While it seems that tablet-mania has us all in its grip, the more I thought of a slate running webOS the more excited I got about it. The graphical touch interface is already outstanding, but imagine it on a 7-inch display. The multitasking of webOS would enter new ground on such a screen. It would not only be a productive environment to use, it would actually be fun. If you ask me, Palm could use a little fun these days.

I am picturing a thin slate with a 7-inch screen even a tad bigger would be OK. The great PIM apps on webOS would be stellar if optimized for the larger display. Palm wouldn't have to add functionality, or even change the way they utilized touch, just optimize the display. The webOS browser is already quite good; It would only be better on a larger screen.

I believe Palm could produce this slate, given its history with device design and production. It should follow the Apple model and make sure all existing webOS apps work on the tablet, and provide incentives to developers who optimize existing apps for the bigger screen. Maybe even make a deal with Amazon to get a solid app to work with Amazon MP3. There are many ways for Palm to go with this slate, almost all of them good.

Palm could produce a Wi-Fi model of the slate, but also a Sprint 3G/4G model. This would compete with the iPad, and with the Sprint data network make a bold statement. I can see Palm making a tremendous splash with such a device, no matter what happens with its phone line. Having given this a lot of thought, I can only see an upside for beleaguered Palm with this. Given the tight integration webOS already has with Google services, this tablet would give Android tablets serious competition.

The only question I have about this tablet venture for Palm is what to call the product. There's the obvious Palm Pad, but I think they need something clever to make a splash. How about the Palm Pilot? Raise the original product name that made the company famous, and get people talking.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

How To Clean Up the Mobile OS Mess

Doctor's Associates, Inc. v. QIP Holders LLC, 2010 WL 669870 (D. Conn. Feb. 19, 2010). My prior post on this case.

As a long-time vegetarian (over a quarter-century), I find America's obsession with "more meat" competitions simultaneously amusing and repulsive. On my personal blog, I have routinely chronicled the "burger wars" between heartland restaurants trying to outdo each other by offering bigger and bigger burgers. As far as I know, the current high-water mark is the Beer Barrel Main Event Charity Burger, a 123 pound burger that includes 80 pounds of meat. See the photo. If you're one of those people who thinks a burger can never have too much meat, good luck working on that bad boy.

Today's post involves subway sandwiches instead of burgers, but it turns out that subway sandwich restaurants' competition over claims of having more meat is no less stiff. Quiznos kicked off the war in 2006 by launching a "double meat" line of sandwiches. Quiznos ran two TV ads comparing the meat in its sandwiches to Subway's and set up a website soliciting individuals to make and submit their own comparative digital video ads. Subway was not amused and ultimately filed a seventh amended complaint (!) over Quiznos' ad campaigns. (What a patient judge).

The parties hotly contested every aspect of the litigation, and Rebecca does a thorough recap of the lengthy ruling. I'm going to focus on the court's discussion of the crowdsourced video ads published on Quiznos' ad campaign website, which Quiznos defended on 47 USC 230 grounds.

Citing the MCW v. Badbusinessbureau case from 2004, the court says "the critical inquiry with respect to CDA immunity in this case is whether the Defendants merely published information provided by third parties or instead were actively responsible for the creation and development of disparaging representations about Subway contained in the contestant videos."

The MCW decision was questionable even at its time, but it's bizarre to see the court reach into history for this obscure, archaic, unpublished and geographically distant (it was a TX precedent being cited in a CT court) district court precedent. To do this, the court bypasses dozens of more recentand more thoughtfulcases, including the multiple Ripoff Report cases that have expressly and implicitly rejected the MCW case. A more natural citation would have been the Roommates.com case, which also referenced legal distinctions between active/passive websites similar to the legal standard quoted above. However, if the court had followed Roommates.com, it almost certainly would have ruled for the defense, as Quiznos didn't require illegality or even channel users towards illegality. (Rebecca makes the same point). Therefore, I'm baffled how the court got to this legal standard citing this legal precedent.

Using this odd legal standard, the court says it's up to the jury to decide if Quiznos just exercised traditional editorial control or impermissibly "actively participated in creating or developing the third-party content submitted to the Contest website."

Unquestionably, sending this case to a jury is a 230 loss, but how bad is unclear. We'll never find out what the jury would do with the case because the parties promptly settled the case after this ruling. However, a plaintiff's ability to hold a case open through trial, rather than having it disposed of earlier in the proceedings, would itself represent a significant win for plaintiffs--it would mean plaintiffs can get discovery to fish for embarrassing facts, force the defense to incur lots of litigation costs, and get a chance to tell their sob story before a jury. (FWIW, I am not aware of any 230 case that has ever reached a juryam I forgetting something?) Nevertheless, I think very few courts will follow this precedent given the plethora of more persuasive precedents and the fact that Quiznos' crowdsourced ads were just one part of Quiznos' larger allegedly false ad campaign. Therefore, I don't expect this 230 loss to spread to many other cases.

I also don't think this case shines much light on the legitimacy of crowdsourcing ads. There's no reason to believe that crowdsourced ads are per se problematic. At the same time, if the advertiser uses the ads offline, clearly the advertiser "adopts" the ad and takes full responsibility for its contents. If the advertiser only publishes the ad online, 230 might be available but the advertiser still might tread cautiously due to the FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines, which basically ignores 230 and holds advertisers liable for certain types of third party advertisements anyway. I think 230 may nullify this part of the FTC guidelines, but most advertisers would rather not tangle with the FTC to establish the deficiencies in the FTC's thinking. As a result, I expect most advertisers will vet most crowdsourced ads, even if they only publish them only, as if the advertiser is legally responsible for the ads and not protected by 230.

BTW, the Subway v. Quiznos lawsuit isn't the only litigation over subway restaurants' claims of double meat. In an apparently unrelated lawsuit, last month a class action suit was filed over Blimpie's "Super Stacked" sandwich for overclaiming that it had double meat.

I confess some schadenfreude when I see lawsuits against meat pushers for overhyping meat quantities. I would not shed a tear if the meat pushers lock up each other in litigation death struggles and sue each other to oblivion. Of course, consumers can facilitate that outcome by refusing to patronize vendors who "compete" with each other by encouraging us to overconsume the Earth's resources.

Today, Rescuecom issued a press release declaring victory in its litigation against Google. But it's an odd definition of "victory" given that Rescuecom has apparently voluntarily abandoned its 6 year litigation effort without any new concessions from Google. The dismissal notice.

This development reminds me a lot of the American Blinds v. Google denouement, where American Blinds also simply gave up and dropped its multi-year lawsuit without any concessions from Google. Note to future plaintiffs: if you're going to threaten Google's $20B/year cash cow, chances are pretty good that they have the resources to outlast you.

Why did Rescuecom give up? According to Rescuecom's press release, "Google has recently confirmed to Rescuecom that it has removed Rescuecom's trademark from its Keyword Suggestion Tool." That, plus the fact that Google blocks trademark references in ad copy, means that Rescuecom feels it has "obtained two of the three things we initially sought in our complaint against Google." And if two out of three is good enough for Meat Loaf, apparently it's good enough for Rescuecom. At minimum, having low standards makes it a lot easier to declare victory when you give up.

However, this explanation is pretty hollow. Although the press release treats Google's removal of Rescuecom from the keyword suggestion tool as a new development, it appears that Google made this change IN 2005. Wendy Davis reports:

[Rescuecom CEO] Milman says he only learned last week that Google had stopped suggesting Rescuecom as a keyword. "Who knows what would have happened if they had told us back in 2005 that they had taken our name out of their keyword tool?" he said.

Hmm...I think I know the answer to that question! Then again, if getting out of the keyword suggestion tool really was one of Rescuecom's Big Three objectives all along, maybe they might have asked Google about it in 2005...or 2006...or 2007...or, well, you get the point. Spin it however they want, it's hard for Rescuecom to look good while dropping a lawsuit based on a 5 year old fact.

Nevertheless, I'm interested in knowing more about this removal. Does Google have a way for trademark owners to "opt out" of having their trademarks in its keyword suggestion tool? I would expect that option to become very popular if it were well-known. If anyone has information about how trademark owners can make an election with Google, please share it.

Given the completely disingenuous nature of declaring victory based on getting out of the keyword suggestion tool, there may be a better--and more self-interested reason--for Rescuecom to give up. Rescuecom is defending a trademark lawsuit brought by Best Buy over Rescuecom's competitive AdWords purchases of the "geek squad" trademark. Rescuecom was caught in the duplicitous position of making plaintiff-side arguments against Google while making highly contradictory defense-side arguments against Best Buy. As a result, every positive step in its Google case had the potential to degrade its position in the Best Buy case. By abandoning the Google fight, Rescuecom avoids this difficult dilemma.

As an odd byproduct of this development, Google and Rescuecom are now aligned in advancing the arguments that competitive keyword advertising in AdWords is legitimate. Isn't there a passage in the Bible about the lion and the lamb lying down together?

The roster of pending AdWords cases (I most recently double-checked the status of these cases on February 20, 2010):

* Ezzo v. Google
* Rescuecom v. Google
* FPX v. Google
* John Beck Amazing Profits v. Google and the companion Google v. John Beck Amazing Profits
* Stratton Faxon v. Google (not initially a trademark case). Check the status.
* Soaring Helmet v. Bill Me
* Ascentive v. Google
* Jurin v. Google 1.0 (voluntarily dismissed), succeeded by Jurin v. Google 2.0
* Rosetta Stone v. Google
* Flowbee v. Google
* Parts Geek v. US Auto Parts
* Dazzlesmile v. Epic

For that big screen device ... there's no diversity. You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it's going to [be] important.

Steve Ballmer teases new Xbox 360 form factors, price points and options originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It's crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything's been programmed to use Yahoo.

It is not unusual for carriers to work deals for specific software on its handsets. They take money wherever they can get it. But this deal is sure to confuse the customer, as Android phones are commonly called Google phones by many. Let's face it, Google makes Android, and one of its strengths is the tight integration with the company's online services. And search is certainly one of Google's big services, but not on the AT&T Backflip.

This is the equivalent of a Windows PC hitting the market that has Internet Explorer removed and Safari as the only browser. Some customers might be happy by that but most would be confused. Then to make matter worse, imagine that Internet Explorer couldn't be installed by the user to get around this major change. That seems to be the case with the AT&T Backflip, as early testers are reporting the inability to get Google search working in any of the Android programs.

There has been enough complaining about fragmentation in the Android space, so I won't rehash that topic. But there is something so fundamentally wrong when an Android phone has Google search removed. And replaced by Yahoo search? I guess this makes the Backflip the Yahoo Phone.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It's crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything's been programmed to use Yahoo.

It is not unusual for carriers to work deals for specific software on its handsets. They take money wherever they can get it. But this deal is sure to confuse the customer, as Android phones are commonly called Google phones by many. Let's face it, Google makes Android, and one of its strengths is the tight integration with the company's online services. And search is certainly one of Google's big services, but not on the AT&T Backflip.

This is the equivalent of a Windows PC hitting the market that has Internet Explorer removed and Safari as the only browser. Some customers might be happy by that but most would be confused. Then to make matter worse, imagine that Internet Explorer couldn't be installed by the user to get around this major change. That seems to be the case with the AT&T Backflip, as early testers are reporting the inability to get Google search working in any of the Android programs.

There has been enough complaining about fragmentation in the Android space, so I won't rehash that topic. But there is something so fundamentally wrong when an Android phone has Google search removed. And replaced by Yahoo search? I guess this makes the Backflip the Yahoo Phone.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req'd):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

140proof, which is based in San Francisco and backed by a $2-million investment raised last summer from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund, said that its algorithm aims ads at users based on their profiles and other public data. Other Twitter advertising services include Ad.ly, which has gotten some press attention for paying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars to endorse products to their followers, as well as Magpie, Assetize and IZEA.

The question all of these services will inevitably confront including Twitter itself, once it launches its own platform is how users will react to a wave of advertising in what was once an ad-free social network (in the case of 140proof, of course, you can simply not use HootSuite's mobile apps and you won't see them). Many of these services are only just ramping up in what will undoubtedly become a much bigger campaign to bring ads to the Twittersphere. So what will you do when ads start appearing in your Twitter stream?

Related content from GigaOm Pro (sub req'd):

How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

First, let me inventory the raw materials that got me thinking this way. Recently JC Hutchins posted that he had been dropped as an author by St. Martins Press and that they would not be publishing the 7th Son sequels. The post lives between a gut-check and a crisis of faith from one of the pioneering new media creator/ novelist hybrid guys. He also posted about monetary realities of writers pubishing via ebooks. Not that long before this, I had listened to JC's Hey Everybody interview with Pablo Defendini and Ami Greko from The New Sleekness blog. It's a really interesting discussion about the future of book publishing by industry professionals young enough in their careers to be less invested in the status quo and more willing to help a new future emerge. (Side note 1: I met Pablo and Ami at last year's Dragon*Con in the classic SF con fashion I wanted to meet them, saw them in a hotel bar, asked if I could sit with them, introduced myself and hung out for an hour. Try it, it works! ) Much in my thinking was informed over the last month by the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing wars of far too large a trail to link to anything. In that debate I did first run across Joe Konrath, his fiction and some of his posts with amazingly open and detailed statistics of what he sells and what he makes from digital publishing. (Side note 2: I bought, read and enjoyed his book Whiskey Sour as fallout from the debate).

There are many other bits of thought in the mix, such as my feelings about beginning my own novel during NaNoWriMo and thinking about hiring my friends at Sterling Editing to work on it and what I might choose to do with such a book when)it is finished. That's enough of a prelude, though. Time to hit it.

JC Hutchins struck a nerve when he basically waved the white flag on his current way of working.

Creating podcast fiction does does not generate direct revenue for me. Based on anecdotal and statistical data, very few people are willing to pay for general podcast content, much less podcast fiction. Since my goal is to make a living wage with my words, the current monetization models including in-show advertisements will not deliver this. Dedicating time and effort to my non-fiction podcast projects will deliver equally underwhelming monetary results.

It is also apparent to me that using the Free model to promote a tangible product, such as I did with 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art, does not deliver sustainable sales results. I have friends some of whom are my best friends, the most talented people I've had the privilege to know and work with who have absolute faith in this model. I treasure their trailblazing efforts and enthusiasm. My faith, however, has been fundamentally rattled.

Put simply: The new media model viably supports only the most blessed and talented of authors. The time, effort and money I invest in entertaining you for free pulls my attention and talent away from projects that can generate revenue. While podcasting, podcast fiction, and most importantly your support and evangelism has positively impacted my life and career in ways I'll never be able to fully express, I cannot continue to release free audiofiction if I wish to make a living wage with my words.

This is pretty big stuff in the world of podcast fiction. Hutch was one of the pioneers of the form and his getting picked up by St. Martins was considered a watershed and a validation for the medium. So if he can't make it in this world, what does that say about all the other podcast novelists who are less engaged, have less of a fan base, less sheer horsepower? Does it mean this medium is screwed?

I am positing that Hutch had a terrible misfortune of timing, that he arose as a viable author at exactly the wrong moment in publishing history. As he started down his path it seemed like the end game was to get a book deal with a major publisher. For writers of the last 100 years, this was the reasonable career success path for authors, and practically the only one. In the last few years though a sea change has happened so rapidly and thoroughly to flip that Hutch got his boat capsized in the process and he will be far from the only one. As crazy as it may sound, for a certain kind of author at this point I think a major publishing contract may seem like winning the game but is in fact losing it.

The red flags I got from the JC Hutchins post started here:

Examining the lead up to, and release of, the novel, I cannot see how I could have promoted it any better than I did. I literally went broke promoting this book and Personal Effects: Dark Art (another novel that will not have a sequel; it also underperformed). I conceived numerous brand-new online marketing campaigns that dazzled you and others. I asked you to purchase the novel, and many of you did.

If JC is literally going broke promoting 7th Son and Personal Effects book, I think a reasonable question to ask is What is St. Martins Press' role in this? If JC is willing and able to put so much of his own time and money into the promotion of the books, what value is he getting from the big publisher that is worth giving away 90% of the sale of the book to them? 50 years ago, and 20 years ago and 2 years ago, this made sense. It was pretty much impossible to get a book published and into the hands of the world in any significant way especially in a way that a writer could make a full-time living without a major publisher contract, especially one paying advances at a level to be a livable wage. Nowadays, especially due to the markeplace enabled by the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader et al, that's a different equation.

Joe Konrath's post about the money he makes from the Kindle store shows a really clear pattern that he summarizes with:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I'm losing $15,762 per year.

For a writer with an engaged audience, like JA Konrath has and like JC Hutchins has, there may well be more money in their books self-published primarily through the Kindle and other ebook stores. An interesting bit from the Konrath numbers above, that's from making 35% of the sales price for his direct books. When it changes to 70%, he'll be making twice as much per book as he posted above for the self-published ones.

Let me say it again: for a writer who is engaged with their audience and reasonably prolific (because you need new books to keep this engine turning), we may be at the turning point where a better living is available through self-publishing than a big New York publisher book deal.

There are certainly authors that this model will not work for. During my preparation for last year's Podcasting for Working Writers panel at Dragon*Con I talked to both James Patrick Kelly and Kelley Eskridge on this topic and they both raised the point that for a number of old school writers, the idea of engaging at the level of podcasting and doing large parts of their own publicity is anathema. A reasonable chunk of authors don't want to get out in the limelight and picked this career specifically so they don't have to engage. They write their books, maybe do a few conventions a year, do some bookstore events and that's it. Back to the keyboard where the serious work happens. That's fair enough and those writers will always need a publisher to do the parts of this business that would make them unhappy to pursue.

I think of the classic big publisher and big record label model as basically serving the function of the bank or maybe as VC. The manufacturing and distribution of the creative work was too capital intensive for an individual so this company would lend that money to the process, make the books or records show up in the store, do some publicity and keep most of the money. They insulate the creator from the process and from the retailers and fans. What publicity efforts exist, the big media company acts as a semi-permeable membrane to let a little of the public through, but not a lot. Ultimately in this model, the relationship with the fans of the buying public is owned mostly by the retailer and the publisher or label, very little by the writer or musician. For the author that doesn't want to feed and water that relationship, that's perfect.

For the other kind of author, a JC Hutchins or Mur Lafferty or Scott Sigler, going with a major publisher outsources to a third party a relationship with their fans that these writers are really really good at maintaining. When Hutch is paying his own money to publicize his books and his his own direct line into his own fanbase, what can the big publishers do for him? They could give him large enough advances to keep his bills paid while future books are written, but obviously they aren't willing to do that because sales aren't high enough. JC's books earn money, but not enough money to keep him in that system. For me, the real question is Did St. Martins Press do 9 times the work than JC did to get the work promoted? If not, what did they do to deserve a 90/10 split?

Last November for NaNoWriMo I began a novel that I have literally been thinking about since 1991 when I was 23. While I came nowhere near finishing it that month and am nowhere near finished now, I have a goal to finish this novel in 2010. I've already been thinking about what happens when I finish the book. Do I try to find an agent and then try to have them place it with a major publisher? Since I don't have any plans beyond that one book and thus don't necessarily have a writing career in mind, how does that affect my decision making? At the moment I'm leaning towards not bothering to place the book with any publisher at all. I'll pay Nicola and Kelley at Sterling Editing to work with me to get it publishable and hire a book designer and/or artist to hone the final product and then publish it to the Kindle store, Smashwords, the Nook store and whatever else seems reasonable at the time. I'll probably release it via Podiobooks.com at the the same time, do my publicity via that and the other usual online suspects and let it ride. The key point to me is that the energy I could spend in placing my book at a big publisher could be spent selling the book to readers and I'll probably make more money that way in the long run. This isn't the way things worked for the 19th and 20th century and it may not be the way it works in the future, but March 2010 it is the way it looks to me now. The validation of having a major publisher decide I'm their sort of writer doesn't do anything for me. I don't need the book contract to pay my living, I'd end up doing mostly my own publicity anyway so what the hell does the publisher have to offer me anymore? Rather than have them put out a $15 Kindle book that I see a buck or two from and no one buys with a print version that is on and off the shelves in head-swimming time on a death march to the warehouse remainder store, I'd rather put out a $5.99 ebook version that I see $4 from each one and more people buy. I have a whole rant on how the true function of ebook platforms is to enable impulse buys, but this current post is already too long. That must come later.

When I interviewed Cory Doctorow in 2006, one of the things he said is that the generation coming of age now is the first one to arise without a stigma attached to self-publication. Since I've been paying attention to the world of science fiction and writers in general, a giant shift has happened. When I joined GEnie in 1992, the notion of self-publishing your work meant that it was unreadable tripe and the very thought of it was risible to any serious author. Nowadays, it might well be the most rational economic choice available. If you aren't already in the system and earning livable wages from advances on your books, and you are the sort of writer and person with that drive a JC Hutchins, a Scott Sigler, a Tee Morris, a Mur Lafferty, an Alec Longstreth, someone willing to do more than thrown the manuscript over the wall and wait for finished copies to return it might be time to take the reins yourself and just do this. The costs are low which means the cost of failing is low. The traditional publishers aren't paying that much anyway so the opportunity costs are low. Just do it. Lynne Abbey, CJ Cherryh and Jane Fancher did. The writers at Book View Cafe did. I will. Don't pin your hopes on a big publisher with economic drivers that are different than yours. Just do it yourself, work the people yourself and keep as much of the money as you can.

Tags: akismet, amazon, ebooks, jakonrath, jchutchins, kindle, macmillan, publishing, sterlingediting, stmartinspress

Anyone who's been to SXSW in the past few years, ever since the iPhone's release, knows that the AT&T network absolutely explodes during the festival. Texts, if they ever make it through, take hours; calls are dropped at an alarming rate, even by AT&T standards; and Internet access is essentially impossible. It's hard for AT&T to keep up because Austin, any other week of the year, isn't absolutely flooded with iPhone users mucking about, asking where the Facebook party is, or if they're on the list for the Gawker party. (I'm on the list, but I'm not going this year so it doesn't matter.) The point is, AT&T has its hands full that week, so let's give them an A for effort for trying to prevent another iPhone meltdown this year.

SXSW starts on March 12, and runs through March 21. It's a couple of days worth of tech, music, movies, and open bars. It's sort of an exaggeration, but every single attendee rocks the iPhone. It brings AT&T's network, already sorta meh, to it knees. This year, though, AT&T has prepared itself for the huge influx of users.

AT&T has installed a distributed antenna system at the Austin Convention Center. In a perfect world, it adds the equivalent of eight cell towers to the covered area. AT&T has also three temporary cell sites for good measure. These things are typically installed during big, but temporary events. Think Super Bowl or, well, large conventions.

The company also says it has added fiber-optic connections to more than quadruple the backhaul capacity of each of the eight cell sites that serve the event area, and temporary sites will also be served by extensive backhaul. Whatever that means!

Fingers crossed, every SXSW attendee will be able to FourSquare till their battery dies. That's all you can ask for.

Flickr

Talk to Me. Avoid language barriers by using a real-time speech-to-speech translator.

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Pros & Cons:

Pros

• Translate language speech to text and text to speech phrases with many different language options
• Email and SMS text message the translations
• Great for traveling
• More language options in text to speech mode

Cons

• Voice translation only works from English to other languages and not in reverse, however you can toggle text to speech mode to write for example Spanish to Italian
• Not 100% accurate but what automated translation service is?!?

Features:

Talk to Me Android App is a speech language translation app for many languages, which also supports text to speech. Send your translations to friends via SMS text message or email the audio file. The speech detection experience has been much better than Google's voice to text experience.

Voice Languages Supported (there are many more language options in text to speech mode):

• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• English (United Kingdom)
• English (United States)

Usefulness:

Talk to Me Android App is very useful to those trying to learn another language or travel.

Ease of Use:

Simply tap the big green button and speak a short phrase into the phone, a few seconds later it will translate in the language and dialect of the translation language chosen.

Frequently Used:

User dependent, maybe sparingly or casual use.

Interface:

Nothing fancy but very intuitive.

Apple Stacks The Deck Against Amazon's Kindle App

Jay Yarow | Feb. 26, 2010, 11:00 AM | 5,634 | 34

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Tags: Gadgets, Amazon, Kindle, Apple, iPad, eBooks, Big Tech, Media

AAPL Feb 26 2010, 05:20 PM EST

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AMZN Feb 26 2010, 05:20 PM EST

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When Apple's iPad goes on sale in a few weeks, its iBookstore will have a distinct user-experience advantage over e-book competitors like Amazon's Kindle App.

That is, the iBookstore will let you seamlessly buy books from within the iBooks reader app, with the iTunes account it's already aware of.

Meanwhile, rivals like the Kindle app and Barnes & Noble e-reader will require you to boot up their apps, then click a button to boot up the iPad's Web browser, shop for e-books in a Web store, sign in and pay with a non-iTunes account, relaunch the e-reader app, and sync up your new e-book. Not as elegant.

It's not a huge difference, but it's the kind of small simplicity advantage that has helped Apple's iTunes music store maintain a lead over its rivals, including Amazon.

People who use the Kindle app on their iPhones today will know that this isn't a new thing: Since the Kindle iPhone app launched last March, users have had to leave the app to buy e-books.

Amazon didn't built the app this way from the beginning. We have learned that when Amazon first submitted its Kindle application for the iPhone to Apple, Amazon included its own payment system within the app, so customers could just pay for e-books and download them right in the app.

When Apple spotted the payment system, it told Amazon to get rid of it, according to a source familiar with Amazon's operations.

Why? It's a rule Apple smartly instituted at the App Store's beginning, forbidding third-party e-commerce of digital goods within apps.

That is, it's okay to use an iPhone app to buy physical goods -- as you can in Amazon's main iPhone app, or the Fandango app, etc. And developers are welcome to use Apple's in-app purchasing system -- and give a 30% cut of revenue to Apple -- to sell digital goods within apps.

But Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other vendors are prohibited from using their own e-commerce systems within apps for virtual goods. Thus the trip to the Safari browser to buy books.

It's obviously a rule Apple itself is allowed to break -- it's Apple's iPhone, and it can do whatever it wants, as we've seen recently with Apple's recent raids on thousands of sexy apps. But it does put competitors like Amazon on uneven footing.

Obviously, Amazon is never going to want to give Apple a 30% cut of e-book sales, so it's not going to implement Apple's in-app purchasing system. So it's indefinitely stuck sending its customers into the browser to make purchases. (Meanwhile, on the new BlackBerry Kindle app, you can buy e-books directly within the app.)

Assuming the iBooks app and the iBookstore have similar selection, pricing, and e-reader features, this one simple step could give Apple a substantial advantage over Amazon.

See Also: 10 Burning Questions About Apple's iPad

Post by Tim Trefren (Co-founder of Mixpanel, Inc.) guest posted at http://mashable.com/2010/02/02/social-analytics/

When most people think of web analytics, they think about pageview tracking; basically, measuring which pages on a website are being viewed. Pageview tracking is a well-established technology, but it's no longer meeting the needs of many of the most well-known companies in social media. Companies like Facebook, Zynga, Slide, and RockYou are spending tons of resources building their own internal analytics tools.

There's a reason for this: Social media is highly competitive, and the biggest advantage you can have is data. To improve and grow, these companies need to gather as much information as they can, and they need more than simple pageview tracking.

In the following sections I will cover three of the most important things to measure for social applications.

1. Funnel Analysis: Measuring Conversion Rates

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One critical kind of analysis that social apps require is called Funnel Analysis. This is a way of measuring conversion rates, which is the lifeblood of all applications. The term conversion rate refers to the total number of visitors who came to a site, compared to the number of visitors who did a desired action (such as creating an account or purchasing an item).

What Funnel Analysis gives you is a more granular way of analyzing conversion rates. Instead of simply looking at signups divided by total visitors, you figure out the steps that have to be taken to get a user to sign up and measure the individual conversion rates between steps. As you can see from the image above, there's often a pretty steep dropoff between each step, giving you the namesake funnel shape. (Note: the image uses made up stats and is for illustration purposes only.)

This more granular look at conversion rates can have surprising results. Let's take a look at Twitter'ssignup funnel:

1. Hit homepage
2. Go to signup page, fill out registration form
3. Browse suggested topics
4. Add e-mail friends
5. Search for someone

As you can see, the signup process is pretty complicated, and will benefit from detailed analysis. We might find, for example, that there's a huge dropoff rate (a dropoff occurs when many of the people who made it to one step don't make it to the next) at the Add e-mail friends step. Once we've discovered a dropoff rate like this, we have to figure out the root cause. The dropoff rate at the Add e-mail friends step could mean that users are unsure how to continue, causing them to leave, or they might not want to add their e-mail information. We would have to test to make sure.

Ultimately, Funnel Analysis is about finding and improving trouble spots in a website. With continual analysis, changes can be measured and ideas can be tested over time.

2. Engagement Tracking: Measuring What People Do

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As I mentioned earlier, pageview tracking is becoming less and less relevant for many web companies. Instead of the basic unit of measurement being the pageview, they are starting to track more directly relevant things, like the actions people are taking. Twitter, for example, may want to know how many tweets the average person sends and what they are searching for, not how many pages they viewed. Pageviews are just a way of approximating the information we really want, and as the web grows more interactive, they become less and less relevant.

Think about this: Sites exist today on which you never actually change the page. These are highly interactive sites, but they are impossible to track with pageviews, so traditional analytics tools are useless.

This will only become more common as time goes on and more companies develop highly interactive applications and adopt AJAX loading techniques.

3. Visitor Retention: How Many People Come Back?

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This next technique measures a fairly complex but extremely valuable metric for successful web applications.

You can think of Visitor Retention as a measure of how sticky your site is. What we're really measuring is the percentage of people who come back again and again. The most common way of approaching this is to look at a group of users from a single time period (a week, for example) and track their behavior over time.

Here's an example of a retention table that should help clarify things:

Each row shows the weekly retention rates for a single group of users (sometimes known as a cohort). The first row, for example, is the cohort seen between December 7 and December 13, 2009. We can see that 15.15% of the users in that group came back after 1 week, 13.4% after 2 weeks, and so on.

This is crucial information, particularly for social applications, because most of the value lies in the size of the community. An application with low retention is like an empty shell many installs but few active users and you don't want to build an empty shell. You want a thriving, vibrant community.

Retention is a huge factor in building a strong community for a few reasons: You don't have much of a community if everyone is a newcomer (so more old users is a good thing), and the nature of retention is such that you get disproportionate returns on any increases you make. Without going into too much detail, an example would be that increasing retention by 33% might give you 50% more users in the long run.

Twitter is again a good example for us, as the network has been plagued by low retention rates. Twitter may seem successful now, but their low retention rate is troubling. In the past, companies that seemed to be extremely successful (think early Facebook apps) ultimately lost their edge because they couldn't retain their users.

It's entirely possible that Twitter itself could be a fad. With such low retention, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised but it is still too early to tell.

Conclusion

---

There's a lot to learn about analytics from the frontrunners in social media. The intense competition has resulted in many new and innovative ways to track and analyze visitor data.

We covered three such concepts in detail today: Funnel analysis, which lets you track conversion rates across whole parts of your site, engagement tracking, which is becoming more relevant than pageviews, and visitor retention analysis, which helps you understand and optimize the number of repeat visitors you get.

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Scherillo v. Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., 2010 WL 537805 (E.D.N.Y. Feb. 17, 2010)

I teach my Cyberspace Law students that the most effective online contract formation process is a "mandatory non-leaky clickthrough agreement":

* mandatory = the user cannot proceed to the destination without going through a screen soliciting their consent to the user agreement.
* non-leaky = there are no alternative ways the user can reach the destination. I realize this is redundant with "mandatory," but I remind students that a seemingly mandatory process can have leaks. For example, if customer support representatives will manually set up user accounts occasionally, the mandatory online process has become leaky because now a few users reached the destination without consenting to the agreement.
* clickthrough = the user manifests assent to the contract by clicking, and the user is told that the click signifies assent.

There are other ways to form online contracts (e.g., email exchanges), but if executed properly, the mandatory non-leaky clickthrough process should do very well against contract formation challenges. But even this description leaves open a number of user interaction judgments. Does likelihood of contract formation vary if:

* the agreement terms are presented on the clickthrough page itself or are only available for review by hyperlink?
* the agreement terms are presented in a scrollbox? If a scrollbox is used, must the user be forced to scroll through the scrollbox?
* the user is asked to check an additional box, such as a certification that the user has read the agreement?

In all of these cases, I believe the contract should be properly formed whether the answer to these questions is yes or no. However, I'm now a fan of adding a bonus mandatory checkbox as part of the formation process after reading today's opinion. A user mounts a sophisticated challenge to a mandatory non-leaky clickthrough process, and the bonus mandatory checkbox helps squelch the challenge. I think the court would have enforced it without the checkbox, but it sure put the user in an awkward/untenable position.

Scherillo bought a financial report about a company from Dun & Bradstreet's Small Business Solutions website. Scherillo alleges that the report painted an overly rosy picture of the company, leading him to make bad investment decisions that cost him money when the company tanked. Scherillo wants D&B to cover his investment losses.

Scherillo is almost certain to lose on the merits. Indeed, this case brought to mind one of the earliest cyberlaw cases, Daniel v. Dow Jones, 520 N.Y.S. 2d 334 (N.Y.C. Civ. Ct. Spec. Term 1987). (This case is a fun read--see how the court discusses electronic networked communications almost a quarter-century ago). That case involved Dow Jones' publication of an ambiguous report via a dial-up online service that led the plaintiff to make a bad investment decision. The court said that any tort claim for publishing inaccurate information required the plaintiff to show that it had a "special relationship" (analogous to a fiduciary relationship) with the information vendor, and an ordinary customer-vendor relationship did not qualify as a special relationship.

Interestingly, D&B would rather hear the case in NJ rather than keep it in NY and hope to benefit from substantive NY law that surely would doom Scherillo's case. (Perhaps NJ has a similar law). To move the case to NJ, D&B invoked the venue selection clause in its user agreement. Let's look at the online contract formation process. The court says:

"since 2007, the SBS website has included a page that requires users to register before purchasing a Dun and Bradstreet product ("the registration page"). On the registration page, users input information, including their e-mail address and name. The bottom quarter to third of the page contains a scrollable text box with the title "Terms and Conditions" [which contained a mandatory venue selection clause designating NJ]. Directly below this text box there is more text that reads: "I have read and AGREE to the terms and conditions shown above." Immediately adjacent to this text is a much smaller, empty box ("the terms and conditions check box"). Also at the bottom of the page is another box containing the phrase "Complete Registration" ("the Complete Registration box"). Clicking on this box completes the user's registration. McDonald testified that if a user clicks on the Complete Registration box without checking the terms and conditions check box, the user is unable to complete registration and is returned to the registration page."

Check out the page yourself as I saw it in Google Chrome on Feb. 18 (with cropping). The formation process looks pretty standard to me.

Scherillo attacked the formation process by saying he never consented to the agreement because "it was possible for him to unknowingly and involuntarily 'check' the terms and conditions check box." Not only that, he lined up Sean Chumura, "a cyberwarfare and computer forensics expert" who is also [LINK NSFW] helping Perfect 10 in its lawsuit against Google, to testify that "it was possible for plaintiff, while 'tabbing' through the registration page, to inadvertently hit the space bar and thereby 'check' the terms and conditions box."

[Snarky paragraph alert] First, this may prove the adage that you can find an expert to testify about ANYTHING. Second, Scherillo alleged $75k of investment losses. For a low-value lawsuit like that, he needs a cyberwarfare expert??? Third, I believe Chumura has a MySpace page. Really...? I wonder if he uses an AOL.com email address too. The MySpace page also reveals that its author appeared to attend the Dan Quayle school of spelling.

OK, back to the case. The judge was no more tolerant of this nonsense than I am. He resolves the factual dispute by saying:

even under plaintiff's theory--that, while "tabbing" through the fields on the registration page, he accidentally hit the space bar key and thereby "checked" the terms and conditions box--plaintiff would have seen the check mark appear in the box and then still would have had to hit the "return" key (or clicked the "complete registration" box with the mouse) to complete the registration and advance to the next screen. Plaintiff would have had an opportunity to see that he checked the box inadvertently before he then hit the return key on the "complete registration" box. Thus, to accept plaintiff's theory, the Court would have to find that plaintiff hit two keys accidentally-the space bar and the return key-and that he was then involuntarily and unexpectedly sent to the next screen where he nonetheless proceeded to enter his credit card information and complete the purchase of the report. This alleged chain of events is simply not credible.

Therefore, Scherillo's click on the "Complete Registration" box manifested Scherillo's assent to the terms, even if Scherillo chose not to review them. The court says that the fact that the terms were in a scrollbox is immaterial, and the fact that some sites require the user to scroll through the scrollbox before proceeding doesn't affect the effectiveness of D&B's implementation.

I believe this court would have upheld the formation process even without the bonus checkbox, but you can see how the checkbox defused the withering assault of a cyberwarfare expert. Thus, you might consider implementing the bonus checkbox to discourage similar silly attacks against your contract formation process in the future.

Four months ago we asked you to vote in our Web Faceoff series for your preferred social network between the two current giants: Twitter versus Facebook. The results were pretty close, although Facebook edged out Twitter in a 48% to 40% victory. Now, there's a whole new game in town.

Google Buzz is now the new shiny, and represents Google's big push into social networking meets mobile social meets location services. We know it's still the early days for Buzz, but it seems like a good time to gauge the opinion of Mashable readers thus far.

Have you had a chance to spend some quality time with Buzz? Do you like the service? Are there parts about it you don't like? Does it draw you away from other social networks, or complement them? Let us know your vote for best social service in the poll below, and be sure to let us know why you picked your favored winner.

Tags: facebook, Google, google buzz, polls, social media, social networking, twitter, web faceoff

Earlier, I posted a video asking which format you prefer our YouTube videos to be recorded in. Going a step further, I can't help but wonder what it is that will make the community one big happy bundle of joy. What do you want to see? What directions do envision our community taking?

For instance, if I post an article or video related to Apple, the Windows fans go ballistic. Likewise, whenever I posted something Windows-related, the Mac fanboys blow a gasket. It's like there's no happy medium these days. I cannot possibly make everyone happy all at once. I'm not even going to try!

However, I DO strongly believe that what we're doing is about the community, not just for the community. So I want to know what YOU think. What do you want to see more of in the coming months? What things can you live without? Leave a follow-up comment here, or drop me an email with your thoughts.

• What is Homeland Security monitoring now?
• Is it difficult for a printed book to keep your attention?
• Could a mobile phone series based around Windows 7 be a big hit for Microsoft?
• Hawaii has said YES to Google!
• What, exactly, is the appeal of so-called reality shows?
• Very soon, Apple will have sold their ten millionth song.
• Redwood trees are being threatened by a lack of fog.
• We definitely need a tax cut!
• Could Intel and Nokia be entering into the mobile phone fray?
• Where can you go online to listen to music, and read the lyrics at the same time?
• What 97 things should every programmer know?
• What will you look like with a 4G network?
• What could possibly be better than Google.
• New research reveals that burglers have changed their shopping lists dramatically.
• Even Barbie is a Geek!

Don't forget to stop by our software center to see what new deals we have for you today!

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Last week I ran into Brad Murphy, the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) / Vice President of Sales for Revision3, the television network for the Internet generation at a Placement Scout product placement event at Tesla Motors in Santa Monica. Well, OK I didn't really run into Brad, I told him and a few other web video producers about the event because I thought it would be a good chance for us to get our shows in front of brands that might benefit from the special engaged audiences that web videos have.

Brad told me that he was glad to come and interact with brands and that it was an opportunity for him ( and for me for that matter) to get a one on one conversation going as to how we could get some of the brands that attended the event to integrate their products and services into web series.

Now it's hard for realyl big brands to get their heads around the value of web video series right now but several mid-size companies are starting to see how they can benefit from getting their product or service in front of their targeted demographic while making it part of the conversation.

In my video interview with Brad he talks about how the Revision3 audience is made up of what he calls, Digital Natives people who don't watch regular television, are looking for content on-demand whether it's text based content, video content or communicating through social media to find that content. It's an audience that hyper-connected.

Brad also goes on to talk about the live events that Revision3 does with their shows. (Something I'm hoping to do more of with my shows.)

What if it Just Ain't True?

A few years ago one of my friends accidentally discovered that his dad was in fact not his dad at all. Ouch. At twenty seven years of age, he discovered that something he absolutely knew (not thought, hoped, or wished) to be fact, was in reality, not true at all. Let's just say that his reaction wasn't a totally positive one. It never occurred to him that his truth', may in fact, be a big lie. A well-meaning lie (his mum had tried to protect him). A noble lie (is there such a thing?). But a major deception nonetheless.

What if you were to wake up tomorrow and discover that something you've believed (thought to be absolute fact) for years, simply wasn't true? Completely and utterly false. You weren't even close. How would you feel? Mad? Betrayed? Confused? Stupid? Maybe a little of each? Could it be that some of us hold on to certain beliefs in order to avoid the above feelings? After all, imagine having to unlearn something we've believed for decades? That would be quite the mental and emotional challenge, wouldn't it?

We've spoken about beliefs many times here at me-dot-com but today I want to give you a little something to chew on, think about and discuss; if you feel so inspired.

Some questions for you:

1. Is it possible that you've learned' certain things over the years that are, in fact, false? Is it maybe even likely?
2. Is it possible that some of your (self-limiting) beliefs are the very things which stop you from fulfilling (or at least, exploring) your potential, making certain decisions, taking chances and possibly finding happiness?
3. Did you consciously choose and develop your own beliefs, or did you simply adopt hand-me-downs from somebody else? (Many people do this). But Craig, why wouldn't I believe dad? He knows and I trust him, so his beliefs become mine - consciously or not. Intentionally or not. Besides, I wouldn't want to offend him would I?
4. Is it possible that you've believed certain things (seen the world in a particular way) for so long that the very thought of questioning some of your long-held beliefs makes you feel (1) uncomfortable, (2) anxious, (3) disloyal, (4) unfaithful, or perhaps even (5) overwhelmed?
5. Have you ever been coerced, pressured or expected to believe certain things, and because of those imposed beliefs you have been compelled to adhere to certain standards, rules and behaviours? Even though deep down you resented it?
6. Have you ever felt like questioning certain beliefs (to others) but held your tongue in order to keep the peace and avoid potential confrontation? (Why bother it will only create problems?).
7. For the most part, do your beliefs empower you or limit you?

Breaking Free

Sometimes beliefs are like handcuffs or leg irons. They restrict movement, potential, exploration and of course, freedom. Freedom to learn, grow and change. They keep us in the custody of something or someone. You know what I mean.

One of the most liberating, empowering and cathartic things we can do as authors of our own lives is to question our beliefs. Not for the sake of being different, difficult or rebellious, but for the sake of learning who we are, what we are and what we really believe beyond the social conditioning, the weight of expectation, the years of mental and emotional programming and beyond the pressure of group thinking.

After all, our beliefs determine our choices and behaviours (for the most part) and our choices and behaviours determine the kind of results we produce in our world. So why wouldn't we? Is it time for you to do a little unlearning?

Tell me about what you've unlearned lately.

Craig Harper (B.Ex.Sci.) is a qualified exercise scientist, author, columnist, radio presenter, television host, motivational speaker and university lecturer. For the past 25 years he has been a leading presenter, educator, motivator and commentator in the areas of personal and professional development. You can visit Craig's blog at Motivational Speaker.FREE eBook So You've Decided to Get in Shape (Again) Craig's FREE eBook takes 20 30 minutes to read, and addresses the REAL getting-in-shape issues based on his 25 years of experience. To get Craig's FREE eBook click here, weight loss books.

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With each new milestone in technological evolution we've seen a company emerge as the clear leader. In the current landscape, we observe this happening in several key parts of the marketplace including networking, search and operating systems.

Cloud computing is a new disruptive force that makes us ask the question whether we'll see the future of the cloud dominated by a single company. In this multi-part series, we'll take a look at a handful companies and envision what the world might look like, if, in fact, they win it all. We'll also analyze what it will take for a new company to rise up and claim the leadership role in this chapter of computing.

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Dominance Happens: A Bit of Recent History

There has been a love/hate relationship with companies that dominate markets. On one hand, it's us consumers that make it happen. But when they become giants we cheer as governement regulators and competitors knock them down.

Microsoft has faced this issue perhaps more than any company in the past few decades. When the browser battles were in full swing in the late 1990s, Microsoft was taken to court by the Department of Justice for antitrust violations.

In this note released in 2000 - Technology, Market Changes, and Antitrust Enforcement -Microsoft evaluated the idea of whether it was consistent with public welfare for a company to "win" a technology market, and what it means to have a network effect in technology.

Microsoft makes the point that no technology company will hold a dominant position for long if it doesn't innovate and expand the market definition. Additionally, if a company doesn't find the right balance of trust and pricing between its customers new technologies will find a way into the market and cause customers to defect.

Point: A Dominant Vendor Will Emerge in the Cloud

Taking these factors into consideration, we believe there are several points that can support the argument that a dominant player in cloud computing in the future. Due to the nature of market forces a single vendor will emerge as the clear leader in offering cloud solutions.

• First mover advantage: We're already seeing amazing things happen at first-movers like Amazon that are defining product and pricing. This gives them an advantage in fueling further growth and by learning and iterating the solutions in the market. Being first in an infrastructure-driven business will help them reach scale that others just can not reach easily - and potentially price it where others can't match.
• Vendor lock: Once you get started with an infrastructure provider it becomes interwoven into business operations. By the current nature of the cloud (e.g. little standards, a lot of innovation) being first with leading solutions adds more momentum to the first-mover that wins strategic customers.
• Strategic synergies: When we look at the combination of cloud computing and collaboration, we see a natural fit in services that meet more needs and take more market share. It may just work out that bundling works also in the cloud and creates the network effect that Microsoft is famous for. Cisco is also partnering across the landscape, with a focus on preparing the network for the cloud. By making it easier to manage your cloud with Cisco gear, it will provide IT leaders a reason to expand their relationships today, and stay tomorrow.
• Acquisitions and Partnerships: Companies that buy their way into the market will be a big factor in putting momentum behind their offerings. Companies to watch: VMware, Cisco, Oracle. These companies are already showing that the race is on to win the cloud through aggregation of capabilities. Cisco has a blog dedicated to Cloud Computing, Oracle is going on tour sharing its ambitions for the cloud

Counterpoint: A Dominant Company Will Not Emerge in the Cloud

Perhaps no single organization will have the ability to create a dominant foundation in cloud computing. Instead, we'll see many types of solutions as equal peers in the market.

In a way, this runs against the grain of existing technology landscape and our history with successful innovations. Maybe that is why we love the idea of the cloud itself?

• It's too big to own: One big reason to doubt a single dominant force in the cloud is that it feels like owning the Internet. Even Cisco with its strengths can't make such a claim. Perhaps the cloud is the perfect market, where the barriers of entry are low enough that continual evolution will occur.
• It's a movement, not a layer: Another argument against the cloud having a dominant player is its fuzzy definition. There are many parts and pieces to it, and it's not clear today what it would mean to "win" the cloud computing market.
• Portability will keep vendors in check: If customers demand solutions where they can move from vendor to vendor freely, it will impact the landscape. Companies with cloud solutions in the marketplace could be required by these customers to remove barriers to moving data and services between different entities. Additionally, standards and best practices may emerge that allow companies and individuals to move freely between providers. In this world, it will become a fluid market that prevents vendor lock and promotes pricing and trust as brand differentiators.

A Glimpse at Potential Futures

We've compiled a list of companies worth reviewing as candidates as possible dominant players in cloud computing. We'll be looking at their brand and the available assets that could be leveraged to achieve this position. Finally, we'll take a fresh look at what it might feel like if they succeed and shape the brave new world of cloud computing.

The list of candidates we're analyzing includes: Google, Microsoft, Apple, VMware, IBM, HP, Cisco, Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook, and our favorite, Insert new startup to our list by adding a comment below.

Please let us know what you hopes and fears are with the cloud computing marketplace. Any companies we should we add to our list (or remove)? What's your take: Is there one company today that is best positioned to win the cloud?

Photo credit: reddodo & savingfutures

The Wall Street Journal reports that more changes are planned for Buzz in response to user feedback, including the option to block conversations and other filtering features.

Even as Buzz impressed some social media enthusiasts, it also angered some folks for various reasons the most significant being that it's a bit noisy and difficult to sort through, and that it isn't quite as privacy-friendly as everyone would have preferred.

The WSJ says Google assembled important company figures into a war room where they discussed ways to respond to user criticism. The first results were the big privacy tweaks that went live over the weekend an end to Reader and Picasa connectivity and Gmail contact auto-following. They also made it possible for users who aren't interested at all to remove the Buzz from Gmail completely.

Details about the coming improvements to filtering haven't been revealed beyond the option to block certain conversations, but we're guessing or at least hoping that the ability to collapse comment threads will be among the coming changes. That was by far the most requested feature when we pinged the Buzz crowd asking what features everyone would like to see.

There are a lot of improvements yet to be made. For example, unless you abandon the option of a vanity URL in favor of a numeric homepage, it's pretty easy for someone to guess your e-mail address. If you want it to stay private, that could be a problem.

We'll see what Google does in the coming weeks; we were expecting a large number of new tweaks and this update confirms that they're coming.

Tags: buzz, Google, google buzz, News, social media

About twice a week I think, "Why don't I try this crazy idea and see if it works?" about some element of my career. With no label, no manager, and no inner voice of reason slow me down, I get to experiment all I want. 90% of my crazy ideas have to do with social networking -- which I spend half a lifetime doing, despite the crap I take from my family and Real Life friends. (Hey, some of us actually do bond over web comics, starship replicas, the fail whale, and photos of stuff on cats.) Mostly my nutty ideas work just a little bit. Some are epic failures. But my experimental flopping and floundering inches me closer to the day when I'll be totally financially independent as a full-time musician. Plus it's more fun than having a real job.

But every now and then a crazy idea works really really really good. Bam!

I planned to sell 20-40 of my little bootleg CD's. Silly me. I sold well over 200. My little stack of jewel cases looked so pathetic.

WholeWheatRadio.org broke every record for online listenership, CD sales, tips -- everything. The more listeners tuned in, the more tuned in, and the more money they gave, the more money they gave. The crowd online was thrilled to be breaking WWR records. I drove away from Talkeetna having earned about $4,000 in one night, with a new CD to produce in just a couple of days and an avalanche of e-mail and publicity requests to deal with. Seldom have I been so happy and so panicked.

1. The Answers market is in a land grab mode
Unlike eBay, where there's a general market for goods and you get huge network effects from having a critical mass of buyers and sellers, StackOverflow is all about niches. People who are searching for how to make sql server not go slow? aren't likely to bleed over to how to make swedish meatballs?.

This means that you'll have to fight for every niche. Similar to how general forums would have to fight for every niche. Just because you have a forum site that's big for gamers, you won't have much of an edge attracting foodies.

Finally, it's not like this is a new idea with no other entrants. Look at Yahoo Answers for a site that's still up with a similar model and look at Google Answers for another that couldn't be turned into a worthwhile business and closed.

2. Stack Overflow is like Starbucks
It really isn't. Starbucks can use capital efficiently because they have big capital expenditures securing land, building out stores, and purchasing coffee machines. Where's the capital intensity part of starting another answers site? Adding another server? Coming up with a new design?

It doesn't seem like Stack Overflow can efficiently use big money for anything but advertising itself. Which is kinda funny when the whole business is about getting page views to sell for ad crumbs. It also rings very much like dot-com. Remember when all you had to do was get eyeballs? Oh, it's free? Who cares, let's make it up on volume!

3. Stack Overflow wants to get on Techcrunch
If you're listing the publicity of Stack Overflow raises $10M in Series A by Fancy Schmancy VC as the 3rd pro for taking money, you're bound to be in trouble. The Techcrunch post you're going to get from this is going to scroll off the front page in 4 hours and nobody who's actually going to use your service is going to care.

Do you think people looking for an answer to how do I get the three gold rings in zelda? is going to give a hoot who's money you're burning to provide that forum? Or even that the advertisers you're hoping to attract is going to look at anything else than CPM and demographics for a clue on whether to invest? No.

4. The investor will give you advice, connections, and introductions
They may, but most of the introductions your typical investor is going to give you is how to get you out in 3-5 years. You can find a lot of advice in many places. Rarely is the quality of the advice associated with having money involved of largely superior quality.

And if you end up building something of considerable value, then the connections and introductions will come all by themselves. You usually have to work to fight them off with a stick when things are going great. And getting an intro to Mr. Very Important Person before you have anything of material value is usually not going to give you much anyway.

5. Taking money means big exit or IPO
I'd argue the opposite. When you take money, your exit is bound to be smaller unless you're playing the Web 2.0 lottery game (where a few lucky contestants gets bought for sums completely uncorrelated to business fundamentals). Taking money means giving up equity, which means there'll be less left over if you happen to build something that's valuable enough for others to buy.

And I don't know if you've heard, but the IPO markets aren't all that interested in eyeball companies without the numbers to back them up any more. Doesn't matter how many letters of the alphabet you've used for series whatever funding before you got there.

If you can build a great, profitable business, you'll have all the options to sell or go IPO. Taking VC only complicates that.

6. Taking VC will make your company successful
This one is funny. So if you're not looking to take VC and play the Web 2.0 lottery or aim for an early exit, you're just in it for personal aggrandizement. If you take the money, you just want the best for your business. Spot the disconnect here.

Now even given all this, there's actually still an argument for why Joel should take the money. It'll probably lower the chances of Stack Overflow ultimately succeeding as a long-term sustainable business, but if he has eyed that he has a hot property right now, it'll be a good time to take some money off the table.

A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else. If Joel and co. can negotiate a deal with Sand Hill road to give them a nice payout as part of the deal, this might well be even better than trying to shop around Stack Overflow for a sale that it's probably premature for.

Much better to take a small slice of the proceeds from a if this just get 1% of the billion dollar advertising market than to take the slice from how much money did you make for the past 12 months? of a strictly look-at-the-books sale.

Go cherries, go!

But that doesn't mean we can't learn something from how China is reacting to the recession with quick and massive stimulus that is succeeding in creating jobs and growth.

The world's largest human migration the annual crush of Chinese traveling home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is this Sunday is going a little faster this time thanks to a new high-speed rail line.

The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York.

Even more impressive, the Guangzhou to Wuhan train is just one of 42 high-speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

China spent $88 billion dollars on high-speed rail investment in 2009 alone, a substantial increase from previous years. It rivals the construction of the interstate highway system in America in the 1950s for its audaciousness and use of public monies to spur jobs and growth. And it's working:

As China upgrades and expands its rail system, it creates the economies of large-scale production for another big export industry. The sheer volume of equipment that they will require, and the technology that will have to be developed, will simply catapult them into a leadership position, said Stephen Gardner, Amtrak's vice president for policy and development [...]

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation's passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects.

Administrators mobilized armies of laborers 110,000 just for the 820-mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year.

You can do this far more quickly in a command economy, of course. But it's the priority order that is striking. China needed economic stimulus, and rapidly accelerated public investment. The US (which actually has added more in stimulus than most countries in Europe) took a balanced approach based more on tax cuts. Aside from the question of what approach works better in terms of economic activity, look at the end result practically all of China will be served by high-speed rail within a matter of years.

It's not perfect. Some Chinese have complained about the fare costs. And again, a single decision-maker rather than a phalanx of competing interests makes decision-making that much easier. But there's something that can be learned here. If you want to create jobs, rather than the Rube Goldberg approach of tax breaks and nudges toward private investment, just go ahead and create the jobs. In the long run you'll have higher growth and a better quality of life for the nation.

Bloomberg is reporting that Verizon is planning on adding official support for Skype to its handsets. The two companies are expected to announce a partnership at the Mobile World Congress on February 16, which will allow Skype calls to be made from Verizon phones using the provider's 3G data plan.

This would be a shrewd move on the part of Verizon. Voice calls are becoming a less and less of a profit center for wireless carriers. Look at the big price cuts that both Verizon and AT&T introduced last month: The biggest area of price savings is in unlimited voice plans. Data is still a premium, and in the case of Verizon, there are still data caps for mobile data usage.

For consumers, having Skype pre-loaded on a phone which Bloomberg says is to be on a range of low and high-end handsets might mean that instead of paying for a voice plan (or a more expensive voice plan), the option to get a better data plan and just use Skype when making calls might make more sense.

Bloomberg quotes IDC analyst Rebecca Swensen:

What's important is that Verizon understands that, at some point, they are going to be losing voice minutes to the data world. This makes their platform more valuable for end-users. It could be a differentiator for Verizon Wireless.

Although Verizon is the largest wireless carrier in the US, it faces stiff competition from AT&T. Although AT&T's service is pretty universally reviled, AT&T has the iPhone and that continues to drive customers to the carrier. While AT&T is expected to lose exclusivity at some point, it is unclear when or if Verizon will get to carry the device. As it stands, AT&T will be the 3G data provider for Apple's iPad this April.

Skype works on AT&T's WiFi network and a 3G version is in the works as well. Depending on which carrier can offer 3G access to Skype first and on what phones could depend on how valuable this feature is.

If given the choice, would you drop your voice plan and just use Skype over 3G data for making and receiving calls? Let us know!

Tags: 3g data, mobile voip, Skype, verizon, voip

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.

Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.

Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...

Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?

Google Docs: For longer documents.

Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.

Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.

Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.

Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.

But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.

The big project fails, the company begins to struggle and before you know it, the board of directors replaces the management team. Sound familiar? But crisis doesn't have to spell the end of the company itself.

Most companies and teams in turnaround situations focus on the obvious and important factors of balance sheet, cash flow and net income health. Teams also usually get to work quickly on market analysis that ultimately results in new product and business strategies. These actions are almost always necessary, just not always sufficient. Here are four often overlooked tactics that, if successfully employed, are critical to rapidly and successfully turning around a struggling enterprise:

1. Facilitate Closure - When a team has been through an extended period of hardship, it needs a sense of closure before it can start moving forward again, and closure is often best facilitated through a cathartic event that symbolizes the end of the perilous and painful journey. But while closure commonly necessitates letting a person or team go, don't rush to find a fall guy. Be very precise about identifying what was holding the company back it could just as easily have come in the form of an ineffective process or out-of-date strategy. Approach its removal the way you would a tumor: Excise carefully, and be wary of damaging any healthy surrounding tissue.

2. Set a Vision - According to intentional change theory, there are five steps to achieving sustained desired change. The first is to identify the ideal self, which for an organization is usually embodied in a collective vision consisting of its members' dreams (to be recognized as the best in the industry? world domination?), their desired future (market penetration? profitability?), and their strengths or values (high quality? extraordinary customer care?) Identify these in order to establish a shared vision that resonates with each team member on a deep, even emotional, level.

3. Find an Enemy - The easiest way to solidify an us is to identify a them. As Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory makes clear, people need to be part of a group, but in a company the result is often conflict between groups. The conflict that most often occurs in a crisis is affective and role-based and therefore often negative and value-destroying. There is no better way to rally the troops than to embody the fight with an external nemesis. Identify for your team an enemy outside the company and focus on beating or staying ahead of it, using everything from its press releases to its product launches to spur the team into action.

4. Tend the Garden - In our recently published book, The Art of Scalability, we talk at length about how leadership is like gardening. Leaders must hire or seed the team with the right people and mentor its members just as gardeners feed their plants. And when team members aren't working out, they need to be weeded out.

The time period between Microsoft's release of its XP desktop operating system and Vista marked the longest in the company's history between product launches. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's co-president, admitted in a Wall Street Journal interview to telling Bill Gates at one point that It's not going to work, describing the development as crashing to the ground due to haphazard methods of feature integration.

To recover from this, Microsoft enlisted the help of senior executive Amitabh Srivastava, who rooted out the process that was holding the project back. He then had a team of architects establish a development process that enforced high levels of code quality and reduced interdependencies. Once the new process was in place, the vision was set for what was ultimately a successful product launch, at least in terms of getting the product out the door and meeting the expected sales volumes.

There are entire books and domains of research dedicated to turning around failed projects and distressed teams. This list is in no way all-encompassing but if you are ever faced with the daunting task of turning around a team, these four tasks will be critical to its success.

If the acquisition of Touchco wasn't enough of an indication that Amazon is preparing for a skirmish with the Apple iPad, this should make it perfectly clear. Mike Nash, a man who has quite a history of accomplishments at Microsoft for the past two decades, is leaving the company to work on the Kindle business for Amazon.

Before leaving Microsoft, Mike was the Corporate Vice President of Windows Platform Strategy and was responsible for pieces of Windows business strategy, ecosystem engagement, consumer security, Internet Explorer, and emerging markets, according to his bio on Microsoft's Web site.

In addition to his most recent role, Nash has had a string of historic positions at Big M including a role as the first product manager on the original Windows NT marketing team; the Corporate Vice President of the Security Technology Unit; and a driver of a number of Microsoft acquisitions in the security space.

There's been no official announcement yet from Amazon so we're unsure of Nash's focus within the Amazon team.

[Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet] [Amazon Kindle]

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclszr.us/5

Related articles by Zemanta

• Amazon acquires Touchco and a Microsoft exec (macworld.com)
• Another Windows exec Mike Nash is leaving Microsoft (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Amazon Hires Mike Nash from Microsoft to Work on Kindle is a post from: Magical Tablet

My Thoughts On Techcrunch And Daniel Brusilovsky

News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here's my take. You can read crayon founder Joseph's take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT.

A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform
I've heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I've also spent time with the Powered executive team last year. Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn't just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings.

Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market:

• Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now's a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value. We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here.
• Acquisition provides key services software platforms can't fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment. In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint. Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group.
• Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together, the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together. Secondly, it'll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform. I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven't made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy.

Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors:

• Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships. This impacts other social agencies like Stage Two Consulting, Social Media Group, AdHoc, Ant's Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks, New Marketing Labs, who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value.
• Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform. Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use.
• This is competition for larger agencies yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman. Yet the smart agencies won't get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don't have in their portfolio.

Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I'm excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.