WePC: Intel, Asus Want to Make Your Dream PC [Laptops]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/a2N6PM6sa_o/wepc-intel-asus-want-to-make-your-dream-pc
Thursday, October 30, 2008
New Tech Brings Augmented Reality, 3D Models to Books [Books]
I'm not quite sure how many practical applications there are for this technology, but it's pretty cool nonetheless. [Gadget Lab]
Netflix Teams Up With TiVo The Way We Want [NetFlix]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/xbVrFty5w8c/netflix-teams-up-with-tivo-the-way-we-want
TIVO AND NETFLIX ANNOUNCE PARTNERSHIP
TO INSTANTLY STREAM MOVIES AND TV EPISODES
FROM NETFLIX DIRECTLY TO THE TV THROUGH TIVO DVRs
Deal Provides Netflix with New Content Distribution Channel, Solidifies TiVo's Leading Position as One-Box Solution for Simple Navigation and Delivery
Of the Best Entertainment Content to the TV
ALVISO, Calif. and LOS GATOS, Calif., October 30, 2008 — TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs) and Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), the world's largest online movie rental service, today announced that they are teaming up to provide Netflix and TiVo® Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL subscribers with the ability to have thousands of movies and TV episodes instantly streamed from Netflix directly to their TVs.
The two companies said they are initiating a test of the new capability today in several thousand U.S. households and expect it to be broadly available in early December, in time for the holidays. The ability to instantly watch content from Netflix on the TV via TiVo DVRs will be offered at no additional charge to customers who subscribe to both services.
The agreement provides Netflix with an important new te! chnology partner to instantly stream a growing library of more than 12,000 choices of movies and TV episodes directly from Netflix to the TV. It also solidifies TiVo's leading position for simple navigation and delivery of the best entertainment content to the TV.
"For Netflix and TiVo subscribers, this collaboration offers a fabulously easy way to enhance the enjoyment of watching movies in the comfort of their living rooms," said Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix. "Subscribers to Netflix and TiVo are avid movie watchers and this combination gives them immediate access to all of the great content available through TiVo and the thousands of additional choices available to be streamed instantly from Netflix."
"Joining forces with Netflix creates the ultimate video on demand service and solidifies TiVo's leading position as the one-box solution for aggregating, searching, and delivering the best content available anywhere right to the TV," said Tom Rogers, president and CEO of TiVo Inc. "Adding Netflix to our already vast library of content differentiates TiVo even further from any other offering in the market today."
Integrating the Netflix streaming functionality into the TiVo experience will result in quick and easy access to a growing list of movies and TV episodes that can be watched instantly at Netflix. Movies streamed from Netflix via specified TiVo DVRs is done through a wired or wireless broadband connection and a Netflix Queue-based user interface. Members visit the Netflix Web site to add movies and TV episodes to their individual instant Queues. Those choices will automatically be displayed on subscribers' TVs and available to watch instantly through the TiVo service. With the TiVo remote control, users will be able to browse their instant Queue, make selections right on the TV screen, and also have the ability to read synopses and rate movies. In addition, they will have the option of pausing, fast-forwarding, rewinding and re-starting whenever th! ey wish.
For more information on how to have movies instantly streamed from Netflix via your TiVo DVR visit www.tivo.com/netflix.
Translucent OLEDs Go Large, Turn Your Windows into Crappy TVs [Oled]
The display is desaturated, claims a wimpy 840x504 resolution and requires distracting frames that break up the image. Seeing this, though, gives the impression that even if it is years and years away, the day when we can control the natural light in our houses, watch video or displays a HUD on the living room window will come. Eventually. [Tech-On via OLED Display]
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
MAKING SENSE OF CPCs AND HOLIDAY TRENDS
Source: http://googleretail.blogspot.com/2008/10/making-sense-of-cpcs-and-holiday-trends.html
10/28/2008 09:36:00 AM
Labels: 2008 Winter Holiday, Online Traffic Trends, Seasonality
A few weeks ago, Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, had a post on "Clicks, Christmas and Conversions". In the post, Hal talks about the importance of understanding the inter-play between CPCs (Cost-per-click), conversion rates (CR) and CPAs (Cost-per-acquisition). Hal stresses that retailers need to focus on the CPA when evaluating the success of their online campaigns and not get hung up on rising CPCs during the holiday season, because they are only one factor in the equation of success. (Of course we could get into a much meatier conversation around ROI and how to accurately measure ROI of online campaigns which it is much more complicated than simply dividing the cost of online advertising/online sales. The true ROI model should include a metric for offline sales generated by online advertising among other metrics...but this is a discussion for a later date)
Therefore, the answer to why we shouldn't get hung up on rising CPCs during the holiday season is: although CPCs rise, conversions rise at a more rapid clip which in turn serves to depress CPAs. The upfront rise in CPCs during the October-November research period is offset by spiking conversions and the resultant plunge in CPAs in the December purchasing period. CPAs are the bottom line!
Taking another look at the graph above, which Hal provided, it is also interesting to note that the CPA does exactly what it should on Black Friday (and the following weekend) and dips down from where it was on Thanksgiving Day. According to Hitwise, Thanksgiving day sees record visits to retail websites (Hitwise Retail Index December 2007 reported that Thanksgiving was when the highest market share of US visits to the Hitwise Retail Index occurred; online traffic to retail websites increased 20% from 2006).
