Generally, at the end of the year, predictions stream forth as to how this or that new technology will transform the world in the next 12 months. This article is a link collection to articles that try to do that.
2012 and the Technology Blahs article mentions few predictions: We will continue to see innovation around cost savings and information flow. There’s no stopping the momentum of consumerization of technology in 2012. Smartphone owners are increasingly paying a high price for free mobile applications, with 2012 set to be a disruptive year of widespread mobile hacking.
TechCrunch has an interesting predictions on how HTML5 and 2012 will change the web in The Definitive Guide To HTML5: 14 Predictions For 2012 article. Apart from making the whole web more interconnected between different websites, web browsers starting to look and behave more like iPad, complete with push notifications and geolocation, and HTML5 ads replacing majority of flash based ads, the article also predicts that browser makers will start to introduce App Stores within their browsers. In fact, Chrome already has one and Facebook will also get a lot more seamlessly integrated with your desktop. Marketing speak decoded:
“Push notifications” -> ads rammed up your ass
“Apps” for browsers -> pay per view content
“HTML5 ads” -> ads take over the whole screen.
“Facebook will be seamlessly integrated into the desktop” -> all your info belongs to us
If there is a way to exploit the consumer with technology, companies have ALWAYS done so. Everything you do, everything you see, everything you eat, every breath you take, every move you make… it’s worth something to someone and they will always do everything they can get away with to capitalize on it. The only areas which aren’t being exploited are either prohibited by law or new enough that they haven’t yet figured out how to best exploit.
Late-Stage Web Companies Took In The Largest Tech Investments Of 2011. Facebook Poised to Lead Biggest U.S. Internet IPO Year Since 1999 Bubble article says that Facebook Inc. and Yelp Inc. are set to lead the biggest year for U.S. initial public offerings by Internet companies since 1999. That would be the most since $18.5 billion of IPOs in 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst. There are companies that would like to go public, but are waiting for the right market environment to do so. The IPO market in Europe is six months behind USA.
6 Game-Changing Digital Journalism Events of 2011 article tells that after an incredible year of news events and milestones, online journalism in 2012 has a tough act to follow. We can certainly expect more successes and more failures when it comes to business models and mobile strategies. News organizations will clamor to be the first on new social networks. 2012 is a year of very new games.
SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions article tells to expect an article page blackout as a way to put “maximum pressure on the U.S. government” in response to SOPA. Technically speaking, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull off. Antitrust on the rise because it tends to be far cheaper to pay lobbyists to cripple your rival than compete in the marketplace. If 2011 was the Year of the Hackers, 2012 may be the Year the Hackers Upset the Political Establishment, especially ones supporting SOPA and similar legistlation. Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.
Click here to find out more! Study Predicts Growing Use Of Social Media In Healthcare article tells that men are more likely than women to turn to Facebook and other social networks for healthcare purposes. Facebook was the most popular site for people searching for healthcare information, followed by YouTube. Another study says that Facebook a Factor in a Third of UK Divorces. When they say cited, they mean just that: That something from Facebook was brought up in the courtroom.
The 5 Hardest Jobs to Fill in 2012 article tells that finding a talent is in short supply, especially in these five areas: Software Engineers and Web Developers, Creative Design and User Experience, Product Management, Marketing, Analytics.
Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012: Responding Like a Trained Monkey, Mindless Traditions, Reading Annoying Things, Work That’s Not Worth It and Making Things More Complicated Than They Should Be. Eliminating these five activities is likely to save hundreds of hours next year. What are you going to stop doing and how are you going to leverage all that extra time?
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Smartphones beat computers for Facebookers time on site
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57429653-93/smartphones-beat-computers-for-facebookers-time-on-site/
A new study shows that the social-networking king also reigns in the mobile space, and its users are spending more and more time on the site via their cell phones.
A new study released today by digital research company ComScore shows that the average U.S. Facebook mobile user spent more than seven hours perusing the site via cell phone in March and around six hours via the computer.
A new study released today by digital research company ComScore shows that the average U.S. Facebook mobile user spent more than seven hours perusing the site via cell phone in March and around six hours via the computer.
In December 2011, Facebook said that more than 425 million monthly active users accessed Facebook on a mobile device. This is roughly half of all of Facebook’s monthly active users.
And, over the past year, Facebook executives have noted the increasing importance of mobile for the company’s growth, launching an initiative to get its app on all mobile devices, including smartphones, feature phones, and the Apple iPad.
Other social networks also did well via mobile. Twitter users spent an average of almost two hours browsing on their phones for the month of March and just 20 minutes on the computer. Pinterest users spent an hour on the phone, Foursquare users spent 2.5 hours, and Tumblr readers browsed for a little over an hour.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Amends IPO S-1 To Admit Advertising Biz Hurt By Increasing Shift To Mobile, Note RSUS Grant
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/facebook-amends-ipo-s-1-to-admit-advertising-biz-hurt-by-increasing-shift-to-mobile/
Facebook has just filed a sixth amendment to its S-1 filing to IPO in order to provide more transparency about how the shift of its user base from the web to mobile is causing it to show fewer ads per user, which could hurt revenue in the long term.
By injecting ads directly into the news feed, Facebook is meddling with one of the most addictive features of the site. If it shows too many ads, users could become less prone to frequent return visits, and might spend less time browsing the feed. The company must walk the tightrope, testing to see how many in-feed ads it can get away with.
While on the web it can keep ad presence in the news feed conservative, on mobile this is it’s only real revenue driver. Facebook may have to slowly ramp up the frequency of mobile feed ads in order to acclimate its users. Unlike other free mobile apps that plaster banner ads over content or force users through interstitials, Facebook is trying to pioneer a less obtrusive way to monetize mobile through ads. Unfortunately, investors may be weary of weathering the process with their money on the line.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Year
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/04/30/heres-why-google-and-facebook-might-completely-disappear-in-the-next-5-years/
We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas. They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.
Don Hambrick:
One of the central tenets of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes. What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.
There’s another school of thought (organizational ecology scholars):
They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes.
I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome all challenges in the external environment.
As I age and watch what’s happening in the world of Internet and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologists though.
More and more in the Internet space, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.
Each generation is perceived to see the world in a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countless other habits.
With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections.
Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm.
Mobile companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm.
The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social mobile as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.
The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time. This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.
But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline. What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up.
Yahoo is already a shell of its 2000 self. There is increasing chatter (including from me) about how Google’s facing a painful multiple contraction, once its desktop search business (still accounting for the vast majority of its revenues and profits) starts to fall off a cliff as users dramatically drop traditional search for new ways of getting information they want in a mobile world.
As Hamish McKenzie said last week, “I suspect that Facebook will try to address that issue [of the shift to mobile] by breaking up its various features into separate apps or HTML5 sites: one for messaging, one for the news feed, one for photos, and, perhaps, one for an address book. But that fragments the core product, probably to its detriment.”
Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social. Does the Instagram acquisition change that? Not really, in my view.
The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8 years could be incredibly dynamic. It’s possible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves – or gone entirely.
They will have all the money in the world to try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be able to successfully do it.
Yet, where are all the great social success stories by Web 1.0 companies? I imagine we’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race to become great mobile companies.
It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box
The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow might not even exist today. And several Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then.
