Supposedly an interview with someone who worked at Microsoft and now works for Google. There was a similar blog last year, don’t know what happened to it. Office culture, cube farms and benefits are discussed. Interesting to hear about the internals at Google.
Before you rush out and buy an iPhone tomorrow, think about the MacBookPro launch. Bad screens, fans, batteries and don’t forget the problems with the motherboard. Owning version 1.0 of any electronic product is a dicey proposition.
Apple just increased the battery life and went from a plastic to a glass screen. Think about that.
If you already own a Treo, the jump to a $600 phone may not seem so bad. For many, it’s a huge jump from the free Razr to half a month’s rent.
People argue it’s a phone and an M3 player. Try going jogging with the iPhone. Not to be a naysayer, I’m sure the user interface and navigation will be intuitive and brilliant, as most Apple products are.
Speaking of getting something right, have you heard about the activation process?
Apple also said today that iPhone buyers will be able to activate the device using its popular iTunes program on either Macs or Windows PCs, a move that should cut down on the time people spend in stores this weekend. “Users will be able to activate their new iPhone in the comfort and privacy of their own home or office, without having to wait in a store,” said Steve Jobs.
I’m excited to see the iPhone, and I’m looking forward to owning the next version.
This YouTube video depicting live humans acting out common SecondLife Experiences is hilarious.
Jeremiah Owyang on Web Strategy Predictions: Facebook, Identity, Social Networks.
Facebook will launch an Identity widget that I can embed on my blog. This allows only those who have registered to Facebook to leave a comment, many high profile blogs will do this, to avoid nasty anonymous comments, thus reducing the incident of Kathy Sierra type events. Dave Winer is right.
-The data collected from these widgets ables Facebook to erode the small marketshare that Attention trackers and MyBlogLog are creating.
-Facebook will have faster adoption that Open ID, as the consumer users will drive it. (Remember the mantra of consider joining before creating communities)
More about community groups and social networking, worth a read.
Some of you may or may not know that my other blog is Online Dating Insider. When I started blogging in 2002 I was working on some dating and social networking business ideas and decided that writing about the “discovery” industry would be a good place to start. Here I am almost five years later, and I still find lots to say about the dating industry.
Of course social networking is incredibly popular now, but I remember when Match.com had a social network feature, which they removed right before Friendster started taking off. Talk about unlucky timing!
I use the phrase discovery because that is mostly what the Internet is about. We are constantly discovering videos, friends, dates, cheap couches and airfare on the net, and to me, at least most days, dating is an interesting corner of the net.
I track the online dating pretty industry closely, especially when innovation is in the air, which is not as often as I would like. Compared to my silicon valley clients, dating companies appear glacial, slow to react to just about everthing. But things are starting to change. Smart, driven upstarts are coming in and turning the traditional idea of online dating on it’s head and new sites are always popping up to challenge the big guns like eHarmony and Match.com.
As for innovation, it looks like dating sites are now starting to discover the benefits of marketing on YouTube. Which is what I’m trying to get to here.
Anyone who thinks that videosharing sites and services like YouTube and Brightcove aren’t usurping a good deal of tv time away from the major networks had their head in the sand. but I’m sure you knew that already, or you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog.
I have a set of friends who are in a band that tours around the US and EU often. Most of them don’t have cable, since they live on a bus for weeks and months every year. When they are back in town to decompress for a while, their entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube. Why give Comcast $1k a year when YouTube has the easily-digestible short videos that my friends voraciously devour upon return to home base?
Back to online dating innovation. In the past few months, online dating companies and producers of dating-related content have begun to wholeheartedly embraced YouTube as a wholesale distribution channel.
Case in point, Jackson West at NewTeeVee says:
Brandon Fletcher of New York QFVCVQLVCAEgained some notoriety by publicly asking YouTube to feature him on the front page, even flying across the country and visiting their offices. The effort, “Can YouTube Hear Me,� did get him a chat, but no promise of feature status. That hasn’t deterred the 20-year-old music and video producer, who has now put together his own reality show, “Date: Unknown.�
According to the site’s about page, there will be new episode each Monday and other short clips throughout the week. You can subscribe via YouTube, iTunes or RSS. Fletcher is paying for the dates, and invites couples near New York City who’ve been chatting but haven’t met yet to be on the show.
