How Gmail destroyed Outlook As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to be online to read or write messages. Desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook have always been able to access your old mail. There is a certain bliss to this; if you've got a pile of letters that demand well-composed, delicate responses (say you're explaining to your boss why you ordered that $85,000 rug), unplugging the Internet can be the fastest way to get things done. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. Follow Google's not alone in providing this option. To get offline access, you first need to download and install a small program called Google Gears (except if you're using Google's Chrome browser, which comes with Gears built in). Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it's a good time to assess the state of desktop software. The shift has been a long time coming. Desktop e-mail presented its own challenges, though.
Amazon vs The World – An Infographic Amazon has come a long way from *just* being the world's largest bookseller. This year alone the company has launched three new products or service offerings that challenge the market dominance of an established player. Check out the infographic (A CPC Strategy First!) Feel free to share this infographic with your friends or repost on your on blog <a href=" ><img src=" alt="Amazon Infographic" width="613" border="0" /></a></p><p>Source: <a href=" >CPC Strategy Blog</a></p><p> About the AuthorNii is COO of CPC Strategy, a shopping feed management agency and is responsible for day-to-day business operations and long-term financial, tactical and strategic planning for the company.
You Don’t Have to Tweet to Twitter November 15, 2011: [Follow Me on Twitter] “In a brand new direction A change of perception On a brand new trajection” - UB40 [Disclosure: Benchmark Capital is a major investor in Twitter, and my partner Peter Fenton sits on the Twitter BOD.] Twitter is having a remarkable year. Active users have soared to over 100 million per month, with daily actives now above 50 million. So, Twitter’s traffic has been growing in leaps and bounds. Twitter suffers from two key misperceptions that need to be resolved before the business can reach its true potential. As its roots are in communication, a key part of the Facebook value proposition is sharing information. The second, and more critical, Twitter misperception is that you need to tweet, to have something to say and broadcast, for the service to be meaningful to you. Twitter is an innovative and remarkable information service. Some who understand this point have suggested that Twitter is merely a “Better RSS reader.”
Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television? On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural transformation in YouTube’s seven-year history. Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience—twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music—and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands. Kyncl puts his whole body into his whiteboard performances, and you can almost see the champion skier he used to be. People prefer niches because “the experience is more immersive,” Kyncl went on. Isn’t that more or less what happened thirty years ago?
"Groupon Is A Disaster" Dan Frommer, Business Insider NEW YORK (AP) -- Only a few months ago, Groupon was the Internet's next great thing. Business media christened it the fastest growing company ever. Today, the startup that pioneered online daily deals for coupons is an example of how fast an Internet darling can fall. Groupon, which had to delay its initial public offering of stock this summer after regulators raised concerns about the way it counts revenue, is discounting its expectations for the IPO. It's the latest twist for Groupon's IPO, which was one of the most anticipated offerings this year. Now, Groupon faces concerns about the viability of its daily deals business model. "Groupon is a disaster," says Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research analyst. Groupon shows what can happen when a startup experiences steroidal growth in an unproven industry. Longtime IPO analyst Scott Sweet, the owner of IPO Boutique, said Groupon is now expected to go public the first week of November. Groupon's beginning
Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die Life inside successful Web startups—especially the really successful ones—can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders. Venture capitalist Peter Fenton calls this phenomenon “the violence of a startup.” And nowhere has the violence been fiercer, or more public, than at a company Fenton invested in and has helped to guide: Twitter. Throughout its first five years of existence, Twitter always seemed on the verge of committing some excruciating form of startup seppuku. Photograph by Robert Twomey for Bloomberg BusinessweekDick Costolo, CEO Now something freakish is happening in San Francisco. In the past, Twitter’s too-cool-for-revenue attitude enhanced its Silicon Valley mystique. Brands are using the hashtag in part because it links them directly to an intense and nonstop online conversation. Illustration by Bigshot Toyworks He pauses again.
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin | Magazine In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. His email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem. Bitcoin did away with the third party by publicly distributing the ledger, what Nakamoto called the “block chain.” When Nakamoto’s paper came out in 2008, trust in the ability of governments and banks to manage the economy and the money supply was at its nadir.
Apple Discovers a New Market in China: Rich Boyfriends - Nathan T. Washburn by Nathan T. Washburn | 11:30 AM May 4, 2012 The 8 million iPhones that Apple sold in China last quarter are a lot like exotic pets: They're cute and they make great gifts for rich young men to give to their girlfriends, but outside of their native ecosystem, their survival prospects don't look very good. The unexpected sales boom in China (8 million is my rough estimate) went a long way toward offsetting the company's less-than-robust performance in the U.S. market and helps explain Apple's record-breaking profits . Analysts and investors are excited by Apple's performance in China, but predictions of the company's sustained growth there are premature. In its native U.S. ecosystem, the iPhone functions beautifully. And then there's the problem of input. So Chinese users are cobbling together an iPhone experience from a variety of sources, and the overall experience is not very good. Who in their right mind would buy this phone?
Forget the fantasy of porn-free youth - Pornography Brits have been in an uproar this week over a supposed attempt to ban Internet porn. But, despite initial reports suggesting that Prime Minister David Cameron was moving to censor all online adult material, the reality is that the U.K.’s top four Internet service providers have agreed to ask new customers to choose either unlimited access or “kid safe” surfing. In short, what we have here is just another case of adults foolishly attempting to prevent determined minors from accessing online pornography. The U.S. has tried to do so, first with the Communications Decency Act and then the Child Online Protect Act, both of which were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. So, in the U.S., if a minor has access to the Internet at home, at a friend’s house or on their smartphone, the only thing standing in their way is the gateway question found on most free X-rated sites: “Are you 18 years of age or older?”
The Facebook Fallacy Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, this assertion will sound exaggerated. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. Things Reviewed: Facebook ads At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Facebook currently derives 82 percent of its revenue from advertising. It’s quite a juxtaposition of realities.
Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. "The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. "Their efforts—over half a dozen browsers within 18 months—saved the poorly funded Web project and kicked off the Web development community," notes a commemoration of this project by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The CERN browsers Erwise ViolaWWW
The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook - Ben Zimmer - Technology Last week, as he paced around the stage at the f8 Developers Conference, Mark Zuckerberg declared with wide-eyed optimism that Facebook was "helping to define a brand-new language for how people connect." "When we started," Zuckerberg explained, "the vocabulary was really limited. You could only express a small number of things, like who you were friends with. And then he delivered the breathless payoff: "This year, we're adding verbs. Last of all, the authors of the languages formed the verbs, as we observe children expressing nouns and particles but leaving the verbs to be understood. -- Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 1744 There was something charming about the jittery young fellow announcing his conquest of the verb, as if this part of speech was a newly discovered territory and we were all hearing the report of the explorer's intrepid expedition -- Zuck's Adventures in Verbland. Complaints about Facebook's deleterious effect on language are long-standing, of course.
Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying - Jared Keller - Technology By harnessing the vast wealth of publicly available cloud-based data, researchers are taking facial recognition technology to unprecedented levels "I never forget a face," goes the Marx Brothers one-liner, "but in your case, I'll be glad to make an exception." Unlike Groucho Marx, unfortunately, the cloud never forgets. The logic of the new application is based on a series of studies designed to test the integration between facial recognition technology and the wealth of data accessible in the cloud (by which we basically mean the Internet). Often, the problems with facial recognition are rooted in the need for greater processing power, human and machine. With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. We use the term augmented reality in a slightly extended sense, to refer to the merging of online and offline data that new technologies make possible. I think judgment matters.