February 8th, 2010
You are currently browsing the articles from Genius Impatience written on February 8th, 2010.
With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.
Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. Bluekiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.
The blueKiwi dashboard allows the community manager to integrate outside feeds—be they RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook—in order to stay on top of external chatter. The “Notebook” shows anything and everything in the blueKiwi community which involves the user. Any chatter which involves the user is threaded in a Facebook status-esque interface, making it simple for users to stay up-to-date on conversations in which they are directly involved.
To ensure the product is being utilized most efficiently, the product has an automated personal assistant, Alice, programmed to make recommendations to community managers in order to keep them on top of important tasks. If part of an online community seems to be slacking in a certain department, Alice will make recommendations to try and increase efficiency. The homepage of blueKiwi also gives suggestions based on analytics to further this goal.
The free version of blueKiwi supports one external community, which can range from customer forums, to channel programs, to developer groups—basically anything where the majority of the users are outside the internal network—but allows unlimited internal groups and external members. Within the community, admins can vary the access privileges of individual members. Internal and External members can see everything which goes on in these groups, or admins can restrict access to only internal members. As conversations continue to grow, admins can change access privileges as well.
blueKiwi was founded in 2006 by Carlos Diaz and Christophe Routhieau. They have raised a total of $12.3 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systemes.
Written by David Diaz on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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Motorola DROID users as a whole are a pretty happy bunch, but after finally getting their first taste of official multi-touch, we can’t help but blame them for wanting a whole lot more. The good news on this front is that Android 2.1 for the DROID will be made available next week, according to Motorola’s Facebook page. Motorola has not detailed what the update will encompass, but here’s what Engadget has been told:
- The current test build is Android 2.1 version 1
- The browser will have multi-touch
- Google Googles is pre-installed
- No visual changes to the homescreen or app drawer
- Active wallpapers aren’t included, but the fancy widgets that made their debut with the Nexus One are
Most of us probably agree that things like multi-touch in the browser are big news, but we can’t help but eagerly wait to see what all the Negative Nancy’s out there have to say about some of the nifty features that will allegedly be left behind. Regardless, we’ll be sure to give you all a shout as soon as the update starts trickling out.
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Written by Michael Bettiol on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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Social networking is filled with people who like to talk. While a majority of the online chatter is simply noise, some individuals, for reasons that vary, have networks of friends, family and colleagues that listen, trust and act on their recommendations. These individuals are known as social influencers. Helping to locate and utilize these social influencers for marketing campaigns, Pursway(formerly Datanetis) announced today that it has secured $6 million in a first round of funding to expand its services in Europe and North America.
Pursway leverages consumer customer databases to target individuals that belong to similar social circles and who have made recent purchases that are followed by those individuals. These identified social influencers can then be targeted for specific marketing messages and campaigns to increase the chances of a return on investment. The company claims to offer a five to 10 times improvement in as little as three months using its patent-pending algorithms and specialized marketing techniques.
According to Ran Shaul, Pursway’s Co-Founder and EVP Customer Solutions, there are typically a small percentage of social influencers (7-15%), but they impact as much as 70% of purchase decisions. By targeting them, consumer companies have a greater chance of marketing effectiveness and acceptance.
Pursway claims customers in the retail, travel, finance and hospitality sectors as well as two major telecommunications providers, including Orange and Vodafone Group. Several companies are also leveraging data driven social analytics for consumer companies, including Media6 and Lotame.
The round of funding, lead by Battery Ventures, will help to establish a new Waltham, Mass. headquarters in the U.S. and a London office in Europe. According to Mass High Tech, the company is looking to hire an additional 10 to 15 people to its 30-person team and was cash flow positive before the round of funding.
Written by Cody Barbierri on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.
Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)
Here’s the full ranking:
Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads
in billions of impressions (comScore)
- Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
- Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
- Facebook: 330 billion
- Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
- AOL: 192 billion
- Google Sites: 7o billion
- eBay: 36 billion
- Glam Media: 25 billion
- Amazon Sites: 22 billion
- United Online: 20 billion
Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.
Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.
Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.
You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.
Written by Erick Schonfeld on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google’s carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).
