The SonyDrive XEL-1 OLED TV: 1,000,000:1 contrast starting December 1st