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First, if you have any questions for the Windows Phone 7 Series team, I'd be more than happy to ask on your behalf (as I do live around the corner from Redmond's campus and will be meeting with the team again at some point in the future). Post a comment and/or video response.

I was invited to a behind the scenes look at elements of the Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform. At Mobile World Congress (covered earlier in this channel), Microsoft provided a first look at Windows Phone 7 Series and I'm pleased to offer you the opportunity to see a live demonstration up close.

Yes, I got to play with the phone, too. It works as advertised even as a prototype. Unfortunately, we could not adjust the brightness settings in this particular device. The Metro interface is a bucket of win in my book.

Charlie Kindel partner group program manager, Windows Phone App Platform & Developer Experience was hosting an intimate reception this evening in San Francisco. I wasn't able to make it, but Microsoft arranged a somewhat more private meeting with Greg Sullivan from the Windows Phone team a little closer to home.

I met Greg a few years ago through the Longhorn Labs project (back when Microsoft Windows team leads worked actively with their most vocal community supporters). I'm not sure if I can reveal any more device details at this point, but suffice it to say

I want one.

• <a rel='nofollow' href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000HCVR5S/lockergnome Word 2007 Version Upgrade</a></li></ul></p><p>Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or <a href="http://blip.tv/file/get/L0ckergn0me-MicrosoftWindowsPhone7ScreenshotsAndLiveDemoVideoWalkth188.mp4">download the video</a>:</p><p><textarea style="width: 460px; height:60px;"><object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/j9F4QJK1wFs"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/j9F4QJK1wFs" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a></textarea></p><ul class="related_post"><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/helping-ponzi-with-her-macbook-pro/" title="Helping Ponzi with her MacBook Pro">Helping Ponzi with her MacBook Pro</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/img0823131736375jpg/" title="IMG0823131736375">IMG0823131736375</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/fixing-computers-for-a-living/" title="Fixing Computers for a Living">Fixing Computers for a Living</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/pay-off-student-loans/" title="Pay Off Student Loans">Pay Off Student Loans</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/hidden-microsoft-security-gem/" title="Hidden Microsoft Security Gem">Hidden Microsoft Security Gem</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/newspaper-industry-problems/" title="Newspaper Industry Problems">Newspaper Industry Problems</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-take-live-skype-calls/" title="How to Take Live Skype Calls">How to Take Live Skype Calls</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/texas-redbud/" title="Texas Redbud">Texas Redbud</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/lids-com-coupons/" title="Lids.com Coupons">Lids.com Coupons</a></li><li><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/geotag-your-photos-with-freeware/" title="Geotag Your Photos with Freeware">Geotag Your Photos with Freeware</a></li></ul> <p><iframe src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/lpj2a0s0b83fm727ahojoknhc4/300/250?ca=1&fh=280#http%3A%2F%2Fchris.pirillo.com%2Fwindows-phone-7%2F" width="100%" height="280" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"></iframe></p>

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.

The matter was remanded by the Federal Circuit to the District Court, and, as we blogged in December, several additional pre-trial rulings again favored the JMRI project, including a ruling on the eligibility of software code that is distributed for free for copyright infringement damages. The settlement was reached with a trial date on the not-too-distant horizon.

With the settlement, the Federal Circuit and District Court rulings will not be subject to direct appeal. Given the rarity of litigation over open source software, it seems unlikely that the reasoning of these two rulings will be questioned judicially in any other open source litigation for some time.

The settlement agreement is here, and the permanent injunction is here.

The explanation of the settlement on the JMRI site indicates that the proprietary software company has agreed, among other things, not to misuse the JMRI software at issue, or to register any domain names incorporating certain terms attributable to the JMRI project, and will make a payment of $100,000. Future disputes will be settled by mediation or arbitration.

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

Now that AT&T has joined the Android revolution, the first question new Android users will ask is what Android apps should I download? Luckily we've created a simple guide to get you started:

First we'll start with the operating system version of the Motorola Backflip at launch, which is version 1.5 the latest and greatest to date is 2.1 (with majority of users on 1.6). This may affect your ability to download some apps as they are compatible with higher versions of the OS. Why is the OS version so out of date? Motoblur Motorola tricked out the software for social networking ease however they have not released Motoblur on the latest and greatest Android OS. Don't fret an update is coming soon.

Now that we're over the OS hump, we'll recommend some of the best Android apps for your Motorola Backflip many for free!

ASTRO File Manager

Browse and Search files on your SD Card and phone with Astro File Manager.

Advanced Task Killer

Close individual or all apps and background services with Advanced Task Killer.