Fortunes will be made by those who adapt to and invest in this complete greenfield.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google, Alert: Bing Wants “To Model Every Object On The Planet,” Reinvent Search
http://www.fastcompany.com/1836901/bing-were-trying-to-model-every-object-on-the-planet
The future of search is not about page rank. It’s about creating giant databases of every person, place, and thing on the planet.
Today Bing is announcing a revamp of its front end, to make its search results more useful for users. But what’s much more interesting is what’s happening on the back end, underneath the hood, as Microsoft re-architects how the data used for search results is collected, stored, and repurposed.
“We decided we needed to reinvent search,” Bing director Stefan Weitz tells Fast Company.
“We’re no longer indexing text. We’re trying to associate data that exists on the web in all forms with the physical object that spawned it in the first place.”
“Our goal is to model every object on the planet,” Weitz says. So far the company has compiled a database of 300 million objects, from computer mice to buildings. As Bing’s bots crawl the web, they identify pages that have information about those objects. And then they use that information to develop an understanding of what kinds of things people might want to do with that object.
Introducing the New Bing: Spend Less Time Searching, More Time Doing
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/05/10/spend-less-time-searching-more-time-doing-introducing-the-new-bing.aspx
The new Bing introduces a brand new information architecture with a three column design that focuses on bringing you information from the web to help you take action and interact with friends and experts without compromising the core search experience.
Getting things done often involves others, in fact 90% of those asked said they prefer to listen to their friends when making decisions. Whether it’s making a purchase, deciding on a vacation destination, choosing a great restaurant, or figuring out which movie to see this weekend, the new Bing focuses on bringing friends, experts and enthusiasts into your search experience through a dedicated social “sidebar.” With sidebar, Bing brings together the best of the web, with what experts and your friends know, giving you the confidence to act. This new way to search lets people share, discover, and interact with friends like they do in real life.
In the coming weeks, you will be able to experience the new Bing on mobile devices (m.bing.com.) We’ve optimized the layout and placement of the social results on the mobile device for smaller screen sizes and for touch input optimized for people on the go.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meet Silk, the Semantic Web for the rest of us
http://gigaom.com/europe/meet-silk-the-semantic-web-for-the-rest-of-us/
Almost since Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the original concept of the web, there’s been a new, improved version on the horizon: the much-promised Semantic Web. This, goes the thinking, is a way to make the online world more useful by categorizing everything on a page with a layer of extra information — data that can tell your browser that one particular series of numbers is a date, say, while another is a price. This, in turn, allows your computer to understand more about the information it processes, theoretically making it easier to identify events on the date you’re looking for, or items at the price you’ve chosen.
It’s an ambitious goal that has been chased by many folk over the years — and yet, for all the effort to bring the Semantic Web to life, the reality of the situation is that it always feels just out of reach …
Silk, an application coming out of private beta on Thursday, has a grand ambition to build a version of the Semantic Web that we can all use.
It works like this: you build a series of pages inside Silk and link them together with tags.
If your Silk pages are tagged properly, the app simply joins the data together and allows you to instantly build charts, graphs or maps documenting the data you’re after.
To me, it’s like some sort of cross between Wolfram Alpha and Wikia, allowing you to perform calculations and answer questions using your own information — and on first glance, it’s really amazing, pulling data together in a fast and powerful way. Imagine if you could perform actions across a huge database like Wikipedia: I know it would save me a huge amount of time.
“The Semantic Web is a very overwhelming problem, but we’re trying to solve it in a different way, our own way,” he said. “We’ve been developing for over two years, and we’re shifting more and more to user-facing improvements.”
http://www.silkapp.com/
ylodred lights repair guide says:
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Tomi Engdahl says:
The anti-social network: Life without Facebook
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/18/tech/social-media/facebook-deactivation-ireport/index.html
With a website that boasts 901 million active users and is launching an IPO on Friday, it seems unlikely that once you get on Facebook, you’d ever leave. But deactivating from the social networking site is not that unusual. Close to half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll.
More and more people are stepping away from the technological realm and de-teching. There are even sites where they can pledge to delete their Facebook accounts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Facebook Offering: How It Compares
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealbook/how-the-facebook-offering-compares.html?src=tp
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We’re Dancing on its Grave’
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/the-golden-age-of-silicon-valley-is-over-and-were-dancing-on-its-grave/257401/
To help make sense of the Facebook IPO, we caught up with Steve Blank, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
BLANK: The headline for me here is that Facebook’s success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon valley is over and we’re dancing on its grave. On the other hand, Facebook is a great company. I feel bittersweet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/05/the-darwinian-evolution-of-startup-hubs.html
In my mental model of Silicon Valley, the first “tree” was Fairchild Semiconductor (founded in 1957) which begat Intel (founded 1968) which begat Apple (1976) and Oracle (1977), which begat Sun (1982), Silicon Graphics (1981), and Cisco (1984) which begat Siebel (1993) and Netscape (1994), which begat Yahoo! (1995) and eBay (1995), which begat Google (1998) and PayPal (1998), which begat YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and LinkedIn (2003) which begat Twitter (2006) and Zynga (2007), which begat Square (2010), Dropbox (2008), and many more.
If you drill down a bit deeper, you see that the founders, investors and early employees generate a tremendous amount of wealth from these big successes. The later employees don’t make as much wealth but they do learn a ton and make enough money that they don’t need to work for someone else and so they strike out on their own and are often funded by the folks who made the big money in the prior startup. That’s how the seed drops from the tree and starts a new tree growing. This continues on and on and on.
If you look at that history of silicon valley, you see that in the forty year history (since Intel’s formation), there have been close to ten cycles of maturation and new company formation, and those cycles are getting shorter and the number of important foundational companies that are formed each cycle are increasing.
This darwinian evolutionary model of startup hub development is not limited to silicon valley. We have seen it play out in other places, most notably Boston, and increasingly in NYC.
And in that case, all bets are off. Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit and who knows what will be the next Silicon Valley.
But of course, all of this is conjecture. History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Chrome Becomes World’s No. 1 Browser
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/05/21/1544243/google-chrome-becomes-worlds-no-1-browser
“Just six months after Google Chrome eclipsed Mozilla’s Firefox to become the world’s second most popular Web browser, Chrome finally surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on Sunday to become the most-used Web browser in the world, according to Statcounter.”
“IE is seeing significant drop-offs in usage while Chrome continues to rise.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Looking for a Coding Job? Better a Ninja Than a Brogrammer
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/ninja_job/
Companies are looking for ninjas, Jedis, and rock stars, but nobody wants a brogrammer.
That’s according to data compiled by Indeed.com, a job listing website, which tracks a 7,000 percent growth in the number of job listings that include the term ninja over the past six years.
Not so with brogrammer, a recently minted term denoting frat-house coder types who like to do shots and rage the clubs. Indeed.com didn’t find any job postings mentioning brogrammers.
And while companies may think they sound hip by putting out the call for ninjas or Jedis, software engineers shouldn’t make the mistake of actually using these terms on their resumes,
“Jedi‘s probably second place in terms of stupidness,” says Sienkowski.
“Engineers have very serious bullshit detectors,” Sienkowski says. “If a guy calls himself a ninja or a Jedi, he’d better be damned good.”
Sienkowski’s advice? Stick with something simple such as software engineer. That’s what the pros do.
“Guru was out there for awhile,” he says. “I think that term faded because guru carried with it, ‘I’m the frigging best.’”