Let’s get something straight. A few million views on YouTube these days is a reasonable success. My friend Dave at Oddcast told me that their avatar system just won a Webby Award for best viral marketing of 2006, with over 100 million impressions! Now that’s a lot of eyeballs, and it’s just a silly interactive monkey.
Match.com, True and other dating sites have loads of videos on YouTube and you can’t load a Myspace page without seeing a co-ed staring back at you in a pseudo-videochat. Myspace and YouTube marketing is incredibly viral and.
Imagine when viral campaigns get past subservient chickens and on to more serious things like Darfur or climate change. I still like talking monkeys and awkward first dates on YouTube.
I just added about 10 very cool links to a draft post in WordPress and deleted it by mistake. Where is the undo feature? It’s times like this that I miss Movable Type and Ecto.
You would probably like the flexible OLED screens. As for the rest, you probably knew about Compete’s new API and most of the other stuff I linked to.
I went to the Linden Labs SecondLife recruiting party in Boston a few weeks ago. Talk about a mind-blower. I ran into people that I worked on virtual environments with almost 15 years ago and made some new friends as well.
Speaking of SL, the new atmospheric rendering from WindLight is major coolness.
Even more SL: GregPC caught myself and John Lester doing some late-night canoing after a long conversation at Dante after the last WebInno event in Cambridge.
This is why Not many people are in Second Life. I have all the respect for the Linden folks, but this is ridiculous. Talk about user-unfriendly.
Snip…
We are initiating a rolling restart of sims to address issues that arose yesterday, as indicated in a previous blog post. These include slow logins, slow or failed group chat and teleports, and presence issues which can be described as people being reported as offline or online when that is not the case. Also to be addressed are problems with group membership lists.
The rolling restart sweeps through the grid north to south in a wave, asking each region to restart. The regions start a 5-minute countdown with warnings given in-world, then restart. You can teleport south to avoid a restart, or (once the wave hits the mainland) teleport north by several regions to jump “over�? the restart wave.
During the first ~10 minutes of the wave, it’s expected that Group IMs and email to LSL will be affected. If you are having trouble after 10 minutes please close all IM windows. To restart the group chats, you have to hit the blue button labeled “close�? in the group im panel, not the orange x. If this doesn’t help, please restart the SL client.
The restart wave will start at 12:15pm SLtime and take approximately 2 hours to hit the entire grid.
 John Heilemann has written about Steve Jobs in New York Magazine. Regarding his “fourth act”, the iPhone:
Apple’s competitors, by contrast, find the prospect of the iPhone terrifying. “The entire fucking Western world hopes that it’s a case of imperial overstretch,� says the CEO of one of the planet’s largest communications companies. “But everybody is quietly saying, er, what if people want to buy a $500 phone? What if, er, people have been waiting for a device that does all these things? What if this thing works as advertised? I mean, my God, what then?�
I’m not buying an iPhone last week, I know too many people with broken MacBook’s to take a chance on a $500 phone that had it’s case and battery replaced a week before launch.
But what if Jobs is right and everyone forks over $300-$500? What will handset makes like Nokia do?
From David Beisel:
Our May WebInno event continued the emerging tradition of drawing an exciting crowd of techies, entrepreneurs, investors, and operators. You can read more about it in a recap blog post. Given all of the season’s various activities, we’re holding one – and only one – special Web Innovators Group this summer:
Boston Web Innovators Group – Summer Edition
Monday July 9th at 6:30pm
Royal Sonesta Hotel Cambridge
For additional information and to RSVP, visit our website and event wiki page.
In addition to the usual format of “main dish” presentations at 7pm followed by schmoozing and informal “side dish” demonstrations, this evening we will be introducing a new networking forum for those individuals seeking jobs/co-founders and employers looking for talent in the digital media space. More details to follow in an upcoming post on the WebInno blog.
As always, if your startup is interested in presenting as either a main dish (five minute demo to the entire crowd) or side dish (walk-through to small groups from periphery tables set during the networking session), please contact me. Note that the deadline for demo applications for this session is June 25th.
As a reminder, the event is free of charge and open to all who are interested in web and mobile innovation.
Please RSVP on the wiki if you plan on attending – thank you.