Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/341790609/
Filed under: Handhelds
Continue reading Willcom D4 MID gets unboxed, all four pre-orders ship out
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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/341923724/
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/340356086/
Tesla Motors, the automobile startup with backers that include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, held a party tonight to mark the launch of its Menlo Park storefront. The store, which is the company’s second, will be open to the general public beginning this Tuesday.
Despite Tesla Motors’ well deserved reputation as a high-end car manufacturer, it is still very much a startup - the company’s $150 million in funding pales in comparison to coffers held by large automobile companies like Ferrari. As a result, Tesla has strived to create a atmosphere of style and sophistication at its showrooms without breaking the bank.
The new dealership is situated in Menlo Park, about 5 minutes away from downtown Palo Alto and Stanford University. The interior of the building is designed to be “industrial chic” - a strange mix of luxurious furniture (white leather sofas, marble tables) and the trimmings of a basic garage (concrete walls, exposed wooden ceilings). It works surprisingly well, keeping the store’s high-end customers at home without distracting from the showroom’s main attraction: the cars.
Ah, the cars. Tesla has half a dozen of their Tesla Roadster electric car on display, and they don’t disappoint. It’s hard to put into words how ridiculously sexy the Tesla Roadster is in person, so we’ve grabbed a lot of pictures. Suffice to say, as soon as you walk in the store, you’re going to want one.
Unfortunately, actually buying a Tesla Roadster is an involved and lengthy process. To reserve a car, first you’ll need to make a $5,000 deposit, which is mostly just to show you’re serious. To actually get a place on the 1,100 person long waiting list, you’ll need to pony up another $55,000 - making a grand total of $60,000. Of the 1100 people on the waitlist, 600 are for the 2008 model, which had a base cost of $98,000. The remainder of the list is for the 2009 model, which has been upped to a $109,000 base value, mostly to account for the weakened dollar.
Tesla is currently telling customers that the waitlist is one year long, but production is only just ramping up so that time frame may slip a bit. By weeks end there will be around 12 cars on the road, most of which are owned by company boardmembers and investors. For the time being, cars are being assembled at a rate of about 4 a week, with expectations that the company will be able to finish 40 a week early next year.
Unsurprisingly, you won’t be able to just waltz in and test drive a Roadster. To get the keys to one of these beauties, you’ll need to prove that you’re serious (namely, pay the initial $5000), or otherwise convince the dealership that you mean business. At least you have these pictures.
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Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/341175455/
OpenDNS isn’t exactly a sexy service. Users have to do some basic configuration of their computer to get it going, and once it’s running they rarely see it again.
Here’s when you do see it - when you type in or click a link to a “bad” site, OpenDNS redirects you to their own page instead, which includes search results and contextual ads. The site has become a hit with schools and businesses that want to filter out any of 50 categories of websites (things like gambling, porn, social networking, etc.). Users can also whitelist or blacklist individual sites.
The service now has 500,000 registered accounts. But the real number of users is far more than that. You don’t have to register to use the service. And a single registered account can represent tens of thousands of actual users. Ulevitch says one school account has 36,000 users, for example. Another account, a hospital, has 5,000 beds and wifi for patients.
The service resolves about 7 billion DNS queries per day and serves about 2 million search pages per day. Revenue from search pages brings in as much as $20,000 per day. They currently work exclusively with Yahoo, Ulevitch says.
All that ad revenue lets OpenDNS offer its core service for free. That means organizations can add spam filtering to their networks without paying up to tens of thousands of dollars for competing filtering solutions.
OpenDNS also uses their community to drive new features and tag new malware sites. Users submit ideas and vote on them in a Digg-like interface. And when a user blacklists a site and tags it with a category, other users are asked to verify. If they do, the site is added to the general category blacklist as well.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/341174561/
Qik, the video service that streams live feeds from your mobile phone, has finally launched its public beta. The site has also introduced a number of new features to the service, including support for restricted group access to videos, self-service event streams, and a new embeddable player.
The beta will support a wide variety of phones on AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint, including support for software on the Windows Mobile platform that began testing in June. Qik says that it will be continually adding new phones to the supported list, which you can view here.
The site has also implemented support for Groups, which allow users to select who can upload and view selected clips. Among the included privacy options are allowance for public groups, which anyone can post to, restricted groups, which allow anyone to view (but only select users to post), and a private view, which restricts viewing and uploading to a specified group of users.
Qik has also introduced support for special Event sites, which are essentially temporary groups that are focused on a single event or conference. In the past users who wanted to create specific event pages would have to go through the company itself. Now, users will be able to create self-serve pages with custom logos where they can aggregate all of the content from a single event.
We’ve been using Qik for the last few months, and for the most part we’ve been pleased with the video quality and the convenience that comes from having a portable video camera that can stream directly to the web (although there have been some troubles with upload speeds that are largely the fault of network carriers). There are a number of very similar services in the space, including Kyte and Flixwagon. You can see a general comparison of some of the services here.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/341250621/torcom-a-blog-a-soci.html
Oh, and for a short time, they're also hosting all the free ebooks they gave away to entice you to sign up for the launch-announcement. Run, don't walk. Link
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/okdork/tZRC/~3/303914402/click.phdo
Recently I got a question asking
“i was curious what methods you used to build a 20k pre-beta email list, and what were the conversion rates for those emails?”`
I love Mint.com and if you are not using them for your personal finance then bleh. Anyways, I think for many new startups the largest challenge is distribution (outside of fb apps) to get people to use their service. Many rely on a Techcrunch post or the hope of a Digg article, Mint was rewarded with those but I think it’s even more valuable to have the right audience checking out your site from the beginning.
1- Figure out your objective. You are a promoter at a party and want the right people in line. No ugly people. For Mint that meant we wanted a waiting list of personal finance interested people in different segmentations. As well, we wanted to have a lot of personal finance people aware of us for trust reasons, the longer you know about something likely the more you’ll trust it.
2- Where are these people? This is not hard, they are reading personal finance blogs, searching for help on Google, listening to personal finance gurus, at Credit unions, in schools, etc…
3- Acquisition. Okay this is the good stuff:
a) Email Collection. duh. However, we did this with multiple landing pages. Amazingly done by Jason Putorti. We a/b tested many types of messaging and such to see what was the most compelling. Do people want Mint for savings, tracking, notifications, etc…New idea: Why not get their phone #? These are your customers, this is your livelihood, ask for their # and call them when you launch. That’s freaking memorable.
b) VIP? We allowed people to recommend friends and post badges to their blogs for earlier access, “I Want Mint”. Xobni, took our idea to a new level and was able to track those refers and have them compete.
c) Sponsor. We found smaller bloggers with passionate readers and sponsored their blog for periods at a time. Great relationship builder with influential writers. Thanks PStam for helping.
Important: We tracked all the cost / conversion to see which keywords, sites, methods were the most effective. Make sure you do this ALL THE TIME so you are not burning money if you are a start-up.
Part 2 later. Leave your own idea and the top three will get Ori Brafman’s new book Sway, about how people make irrational decisions.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/337942481/there-it-is-aga.html
Chris Anderson of Wired had the insight and guts to discover one of the two most important natural laws of the Net, give it a name, explain it and teach it to the rest of us. The Long Tail is a natural law, the sort of thing that just keeps showing up. Every time I crunch a set of numbers, every time I examine something happening online, I see it again.
(The other one? Metcalfe's Law, which explains the network effect. It's sort of like the long tail, but flipped in the mirror. The more people who connect to a network, the more it's worth--squared. Facebook and fax machines are both network effect businesses).
A lot of people don't seem to understand a key implication of the long tail: Given the choice, it's better to make a hit.
If you have a choice of cutting a top 10 record or making a track of Jamaican polka music for iTunes, go for the hit.
If you have a choice between being on page 30 of the Google results for "Bolivian sushi" or the number one match for "buy life insurance", go for the latter. No brainer.
The problem, of course, is that you don't have a choice. You can give the hit a shot, but it's awfully crowded at that end of the curve.
The implications of the long tail have nothing to do with this false choice. What it explains in a powerful but subtle way is:
Aside: In the last few weeks, I've gotten a ton of email about an article in the Harvard Business Review and a companion slash piece in Slate about the Tail. A professor tried to poke some holes, and in my opinion, missed the entire point. The long tail is so clearly a force that the real work is in refining the definitions and expectations of those that are affected by it.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/338254809/
Here’s a horror scenario for everyone on the content side of the Internet: A consumer comes to a web site to download a movie, work presentation, software update or photos, and just before they commit to the download they pause and wonder: Am I over my usage quota this month? How much will downloading this new HD movie from Netflix on my Xbox cost me?
We’ve all been there before — with cell phones, about a decade ago. Usage-based pricing tiers started out with very limited minutes and lots of overage charges. Competition in the market by innovative operators drove plans fairly quickly to a point where only exorbitant usage resulted in overage charges (and now there are flat-rate plans for those consumers, too).
Unfortunately, the usage-based pricing plans (starting at 5 gigabytes) being considered by AT&T, Time Warner and others will force us all to wonder about the size of our connectivity bill on a monthly basis. Further, the lack of last-mile (the infrastructure that connects the consumer to their Internet service provider) competition will not result in these plans changing in the near future. Today, true competition on the Internet last mile requires new copper or fiber to each consumer — a very costly proposition. Cellular competition, on the other hand, required a less costly (on a relative scale) deployment of cellular towers.
While it is true that the consumer can elect who provides services over their last mile, most of us have very limited choices. As an example, a friend of mine recently moved into a building in downtown San Francisco that had exactly one last-mile provider: AT&T. The 700Mhz wireless spectrum provided a hope for an alternative consumer last-mile option, but that dream quickly faded.
Competition and an aggressive last-mile build have resulted in reasonable usage-based pricing models in Japan. OCN, the carrier operated by NTT Communications, is planning for unlimited download bandwidth usage and a 30-gigabyte limit on daily upload usage capacity. By my estimates, that will be more than adequate for all but the largest consumers of Internet bandwidth and does not invoke any horror scenarios for the large content owners.
In fact, large content owners may help us all avoid usage-based pricing horror scenarios. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every month (assume $10/month/Mbps using 95th percentile on 10Gbps of traffic) with the same Internet service providers buying connectivity to their networks because they want to be connected directly to the consumers via the last mile.
If the Internet service providers start billing on usage-based pricing, it’s inevitable that large content owners will look for new ways to reach the consumer. It seems unlikely that they’ll be willing to pay the service provider for access to their last mile if at the same time the consumer is being motivated not to access their content. Why would Microsoft and Netflix pay Time Warner for connectivity to their cable Internet infrastructure consumers if those same consumers are being billed on usage and worry about their usage quotas before downloading HD movies onto their Xbox?
Like other large businesses, Internet service providers are looking for ways to extract more value from their customers. As a venture capitalist, I understand and appreciate that perspective. Usage-based pricing, however, at least as currently envisioned by the service providers, will not only change consumer behavior but will work against some of their larger customers.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/338390864/
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/338996259/
Startups selling virtual goods and offering virtual experiences are raking in the venture capital these days. Perhaps it’s the fact that virtual gifting hit the mainstream in 2007 or because people are worried about the impact of business travel on the environment, but the virtual world is beginning to get its share of real dollars.
In the first half of 2008, virtual worlds raised $345 million in venture investment, according to data from Virtual Worlds Management, a media company that covers the industry. And while it may be easy to dismiss the virtual economy as frivolous or scoff at the idea of attending a virtual trade show as useless, deriding the intangible misses a crucial point about today’s culture: A lot of it is happening online.
From World of Warcraft to relationships built on Facebook or MySpace to intensely personal blog entries, we are using the web to extend our real lives into virtual ones. It makes sense that an army of startups will follow us there, ready to supply us with tools that make our virtual lives more productive or enhance our virtual status. So even as Google struggles to monetize video advertising on YouTube and social networks pray for higher CPMs, there is money to be made selling virtual swords and trade show booths.