Tomi Engdahl says:
100 Most Valuable Brands: Apple Tops Again; Nokia Disappears
http://allthingsd.com/20120522/100-most-valuable-brands-apple-tops-again-nokia-disappears/
WPP’s Millward Brown published its annual BrandZ study, ranking the world’s leading brands, which are increasingly technology companies. According to the research house, four of the top five global brands and seven of the Top 10 are tech firms.
At $183 billion, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand
IBM ranked second with $116 billion in value. Google, which ranked second last year, this year swapped places with IBM
Microsoft claimed fifth place, ranking below McDonalds — the only non-tech company in the top five.
The biggest year-over-year gain also went to a tech company: Facebook, which rose from No. 35 in 2011 to No. 19 in 2012.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top 2 Reasons LinkedIn Is Taking Over the World
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/05/11/top-2-reasons-linkedin-is-taking-over-the-world/
Think about it in terms of job search and hiring, one of LinkedIn’s most popular uses. Even in this era, almost 50% of people say they got their job through personal connections and networking. LinkedIn allows for personal connection at a distance. When you get someone’s resume on LinkedIn, you also get a lot of other information that you’d otherwise only get by meeting him or her – you can even see how many degrees of separation you are from that person. It ‘feels’ personal. And you can get those resumes from all over the world.
Voila: Personal + global business.
The same is true in the area of sales and customer acquisition.
LinkedIn can offer that: a fairly 3-D connection with a business and the people who operate it and sell their wares to you…anywhere in the world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VCs’ next big things: Big data, drugs, and education
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57439706-93/vcs-next-big-things-big-data-drugs-and-education/
Five of the most influential tech investors, including Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, highlight their top 10 trends for the next five years during a panel discussion.
Bing’s digitalization of education also hit a high note. The Kleiner Perkins partner said digitalization is the first step to addressing many issues. Bing, who is in charge of the firm’s social-media investments, did not hold back on his opinion of the current education system. He said parents use school as a “babysitter,” and that people in the middle class go into teaching because “they don’t know what else to do.”
“For digital natives, public schools are jails,” he said.
Not surprisingly, Thiel had big ideas, with his most popular one of the night being the growing trend of bioinformatics, which uses computers to revolutionize the creation of pharmaceutical drugs. The co-founder of PayPal, the Libertarian Thiel has been vocal about pushing Silicon Valley to be more innovative.
Tomi Engdahl says:
9-year-old’s blog shames school into changing food
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57439703-71/9-year-olds-blog-shames-school-into-changing-food/
Martha Payne is disappointed by the food her school serves her. So she begins to write about it. Her blog gains the attention of TV chef Jamie Oliver. Just a few posts cause national uproar.
So today we have learned that the power of publicity is very strong. And if you want to get something done you have to get noticed. You have to blog about it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Browser choice: A thing of the past?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57439936-93/browser-choice-a-thing-of-the-past/
Devices using iOS and the future Windows RT hobble third-party browsers. Despite some good reasons for doing so, the change could undermine browser competition.
Like to pick your browser? Beware, because new mobile devices threaten to stifle the competitive vigor of the market for Web browsers on PCs.
On personal computers running Windows, Macs, and Linux, you can pick from a variety of browsers, finding the best combination of user interface, performance, expansion, customization, and other attributes.
But on a host of devices ranging from today’s iPhones to tomorrow’s Windows RT tablets, though, things are very different. The idea that the browser is a feature of the operating system — an idea Microsoft floated to defend against an antitrust attack in the 1990s regarding the link between Internet Explorer and Windows — has boomeranged back.
Although many new devices technically can accommodate other browsers besides those that come with the operating system, those third-party browsers won’t always get the full privileges and thus power of the built-in browser.
The organization that cares the most about this matter is Mozilla, whose founding purpose is to keep the Web open and whose Firefox browser is today at a significant disadvantage when it comes to spreading beyond personal computers
There are real technical reasons that curtailing browser privileges can makes sense.
Thus, when an underlying operating system such Windows, iOS, or Linux grants full privileges to a browser, it’s extending a lot of trust when it comes to security, reliability, power consumption, and other factors.
That’s why Microsoft clamped down with its new Metro interface that debuts with Windows 8 and its sibling for ARM-based devices, Windows RT. “The Metro style application model is designed from the beginning to be power-friendly,” Microsoft said in one blog post, and for IE, Microsoft is working to head off security problems.
The sticking point for Mozilla and Google is that Microsoft’s own browser gets the deeper privileges.
And because plenty of software, especially mobile device software, uses browser engines as a part of its user interface, browsers are really becoming part of the operating system. Metro, for example, offers Microsoft’s browser engine as a way to let programmers more easily write software that works on multiple devices.
Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android also permit apps to use Web technology behind the scenes.
For Google to bring Chrome to iOS, it likely would have to either use Apple’s version of WebKit rather than its own or, less likely, rely on a proxy server.
Windows Phone 7.x shares similar restrictions: other browsers are technically possible but not permitted to spread their wings fully, and programmers can build new browser interfaces on Internet Explorer.
Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Windows Phone 7, said last year that Microsoft doesn’t bar other browsers from Windows Phone but said it would have to be written using Microsoft’s higher-level programming techniques.
“If you can write a browser in Silverlight or XAML, you could submit it to the market,” Sullivan told
One of the central issues of browser restrictions is a programming approach called just-in-time compilation. Modern browsers running JavaScript applications use JIT compilers to convert high-level JavaScript software into fast, low-level native instructions for a particular processor.
To do that, however, the browser must have an important power: to be able to create the low-level code then tell the computer that it can execute the code. Marking the memory where the code is stored as executable, though, is a significant step when it comes to security.
Windows 8 and Windows RT uses a newer interface called WinRT that doesn’t come with the ability to mark code as executable. On x86 machines, Microsoft made an exception, so that third-party browsers running on Metro will be able to use Win32. But on ARM-based systems using Windows RT, it hasn’t made that exception, so only IE gets access to Win32.
That means no JIT for third-party browsers on Windows RT, which in turn means undoing much of the progress that’s been made in recent years in accelerating JavaScript. And nobody wants to use JavaScript-heavy Web pages and Web applications these days.
The reason JavaScript program size has exploded is because browsers can shoulder a heavier burden.
As Nokia Chief Executive Stephen Elop is fond of saying these days, competition has become a war of ecosystems. He’s right.
It’s not enough to have a nice piece of hardware or a nice operating system. Today, there’s a rush toward vertical integration,
A browser is one key piece of this stack of technology, so it’s no surprise it’s become so competitive.
A browser is the gateway to online services, for starts. Google has those services in abundance, with Microsoft charging as fast as it can down the same path. Controlling the browser can ensure people have the Web technologies — Google’s Native Client or Dart programming languages, for example — a company believes necessary to make those services work well.
That’s where Mozilla gets worried, though
Google’s Chrome OS and Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko (B2G) don’t even give the option of another browser, of course, because their operating system is the browser.
And the Web simply is too broad today for developers to target any single browser except in some unusual conditions.
Now, in addition to real browser competition on PCs, programmers must contend with Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android, IE on Windows, and other contenders such as Amazon’s Silk on Kindle Fire tablets.
That diversity ensures that, even you’re locked into a particular device’s browser, at least the Web overall won’t be.