Traffic is high on Thanksgiving day (now often referred to as Brown Thursday) but it is not the peak day for conversions or purchases because consumers are in the research phase on Thanksgiving day, planning out their online purchases and in-store shopping trips for the next day, Black Friday. Black Friday is when retailers traditionally start offering large price discounts. Additionally, Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), known for its high online retail sales, sees a slight dip in CPA and then December 1 rings in the purchasing season. We also see the clear and expected conversion rate increase on Green Monday (Dec. 10, 2007/ second Monday in December) which has been noted as being the strongest online retail sales day. If the trend holds, the highest online retail sales day of 2008 will fall on December 8th.
Finally, in thinking about the 2008 winter holiday season, here's what we know:
- Both research and shopping will start early this year: 31% of consumers plan to start holiday shopping and research before Halloween and a majority (57%) will start before Thanksgiving.1 Therefore, the shopping has already begun...is your marketing strategy ensuring that your brand is top of mind throughout the entire research-purchase process and making it into the consideration set early on?
- Consumers will spend more time looking for deals: 43% of consumers say they plan to spend more time this year shopping around for gifts because of the current state of the economy.1 Consumers are taking the time to research the right purchase...Brands will need to focus on having a strong presence and clearly expressing their value proposition to guarantee inclusion in the consideration set.
- There are 5 fewer shopping days this year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, than last year: This is when the peak of conversions happen; therefore, retailers need to be wary of the tightened timeline and put strategies in place to lessen the crunch, by urging consumers to start purchasing before Thanksgiving!
Windows 7 details galore: interface tweaks, netbook builds, Media Center enhancements
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/434966875/
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
- Obviously, the big news is the new taskbar, which forgoes text for icons and has new "jump lists" of app controls and options you can access with a right-click. You can select playlists in Media Player, for example. Super cool: when you scrub over the icons, all the other app windows go transparent so you can "peek" at the windows you're pointing at.
- Gadgets now appear on the desktop -- the sidebar has been killed. That makes more sense for all those laptop owners out there with limited screen space, and you can still see gadgets anytime by peeking at the desktop, rendering all other windows transparent.
- Window resizing and management now happens semi-automatically: dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it, pulling it down restores; dragging a window to the edges auto-resizes it to 50% for quick tiling. Nifty.
- The system tray now only displays what you explicitly say it should -- everything else is hidden, and the controls have been streamlined.
- User Account Control settings are now much more fine-grained -- you can set them by app and by level of access.
- They demoed multitouch features on an HP TouchSmart PC -- it was pretty cool, although the usual nagging "what is this good for / that'll get old fast" concerns weren't really addressed. The Start menu gets 25 percent bigger when using touch to make it easier to handle, and apps will all get scroll support automatically. There's also a giant on-screen predictive keyboard. Again -- could be amazing, but we won't know until it's out in the wild.
- We've always known Microsoft intends Windows 7 to run on netbooks, and we got a small taste during the PDC keynote: Windows SVP Steve Sinofsky held up his "personal" laptop running Windows 7, an unnamed 1GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM that looked a lot like an Eee PC, and said that it still had about half its memory free after boot. (We're guessing it was running a VIA Nano, since most Atoms run at 1.6GHz.)
- At the other end of the scale, Windows 7 supports machines with up to 256 CPUs.
- Multiple-monitor management is much-improved, as is setting up projectors -- it's a hotkey away. Remote Desktop now works with multiple monitors as well.
- Media Center has been tweaked as well -- it looks a lot more like the Zune interface. There's also a new Mini Guide when watching video, and a new Music Wall album artwork screensaver that kicks in when you're playing music.
- Devs got a pre-beta today; a "pretty good" feature complete beta is due early next year. No word at all on when it'll be released to market apart from that "three years from Vista" date we've known forever.
Read - Keynote videos on the PDC site
Read - Technologizer Windows 7 hands-on
Read - Ars Technica Windows 7 interface walkthrough
Read - Laptop Windows 7 hands-on
Read - Windows 7 Media Center revealed
Online Image Editing Suite Aviary Comes Out of Private Beta
source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aviary_out_of_private_beta_discount_offer.php
Written by Frederic Lardinois / October 27, 2008 11:30 AM / 5 Comments
Aviary is indeed a very comprehensive image editing suite. While testing the different applications, we were impressed with the overall speed of the service and how closely the apps resembled more traditional desktop tools. While the feature set of Phoenix, the core program in the suite, doesn't quite rival that of more fully-featured desktop applications like Photoshop or evenPaint.NET, the combination of all the Aviary apps makes this suite an attractive alternative.
Like most of its free rivals like FotoFlexer or Picnik, Aviary can import pictures from most of the popular online photo-sharing sites, including Flickr, Facebok, and Picasa. Its features, however, go far beyond the functionality of these free online applications and the Peacock application allows you to experiment with images in ways that no other online application has allowed you to do so far.
Discount Offer
Overall, Aviary is definitely worth a try. You can sign up for a free (but limited) account here, or follow this link to claim your $55 discount if you decide to go for the paid version before November 3rd.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Microsoft Launches Windows Azure for Cloud Computing [Windows]
Seam Carving GUI Resizes and Rearranges Images Smartly [Featured Download]
Save Money Shopping Online with GotoDaily [Shopping]
MySpeed Adjusts Online Video Playback Speed [Featured Windows Download]
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