Meridian Player

Meridian Player for Music & Videos.

Dolphin Browser

Dolphin Browser allows you to browse the web using Tabs and create shortcuts using Gestures.

Handcent SMS

Handcent SMS offers text messaging like on iPhone, get T9 text capabilities and text signatures.

Shazam

Shazam... simply awesome! Get any song by simply letting your phone listen to it!

i Music Tao

i Music & i Music Tao allows you to download free MP3s.

Pandora Radio

Stream music for free with Pandora Internet Radio.

Gmote

Turn your AT&T Backflip into a media remote with Gmote and even control your computer via phone!

ShopSavvy

Scan bar codes of products in stores to find best pricing nearby or online with ShopSavvy.

Google Shopper for Android

Photo scan products to get pricing and details with Google's Shopper

Aloqa Always Be A Local

Aloqa location-based app finds places nearby you versus you searching for it.

Abduction!

Abduction! Is an additive game using your phone's accelerometer.

Robo Defense

Robo Defense is a classic tower defense game for Android phones.

Mystique. Chapter 2: The Child

Check out parts 1, 2, and 3 of the Mystique 3D horror puzzle game series.

Wixel

Like words games? Try Wuzzle for hours of fun!

Jewellust

Kill time with addictive Jewellust game

Solitaire

You can't forget a classic time-killer like Solitaire.

What the Doodle!?

Guess what others are drawing while they guess your drawing all online with What The Doodle!?

BlackJack Pro

Satisfy your Vegas crave with Blackjack Pro!

If you download all these apps you might run out of space on your Backflip! Do check these apps out and tell us what you think in the comments.

I'm heading to Tampa, Florida for a couple of days to take care of some business. I have my second thesis defense at the University of South Florida, and tomorrow I'm scheduled to give a teleseminar with the Poynter Institute about producing news with with smartphones.

My mobile media journey started a couple of years ago when I used Twitter to share news from the field as I covered the 2008 Gulf Coast storm season for the now defunct HDNews. I don't know how many journalists were doing it at the time, but I found Twitter and hashtags (like #Ike and #gustav) to be a great way to share first hand accounts of what I was witnessing from the field during Tropical Storm Fay, Hurricane Gustav, Ike and Tropical Storm Hanna.

I also used my blog to post the stories that we produced from the field and I shared footage that wasn't included in my stories. Oh if only the iPhone 3GS was out back then. The iPhone and other smartphones like the Android and Nokia models make it extremely easy to share video from anywhere. Other applications and sites like TwitPic allow easy photo sharing.

We all know that media can't be every. But people with these devices are everywhere, and it's changing the face of news and information. As an example, check out these pics from the Chile earthquake that were posted via Twitter.

Of course I can't share all of my secrets, but if you check out this Webinar, you should have a greater understanding of now TV news stations, and vloggers like myself are using technology to innovate the gathering of content.

WTTG Fox 5 in Washington DC, and KOB in New Mexico are doing a great job of experimenting with technology to enhance coverage.

I'll probably be posting mostly mobile videos, so keep it tuned to either my Twitter account, or check back here for the latest video updates.

Forgive the typos, I gotta board my flight!

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

---

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?

---

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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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

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.)

Continue reading Nokia N900 gets new firmware, new games coming too (video)

Nokia N900 gets new firmware, new games coming too (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Did you really think book publishing would go the way of the music industry and publish eBooks without DRM? Amazon already wraps their eBooks in DRM for the Kindle and now, Apple will do the same for publishers in its iBookstore.

According to the Los Angeles Times, sources in the book publishing industry have indicated that Apple's FairPlay DRM the same DRM used for its apps and its audio and video content will be made available to any book publisher who'd like to use it.

While there hasn't been an official announcement on its use, it's unlikely that many publishers will decline to use it except for maybe O'Reilly who is outspokenly against DRM.

Has DRM stopped you from buying eBooks?

Disclosure of Material Connection: http://dsclzr.us/0

[Los Angeles Times]

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• Amazon Allows Some Publishers and Authors to Opt Out of E-Book DRM (readwriteweb.com)
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• Amazon Forgot to Mention That Publishers Can Skip DRM on Kindle Books [Amazon] (gizmodo.com)
• Amazon At War With Publisher(s) (mydigitallife.co.za)
• The Ebook Maze Today (rudyrucker.com)

Apple iBooks To Be Wrapped in FairPlay DRM is a post from: The Magical Tablet

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

I stopped by the 4iThumbs booth to check out their product that would purportedly increase my (admittedly dismal) typing speed on the iPhone/iPod touch. It consists of a plastic overlay that puts small ridges between the letters of the standard iPhone keyboard, available in both portrait and landscape formats. The product comes with some tabs that you affix to the top and bottom of the device, and you can then slip the plastic overlay on and off. You can touch through the overlay and use the phone as usual while it's attached, although the bumps aren't terribly comfortable for swiping. There's a matching set of tabs for the back of the device which can hold the overlay when it's not in use.