Tomi Engdahl says:
President Obama orders federal agencies to optimize sites for smartphones and tablets
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040486/president-obama-federal-agencies-mobile-web-order
President Obama has issued a directive to urge major government agencies to focus on the “growing mobile revolution.” In a note issued by The White House this week, Obama says “it is time for the Federal Government to do more” to assist American people using Government services on smartphones or tablets. ”
A new strategy, entitled “Digtital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People,” was issued this week with a 12-month roadmap for agencies to implement mobile friendly services.
Obama believes the use of technology is “fundamentally transforming” how American people do business and the steps to focus on mobile and web-based technologies will serve as a strategy to deliver information in new ways to American citizens.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No, Google’s Chrome isn’t the world’s leading browser – yet: see our map
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/may/22/google-chrome-isnt-world-leading-browser
Claims that Google Chrome has passed Internet Explorer turn out to be wrong according to Statcounter’s data – but it won’t be long. Firefox turns out to have a surprising dominance on our map, though
The data for the “world” region on StatCounter for the month so far shows IE just ahead, at 32.42% against Chrome’s 32.29%. That share varies by day as well, because a number of people use IE at work and then Chrome at home.
It’s a remarkable triumph for Google’s browser, which was only launched in September 2008
Here’s the world map, country by country, drawn from the StatCounter data. IE is blue; Firefox is brown; Chrome is green.
You might expect that Chrome would enjoy its strongest position, and have taken the lead, in the US – since that is after all Google’s home.
In fact, according to Statcounter, IE is the leader in the US and Canada. On reflection, that makes sense, since those countries will have the largest and oldest installed base of PCs, and those are most likely to be corporate, and locked down to using IE.
n fact the “regional” breakdown according to StatCounter for May is as follows:
Worldwide: IE 32.4%, just ahead of Chrome 32.3%; Firefox 25.4%,
Africa: Firefox 40.6%, Chrome 29.9%, IE 23.6%
North America: IE 38.3%, Chrome 25.3%, Firefox 21.9%. (It’s also the only region with an appreciable Safari usage, at 12.5%.)
South America: Chrome 49.4%, IE 26.6%, Firefox 21.4%
Europe: Firefox 30.7%, Chrome 29.4%, IE 28.5% (the closest three-way fight)
Asia: Chrome 37.6%, IE 32.5%, Firefox 24.3%
Oceania (Australia/Pacific): IE 34.9%, Chrome 25.5%, Firefox 22.5%.
Antarctica: Firefox 75.1%, IE 15.6%, Chrome 5.8%
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Facebook’s Timeline is like genital herpes
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57442141-71/how-facebooks-timeline-is-like-genital-herpes/
A film that spoofs the TV ads for Valtrex shows how Facebook’s Timeline tries to dominate your life. But you can manage it. No, really. You can.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Startup Skips IE Support, Claims $100,000 Savings
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/1222235/startup-skips-ie-support-claims-100000-savings
“Guess what — you don’t have to support Microsoft’s IE web browser any more to build a successful website. In fact, you might just be able to save yourself a pile of cash if you avoid IE altogether.”
Evidently, no one complained about the lack of IE support either.
Skip Internet Explorer for Web Dev. Save $100,000
http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/skip-internet-explorer-for-web-dev.-save-100000.html
Case in point – I read an interesting story today in Canada’s National Post about a new startup that is avoiding developing for IE since it costs more money.
“To save more than $100,000, 4ormat decided to skip Internet Explorer, opting to only allow users to access its service through Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome browsers,” the article states.
Even better is the fact that the company got few complaints — meaning that IE support isn’t a big deal anymore.
This is fantastic news for Linux users (who can’t run IE) and good news overall that the hegemony of IE is now a thing of the past.
How to start a business when you have no money
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/05/25/how-to-start-a-business-when-you-have-no-money/
The company made an important strategic decisions as a result of its bootstrapped model. To save more than $100,000, 4ormat decided to skip Internet Explorer, opting to only allow users to access its service through Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.
“What’s more important is to prove that this is a product people will use and want,” Mr. Rooney said, adding the decision to scrap a major browser was validated when no users complained about the lack of compatibility.
Ottawa-based Shopify Inc. — a platform that allows users to build an online store — has embraced this “democratization” of entrepreneurship.
“I don’t have to go and build some huge brick-and mortar-retail store. I can sell to a global audience, there’s no rent I have to pay, there’s no payroll,” said Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief platform officer.
Founded in 2005, Shopify bootstrapped for years before taking financing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google introduces a new display business trends report for publishers
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/05/29/google-introduces-a-new-display-business-trends-report-for-publishers/
Advertising on the web is certainly at a crossroads. With huge companies like Facebook figuring out how to monetize its userbase, trends in display ads are more important than they’ve ever been.
Google, via its purchase of DoubleClick, has launched a new report called “Display Business Trends: Publisher Edition” to shed some light on what’s working in online advertising, and more importantly, what’s not.
Some of these trends include the death of the 468×60 banner ad, which now only accounts for 3% of Google’s ad impressions. Also, the company says that mobile is continuing to explode as “mobile web impressions on the Ad Exchange and AdSense platforms increasing by 250% from the third to fourth quarter in 2011.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Youtube head blames slow adoption of HTML5 on cost and fragmentation
Says consumers are unaware of the capabilities of technology
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2181328/youtube-head-blames-slow-adoption-html5-cost-fragmentation
GOOGLE’S EXECUTIVE in charge of Youtube, Andrey Doronichev has said that many issues are affecting the take-up of HTML5, and he cited concerns about cost and fragmentation as well as consumer ignorance.
Doronichev said that HTML5 is still too costly to use, even though it allows developers to write apps for multiple platforms.
“The key problem with HTML5 is cost,” said Doronichev during a panel discussion at the Open Mobile Summit.
“Building apps with HTML5 is its own skill, it’s harder than IOS.”
The Youtube chief also cited distribution as another key problem facing businesses looking to use HTML5 to develop apps, and this is also causing web users to remain unsure what the platform can provide.
“The app has to work across websites on different browsers so browser fragmentation is an issue” said Doronichev.
“Distribution is another major problem, where to find it. Consumers don’t get HTML apps as there is no single place to go for the apps.”
“I don’t know who will win the majority payment market share. At the moment its Apple but in the future I don’t know, it could be something new,” said Doronichev.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In Ad Network Nightmare, Microsoft Making ‘Do Not Track’ Default for IE 10
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/ie10-do-not-track/
Microsoft announced Thursday that the next version of its browser, IE 10, will ship with the controversial “Do Not Track” feature turned on by default, a first among major browsers, creating a potential threat to online advertising giants.
That includes one of Microsoft’s chief rivals — Google.
The change could also threaten the still-nascent privacy standard, and prompt an ad industry revolt against it.
Do Not Track doesn’t attempt to block cookies — instead it sends a message to every website you visit saying you prefer not to be tracked. That flag is currently optional for sites and web advertising firms to obey, but it’s gaining momentum with Twitter embracing it last week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Online Social Networks Can Be Tipped By Less Than 1% of Their Population
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/04/1710206/online-social-networks-can-be-tipped-by-less-than-1-of-their-population
“A new algorithm developed by researchers at West Point seems to break new ground for viral marketing practices in online social networks”
the new West Point algorithm can find a set of individuals in the network that can initiate a social cascade – a progressive series of ‘tipping’ incidents — which leads to everyone in the social network adopting the new behavior. The good news for viral marketers is that this set of individuals is often very small – a sample of the Friendster social network can be influenced when only 0.8% of the initial population is seeded.
