Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Export and Backup All Emails from Outlook to Your Gmail Account

from Digital Inspiration by Amit

Sachin writes - "I have few thousand email messages inside Microsoft Outlook (a pst file) organized in various folders. I know it is possible to download emails from Gmail to Outlook using POP3 or IMAP but is the reverse path possible."

Sachin is looking for a trick to archive all Outlook email messages (and folders) to his online Gmail account for two reasons - one is secure backup and two, he will be able to access his old emails from any computer.

gmail-outlook-backup

Solution: It is quite easy to transfer Outlook emails to your Gmail mailbox. Here's a step by step guide:

Step 1: Enable IMAP in your Gmail account and then configure Outlook (or Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail) to sync with your Gmail address via IMAP. Read this guide.

Step 2: Import your Outlook PST file into a Personal folder that is different from your default Gmail Inbox.

To import, click File -> Import And Export -> Import from another program or file. -> Next -> Personal Folder File (.pst) -> Next.

Select the PST file that contains your email, then pick the email folders that you want to import in Outlook and click Finish.

Step 3: Select the Personal folders that you want to backup online and copy them your Gmail Folder in Outlook (see screenshot).

In the Folder List, right-click the folder you want to copy and click Copy Folder name. Click the Gmail Folder in Outlook to copy that folder in that location. You can repeat the steps as needed for other folders.

That's it. Your Outlook email will soon become available inside your online Gmail Inbox.

Caution: The migration from Outlook to Gmail can take a long time if you have very large Outlook pst file or if your internet connection speed is slow. Therefore, consider removing all large emails before moving them to your Gmail via IMAP.

Related: Is Your Outlook+Gmail Slow ?

Sunday, December 09, 2007

CarbonRally: Small Competitive Steps For The Environment

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

CarbonRally applies gaming and social networking concepts to environmental activism by challenging participants to take positive steps against carbon emissions.

Boston based CarbonRally offers a series of carbon reducing challenges, such as not drinking bottled water, dumping shopping bags and leaving your car at home, whereby users can compete against others to become the most carbon friendly participant. Current users include Google's offices in Boston and Pittsburgh who are openly aiming to beat one and other.

The competition is all in good fun with no prizes offered, however CarbonRally is looking at corporate sponsorship of challenges in the future.

If you're passionate about carbon emissions, CarbonRally providers a fun and friendly forum from which you can join others in saving the world.

In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

With all the talk about Amazon's Kindle, there's a bigger revolution taking place and those who studied classic literature will be horrified. In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, "turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process."

One book, Koizora (Love Sky) about high-school girl who is bullied, gang-raped, becomes pregnant has sold more than 1.2 million copies since being released.

The mobile internet has a role in this growing phenomen in Japan, with another book Moshimo Kimiga (420,000 copies) starting with installments uploaded to an internet site and sent our to "thousands of young subscribers."

Notably, at least when considering the Kindle, is that the Japanese market happily pays for mobile books as well; we've quoted hard copy figures here but there are many more Japanese viewers paying to read this content online via their mobile phones.

I can't see anyone in Western nations waking up tomorrow and seeing mobile phone composed novels on the top seller lists, but usually Japan is years ahead on many tech fronts; mobile phone data services were available and popular in Japan years ago as the rest of us are only now catching up. Perhaps the NY Times best seller list in 2012 might consist of keitai shousetsu, stranger things have happened.

(image: Wikimedia Commons)

Adroll: The Social Ad Network (Beta Invites)

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Jared Kopf thinks that ad networks should be more like social networks. A member of the PayPal mafia (he also helped start Slide), Kopf is now CEO of Adroll, a social ad network that launched in private beta last week. (The first 100 TechCrunch readers to register and type in the promo code "Crunchroll" will get a beta invite).

The last thing the Web needs is another ad network, but Adroll is at least trying something new. It lets niche publishers self-organize into communities of interest so as to have a better shot at attracting advertisers. For instance, in the "Surfing Ad Community," there are currently eight surf sites that collectively attract an audience of half-a-million per month. There is also an "Alt Music Community" of music blogs. Any publisher can create their own community or ask to join an existing one. Kopf explains this to me in an e-mail:

(Communities can be a) Open, b) Members Can Invite, and c) Only Leader Can Invite)

This actually allows publishers to form communities that are exclusive, or semi-exclusive. So you could form the TechCrunch Ad Community that is made up of smaller tech-focused blogs that you rep. Or a community of "Breaking News Sites." Sites can join by "friending" you…and you approve (or deny) their admission.

The big point of differentiation for us is that we . . . use a "social-networking"-style matching system to enable publishers to create their own networks, and help publishers to sell more, at higher CPMs by working together.

Well, that's the idea. You create your own adroll, just like a blogger would create a blogroll with other related blogs. Except that advertisers can buy ads across that blogroll. They can also buy ads across a tagroll. When publishers set up their profiles they choose tags to describe their site, like "surf," "celebrities," or "web 2.0." And advertisers can buy those tags. Advertisers also have their own profiles, with their own tags. So publishers interested in attracting a certain advertiser need only look at its tags, add them to their own profile, and hope for a match. Thus, the tagrolls could end up being so easy to game as to render them useless.

The bigger question for Adroll is whether advertisers will bite at all. Do they actually want to reach the Long Tail of surfing sites, or just stick with the most popular ones they already can get through other ad networks? The bigger the adroll, the more appealing it will be to advertisers. But become too big and generic, and the communities lose their targeting advantage. Also, most advertisers are used to spraying ads at certain demographics, but Adroll communities are organized by interests. That could be another problem.

The bulk of advertising still goes to the top handful of sites on the Web. So anything that gives niche sites more of a fighting chance is worth trying. Adroll is offering them a new way to band together. Whether advertisers will care depends on how cool the publishers can come across. The same as any other social network.

Screenshots:

Saturday, December 08, 2007

TringMe Develops Its Own Flash Phone

Augustine: getting very very close to just needing 1 unlimited data plan to do voice calls (VOIP) and all data - $59/month unlimited everything including international long distance

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Here come the Flash phones. Most Web-based phone services require a separate application like Skype or Gizmo. Or, like Jajah, they use the Web primarily to initiate a call on a regular phone. But Flash-based Web phones are bringing VOIP calls directly to the browser. Last month we covered Russia's Flashphone. Now another SIP-based Flash phone is coming out of India's TringMe, which launched in October with a click-to-call widget. (Update: See also Ribbit).

The TringPhone, as it is called, really is more of a technology demonstration than a full-fledged service. TringMe is hoping to license the technology to VOIP providers and help make Web-based telephony as simple as visiting a Web page. It already works with any existing account on a SIP-based phone service, and can be configured for pretty much any VOIP provider. I tried out a demo of the TringPhone, and it completed a call to my U.S. cell phone. Starting later today, the TringPhone should be available on TringMe's Website.

The startup is also working on a mobile VOIP service that will let you make SIP calls from your phone's browser over a 3G data network. That one probably won't be based on Flash.

Paypal Launches Storefront Widget

Augustine: extending their reach much much further than eBay; on their way towards intermediating all payments everywhere.

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Paypal has launched the Paypal Storefront Widget, a web based widget that allows anyone to embed a store widget on a web site.

The Storefront widget offers a seamless e-commerce platform for those wishing to sell anything on their site, such as t-shirts, CD's or other items

The widget (see pic right) includes:

An Index page that shows thumbnail images of all the items for sale through the widget
a product page that shows a larger view of the items/ products for sale
A shopping cart directly within the widget
About and policy pages mean that any conditions are also contained with the widget

Users can set the widget to "sold out" or "sorry we're closed" from the central control panel, and comes standard with a sharing option; visitors are able to grab the html for the widget from the widget and display it on their own site should they so desire.

I spoke with Paypal prior to the launch and they emphasized that the product was focused on blogs and social networking sites. Paypal has a deal with SixApart that sees the widget being embeddable into TypePad blogs without the need to copy and paste, for everyone else though its no more difficult than any widget is to embed, presuming you know where to get at, and where to paste the html.

Initially there are some limitations with the service, for example you only get the choice of one size for the widget, and it currently only supports sales in US dollars. Paypal though will be seeking user feedback once the program takes off and they are open to expanding the options available in the future.

Paypal sees a lot of possibilities for the widget; for example it provides a seamless shopfront for bands on MySpace who may want to sell recordings. It may also be a substitute for donation buttons that are occasionally used by bloggers as well; Paypal admits that some of their previous embeddable shopping options haven't been as user friendly as they'd hoped, where as the Storefront widget is focused on being simple to use for everyone.

I've had time to play with the setup features for the widget and there's little doubt that Paypal got the easy part right. Drop down menu items for navigation compliment sample products to get users started.

There are some parallels to Tailgate, in that both are transaction on the page. The difference with the Paypal widget is that like any Paypal transaction payment is made on the Paypal website itself to guarantee a secure transaction; the widget is fully transactional only to the last purchase point. This is functionality usually delivered by often expensive merchant solutions where as Paypal is offering this service for free, except of course they get a standard cut from the sale itself.

I know when I first heard about Paypal's Storefront Widget that my thoughts were: here we go, yet another widget offering, but this is impressive and quite unique in the marketplace. I'd think that this product will be warmly received by those with something to sell, or those who haven't offered items for sale previously on their blogs or social networking pages due to the cost and technical knowledge required in doing so.

AdMob + iPhone + LandRover = Good Results

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

A iPhone focused LandRover campaign powered by San Mateo based mobile advertising startup AdMob has seen some interesting results (video demo above).

AdAge has some details on the campaign here, but I obtained some raw figures from AdMob. Of those users who clicked on the Land Rover advertisement, 23% responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page. 88% of those users watched the video, 9% entered their zip code to find a nearby Land Rover dealership and 3% used the click-2-call action, all of who were highly qualified leads. Of the 3% who clicked to call through the advertisement, 50% of the calls lasted more than 30 seconds and 20% of the calls lasted for more than a minute. Sales figures from the campaign were not available, but consider that the campaign was only 400,000 impressions; if LandRover had managed to sell one or two cars it would make the campaign more than effective.

The results would seem to indicate that the iPhone has become a more effective means of targeted mobile advertising campaigns than regular phones; the integration with Google Maps and the display of video provides a richer experience for both the viewer, and for the company seeking to expose their product.

iPhone Delivers: Bigger Browsing Share Than Windows Mobile

Augustine: better user browsing experience using iPhone

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark.

According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.

In perspective the iPhone still only holds a small marketshare in the area that counts (sales) but those users are becoming a far more influential and reachable target audience than users of other phones, such as the LandRover iPhone campaign in our earlier post also shows. With a 3G version on the iPhone due in 2008 that will finally deliver broadband mobile browsing speeds to the handset, this is a product that will just continue to grow in importance.

(via Computerworld)

Visible Path Sees Its Way To An Acquisition

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Corporate social networking application Visible Path is set for an acquisition soon. The term sheet has been signed and the acquirer, says the company, is a “multi-billion dollar international company with established sales and technology operations.” No word on the terms of the deal, but a worthwhile exit price would be high considering the $22.7 million already invested in the firm.

Visible Path differs from other business social networks like LinkedIn or Xing, by creating your social network out of your email inbox. The service is based on an Outlook plug-in that impressed us earlier because your connections are based on the frequency of your real interactions and not random friending or pokes. These relationships are mapped online and make up a directory of people you can search through by skill or relationship. It’s a useful feature that I imagine a service like the “email utility” Xobni implementing.

Visible Path never saw as great a level of adoption as LinkedIn, which launched around the same time and has effectively cinched the U.S. corporate social networking scene. Maybe their new partner will give them some much needed exposure.

JibJab Now Puts You In a Pepsi Ad—Thanks Lloyd Braun

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

We’ve written before about JibJab’s Sendables electronic video greeting cards that cost $0.50 to $3 each. Now, they found a sponsor in Pepsi for two holiday greeting videos through former Yahoo exec Lloyd Braun’s new company BermanBraun, which works with Pepsi to create online video branding opportunities like this one. You can upload a photo of your head and that of your friends (or frenemies) to personalize the cards, just as you can with JibJab’s Starring You series. A “This Sendables is free thanks to Diet Pepsi Max” message flashes for a few seconds before the greeting starts, and if you don’t blink, you will see that you are actually part of the promo. In the Snowball Fight card below, which the folks at JibJab made for us, you can see Mike and me in elf costumes doing a cartwheel over the sponsorship message. So not only can the audience now star in JibJab videos, but it is also being roped into pitching products. Hey, where are our royalties?

And now a message from Jibjab’s sponsor [Update: The Pepsi ad only appears on JibJab.com, not in the embedded player below]:

Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

The Financial Times has a profile of French (now Silicon Valley) entrepreneur Loic Le Meur today.

Loic is an accomplished entrepreneur - he founded uBlog (merged with Six Apart), organizes the annual Le Web conference and has now created Seesmic (note that I’m an investor in Seesmic). So even though he’s French, his advice, when given, is worth listening to.

Included in the article are his ten rules for startup success. Reprinted below.

Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Buy A Virtual Gift And Fight Malaria

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Causes is one of the most popular Facebook Applications, with over 300,000 active users. The service, which leverages virality to spread the word about worthy causes, aggregates 40,000 causes that benefit 13,000 nonprofits worldwide. In many ways, it’s a pyramid scheme for good.

Now founders Sean Parker and Joe Green are leveraging another phenomenon to increase participation even further: virtual gifts. Facebook has been selling them since February this year. A number of unofficial virtual gift applications created by third parties have also launched on Facebook. Clearly, they are here to stay. Facebook says 24 million of them have been given away through the official application alone (although many of them were free).

But now you can give a gift that says a little more than “I spent a dollar on you.” With Gifts from Causes, you can give a $10 - $200 gift to a friend. Each virtual gift (see image below) benefits a different charity. 100% of the proceeds (minus only credit card fees) go directly to the charity.

$10 gives two blankets to people in a disaster area. Or one insecticide-treaded bed net to a child in Africa to fight Malaria. Or a soccer ball to a poor child. etc. So the next time you want to send your boyfriend a rose, think about spending $15 instead and sending him a teddy bear. In the real world, a sick child will receive a real teddy bear, thanks to your generosity.

Is Beacon Inflating Facebook’s Visitor Numbers?

popups or includes being counted as traffic/uniques

Is Beacon Inflating Facebook's Visitor Numbers?

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

While Facebook's Beacon program has been drawing the ire of many people because of the privacy issues surrounding it, advertisers might be equally concerned about whether Beacon is inflating Facebook's overall visitor and traffic numbers. Yesterday, Compete reported that Facebook's unique visitors went up 20 percent in the month of November, after a controversial dip in September and practically zero growth in October. Could the increase have had anything to do with the launch of Beacon in early November?

In a word, yes. Every time someone visits a Facebook Beacon partner (there were 40 of them at the time of the announcement) and performs a pre-defined action like writing a review or rating a hotel, a little Beacon toast pops up alerting you that your action is being sent to Facebook. That pop-up is actually coming from Facebook, and in some cases may be counted as a Facebook page even though the person seeing it does not normally click through to Facebook. It is triggered by a tag on the partner's page known as an iFrame, which then tells your browser to load a page from Facebook within the site you happen to be visiting. This occurs even when a non-Facebook member visits that page and performs the same action. In that case, it creates a ghost iFrame, though, because the viewer does not see anything. But data is still sent to Facebook.

I called up Jay Meattle at Compete, who wrote the post, and he confirmed that of the 29.2 million unique visitors Compete counted for Facebook in November, those could also include visitors to Facebook iFrame "pages," which are really nothing more than a pop-up on a partner site. So, for instance, if you write a review on Yelp, a Beacon partner, a JavaScript is executed for all users writing a review (http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php) and an iFrame is launched (http://www.facebook.com/beacon/auth_iframe.php). That review on Yelp can now count as a unique visitor on Facebook.

So how many Beacon iFrames "visits" did Compete mix up in its numbers? Meattle says that 2.3 million people triggered a Beacon iFrame in November. But he wasn't able to tell me what the overlap is because a portion of those 2.3 million people could have already been counted as Facebook visitors when they visited Facebook previously, and thus would not be counted again. The Beacon pop-up would be treated in that case like any other Facebook page. (That is, after the first one, it would count towards page views, but not towards unique visitors). But remember, these iFrames are triggered by non-Facebook members as well who never go to Facebook proper. That would explain why Facebook had such a huge jump in visitors in November. If all 2.3 million of those iFrame visitors were counted improperly as part of Facebook's total, that would account for nearly half of the 4.9 million jump in unique visitors measured by Compete.

Another strange thing about the Compete numbers is that they show unique visitors going up by 20 percent but page views only going up 2.58 percent. That could be due to lots of things, like Facebook users doing more stuff with apps on a single page, clicking off to Websites controlled by application providers, or Facebook just becoming more efficient in not making you click around as much to do the same things. But I wonder if that is partly Beacon-related as well.

Will wel see the same inflation in comScore's November numbers when they come out next week, or in other measuring services such as Quantcast, HitWise, or Alexa. The folks at comScore assure me that they filter out any traffic or pages not requested by users such as pop-ups, so it might not be an issue for them. I don't know how the other measuring services treat iFrames. But in an age when Websites are interchanging so much data and so many actual applications, where one begins and the other one ends is becoming blurred. Do page views even matter anymore? Do uniques? Maybe it is time for some new metrics.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0

Pass The Bong, It’s Another Whacky Zune Commercial

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Popout We first covered the rather different advertising campaign for Microsoft’s iPod wannabe MP3 player the Zune in November. Enamored perhaps by the surrealism presented in the original campaign, Microsoft has sponsored a project called Zune-Arts, which created the above ad for the Zune.