Given that gaming, all the way back to Dungeons & Dragons offline to World of Warcraft online, has long pushed the envelope when it comes to building virtual worlds, it’s easy to see why their players are among the most comfortable buying and selling binary-based goods. Since games are where a lot of this began, it’s where a lot of investment dollars continue to flow. Earlier this week, Social Gaming Network netted an investment, the value of which was undisclosed, from Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ personal fund. SGN creates games for social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, and makes some of its revenue from the sale of virtual goods.
Last week Challenge Games, the Austin, Texas-based startup behind the popular casual role-playing game Duels, raised $4.5 million in a first round funding. Ironically it started its very real relationship with its newfound venture backer, Sequoia Capital, after a Sequoia partner attempted to purchase a pack of virtual armor. More than swordplay, sparking those real-world relationships is where the future of virtual worlds is headed as socially networked and digitally savvy generations rise in the corporate ranks.
Research firm eMarketer expects the number of teen Internet users visiting virtual worlds to rise to 20 million by 2011 from just 8.2 million in 2007. Expectations like these are driving investments in virtual worlds largely populated by teens, such as the $11 million Series C round of funding Gaia Online took in this week. That world makes money by selling virtual goods and advertisements.
Despite the hype surrounding Corporate America’s embrace of Second Life, which included stories about conducting job interviews in the metaverse and its very own news bureau, there is a business model around enterprises going virtual when it comes to conferences and collaboration. Just ask Cisco Systems, which has been quite busy in Second Life as of late.
According to the 2006 Meetings Marketing Report by the International Congress & Convention Association, corporations spend an average of $107 billion sending employees to conventions and in-person meetings. The number of conventions and meetings that year totaled 1,243,600.
Eliminating some of those costs — and the need to meet face to face at all — is one of the advantages of virtual conferencing, which explains why On24, a webcasting and virtual event producer, raised $8 million in funding on Tuesday. Many gamers and young adults bring their avatars into the workplace and are comfortable holding meetings online. To some this sort of communication may seem awkward, trendy or forced, but that’s at least partly because an older generation of workers isn’t used to managing online relationships.
The rise of the virtual won’t supplant the economy and relationships of the real world, but it will augment them. However, until bringing your virtual wealth and friends with you around the web becomes easier, virtual worlds will remain fragmented and bereft of their full economic potential. True data portability could allow people to create one digital persona that travels the web, paying money to access certain worlds via subscription, but able to leave that world and still seamlessly connect with friends made there. There's still too much real-world work required to link your various avatars and social network in multiple worlds. Solving that problem is yet another venture opportunity.
This post was originally published on BusinessWeek.com.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/341132517/
It was no different this time around. I first learned about today’s outage when avatars and photos (stored on S3) used by Twinkle, a Twitter-client for iPhone, vanished.
My big hope was that it would come back soon, but popular S3 clients such as SmugMug were offline for more than eight hours — an awfully long time for Amazon’s Web Services division to bring back the service. As our sister blog, WebWorkerDaily, points out:
With two relatively serious outages in the space of 6 months, some will be asking the question of why depend on S3? The answer is simple: the rates are hard to beat, especially for service that doesn't require any sysadmin budget.
That said, the outage shows that cloud computing still has a long road ahead when it comes to reliability. NASDAQ, Activision, Business Objects and Hasbro are some of the large companies using Amazon’s S3 Web Services. But even as cloud computing starts to gain traction with companies like these and most of our business and communication activities are shifting online, web services are still fragile, in part because we are still using technologies built for a much less strenuous web.
Update: Antonio Rodrigez, founder of Tabblo, now part of HP, on his blog asks the $64,000 pertinent question:
…if AWS is using Amazon.com’s excess capacity, why has S3 been down for most of the day, rendering most of the profile images and other assets of Web 2.0 tapestry completely inaccessible while at the same time I can’t manage to find even a single 404 on Amazon.com? Wouldn’t they be using the same infrastructure for their store that they sell to the rest of us?
Update #2: Building an offline redundancy for Amazon S3 could be big opportunity, Dave Winer says.
Update #3: A reader sent me an email and asked these two questions
Random Thought: The S3 outage points to a bigger (and a larger) issue: the cloud has many points of failure - routers crashing, cable getting accidentally cut, load balancers getting misconfigured, or simply bad code.
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/339384151/dropupload-does-quick-drag+and+drop-ftp
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