Sina Whittle says:
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Tomi Engdahl says:
How Facebook and Google manage users who hate every redesign
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/social-web/how-facebook-and-google-manage-users-who-hate-every-redesign/article4239399/
Jon Wiley, the lead designer behind Google’s home page, is used to taking heat any time he fiddles with the search giant’s iconic stark-white design – no matter how small the change may be.
For web designers, particularly those working for large, popular sites that have legions of repeat visitors, it’s a major headache: it seems there’s no pleasing an audience of web surfers who are perfectly content with the status quo.
“I think any design change I’ve ever made there’s always someone, whether in Google or outside of Google, for which that change is controversial,” Mr. Wiley said.
“Every single time I make a change to Google’s search there’s probably a group of people larger than my hometown (Austin, Tex., population 790,000) who are grumpy about it. But conversely, there’s a huge number, a much larger number of people, who are pleased by the change. (Although) maybe not initially.”
While the likes of Facebook and Google will say that they listen to all user feedback, they also admit those comments aren’t the biggest influencer of design changes. They respond to the cold, hard numbers.
“At the end of the day, we basically do a lot more data (collection) and testing on … how we think our product is performing and what the metrics are that we should be looking at, and we focus more on that than how reporters look at something or how it’s reviewed,” Mr. Vijayvergiya said.
“There’s a natural human inclination to resist change, it’s well documented. We find our comfort zones and get comfortable,” Mr. Wiley said.
“To see that large companies and corporations are actually using these methods that are deeply scientific in order to come up with better and stronger, more refined design is not a surprise. What is a surprise is that it’s happened so quickly, only five years ago it was much more experimental.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mobile Advertising:
The $20B Opportunity Mirage
http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/06/10/mobile-advertising-the-20b-opportunity-mirage/
There are a lot of questions left to be answered about Facebook’s IPO fiasco, but one thing we know is this: As consumers shift their use of Facebook from PCs to smartphones, investors worry about lower mobile advertising revenues. Is this a temporary situation that will be remedied when usage patterns settle, or do investors have a right to be concerned? Must the advertising industry learn to adapt to a permanently leaner income stream from smartphones?
$20B is a big number, and it got me thinking. How is it possible that the industry’s richest and most sophisticated players are unable to grab such a big pile of money? They have the brains and the computers, they’re aware of the situation…Is there a deeper problem?
A too-easy answer is the market’s age: Mobile advertising is still in its infancy. But that’s an indefensible excuse: The first iPhones shipped in late June 2007, the Smartphone 2.0 era is now five years old.
Now we have advertising on smartphones, and we’ve fallen into a comfortable, predictable rut: “It’s just like Web advertising on the PC, shrunk to fit.” We see the same methods, the same designs, the same business models, wedged onto a smaller screen.
PC advertising has successfully navigated different screen sizes.
Of course, there’s more to the smartphone misunderstanding than the fairly obvious screen size problem. There’s also a matter of how we use our computing devices.
When we sit down in front of a laptop or desktop screen, our attention is (somewhat) focused and our time is (reasonably) committed.
With smartphones, we’re on the move, we’re surrounded by people, activities, real-world attractions and diversions. As yet another Mary Meeker presentation suggests, time spent on mobile devices is fragmented:
Business Insider features an InMobi report on mobile ads, with the following comment [emphasis mine]:
Those ads were served across 6 billion mobile devices. That’s less than $1 per device, per year—a tiny sum. That tells you how far mobile advertising has to go, and how massive it will become in the next five years.
The dollar-per-device statement is a fact, the assumption of “massive” growth is wishful thinking.
If the industry hasn’t cracked the mobile advertising code after five years of energetic and skillful work it’s because there is no code to crack. Together, the small screen, the different attention modes, the growing concerns about privacy create an insurmountable obstacle.
The “$20B Opportunity” is a mirage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web ads hit first-quarter record with $8.4B
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57450963-93/web-ads-hit-first-quarter-record-with-$8.4b/
Internet advertising, mostly from text-based ads, reaches an all-time high for the first quarter.
More advertisers are flocking to the Web to court buyers, according to the Associated Press. First quarter results for Internet advertising revenue are in and they’re record high — reaching $8.4 billion.
According to the Associated Press, the majority of the revenue comes from Google and other text-based ads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Says the Facebook Ads It Didn’t Sell Work Great
http://allthingsd.com/20120612/facebook-says-the-facebook-ads-it-didnt-sell-work-great/
Here’s Facebook’s retort to people who say Facebook ads don’t work: A study that says people who see brand messages on the site spend more money on those brands, right away.
The catch: The study focuses on “earned media” — the messages that Facebook users share with each other, not the ones brands pay Facebook to promote.
Here’s Facebook’s retort to people who say Facebook ads don’t work: A study that says people who see brand messages on the site spend more money on those brands, right away.
The catch: The study focuses on “earned media” — the messages that Facebook users share with each other, not the ones brands pay Facebook to promote.
Facebook says it also has evidence that “premium” ads — the ones advertisers actually paid Facebook to promote — are also working.
Facebook’s retort: It says it has measured more than 60 ad campaigns in the last couple of years, using a variety of measurement services, and has seen 70 percent of its advertisers score a 3x return on their investment.
The fact that the main comScore study focuses on ads that don’t make any money for Facebook isn’t great news for Facebook. But it’s not terrible news, either.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Technology Promotes World Peace
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/233201/how-technology-promotes-world-peace
‘As the global economy has become more integrated, states have greater interest in cooperating and less interest in conflict, which can lead to a kind of mutually assured economic destruction,’
This economic inter-dependence, the theory goes, promotes peace, but technological power is also cooperative in this way, perhaps even more so.
Like economics, technology doesn’t just increase cooperation, it is the cooperation. ‘The increasingly integrated global system is shaping the states within it, much as individual powers shape the system. The question is thus not who controls technology, but the way in which we develop, guide, and control it collectively.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Smart People Are Stupid
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/2148229/why-smart-people-are-stupid
here’s a good piece by Jonah Lehrer at the New Yorker about why smart people are often more likely to make cognitive errors than stupid people. The article examines research about the shortcuts that our brains take while answering questions, and explains why even the smartest people take these shortcuts too.
Why Smart People Are Stupid
Posted by Jonah Lehrer
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html
When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.
“people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.”
Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.
In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.
And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse.
What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top Startup Businesses for 2012
http://www.businessfinancestore.com/2012/02/02/top-startup-businesses-for-2012/
A recent IBIS World research study reviewed the best industries for your next startup
According to Brian Bueno, economic research analyst at IBIS World, the economy beginning to stabilize and other conditions such as job growth, credit conditions, and consumer spending will put “more money in the pockets of consumers and various opportunities for new businesses.”
If you’re ready to start a business and want to improve your chances of success, read the descriptions below of which are the up and coming industries of 2012
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aussie Online Retailer Impose IE7 Tax
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/14/0253237/aussie-online-retailer-impose-ie7-tax
“Online retailer Kogan will impose a new tax on its customers that visit its website using Microsoft’s outdated Internet Explorer 7 web browser, which means they will spend 6.8 percent more than customers on browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.”
web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7. “It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions,” Mr Kogan said.
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually. They’ve been campaigning for people to stop using v7
IE 7 is not standards compliant. So, therefore, IE 7 is proprietary internet graphical interface, that can display content from HTTP servers, that is encoded using microsofts proprietary content protocol…..which may be similar, but is not HTML/CSS.
Microsoft chose to do this, in order to try and leverage msHTML into the open internet. They failed. However, the mess they left is still around. Why shouldn’t online retailers charge more to customers who insist in using proprietary clients, to cover the cost of converting the standards compliant HTML, to the Microsoft format?
Wouldnt it just be as effective to block IE7, or stop making effort to code for it ?
No, ‘cos that wouldn’t get you the free publicity of being on /., boing boing etc
Tomi Engdahl says:
The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_abtesting/
At Google—whose rise as a Silicon Valley powerhouse has done more than anything else to spread the A/B gospel over the past decade—engineers ran their first A/B test on February 27, 2000. They had often wondered whether the number of results the search engine displayed per page, which then (as now) defaulted to 10, was optimal for users. So they ran an experiment. To 0.1 percent of the search engine’s traffic, they presented 20 results per page; another 0.1 percent saw 25 results, and another, 30.
In 2011 the company ran more than 7,000 A/B tests on its search algorithm. Amazon.com, Netflix, and eBay are also A/B addicts, constantly testing potential site changes on live (and unsuspecting) users.
Today, A/B is ubiquitous, and one of the strange consequences of that ubiquity is that the way we think about the web has become increasingly outdated. We talk about the Google homepage or the Amazon checkout screen, but it’s now more accurate to say that you visited a Google homepage, an Amazon checkout screen. What percentage of Google users are getting some kind of “experimental” page or results when they initiate a search? Google employees I spoke with wouldn’t give a precise answer—”decent,” chuckles Scott Huffman, who oversees testing on Google Search.
Use of a technique called multivariate testing, in which myriad A/B tests essentially run simultaneously in as many combinations as possible, means that the percentage of users getting some kind of tweak may well approach 100 percent, making “the Google search experience” a sort of Platonic ideal: never encountered directly but glimpsed only through imperfect derivations and variations.
Still, despite its widening prevalence, the technique is not simple. It takes some fancy technological footwork to divert user traffic and rearrange a site on the fly; segmenting users and making sense of the results requires deep knowledge of statistics.
This is a barrier for any firm that lacks the resources to create and adjudicate its own tests. In 2006 Google released its Website Optimizer, which provided a free tool for anyone who wanted to run A/B tests. But the tool required site designers to create full sets of code for both A and B—meaning that nonprogrammers (marketing, editorial, or product people) couldn’t run tests without first taxing their engineers to write multiple versions of everything.
In 2009 this remained a problem in need of a solution. After the Obama campaign ended, Siroker was left amazed at the efficacy of A/B testing but also at the paucity of tools that would make it easily accessible.
Siroker joined forces with another ex-Googler, named Pete Koomen, and they launched a startup with the goal of bringing A/B tools to the corporate masses, dubbing it Optimizely.
Unlike the earlier A/B tools, they designed Optimizely to be usable by nonprogrammers, with a powerful graphical interface that lets clients drag, resize, retype, replace, insert, and delete on the fly. Then it tracks user behavior and delivers results.
By subjecting all these decisions to the rule of data, A/B tends to shift the whole operating philosophy—even the power structure—of companies that adopt it. A/B is revolutionizing the way that firms develop websites and, in the process, rewriting some of the fundamental rules of business.
Choose everything.
Give us 10 percent of your traffic and test the results against PayPal in real time. It was an almost entirely risk-free way for the startup to prove itself, and it paid off.
Data makes the call.
Google insiders, and A/B enthusiasts more generally, have a derisive term to describe a decisionmaking system that fails to put data at its heart: HiPPO—”highest-paid person’s opinion.” As Google analytics expert Avinash Kaushik declares, “Most websites suck because HiPPOs create them.”
The risk is making only tiny improvements.
One consequence of this data-driven revolution is that the whole attitude toward writing software, or even imagining it, becomes subtly constrained. A number of developers told me that A/B has probably reduced the number of big, dramatic changes to their products. They now think of wholesale revisions as simply too risky—instead, they want to break every idea up into smaller pieces, with each piece tested and then gradually, tentatively phased into the traffic.
But this approach, and the mindset that comes with it, has its own dangers. Companies may protect themselves against major gaffes but risk a kind of plodding incrementalism. They may find themselves chasing “local maxima”—places where the A/B tests might create the best possible outcome within narrow constraints—instead of pursuing real breakthroughs.
Data can make the very idea of lessons obsolete.
The single biggest evolution in A/B testing over its history is not how pervasive it has become but rather how fast it has become. In the early ’00s, test results were typically delayed 24 hours: You ran a test today, saw the results tomorrow, and learned something—a principle, a rule of thumb—to apply to future designs. This might explain why testing began in marketing teams before it moved to product team
That’s all different today. “Ten years ago you did not have data. Five years ago the best reporting tools were a day behind,” says Yulie Kim, VP of product at the furniture etailer One Kings Lane. “But we’re in a world now where you can’t wait a whole day to get your data.”
The difference with live testing is not just that there is no time to learn and apply lessons. It’s more radical than that: There are no clear lessons to learn, no rules to extract.
The elegant minimalism of Apple’s design has trickled out into the world beyond technology. So it’s fair to ask: Could the scientific rigor of Google’s A/B ethos start making waves outside the web? Is it possible to A/B the offline world? With the rise of big data, some major retailers are embracing the experimental method. Chains will test out store floor plans in a few locations and then implement them nationwide if they boost revenues. Some retail software packages will oversee the rollout of individual products, putting them on a few shelves throughout the system and tracking their sales.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Discrimination Is Never The Answer
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/software-discrimination-never-answer
Last night, as I was perusing social media, a post from a friend caught my attention. It seems that the web-types at Kogan, an online electronics retailer in Australia and the UK, have tired of the additional work required to support Internet Explorer 7, and to even the score, have imposed a 6.8% tax on shoppers using IE7.
While others were celebrating the move, as a Linux user, I was appalled. “What? Appalled? You should be cheering — it’s a master stroke against evil and outdated software!”
No, no it isn’t. It’s discrimination, and of a type that every Linux user has suffered.
I won’t deny that it’s a pain to ensure IE7 compatibility. As a web developer, I know it well. I’m keenly aware of the time I’ve spent fixing sites for IE7, and what it has cost my clients. As a business owner, I’m acutely aware of the cost of accommodating niche sections of the market. I feel the pain.
I understand the allure of a stunt like this — and let’s be honest, with IE7′s market share at 1.5%, this is about publicity, not profit loss
We all run up against a lack of Linux support on a regular basis, and if pressed, the responsible company is guaranteed to reply with a variant of “Sorry, supporting you would cost too much.” What one of us hasn’t heard “We don’t have the resources”, “Linux users aren’t a significant segment of our market”, “We have other development priorities”, and a million other ways of saying “You won’t bring in enough money to be worth our time”?
Cross-platform and cross-browser support is part of the cost of doing business. So are credit card processing fees, employee benefits, and the coffee machine in the break room. Taxing IE7 users because it’s too annoying to support them is as evil as creating IE-only websites that shut out users of Firefox or Chrome. It’s as evil as creating Flash sites that millions of users can’t see. It is the evil of saying “You’d better do what we tell you to, or you’re going to suffer for it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Depressives Surf the Web
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/how-depressed-people-use-the-internet.html?pagewanted=all
In a study to be published in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, we and our colleagues found that students who showed signs of depression tended to use the Internet differently from those who showed no symptoms of depression.
There were two major findings. First, we identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression. In other words, we found a trend: in general, the more a participant’s score on the survey indicated depression, the more his or her Internet usage included these (rather technical-sounding) features — for instance, “p2p packets,” which indicate high levels of sharing files (like movies and music).
Our second major discovery was that there were patterns of Internet usage that were statistically high among participants with depressive symptoms compared with those without symptoms. That is, we found indicators: styles of Internet behavior that were signs of depressive people.
Another example: the Internet usage of depressive people tended to exhibit high “flow duration entropy” — which often occurs when there is frequent switching among Internet applications like e-mail, chat rooms and games. This may indicate difficulty concentrating. This finding, too, is consistent with the psychological literature: according to the National Institute of Mental Health, difficulty concentrating is also a sign of depressive symptoms among students.
What are the practical applications of this research? We hope to use our findings to develop a software application that could be installed on home computers and mobile devices. It would monitor your Internet usage and alert you when your usage patterns might signal symptoms of depression. This would not replace the function of mental health professionals, but it could be a cost-effective way to prompt people to seek medical help early. It might also be a tool for parents to monitor the mood-related Internet usage patterns of their children.
Gertrudis Heinecke says:
You should check out http://smoke-shop.co , it has some interesting stuff on there and is an excellend resource.
Tomi Engdahl says:
From Russia with likes: Kremlin to launch Facebook-style social network
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/19/russia-kremilin-facebook-social-network
With the internet genie fully out of the bottle in Russia, Chinese-style attempts at top-down control are doomed. So officials have come up with a plan
Social networks have been the tool of choice for opposition activists since street demonstrations broke out in December, but the popularity of the internet in Russia means any Chinese-style attempt to assert control from above would be doomed.
So the authorities appear to have been forced to play the socially networked activists at their own game.
The Kremlin is planning to create its own Facebook-style social network, where users with personal accounts will be able to upload content and discuss the issues of the day.
Government minister Mikhail Abyzov told the Izvestia newspaper that the network, which is intended to go live in June and to attract private capital, would be created from an existing site called russiawithoutidiots.rf. Set up earlier this year with the support of the then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, the site allows users to complain about civil servants.
“If the government creates some form of social network, then people will not join it,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services and the internet. “It is not realistic.”
“If the authorities do not like what is happening on the internet there is only one way of resisting,” Putin said when asked his opinion on the internet last year. “On the same internet platform you have to propose different answers … and collect a larger amount of supporters.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
They Work! Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/19/facebook-mobile-ads/
How will Facebook monetize mobile? Its organic-seeming Sponsored Stories ad format may be the answer. Mobile Sponsored Stories are getting over 13 times the click-through rates and earn 11.2 times the money per impression (eCPM) on mobile compared to all of Facebook’s desktop ads, and 1.93 times the CTR and 2.65 times the eCPM of Sponsored Stories on the web in the two weeks since Facebook began selling them separate from web ads.
Much of the doubt surrounding Facebook’s IPO came from evidence that the social network’s user base was shifting away from the web to mobile, where Facebook only began testing ads in February. On the web users are shown up to seven ads per page and some spend big sums on social games, but on mobile they’re only shown a couple of ads per day and few pay for games on Facebook’s HTML5 gaming platform.
Facebook Ads Performance: Mobile vs Web
According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.
Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.
Other sources in the ad industry confirm the high performance of Facebook mobile ads. Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor.
Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile.
There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.
And advertisers are lining up to buy them, says AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal, “By allowing advertisers to show ads only on mobile – Facebook is definitely going to be able to generate more revenue. We have seen a ton of interest from advertisers who want to advertise just on mobile.”
And Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Call for Ray Bradbury to be honoured with internet error message
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/22/ray-bradbury-internet-error-message-451
A new status code to reflect internet censorship could be named after Ray Bradbury’s most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury’s fiction looks set to enter the structure of the internet, after a software developer has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451.
Tim Bray, a fan of Bradbury’s writing, is recommending to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which governs such choices, that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons the user is given the status code 451.
There are already a host of HTTP status codes, from the common 404 Not Found to 504 Gateway Timeout. The 451 idea follows a blogpost from Terence Eden, who found that his ISP had been ordered to censor the Pirate Bay when he was given an HTTP 403 Forbidden message, meaning that “the server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfil it”. In fact, Eden writes on his blog, it was not Pirate Bay that was preventing access but the government
“We can never do away entirely with legal restrictions on freedom of speech. On the other hand, I feel that when such restrictions are imposed, they should be done so transparently; for example, most civilised people find Britain’s system of superinjunctions loathsome and terrifying,” Bray told the Guardian.
The Internet Engineering Task Force is likely to look at his proposal when it next meets in late July, Bray said. “This is a smart and conservative group and it’s possible that someone will point out a fatal flaw in the idea, or that while such a status code is sensible, the number ’451′ is inappropriate for technical reasons. I’d be mildly surprised, but not too terribly; designing the internet is hard,”
It’s not clear whether Bradbury would have welcomed a proposal to honour his memory in an internet error code. He said in an interview in 2009 that “the internet is a big distraction”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Everywhere, people aspire to simplicity. In their lives, at work, and at every interaction.
Armed with this mission, we have started to simplify how we work, and how we’re organized. To build better products, we need dedicated product teams bringing together the best engineers, the most creative designers, and phenomenal product managers.
Mobile is simpler by definition. Starting product designs from mobile will force the elimination of features introducing unneeded complexity.
Source: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2012/06/simplifying-how-we-work/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cdn Fed Court Says No Copyright Infringement For Linking, Posting Several Paragraphs from Article
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6558/125/
The Federal Court of Canada has issued an important decision involving copyright and posting content online.
Warman and the National Post sued the site over the appearance of two articles and an inline link to photograph that appeared on the forum. The court dismissed all three claims.
In this case, the article was 11 paragraphs long. The reproduction on the Free Dominion site included the headline, three complete paragraphs and part of a fourth. The court ruled that this amount of copying did not constitute a “substantial part” of the work and therefore there was no infringement.
The court added that in the alternative, the reproduction of the work was covered by fair dealing, concluding that a large and liberal interpretation of news reporting would include posts to the discussion forum.
The court’s discussion is important for several reasons. First, the finding that several paragraphs do not constitute a substantial part of the work
Second, the court’s conclusion is critically important to online chat forums, blogs, and other venues where copying several paragraphs from an article is quite common.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Google Became a $2 Billion Advertiser
http://adage.com/article/news/google-a-2-billion-advertiser/235572/
Search Leader and Three Other Rulers of the Internet Domain Are Now Among Biggest Ad Spenders
Google this: The titan of search last year doubled its global ad and promotion spending to $1.5 billion.
Estimated U.S. ad spending for Google and Motorola topped $1 billion in 2011, placing the combined company No. 34 on Ad Age’s ranking of the 100 Leading National Advertisers. This marks Google’s debut on the list.
Google is a big ad seller; advertising accounted for 96% of 2011′s $38 billion worldwide revenue.
Google is also a big ad buyer.