According to Wired earlier this week, the site is dedicated to creating “pieces of art, content with viral potential, instead of just a [regular] 30-second commercial.” Microsoft’s Robert Schaltenbrand said that the campaign is part of Microsoft’s push to target “the cultural core, the key influencers in society that pay attention to this kind of art,” presumably so they’ll buy Zunes. Each clip created for the project revolves around the concept of sharing, which apparently is the Zune’s main selling point.

Regular TechCrunch commenter Fake Steve Ballmer claims that Microsoft has “finally cracked the cool thing” but I can’t help that think that this would be way cooler under the influence of one of a variety of drugs*, as opposed to it being appealing to a broader spectrum of key influencers. Does this make you want to go out and buy a Zune?

Friday, December 07, 2007

Commercials As Content - 7 Places to Watch Ads On Purpose

Written by Josh Catone / December 6, 2007
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/commercials_as_content_-_7_pla.php

Ah ads, nobody likes ads. Especially ads that postpone your enjoyment of some media -- that's why 70% of people using TiVo to timeshift television are also skipping the commercials . But there is one time each year when commercials take center stage. That's right, the Super Bowl. Every time the world's most watched yearly one day sporting event rolls around, people seem to forget their hatred of television advertising -- sometimes the high priced TV spots are more talked about than even the game itself.

And there are plenty of places to watch Super Bowl ads. There's the aptly named SuperBowl-Ads.com . There are the specialized channels on iFilm , AOL Sports , YouTube , and CBS Sportsline . But what about all the ads that get made the rest of the year? They're funny too, right?

Never fear, there is a growing breed of sites dedicated solely to TV ads as content. Below are 7 places you can go to get your commercial watching fix.

Firebrand , which launched a couple of weeks ago, is one of the newest entries to the advertising as content space. It is a curated collection of what its editors consider to be the creme-de-la-creme of television advertising. Firebrand sports one of the slickest interfaces of the bunch, and users can rate, download or embed commercials. The site was a little glitchy at times for me, in Firefox, though.

American television network TBS created Very Funny Ads to promote its yearly round up of the world's funniest television advertisements. They realized that the annual special's popularity could translate into a continuous source of revenue in the form of a web site. So far, it seems to be working. Many of the site's top ads have hundreds of thousands of views, with the most popular clocking half a million. Those aren't YouTube numbers, but for a niche video site, that's impressive -- especially considering videos from the site can't be embedded elsewhere.

AdForum has a huge selection of over 75,000 ads from over 20,000 different agencies. It is not the slickest site, but their library is certainly impressive. Unfortunately, not all of their content is available for free (some is behind a rather pricey subscription wall), and there is much to be desired from their player (which pops up in a Javascript lightbox, is Windows Media based, and doesn't allow rating or embedding -- at least not for free clips). To be fair, the site targets ad professionals and students (i.e., those studying advertising), and not the general public.

Visit4Info is a huge television advertisement repository focused on British commercials. Their library has over 47,000 TV ads from the UK. Ads can be rated, downloaded, or embedded, and the site also operates a paid, members-only site that includes more information for ad professionals. Careful, not all of the ads here are safe for work -- but then, is watching TV ads at work really ever safe? (Excepting for those who work at an advertising firm...)

YouTube certainly isn't focused on TV ads, but there are a ton of them on the site. The catch is that you have to search for them specifically (hint: try searching by brand or product). YouTubers have often expressed frustration whenever Google has tried to push ads on the site, but just check out this search for Sony Bravia to see just how popular ads on YouTube can be -- many of these ads have a few hundred thousand views.

~~AdCritic~~ Creativity is an online magazine about the ad industry that takes the place of the old AdCritic site, which is where I remember watching TV ads online in the late 90s. Their AdCritic section still houses an impressive repository of TV, print, and interactive advertising. Their ads are posted at a higher quality than many of the other sites in this roundup (example ), and members can rate and review them.

Have a hankering from some old school advertising? Retrojunk has your back with an archive of classic TV commercials from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Who could forget the infamous Where's the Beef? ad, for example? Retrojunk isn't the easiest site to get around, but users are encouraged to rate ads by whether they remember them or not, so the most memorable are easier to locate.

Bonus Site

The most frustrating part of ads is not always just having to sit through them, sometimes it's hearing a great song, getting it stuck in your head, and then not being able to figure out what it is. Enter AdTunes , a massive forum community where people discuss the music used in television advertisements. This site has lead me to such gems as "Noah's Arkestra" by Mountains in the Sky a song used in NBA Finals commercials a few years ago (actually, you can watch it yourself ).

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