The latest from TechCrunch
- Tim Cook: Apple Is "A Mobile-Device Company"
- Flavors.me: A Dead Simple Way To Pull Your Online Presences Into One Place
- Sellaband Not Quite Dead Yet, Waiting For White Knight's Signature
- Is The Nexus One's Display Inferior To The iPhone's?
- What Should Twitter Ads Look Like? And Will You Really Love Them?
- More MySpace Product Strategy Laid Bare: MySpace Apps Expert Review Document
| Tim Cook: Apple Is "A Mobile-Device Company" | Top |
| Apple thinks of itself as a mobile device company. In January at the iPad launch event, Steve Jobs noted that “Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.” And responding to a direct question today at a Goldman Sachs conference, liveblogged by the WSJ , COO Tim Cook reiterated: “Yes, you should definitely look at Apple as a mobile-device company.” Cook also pointed out that the majority of Apple’s revenues now comes from mobile devices (including laptops) or content for those devices. Indeed, if you look at the breakdown of Apple’s fourth quarter revenues of $15.7 billion, nearly $12 billion of that came from portable Macbooks ($2.8 billion), iPods ($3.4 billion) and iPhones $5.6 billion). And another $1.2 billion came from iTunes. Apple isn’t abandoning computers. It is a mobile device company because computing is going mobile. What about things like Apple TV? “Apple TV is a hobby,” Cook says dismissively, echoing another sentiment Jobs has expressed before. Nevertheless, the company sold 35 percent more Apple TVs last quarter than the year before and continues to invest in the opportunity. For more on what Cook said today, read the liveblog notes from the WSJ or the Business Insider . CrunchBase Information Tim Cook Apple Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Flavors.me: A Dead Simple Way To Pull Your Online Presences Into One Place | Top |
| If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public. The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site. All of your linked content is pulled into your Flavors.me page so it’s easy to access, but it’s never overwhelming — the site’s templates are minimalist, and hide everything but your name and a list of your online feeds/profiles at first. If you click on one of these feeds, the content will smoothly transition into view; it’s all very slick. You can also tweak your page’s color scheme, backgrounds, and layout to suit your taste (though there are only a handful of layouts to choose from initially). You can get a feel for what’s possible by checking out my Flavors.me page, which took me all of ten minutes to set up — keep in mind that it’s entirely possible to make a page that looks better than this with a little more time. There are plenty of other services out there that let you list all of your online presences in one place, with options including chi.mp , card.ly , UnHub , and even Google Profiles. But Flavors.me really makes the process extremely simple, and the results look great. Flavors.me is free for its basic features, and will generate revenue through premium subscriptions, which are $20 a year. Premium features include the ability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and the ability to include a contact form in your page (though obviously you could just include your Email address in the standard ‘About’ field). Flavors.me was built by HiiDef , an incubator started by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and his brother, David Marcus. Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo . CrunchBase Information Flavors.me Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Sellaband Not Quite Dead Yet, Waiting For White Knight's Signature | Top |
| Dutch startup Sellaband , which enabled music fans to invest in their favorite bands , last week on Friday requested provisional suspension of payments in their home country. It was promptly granted by an Amsterdam Court, and was this morning changed into full bankruptcy . The news of the bankruptcy led to a flurry of reports about Sellaband calling it quits for good – or as we like to say, hitting the deadpool . Now it appears that there’s a chance the startup may live to fight another fight after all. A message that was very recently posted on the Sellaband website claims that an acquisition of the business is imminent, and merely a matter of a “few technicalities” at this point. The full note: On Friday February 19th, SellaBand AG requested provisional suspension of payments (moratorium). This was granted by the Court in Amsterdam on the same day. Yesterday, Monday February 22nd, this moratorium was changed into bankruptcy, with appointment of, Mr Paul Schaink, an amsterdam lawyer, as trustee. The trustee wishes to inform the ‘Sellaband community’ that, apart from a few technicalities, the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon, in order to make a fresh start, safeguarding both the rights of Believers and Artists. More news will follow shortly. On behalf of the trustee, Johan Vosmeijer CEO SellaBand From what I can gather, Sellaband was close to breaking even, after raising $5 million in venture capital back in 2008. That on itself is not an easy feat to accomplish in the cutthroat business of online music and crowdfunding services. If a buyer does step in and manages to reboot operations without too much damage , Sellaband might still have a shot. CrunchBase Information SellABand Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Is The Nexus One's Display Inferior To The iPhone's? | Top |
| Well – not entirely . After all, it’s bright, responsive, and has a much higher resolution. But there is a lot more to making a good screen, and under a detailed analysis it’s far from a rout when you pit HTC’s bleeding-edge OLED screen against the old-school LCD of the iPhone. Here is the basic list of complaints, which seem to be backed up by pretty credible evidence. Read the rest of this post on MobileCrunch… | |
| What Should Twitter Ads Look Like? And Will You Really Love Them? | Top |