Advertising and promotion represents a growing portion of Google’s sales and marketing expenses.
Ad and promo spending as a percentage of revenue reached 4.1% in 2011, up from 2.6% in 2010 and 1.5% in 2009.
Google is one of four internet-based companies to make this year’s 100 LNA ranking. The other three:
Amazon
EBay,
Expedia
Tomi Engdahl says:
Scoop: Microsoft bets on WebRTC for Skype’s browser future
http://gigaom.com/2012/06/26/skype-webrtc-web-client/
Skype is taking first steps towards a browser-based future, and it is doing so by embracing a key technology open sourced by Google last year: New job postings on Microsoft’s website suggest that WebRTC will be at the core of Skype’s next generation messaging architecture. This is a big step for Skype.
Microsoft has been working on bringing Skype to the browser for some time. First job offers searching for relevant talent popped up earlier this year, but a number of new postings published in June reveal that WebRTC will play a key role in these efforts.
WebRTC is a media signaling framework that was open sourced by Google in May of 2011. To put it in a nutshell, WebRTC enables real-time communication, including voice and video chat, in the browser without the need to download any plugin.
WebRTC is based on technology Google acquired when it bought VoIP technology provider Global IP Solutions two years ago, and makes use of the VP8 video codec
Google wants to use WebRTC to power the next generation of Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts, which until now require users to download a plugin. The company has been adding WebRTC tech to Chrome
But Google doesn’t want to do this alone, and there are active efforts to advance WebRTC as a web standard under way both at the IETF as well as the W3C. These efforts are being supported by Mozilla and Opera, both of which have been adding WebRTC to their own browsers. WebRTC has also gotten some support from Microsoft
http://www.webrtc.org/
Skype has been taking steps towards open source in standards-based solutions over the years. For example, its group video chats are now based on VP8, the open source codec at the core of Google’s WebM video format.
Tomi Engdahl says:
the recruiter honeypot
http://www.ewherry.com/2012/06/the-recruiter-honeypot/
Based upon two years of non-scientific research, here’s what you should know…
The Recruiting Crisis
The honeypot idea emerged slowly, “If only I weren’t a founder! Which recruiters would have contacted me as an engineer?” I stewed on the idea of posting my resume online with a fictitious name for days and then one sleepless night, without telling anyone, I woke up and posted a small three-page website with an about page, resume, and blog for a supposed Pete London whose interests and engineering persona mirrored my own except he wasn’t a founder.
My hopes sank pretty quickly. PeteLondon.com sat alone in Internet ether for weeks with absolutely nada activity. I was about to pull down the entire site when I thought – I’ll just post the resume on LinkedIn as a last resort.
After two and a half years, I learned less about recruiting recruiters and more about recruiting engineers. Here are my eight biggest take-aways to finding the best talent online…
Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn
Lesson 2: Fear the Silicon Valley long tail
Lesson 3: The recruiting landscape isn’t just filled with recruiters
Lesson 4: Can a start-up rely upon external recruiting?
Lesson 5: Be careful whom you invite into your house
Lesson #6: The most common little white lie is…
Lesson #7: It’s time to buy more hoodies
Lesson #8: Who’s the best in the valley?
SUMMARY
Of the 382 recruiters, there was only one recruiter who actually figured it out. To do so, he did one thing that no other recruiter did – picked up the phone and called someone who should have been connected to Pete to ask for an introduction. And that’s where the ruse unraveled. If there were one recruiter I would have partnered with during my toughest hiring crunch ever, it would have been him.
However, that recruiter had also recruited for Meebo the prior year and he shouldn’t have been poaching Pete London from our team. He apologized. In the end, the honeypot ended up identifying the one amazing recruiter I already knew about but couldn’t justify working with again.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firm Threatens To Sue Consumer Websites For Harrassment
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/06/28/0255257/firm-threatens-to-sue-consumer-websites-for-harrassment
“The BBC reports that RLP, a legal firm that sues shoplifters on behalf of retail groups, has shown its ignorance of the Streisand Effect by attempting to censor The Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and other consumer websites.”
Another example how some new mega-powered version of the Peter principle is pushing all the idiots to the heads of these organizations. There seems to be incompetency in the top level of every organization right now.
CAB official accused of harassment by civil recovery firm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18595023
A company that sues shoplifters on behalf of retailers has accused a Citizens Advice Bureau official of organising a campaign of harassment against it.
The firm, Retail Loss Prevention (RLP), has also threatened legal action against several consumer websites because of comments on their forums.
It wants to uncover the identity of internet critics who have called for the company’s business to be disrupted.
The CAB official denies the accusation.
RLP has accused its critics of trying to damage its business in a “vindictive” campaign.
He is the CAB’s policy officer dealing with the civil recovery industry and denies the accusations.
“I don’t plead guilty to either harassment or defamation, and would warmly welcome a police investigation.” Mr Dunstan told the BBC.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Social media takes an hour a day
Social media are primarily used to communicate, entertainment and current affairs knowledge.
Social media is the third most used by the Finnish communications channel. Research in social media spend, on average one hour per day, the study shows Itella.
Most social media used by 15-24 year-olds
Social media is growing in popularity because it offers a wide range of benefits in everyday life, such as opportunities to interact, to make purchasing decisions and fast news transmission.
Source: http://www.3t.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/tyoelama/sosiaalinen_media_vie_tunnin_paivassa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Infographics Are Broken. We Can Do Better.
http://erickschonfeld.com/2012/06/28/infographics-broken/
nfographics on the web are so bad and so broken. They are everywhere, yet few actually do a decent job of conveying information (click on the one at left to see what I mean). Some even argue that they are ruining the Internet. They tend to be formulaic and overreaching, often cobbling together too much information instead of focusing on the one or two nuggets that are truly useful.
There are many reasons why they suck. Primary among those is that they take too long to make, and the underlying data is difficult to assemble. Today, they are driven more by marketing budgets than editorial discretion. Most of them are created by companies and distributed for “free” to blogs and media outlets as a form of PR and viral marketing. The publishers eat them up because it is free content that would otherwise be expensive to produce. Design shops sometimes charge a few thousand dollars to create a single infographic.
And yet people love them because humans are visual creatures. We can absorb more data more quickly by glancing at a chart than scanning the same numbers in a table, or reading through a few paragraphs. Publishers love infographics because readers can’t stop themselves from clicking on them.
What publishers need is a better way to create and present visual data. We need a tool to produce well-designed infographics on our own—quickly, efficiently, and cheaply. And not just one-size-fits-all infographics—all kinds of data visualizations, from simple bar charts to interactive maps and timelines.
But wait. Aren’t there a growing number of startups already tackling this infographic-creation problem? Yes, companies like Visual.ly, Infogr.am, Vizualize.me, Tableau Software, and iCharts are creating tools in this general area. And that’s great. If they can do a better job creating these visualizations, I’d love to work with them. However, all of them currently embrace a bring-your-own-data approach.
Producing a great interactive chart is only half the battle. A platform that taps into existing data and makes it instantly chartable is what is missing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sundar Pichai: Chrome ‘exceptionally profitable’ for Google (q&a)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57463393-93/sundar-pichai-chrome-exceptionally-profitable-for-google-q-a/
Search-ad revenue driven by Google’s browser helps the bottom line, the chief of Google’s browser and online apps business says. With Chrome now on Android and iOS, he’s expecting even more money.