Facebook and Twitter users today are simply out to get followers, no longer focused on sharing good content. There is just too much noise created by high volume of poor-quality content.
At least that’s what the new social network Pheed is arguing as it places emphasis on providing high-quality content.
“It’s pretty simple, if you allow influencers to charge for content, high quality content will be produced,” Forbes writes. “Pheed enables users to share all forms of digital content, including text, photo, audio, video, and live broadcasts. ‘Pheeders’ then have the option to share for free or at a premium, either by applying a monthly subscription fee to their channel or setting up a pay-per-view live broadcast event.”
Just days after launching the site, Pheed has already seen 350,000 unique visitors. The company says 200 celebs and “taste-makers” have signed up for the service.
“Users can charge anywhere from $1.99 to $34.99 per view, or $1.99 to $34.99 per month. In both cases, the user selects their own pricing and owns all of the content,” explains the article. “Pheed makes money by taking half of the revenue, which covers bandwidth and storage, payment processing, and of course, Pheed’s profits.”
Pheed faces one, potentially large, obstacle: Will people actually pay to view content or subscribe to celeb content?
“Time will tell,” Forbes concludes. “Pheed has a good opportunity to succeed if it stays focused and doesn’t try to become a jack-of-all-trades. For now, it’s safe to say Pheed is a site we should all keep an eye on — its Twitter-with-a-business-model approach stands to seriously impact the social media game.”
Tablets and PCs running the new Windows 8 operating system will have access to video content via Hulu Plus, according to a post on the Hulu blog yesterday.
“Hulu announced that it will be launching its Windows 8 app on October 26, the same day that devices running the Microsoft operating system will finally become available,” reports TechCrunch.
The Hulu app will be tile-based, similar to the styling of Windows 8, and promises to make it simpler to discover and watch TV shows.
“When a user selects an episode, they’ll be treated with a menu of options, like ‘Play’ or ‘Queue,'” explains the post. “Users will also be able to ‘Pin’ shows” to their home screen, and “minimize shows they’re watching into a ‘Snap View’ and multitask, replicating the typical TV watching experience where they’re not watching TV and doing email instead.”
In related news, Engadget reports that Skype is also offering a new version optimized for Windows 8. Skype and Microsoft accounts will be linked so users who log in with their Microsoft ID will already be on Skype, and integration with the People Hub will list an individual’s Skype handle alongside other contact information.
“Just as you can pinch your Live Tiles to zoom out and make them easier to navigate, you can use semantic zoom to sift through a long list of contacts,” notes Engadget of the new functionality. “And, because Skype runs in the background, you can set up your Start Screen so that the Skype Live Tile shows notifications for things like missed calls.”
The free Skype app will be available in the Windows Store starting Friday. Microsoft will likely have more app announcements as it gets ready for this week’s release of Windows 8.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a 3D printing competition called “New York’s Next Top Makers,” intended to strengthen the city’s tradition of innovation.
“The competition will act as a business accelerator for New York City-based entrepreneurs, inventors and makers, who will be judged by a panel of experts as well as the public and will receive assistance on the path to commercialization, including studio space, business support and mentorship from industry experts including Shapeways, Adafruit Industries, and Honeybee Robotics,” the mayor’s website explains.
“This contest will make sure New York City stays on the cutting edge of 3D printing, an exciting new industry with virtually unlimited potential, and which could completely revolutionize manufacturing,” says Bloomberg. “New York City — the center of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship — is a natural home for Shapeways, and we look forward to seeing what kinds of exciting products — and quality jobs — they can create.”
The competition will progress in four phases: Entrepreneurs will upload pitches of the their proposed products from November 2012 to February 2013. Expert judges will then select five pitches from qualifying entries. There will also be a sixth “people’s choice” entry.
“Over five months, from approximately April 2013 to August 2013, the six selected finalists will participate in a five-month design studio, to further develop their product ideas,” explains the post about the third phase. “During this process they will receive studio space provided by competition sponsor NYDesigns, as well as technical support, materials, access to equipment and mentorship.”
And finally, during the second annual Maker Week in September 2013, judges will award additional cash prizes to the most promising business.
Amazon has tested its Kindles on students in grades from kindergarten to high school and hopes to sell the devices in bulk at a discounted price to school districts, reports Yahoo Finance. Amazon would then profit as districts purchased e-books on the devices.
Amazon has increased its appeal by introducing Whispercast, a “service that lets schools manage fleets of Kindle devices from one online location,” explains the post.
Whispercast allows administrators and teachers to block websites like Facebook from the devices, while also setting up user accounts for students and grouping students by class and grade level.