| Twitter is getting closer to launching its own advertising on the micro-messaging service. Speaking on an advertising industry panel yesterday, the company’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, confirmed that Twitter would launch its own advertising platform within a month or so, at least in a beta test. Twitter has been planning to launch an advertising product for a long time. Last November, COO Dick Costolo told us at our Realtime Crunchup that ads were coming. He promised the new ads “will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it.” And a year ago, Twitter execs discussed different advertising revenue models in a strategy meeting , including realtime search ads, sponsored Tweets, and AdSense-like widgets that could appear on other sites. Of course, other startups are already experimenting with their own Twitter ads ranging from in-stream sponsored Tweets (Ad.ly) to placing retweet buttons on display ads themselves (Tweetmeme). But what will an official Twitter ad look like? And will people really love it? There are lots of options for different ad units on Twitter. Seth Goldstein, the CEO of SocialMedia, was on the same panel and is the one who grilled Banerji about Twitter’s ad plans. He presented the slide above, which gives some flavor the types of ads which could appear in a social stream like Twitter. Ads could range from straight endorsements (“This is my favorite salsa”, “My favorite car is a Jetta”) to more subtle local business ads (“I am at Starbucks,” “I am the Mayor of Superdive”). Other people think the Tweets themselves should be sacrosanct. Robert Scoble, for instance, suggests the idea of a SuperTweet with all sorts of metadata that pops up when part of the message is rolled over with your mouse. This data could include things such as the location of the Tweet and how many times it’s been retweeted, but it could also trigger a contextual ad triggered by certain keywords. Most likely, the ads will start out simple. If they are in-stream ads, they will be clearly labeled as such, perhaps by highlighting the Tweet with a different background color or otherwise clearly marking it as “Sponsored.” Right now, the only way you know something is a sponsored Tweet is if it is disclosed in the text of the Tweet itself, like in this Ad.ly example: Twitter could make them stand out more and really distinguish them as ads. But that in itself would find little love from most Twitter users. For ads to work on Twitter, or anywhere else on the Web for that matter, they need to be authentic and useful. Contextual ads related to keywords in specific Tweets or shown only to people who are known to be interested in related topics is a better approach. It is fairly simple to analyze people’s Tweet streams and cull the main topics they either talk about or the topics of the Tweets the people they follow talk about. Semantically targeted ads should perform better than random ones. But it’s still not clear what there would be to love there. It also is not clear what the rules will be for Twitter ads. Will they just start appearing in everyone’s stream, or do you have to allow ads into your stream? And if you allow the ads, do you get a cut of the ad revenues since they are being shown to your followers? I’d be very surprised if there is a user opt-out for ads, and even if Twitter starts the ads on its own site it would make sense if it could syndicate them out to third-party Twitter clients. Eventually, if a Twitter client takes the stream, it will have to take the ads as well. Presumably, Twitter would offer them a cut of any ad revenues much like Google does with AdSense. Finally, there is the question of how the ads will be paid for. It makes little sense to charge on a per follower or per impression basis because people tend to read their Twitter streams sporadically. A cost-per-click model would work much better. Twitter could create a keyword auction to trigger the insertion of the ads and advertisers would only pay for actual clicks like they do with search ads. That way the entire message of the ad would not have to be contained in the Tweet itself. With 1.5 billion Tweets a month and growing, advertisers will certainly love any opportunity to insert themselves into the conversations occurring on Twitter. But users generally don’t love ads, they hate them. And it is hard to believe that Twitter is somehow going to magically change that basic fact of life. You tell me: What would Twitter have to do to make you love its ads? CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| More MySpace Product Strategy Laid Bare: MySpace Apps Expert Review Document | Top |
| Internal MySpace product documents continue to leak into our inbox from presumably angry employees and former employees. Today we’ve got a late 2009 powerpoint presentation created by Tim Sutcliffe, MySpace’s Senior Manager Information Architecture. The document summarizes the recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform from an outside UK based user experience firm called Userfocus . Sutcliffe was part of Katie Geminder’s “swat team” organization at MySpace, and supposedly “knee deep” in the remakingmyspace project that we wrote about yesterday. Revamping the apps platform was a side project, but this document is representative of the type of work that group was doing, say sources. Or at least, sort of. This document recommends what some product people call “pushing pixels around” instead of rebuilding from scratch. The remakingmyspace project was clearly the latter. Although since that project has now been scratched, we’ll never know whether it would have been successful or not. The problem, as the document states, was that MySpace app installation rates were too low, and churn was too high, relative to Facebook: “MySpace apps are not performing cf. Facebook regarding churn and installs. It's believed that these performance problems are caused by basic usability issues.” Sixteen pages of specific product recommendations followed. The entire document is embedded below, or you can download it yourself here . MySpace would not comment on the document. View this document on Scribd CrunchBase Information MySpace Information provided by CrunchBase | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment