Yesterday we showed you the first Microsoft Bing commercial. We didn’t like it and neither did you. Today we have two new commercials which are, better. Yes, we have to admit, this is starting to look like something.
Could it be that Microsoft has a new “First announce shit, follow up with improved shit” strategy? They show us something dreadful which every blogger jumps on and then follow up with something which is better. We, the bloggers, users and Twitters, have to admit then that the second version is better. Result: more PR and readers are left with the memory of the second, more positive, review.
In these new ads Microsoft focuses on the downside of keyword based search. It limits the output. This isn’t necessarily a Google problem though: all search results improve radically when you use more than two keywords in your search. Still, these ads look more like they could be part of a campaign with a philosophy behind it than the cut and paste, no character, stock video mash-up we saw yesterday.
A few weeks ago, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid invited an army of tech-savvy hitmen to work on a technology to kill the business card for “once and for all“. I know some of these ruthless killers personally and I can tell you, they’re about ready to hit. When these guys are not working on their brutal murdering techniques, they’re actually great company. Yet I feel I have to stop these fellas and plea for a world that embraces the little paper connectors for “once and for all”.
The discussion on TechCrunch was pretty hefty, vibrations were getting nasty. Arrington chose sides of Kincaid and even posted a picture of the drawer in which he saves all the cards (pretty sight, uh?). Nevertheless, most visitors weren’t too fond of the whole death warrant idea.
Every now and then the Silicon Valley folks need to step out of their Tech bubble and interact with non-Tech folks to understand how the vast majority of the population works.
Look out for Arrington’s article tomorrow, “We need to kill the handshake, Facebook pokes via the iPhone are good enough”.
Really? Kill the business card? That would be really inconvenient for someone who works with consumers who can’t afford an iPhone or any other fancy smartphone, or who aren’t as immersed in this world of tech like we all are.
I don’t really care about what these guys are saying, I love my bubble. And most people who don’t master the new technologies but are in fact interesting don’t even have a business card. No, I need the business cards for other reasons. Karen from hyperart made an excellent point. She noted that cards are perfect for self-expression:
This is like saying canvas has to die because people can just photoshop.
She’s right! You know, I was going through my Web 2.0 Expo New York cards collection when I realized that the self-expression part is the very reason I care so much about the business card. Then I remembered the TechCrunch discussion and started reading the comments. I’m glad Karen and a few others think about it the same way.
Just look at these three great cards I got last week:
Sorry for the sorry quality, but I hope you get the idea. Here’s why I dig these cards so much:
The one in the top left was given to me by Jerri Chou from alldaybuffet, a social innovation brand for the creative mavericks. The line “You are connected to everything. Love accordingly” fits that company mission perfectly. The back of the card shows her email address in handwriting.
The card of this startup junkie reads “Hey, how awesome, we just met. my name is Andrew Hyde (we should keep in touch)” and depicts a great cartoon of his face. Enough said.
Business cards are here to stay, they’re great tools for self-expression during first impressions. And don’t you dare going green on me.
Although Web 3.0 seems to be coming closer by the day, typical 2.0 initiatives are still launched on a daily bases. Just for the record, I follow Calacanis’ definition of Web 3.0: balancing the ‘wisdom of crowds’ by embracing experts. A good example is Topicle, a search community with a pool of small search engines that use the human intelligence of experts.
So I just registered to ReStyleme, a service that allows users to rate other users’ clothing style. What pleads for the ReStyleMe is that they don’t just offer a dull 1 to 10 rating system but actually make it possible to judge in detail. To be more specific, you can rate the hair style, body style (?), accessories, makeup, eye glasses, dental style, facial hair, clothing and tattoos. Moreover, it’s possible to pinpoint good and bad points on the picture. And of course, users can leave comments as well. Like this one, from DieWeissenRose about steph19812006:
You need to cheer up some! :) try straightening or curling your hair. Also wear clothes that are your size.
KillerStartUps is raving about this service in their review:
RestyleMe fills a gap for a website that’s specifically built for actually useful style advice. (..) It utilizes Web 2.0 features that makes it user-friendly and fun to provide or obtain style advice.
Yet you could also see their remark as negative. If you think about it: who wants a style advice based on the wisdom of the crowds? I mean, a business man might want to see if other business people dig his suit. And a goth teenager only cares about the dark view of other goths. ReStyleMe doesn’t offer this possibility. You can only sort the style results by age, geographical location and sex.
Moreover, if every body pays attention to the fashion sense of the majority, that would be disastrous for creativity. People would just adapt their style to the generally safe (= dull) judgments of Average Joe. So I hope ReStyleMe will soon create some more options to select opinions. Otherwise they’re just making the world a bit more gray.
Don’t agree with me? Express your anger here by giving me a thumbs down for my clothes.. or hair. Whatever you want.
Setting up panels: why are conference organizers doing this? So you have four entrepreneurs on stage, all really good in what they do – I assume. You ask a moderator to do her job. And here we go: an entrepreneur gives a mediocre answer, the others are just nodding. The moderator tries to spark a fire, yet the only daring thing the entrepreneurs do is trying to speak louder than the other. In my experience, it often goes like that.
Same thing with today’s panel: Simon McDermott (Attentio), Rodrigo Sepúlveda (Vpod.tv), Andrej Nabergoj (Noovo) and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (From the blog you’re reading now) are all skilled entrepreneurs. Some of them are even gifted speakers. Moderator Colette Ballou from Ballou PR is doing the best she can – making jokes, asking daring questions. Yet like aways, the result of a panel isn’t noteworthy.
I rather see these businessmen give four well-prepared short presentations. Discussion can follow afterwards, or on a backchannel (like the coffee break). Only then they’ll manage to share their expertise in an exciting and fairly thorough way.
Oh, I was just about to press publish, yet I wanted to share this cool quote: “starting a company is like having sex for the first time. You don’t know how it works, , it takes very long, but you’ll discover along the way”, stated Rodrigo Sepúlveda. Boris’ reply: “There’s one difference, if you have more sex you take more time.”
Left to right: Andrej, Rodrigo, Simon, Colette and Boris
This is a guest post by Stefan Fountain from Dutch start-up Soocial.
By now most will have read about theZuckerbergrevolt (video here, and more), the release of Clickpass, and all the other big news. Yet I noticed something equally remarkable at the SXSW conference in Texas last week.
Building Portable Social Networks Panel – with Jeremy Keith, Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, Joseph Smarr, David Recordon
My impression of SXSW has been generally very good, the quality of the panels outstanding, yet the most important part of visiting this conference was – surprise! – meeting people. Walking around and having conversations with the likes of JavaScript heroes John Resig (jQuery), Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us), Sam Stephenson (Prototype), Chris Messina (OAuth evangelist), Simon Willison (OpenID evangelist). At parties I met people from Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! in various stages of intoxication. I even got some quick peeks at Billy Bob Thornton and Moby.
It wasn’t until the last day at the closing party when I was talking to a hard-to-understand German that I realized something. This was the first European I had spoken to. We met the great guys from Brighton-based Clearleft and quite a few other British guys, but where were the main-land Europeans? Perhaps I missed them, yet I’m judging from the panels, parties we went to and after speaking to over a hundred people. The statistics support my theory. My contact at SXSW confirms that 3 percent of the attendees came from the European mainland. Although the statistics on traffics to sxsw.com probably don’t say much, cumulative European visits is around 16 percent.
For what is arguably the most important tech event of the year, is the lack of European involvement a sign of something greater? Is it the current political climate, lack of European startups, overkill of our collective chauvinism or <enter any far-fetched reason here>? I don’t know, but what I do think it’s important to be present either to influence someone’s views, or to be influenced and inspired yourself.
So I would encourage European startups and established companies to head over to SXSW next year as it is well worth the money, jet lag, the occasional loud Americans, fat food and other pre-conceptions largely encountered on this trip. I think it’s time we head over the pond to learn, meet and share our own wealth of knowledge.
As you might know, Meghan McCain – the daughter of the Republican presidential candidate – has a blog. So what, you probably think, it’s just a random PR thing. And you’re totally right. She even hired a photographer and an independent producer to give the blog a hip and professional look and feel. Together they form the blogettes.
Meghan loves the campaign of her father as well as music. Therefore she picks a ’song of the day’ and regularly posts playlists. You know you won’t find anything more shocking than that the daughter of a politician listens to a song called ‘the Angry Mob’. Though despite the boring an marketing minded content, the blog does reveal something shocking, at least for me.
Yesterday my parents hosted a BBQ at our cabin in Sedona, Arizona for the press who have been traveling with us on the campaign.
Excuse me? Journalists are having dinner with a presidential candidate? Am I that naive that I always thought journalists should be independent and not too cousy with politicians? Sure, when I was working at the United Nations I made sure that the vibe between me and a politician was ok, but we didn’t barbecue on the shore of the East River! The pictures of the laughing ‘press guys’, chilling with the pretty blond daughter of McCain make my old-fashioned romantic idea (I guess?) of journalism fall apart.
And so, without even the intention to actually reveal anything of the truth behind a presidential campaign, Meghan’s blog does surprise me. I wish every slick PR publication did that.
Mike Mann is rethinking domain tasting. He’s the founder of BuyDomains.com and now works as a VC for WashingtonVC. Domain tasting, or front running*, is the act of registering a domain name which you know somebody else is intending to register. Earlier, we reported that Network Solutions automatically registered domain names that people checked for its availability and that Google would make it harder for domain tasting companies to show up in the search results.
So Mann is rethinking a rather touchy subject. In an email he send to his personal mailing list, he said that ‘domain tasting is indiscriminate and buyers end up having their robots purchase other peoples’ clear trademarks, as well as a lot of lewdly suggestive names, or names that once resolved to questionable content. So it’s nothing I’d want my team to take part in’.
Yet that’s where the rethinking begins. And then Mann changes his mind:
In the past I thought nobody should do it. Today I think it should actually be done by others carefully for one simple reason: It’s good for the economy. People are typing in and clicking on legacy domain links for expired domains, and if they get a 404 error it’s a waste of time, energy and bandwidth – and nobody gets paid, however if it lands on a tasting speculators PPC page or monetizable site then someone is getting paid, and they can pay their employees, taxes, and tips at the local restaurant, etc. So domain tasting while lame in most respects is still good for the economy.
At first you might think: he’s right! But then, you hopefully realize that it’s just a justification thing for what his fellow domain traders do. Domain tasting isn’t good for economy, it hurts the ecomony. Why? For a number of reasons:
Imagine somebody wants to start a new site with a name he absolutely loves, then it turns out that this domain is registered by a domain tasting company. That probably scares him off, so domain tasting actually blocks creativity and entrepreneurship;
People lose their faith in the Internet, since the domain tasting pages are nothing more than a collection of sponsored links. Some even use pop-ups, automatic bookmark scripts or whatnot. When people don’t trust the web anymore, they will spend less time and less money online;
Those ‘monetizable sites’ clutter the web and make it harder for users to find what they’re actually looking for.
Please Mr. Mann, start rethinking your thinking on domain tasting again.
* Update: Eric Litman provided some definitions of domain tasting and front running in the comments.
Last night Kevin Rose posted an announcement on the official Digg Blog that the Digg algorithm, responsible for determining if your Digg will reach the front page, has been updated. They continuously work on the algorithm to make sure it is less sensitive to fraud attempts. This means that if the same group of people repeatedly Diggs the same group of URLs these Diggs are considered less valuable then Diggs from random groups of people.
Some people think these changes mean that new Digg members without any friends will have a higher change of getting to the front page of Digg than older members with more friends. This could lead to more fraud attempts using new and fake accounts.
Although that may well happen there is something else to consider. There is both a short and long term benefit to being Dugg. The short term benefit is only achieved if your Digged page becomes popular and makes it to the front page. Then you get an avalanche of random traffic from Digg. This is known as the Digg effect and can crash servers. The benefit of having a couple of thousand random visitors to your server has been disputed many times before. These visitors tend to visit your webpage for about a second or less and never come back. They just want to see what the fuss is all about.
“61% of your visits go to posts older than a month”
The long term benefit is bigger and undervalued. More and more people start to use alternatives to Google to find stuff on the Web. Michael Arrington has regularly stated that he uses Del.icio.us more than Google to find interesting content. The same goes for Digg. If you look at our visitor stats you see a fair amount of traffic coming from the Digg search engine. These aren’t visitors who notice our posts in the upcoming section of technology but people who search for a certain subject they have genuine interest in, get a bunch of previously Digged pages and pick our URL because it has received maybe 10 Diggs compared to the other URLs that received only one Digg. They come over, read our articles and stick around. That is the kind of traffic we want.