I tested it out, and it works. I never texted much on any device other than the iPhone, so I can't make a direct comparison of typing speeds between an iPhone and, say, a Blackberry. I do type a lot on my iPhone, though, and I can readily say that my typing speed and accuracy increased dramatically while using the 4iThumbs overlay.

4iThumbs is $19.95US online for 1 set, which includes portrait and landscape versions and the tabs to attach them to your iPhone/iPod touch. At Macworld, you can pick up 2 for $15US, but you'll have to get there quick to take advantage of the show pricing.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Hands-on with the 4iThumbs keyboard for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Facebook users in the American West appear to move around a lot, and often have friends throughout the country, while users from Minnesota to Manhattan have connections much closer to home.

And in areas in and around Texas, on the edge of what's generally thought of as the Bible Belt, the Dallas Cowboys rank higher overall on users' fan pages than God.

These are just some of the interesting findings about Facebook users recently discovered by Pete Warden, a Colorado-based, British-born ex-Apple engineer who has spent the last six months gathering and analyzing data from more than 215 million public Facebook profile pages.

What he's discovered just might shed more light on the culture of connected America than the 2010 census.

"If you actually look at [Facebook user data] in the aggregate, it's like a painting," Warden told TechNewsDaily. "Each individual data point isn't interesting, but when you step back and look at the trends in millions of profiles, you start to see some pretty interesting pictures emerging."

Warden says he's been overwhelmed by the response he's gotten from this project, after working on similar projects in obscurity for years.

Among Warden's less surprising findings: Fox News host Glen Beck gets the number one spot on Facebook fan pages from users in Eastern Idaho. And the "Twilight" books, penned by Mormon author Stephenie Meyer, rank high in the heavily Mormon communities in and around Utah.

Facebook mining

These and other observations that Warden mined from the massive amount of Facebook data were posted on his blog last week, along with maps that break down the U.S. into seven regions based on Facebook user trends.

Now, after gathering the data from Facebook's site using software he designed and honed in the process, and making a first round of enticing observations, he wants to turn the raw data he's culled over to academia for further analysis. But he also hopes to steer investors and customers to his own software and services for further data gathering and aggregation.

"I'm much better at building the pipeline for processing the data than I am at doing really rigorous stuff with the results that come out at the end," Warden said in a telephone interview. "The patterns that I've blogged about in the U.S. data are very qualitative."

Indeed, much of the conclusions that Warden has drawn are open to interpretation, and his given names for America's regional social connection groups "Stayathomia" (the Northeast), "Socalistan" (Souther California), and "Mormonia" (the predominantly Mormon towns in Utah and Eastern Idaho) among them are playfully clever, but not very scientific.

Serious about privacy

But Warden is serious when it comes to people's privacy concerns, even though all the data being gathered is publicly available on Facebook's site, and can be found via Google. He says he wants to make the data useful for large-scale data analysis, but not for tracking down individuals.

"We want to make sure we don't help scammers, we don't help spammers, and we respect people's privacy," Warden said, "but also allow some sort of new insight to come out of this."

To that end, Warden has delayed releasing the data for the time being (he initially intended to release it yesterday, Feb. 9), after someone from Facebook contacted him, asking for some time to check the privacy implications.

Once Facebook clears the data for release to the academic world, Warden says he's ready to pass the task of interpreting all this data on to others and feature their conclusions on his blog more often than his own.

Meanwhile, Warden has some problems to patch in his data pipe, problems that have been helpfully pointed out by readers of his blog.

"One of the great things about getting this out there is having thousands of pairs of eyes to look over this stuff, like the fact that [the data shows] the top name in Alexandria, Louisiana is Mohamed," Warden said.

"When somebody pointed out that some of the profiles seemed to be coming from Alexandria, Egypt, that was a head-slapping moment."

• Teens Favor Social Media Over Blogs
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• Tips for Protecting Your Online Reputation

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.

ViralHeat, a social media analytics firm, hopes to fill the space left empty by other, far more expensive services.

Sponsor

The Basics

ViralHeat has been around for just over six months, providing a low-price but full-featured social media analysis for the budget minded. We had a chance to chat with CEO Raj Kadam and founder Vishal Sankhla today before the relaunch, which is unveiling support for Facebook monitoring, a new user interface and API support.