This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. It doesn’t come as a total surprise though — last week there were reports of a Google job listing for “Phone Support Program Manager, Android/Nexus One” to be based out of its headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
The news was first reported at TMO News, and we’ve gotten a response from a Google spokesperson explaining the company’s logic behind the support number:
By design, we focused initially on providing the best possible customer support through our on-line channel, and our experience in the four weeks since the Nexus One launch enabled us to significantly enhance that on-line support offering. We have been able to address a large majority of customers’ inquiries successfully through on-line support, in combination with phone support from our partners, HTC and T-Mobile. That said, our approach with our new consumer channel is to learn fast and continue to improve, and we have, therefore, also been developing our capabilities to provide a number from Google, 888-48-NEXUS (63987) for live phone support for the Nexus One. Live phone support from Google, combined with an optimized on-line support experience, enables a superior Nexus One customer experience.
In other words, Google probably would have liked to have gotten away with online-only support, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to cut it.
In other news, Google has also announced that the early termination fee (ETF) for the phone is down to $150 from $350 (they’re actually calling it an “equipment recovery fee”). But that’s still on top of T-Mobile’s $200 fee. The drop may have well been spurred by the ETF inquiry recently launched by the FCC.
Written by Jason Kincaid on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn’t have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it’s not the same. And while they still haven’t added comments, tonight they’ve temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies.
While it doesn’t appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they’re going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it’s a photo comment.
To enable it on any post, simply check the box that reads “Let people photo reply” in the Tumblr backend for your blog.
While Tumblr itself doesn’t have a native commenting system, many users choose a third-party commenting option. The Tumblr Staff Blog, for example, uses Disqus.
[top photo via]
Written by MG Siegler on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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I don’t normally blog about gadget hardware, but zoomMediaPlus‘ new zoomIt SD card adapter for iPhone and iPod Touch fills a gaping hole of utility. Not only does it let Apple handset owners look at photos, play music, and read documents off an SD card, it has smart software that optimizes the experience.
When you first connect the adapter, it prompts you onscreen to download a free iPhone app that controls the media on your memory cards. For photos, you have pushbutton options to email them, post them to Flickr, or upload them to your Facebook account. For each of these cases, the app will shrink giant photo files down to an email, Flickr, or Facebook-appropriate size to make transfer from the card to the iPhone or iPod as quick as possible without sacrificing any more image resolution than is necessary. (Apple’s proprietary 30-pin connector speaks standard USB protocol, but isn’t as blazing fast as a full-sized USB port. Plus it’s a serious waste of time to upload full-size photo files you won’t be able to see at full resolution anyway.)
ZoomMediaPlus CEO Chris Fisher told me in a phone call today that the zoomIt will also play any unprotected music or video files on an SD card. So it’ll work with Sandisk’s pre-loaded 1000-song slotMusic cards, but not the DRM-wrapped slotRadio cards. Same for video. If it’s unprotected, it’s possibly playable. But video on SD is much more complicated than the music situation, so I’m wary of overpromising there.
The company takes online orders at $59.95 list, and Fisher says they’ll toss in a 4 gigabyte SD HD card with the first 250 orders. No units in stock at Amazon yet, but my hunch is that will likely change. Fisher says they’re working on enabling future upgrades to the app to play popular forms of DRM-protected music and video. A 16GB card would carry more than enough of my iTunes library, leaving room for me to shoot photos and video onto my iPhone’s built-in memory. I could go for that.
Written by Paul Boutin on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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Ooh, one youthful blogging network takes on another!
Tumblr, the uber-simplified blogging platform that has more than 3 million accounts, kicked off a 48-hour experiment today. It’s letting people reply to others with photos, instead of regular comments or re-blogs.
The blog owner has to turn on the feature by checking “Let people photo reply” every time they publish a post. If a post is photo-enabled, a camera icon will appear in the reader’s dashboard. Then they can just drag-and-drop a photo from their desktop to the icon and upload it instantaneously to reply.
The extra feature is vaguely reminiscent of the core functionality that has powered another microblogging network popular with teens, DailyBooth. DailyBooth is kind of like Twitter for photography. People take a photo of themselves every day or so and can follow and respond to other people’s photo streams. It raised $1 million in October from angel investors.
It’s interesting that the company decided to debut this for just a two-day period. It creates a nice sense of urgency to start experimenting. Tumblr last raised $4.5 million from venture capital firms including Union Square Ventures in December 2008.
Written by Kim-Mai Cutler on February 8th, 2010 with no comments.
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