In general, it is better to concentrate on more insightful and thorough articles instead of quick news items. You would think that people try to stay up-to-date on your blog and that old news is forgotten and people only read the newer posts but this is not true. Deborah Schultz recently gave me these numbers based on research she did for 6 apart:
61% of your visits go to posts older than a month
37% of your visits go to posts from this month
12% of your visits go to current news
So if your goal is to get quality visitors you should try to write interesting and timeless articles and not just focus on breaking news. And make sure that people can find your older articles by being well represented in archives at Del.icio.us, Digg en similar sites. The new algorithm makes it harder to get your Digged page to the front page, but so what? The long term benefits far outweigh the short term benefits. My advice; keep digging and don’t worry too much about the front page.
After all, there is a good chance (61%) that by the time you read this it will be old news…
Here is a brilliant video about the VPAD. It is a Smart device for Deaf people which allows them to communicate with sign language and video through the internet. The gadget is made by Viable and currently in beta. The deaf and HOH (Hard of Hearing) community is relatively small but very interested. Apparently a normal Skype or iChat video connection isn’t enough to let them communicate with sign language. As they explain in the video the speed of communication via sign language is 3 times as fast as normal speech. This means that they need at least a 30 frames per second video feed unless they want to miss half the words.
So think about that for a minute. I never believed that the future of data input would be voice recognition. Unless the circumstances are perfect, and they never are, speech recognition is too slow and error prone. I’m in a noisy office surrounded by talking people and music all day. No way that voice recognition will ever work for me. But sign language would be a lot easier to recognize for a computer than sound. And sign language is probably (I hope!) easier to learn than typing with 10 fingers, which I can’t do either. And that would mean that just by gesturing at my computer I would be able to input text 3 times faster than talking to it. Now THAT would work!
Look at this video not just for the gadget or deaf people but see it as a demo for how one day you, or your kids, will be inputting text into the computer:
A good headline does a lot for an article and sometimes it can be attractive to make things look bigger than they are. Titles like “Did an UFO steal my milk?” just work better than “Milk missing from doorstep”. We all understand that and use it to our advantage. Just like I just did with this article title.
But maybe ZDNet went a bit too far when they titled a post “Did Wi-Fi interference cause Boeing 777 crash?“. A questionable source, Nina Anderson, author of ‘Worse Than Global Warming — Wave Technology’ speculates that “interference from rogue radio frequencies could have influenced the aircraft’s “brain”, causing one or more of its electronically-controlled systems — such as the auto-pilot, auto-throttle and power management — to fail”.
ZDNet explains that “The recent BA038 crash-landing at Heathrow airport may have been caused by interference from wireless networks, which affected the aircraft’s electronically controlled power and automated flight systems.”. In other words: don’t you EVER use Wi-Fi because you might crash a plane!
Gordon Brown
in reality, and explained later in the article, no such thing could happen. All wiring in these aircrafts is heavily shielded against radiation, radio signals and stray currents that might interfere. So there is actually no need to worry about your Wi-Fi usage in airplanes.
Fortunately there is a more interesting conspiracy theory offered in the comments by Joe Ralph:
The plane allegedly flew over or very close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s car as it came into the airport. It’s certainly not beyond question that his convoy was using ‘electronic jamming’ equipment (to block remote detonation of roadside bombs etc) and that would be far stronger than any wifi signal.
Written on 4th June 2009
16 COMMENTS 
Written on 19th September 2008
The discussion on TechCrunch was pretty hefty, vibrations were getting nasty. Arrington chose sides of Kincaid and even posted a picture of the drawer in which he saves all the cards (pretty sight, uh?). Nevertheless, most visitors weren’t too fond of the whole death warrant idea.
Written on 16th March 2008
Excuse me? Journalists are having dinner with a presidential candidate? Am I that naive that I always thought journalists should be independent and not too cousy with politicians? Sure, when I was working at the United Nations I made sure that the vibe between me and a politician was ok, but we didn’t barbecue on the shore of the East River! The pictures of the laughing ‘press guys’, chilling with the pretty blond daughter of McCain make my old-fashioned romantic idea (I guess?) of journalism fall apart.
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