Jay Marine, VP of Kindle product management explains that Amazon wants “to make it as easy as possible for everyone to own a Kindle device.” But Yahoo Finance says that while Amazon’s mission to convince children to read more is noble, the company’s primary goal is to sell more product.
E-readers provide some tangible benefits for students. The devices are small and light, as opposed to bulky books. This also makes an e-reader less intimidating, as the student may not realize how many pages they are going through as they tap through the pages, rather than flipping them.
However, e-books also have their drawbacks. E-books cannot be resold, which places financial burden on those who rely on the resale of books. Also, it is difficult to study from multiple e-books at once, as people do with physical books.
AOL has launched a beta version of its new Alto email service that works with existing email platforms and promises to “revolutionize how we interact with email,” reports Fast Company.
Bill Wetherell, senior director of UX design at AOL, talks about today’s “inbox fatigue,” which has resulted from a continued lack of innovation.
“Yes, there have been improvements — in search, contacts, storage size — but they’ve been incremental at best, and based on an outmoded architecture of lists, folders, and more lists,” notes the article. “Alto is a radical rethinking of inbox design, and features a stripped-down interface that’s spruced up by visual cues and intuitive navigation tools.”
“In Alto, many messages and files are automatically and neatly aggregated into tiles of common categories: for photos, attachments, social, daily deals, and retail. So, for example, say you get an email offer from Amazon or iTunes — Alto will automatically pull those messages into the retailers stack, seamlessly and without hassle,” Fast Company explains.
“In the social stack, notifications are culled from Twitter, LinkedIn, Path, Facebook, and more. But Alto goes the extra mile to display infographics to help users navigate through fragmented social network updates.”
Users can easily create new stacks and a “skip inbox” function that sends certain emails straight into a stack. The left hand message column has a “people” tab, which shows contact information and a social profile of email correspondents.
“The colors are softer on the eyes than Gmail’s scheme; there is less junk mail; and the myriad icons that normally overwhelm inbox screens (stars, trashcans, checkboxes, numbers) are gone, save a select few that appear upon mousing over a particular message,” suggests the article. “It’s a clean experience reminiscent of your simple, thin iPhone email message list.”
YesVideo converts physical media to digital and allows customers to share indexed footage via their Facebook Timelines. Customers can use the service to digitize old VHS tapes, 8mm, miniDV and photos — and publish to Timeline through a new feature that launched last week.
“You can submit your vintage videos at any of YesVideo’s at CVS/pharmacy, Walgreen’s, and Costco retail locations,” explains Digital Trends. The footage is then shipped to YesVideo where it is digitized and uploaded to the cloud for easy access.
“While YesVideo’s primary focus is its cloud hosting service, the company sends you a DVD copy, alongside the original media,” explains the post. Additionally, YesVideo indexes the video content algorithmically and breaks it into chapters. This offers users the ability to share more manageable clips.
“YesVideo digitizes over 1.5 million videos per year, and with its indexing feature, turns that into approximately somewhere between 75 million and 150 million clips a year,” notes the post.
The company is also planning an open API in order for third-party developers to create new tools.
“This idea that you have all your home videos and access to your extended family’s old home videos and you sit down and log into your Google TV for instance or your Roku box and voila, you’ve got your home videos that you can share with your family or on your mobile device,” says CEO Michael Chang.
Last week, Yelp introduced a new consumer alert label in an effort to to crack down on fake reviews.
“Whenever Yelp catches a business paying a customer or individual for a review, the site will flag that company’s page with a notice that reads, ‘We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews,'” Mashable reports.
The label will remain on the page of an infringing business for 90 days. If the business continues to buy reviews, the notice will stay longer. Additionally, interested users can click on the label to see the fake reviews.
Yelp hopes the initiative will cut down the number of fake reviews by creating a strong disincentive for businesses, but Mashable notes, “It remains to be seen how successful this new effort from Yelp will be.”
“Yelp’s automated review filter is working around the clock to flag these types of biased reviews, and we believe that you deserve the right to know when this type of activity is taking place behind the scenes,” explained the company in a blog post.
The issue of fake reviews is expected to continue in the coming years. According to a report by Gartner, fake responses will rise to 10-15 percent of all social media reviews in 2014.
Amazon is positioned to make up to $1 billion in advertising over the next year, according to Baird Equity Research.
While Facebook “knows who your friends are” and Google “knows what you’re interested in finding on the Internet,” Amazon has the unique advantage of purchase history. This is an immensely valuable item to offer advertisers who want to target people who will actually buy their products.
Amazon can use its user purchase history data to help create targeted advertising on its ad-supported Kindles. Amazon can also use the data for a per-click advertising model on Amazon.com as well as Amazon-owned sites such as Zappos, IMDb, and Diapers.com, reports Wired.
Lisa Utzschneider, VP of global sales for Amazon, explains that Amazon’s advertising could help customers. “If we think about Amazon in two worlds, one world is an Amazon with ads and lower prices. Another world is an Amazon with no ads and higher prices,” she notes. “Which one would we choose?”
Amazon is the sixth most visited site in the U.S. every month, according to comScore. The top five sites all rely on advertising for revenue, but Amazon does not. It has already been successful without advertising, but if the company combines its substantial traffic with its precise user data, it could add much more value.
Additionally, the company’s demand-side platform (DSP) enables tracking of people who made purchases on Amazon, data that can be used to advertise on different sites.
“The winner in the media game is the one who can best identify a user and match that user up with an affiliation that an advertiser cares about,” suggests Jay Habegger, CEO of Boston advertising firm OwnerIQ.
At its Social Media ROI conference, Business Insider addressed the convergence of social and mobile — which it calls “smobile.”
The presentation noted statistics that look at “the continued shift of social networking to mobile, how smartphones compound the difficulties of advertising on social networks, the potential of social commerce and social discovery applications, and the players who have the early lead in monetizing social-mobile media.”
In March 2012, the number of minutes per month spent on apps rose above 120 billion, while mobile Web usage stayed pretty stagnant around 20 billion minutes per month. That said, mobile Internet is increasing as desktop Internet traffic drops off.
Social networking is one of the fastest-rising activities on mobile devices. In 2011, users spent an average of 15 minutes per day on social networking apps. In the same quarter of 2012, that number had increased to 24 minutes, the same amount spent playing games.
Business Insider reports that “37 percent of U.S. smartphone owners check social networks daily; 64 percent monthly.” Facebook has accumulated around 500 million mobile users, and 55 percent of Twitter’s usage is mobile.
Unfortunately, click-through rates on mobile ads sits at only 32 percent and only about a third of smartphone users believe advertising is acceptable. Also, mobile remains a small fraction of digital ad spending.
Despite efforts to advance social commerce, there hasn’t been much traction. It’s not enough to provide discounts based on proximity; consumers have to first be interested in the product or service. Similarly, checkins and social references to commerce sites are “tiny.”
The presentation recommended “native” mobile ads like Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories” that appear along with regular content. Ads also need to have contextual relevance.
More than one billion smartphones are now in use worldwide, according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm also projects there will be over 2 billion smartphones by 2015.
The numbers mean that one in seven people worldwide now uses a smartphone. This represents a 47 percent increase since last year.
Nokia is credited with introducing the first “modern” smartphone in 1996. The industry exploded following the rapid adoption of Apple’s iPhone.
“The growth of the smartphone market, estimated by Bloomberg Industries to be worth $219 billion last year, has helped Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. rack up record earnings as they take sales from rivals including Espoo, Finland-based Nokia,” reports Bloomberg.
Apple set a new record last month when the company sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s during the product’s debut weekend. “Samsung, the Suwon, South Korea-based maker of Galaxy smartphones, ended Nokia’s 14-year reign as the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones this year,” notes the post.
While the U.S. smartphone industry has already boomed, Strategy Analytics executive director Neil Mawson explained that “Most of the world does not yet own a smartphone and there remains huge scope for future growth, particularly in emerging markets such as China, India and Africa.”
Despite the attention cord-cutting has received, several recent studies suggest that consumers are in fact much too comfortable with their pay TV subscriptions to switch.
According to a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, “The reluctance to opt out of pay TV subscriptions may be less about enthusiasm than about inertia,” reports Variety. “Nearly three out of four surveyed indicated they had no plans to change providers in the next year, and 59 percent hadn’t bothered switching providers within the past year, which PwC chalked up to complacency.”
Another survey of 2,000 online respondents by Digitalsmiths found that keeping customers could however be difficult. “Of the four-fifths who registered satisfaction, 38 percent said they would consider changing services within the next six months,” explains the article. “But rival pay TV services are likelier to benefit from that switch than so-called over-the-top apps like Netflix; 65 percent of those surveyed didn’t use those services at all.”
Rising fees was the main reason for dissatisfaction among the remaining one-fifth. Although nearly double the rate of inflation, pay TV fee increases still lag behind the price growth of a gallon of gas, a cup of coffee or pet food.
“You don’t often hear of pundits warning of a pending crisis because the cost of dog food is spiraling out of control,” Bernstein Research analyst Todd Juenger notes.
Cord cutting isn’t entirely out of the picture though. “Younger demos showed significantly less devotion to multichannel brands and more willingness to switch, particularly when it came to new features. Half of respondents ages 18-29 told PwC they were ‘likely to use the Web to satisfy their entertainment needs,’ which could bode well for the Hulus of the world,” the article states, warning pay TV providers from getting too comfortable.
The next generation 4K HDTVs will be known as “Ultra High-Definition” or simply “Ultra HD,” according to a decision made Thursday by the Consumer Electronics Association’s Board of Industry Leaders.
The first Ultra HD models are slated to go on sale this fall and are expected to be a major theme at January’s CES in Las Vegas. LG launched its $20,000 84-inch Ultra HD model in September, followed by Sony with its competing 84-inch model for $5,000 more.
“Earlier this year, the CEA Ultra HD Working Group was formed to discuss how best to define and educate consumers about this new technology,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. “The organization also undertook extensive consumer research on the best way to explain to consumers the new technology and its value.”
To meet the requirements of Ultra HD status, products such as TVs, monitors and projectors need to feature at least eight million active pixels.
“Displays will also have an aspect ratio of 16×9 and must have at least one digital input capable of carrying and presenting native 4K format video at 3,840 x 2,160 resolution,” notes the post.
“Ultra HD is the next natural step forward in display technologies, offering consumers an incredibly immersive viewing experience with outstanding new levels of picture quality,” says Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CEA. “This new terminology and the recommended attributes will help consumers navigate the marketplace to find the TV that best meets their needs.”
“All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing,” the service stated on its Facebook page with the announcement that it has traded out its physical servers for virtual machines on cloud services.
“By hosting its infrastructure in multiple data centers and even multiple countries, the widely used torrent site says it will avoid being shut down by authorities targeting BitTorrent sites,” Ars Technica writes. “It has been the target of raids on previous occasions, and has suffered downtime because of the types of IT hassles that afflict most businesses. Moving to the cloud will help on both counts.”
In a related article, TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay is now hosted by several cloud hosting providers in two countries, and providers don’t know they’re hosting the service. “All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be reinstalled at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world,” notes the post.
Converting to the cloud also has IT benefits, such as avoiding going offline for reasons like broken power distribution units — a problem The Pirate Bay faced in the past.
“If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider,” a Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak. “Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”
There are still ways for authorities to take The Pirate Bay offline despite the service’s claims. ExtremeTech also notes that installing a new load balancer is not easy or cheap.
The social gaming space has become increasingly crowded, and customer attention spans for games have become shorter.
This has resulted in a dangerous scenario for game developers, as investors do not want to put money into a game when the life span can “be clocked with an egg-timer rather than an old-fashioned desk calendar,” writes Fortune.
Robert W. Baird & Co. researcher Colin Sebastian notes that while the social gaming market is still growing, the pace has slowed considerably, and the uncertainty inherent in the genre makes it a tough sell for investors. “Games are a hit-driven business,” he says, “so it’s really hard to have a crystal ball and know what games are going to be successful and for how long.”
Zynga’s purchase of OMGPOP for $200 million underscores the uncertainty in social gaming. Zynga wanted OMGPOP’s hit game “Draw Something,” but just as Zynga bought the game, the user base tanked, as users got bored and moved on to new games.
PopCap Games has also struggled since Electronic Arts purchased the company in 2011 for $1.3 billion.
“We’ve seen a dramatic change in the way people play and pay for games,” explains PopCap founder John Vechey. “The change in consumer tastes requires us to reorganize our business and invest in new types of games on new platforms — it’s a completely different world from when we started.”
Analysts warn against the acquisition of “one-game companies” like OMGPOP because of the quick turnover in what games are popular at any given time. Other analysts suggests companies should hire individual developers rather than companies.
The Isis consortium has announced that its mobile-payment service using smartphones with NFC chips will launch Monday in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas. The test launch was originally scheduled for the summer.
The consortium includes wireless carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Isis confirmed via an email statement that 20 Isis-ready phones would be available by the end of 2012 to use the network.
T-Mobile USA Mobile Commerce is offering the Isis Mobile Wallet application through the Google Play online store. AT&T will provide five phones: the Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One X, Samsung Exhilarate, LG Espace and Samsung Rugby Pro. The other carriers have yet to announce specific models.
“Isis previously confirmed a number of retailers, gas stations and transit providers that will be equipped to handle the NFC payments,” reports Computerworld. “The NFC phones also contain special security, known as a ‘secure element’ inside, which protects a customer’s credit card information.”
“There has been a debate between banks and other parties to mobile commerce as to whether the secure element should remain in the phone — either on a SIM card or embedded in the phone’s core — or be should located in the cloud,” notes the article.