The fully Web-based app gives full analytics by monitoring an array of blogs, over 200 video sites, Twitter and now Facebook for mentions of your brand, which is set up as a profile. Each profile exists as a simple logic search, wherein you can keep track of your brand by searching for phrases, domains and hashtags, all in the syntax we've become accustomed to from using from sites like Google.

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget?

While ViralHeat compares itself on price to services like Radian6, there is a primary difference between the two services. ViralHeat offers a full set of analytics features, from standard mention monitoring to sentiment analysis using a natural language algorithm, but this is where it stays. It does not venture over to the content creation side, where we find the more expensive and extensive services like Radian6. Other services might offer workflow management, scheduled content delivery and other conversational tools, but this would be overkill for the users we imagine at this app's usability sweetspot.

We see that as an additional merit: ViralHeat has both the price point and the feature set fit for the company that wants to get on top of its image and perception on the social Web but can't afford to bring a social media expert on board - and on salary. The learning curve is suitable for the DIY set and the analytics it provides are self explanatory, not riddled with indecipherable, industry jargon.

For those of you that like the pricing but want to do a little more with the data, the service also allows you to export data into Excel format and access your data using the API.

The Price is Right

Speaking of pricing, this is a point that really brings it home for ViralHeat. With today's relaunch of the site, ViralHeat offers a three tiered pricing system, starting with a basic package for $9.99, a professional package for $29.99 and a business package for $89.99. The Basic package offers standard mentions analysis for 5 profiles, while the other packages offer sentiment analysis and API access for 20 and 40 profiles, respectively.

If we haven't drilled it in enough quite yet, here's the bottom line: ViralHeat looks like a solid social media analysis tool that is priced and designed for the more casual user, while offering simple features like export and API interaction that keep it flexible enough for the more serious user.

The O!Play streamers are very highly-regarded here at Gizmodo, especially when considering they don't cost more than 200 notes. The addition of Wi-Fi 802.11n, along with a multi-format card reader and ethernet port, for 129.90 in Italy (around $177), is definitely worth the few extra bucks. [ASUS via Slashgear]

Bloomberg News

Apple intends to stay nimble on pricing of the iPad, possibly lowering prices if the newly unveiled tablet device fails to gain traction among consumers.

That was just one of the items in a note out Sunday night from Credit Suisse recounting meetings with Apple executives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Apple officials who met with CS analyst Bill Shope seemed to downplay the potential for some cannibalization of other Apple lines, which analysts have noted.

Apple wants the iPad to be the best device for a few key use cases. For instance, the company believes it could eventually be seen as superior to both handheld and notebook devices for browsing the Internet, using the App Store, and consuming mobile media (video, photos, and e-books). Nevertheless, in other areas, notebooks, the iPhone, or an iPod may be more appropriate. This clear segmentation of capabilities suggests that cannibalization may be less of a concern than most currently believe.

Shope also wrote that despite the seemingly aggressive pricing of the iPad the lower-than-expected price points range from $499 to $829 Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn't revving up the way it liked. While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated), Shope wrote.

Apple shares are up about 0.5%. On the year, they're down a bit less than 7%. And since the iPad was introduced on Jan. 27, shares are down about 5.5%.

• It's based on Android 2.1. The build currently being circulated is identified as 2.1 version 1, mirroring the update just pushed to the Nexus One last week.
• Google Goggles is now pre-installed (no matter how unhelpful it may be).
• The browser's now multitouch enabled, just like Google Maps 3.4. Huzzah! No Flash, but then again, we weren't really expecting that.
• Interestingly, the home screen's still got the same look as 2.0.1, meaning it doesn't adopt the Nexus One's rotating 3D grid of app icons -- it's still got the pull-up drawer tab at the bottom.
• No active wallpapers. Bummer!
• The news and weather widgets introduced on the Nexus One are included. Maybe certain capabilities of 2.1 are going to be restricted to devices with minimum performance benchmarks?

Motorola Droid's next update to be Android 2.1, includes multitouch browser originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Kindle dev kit now rolling out in limited beta originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Are you on the fence about attending SXSW? Looking for some ammunition to take to your boss? Have a look at what top social media professionals Guy Kawasaki, Rebecca Corliss, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Greg Cangialosi, Dan Neely and Jeff Pulver have to say about why you should attend SXSW.

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.

We're not going to see the iPad hit stores for another two months, but it is already changing the e-book game and forcing publishers and consumers to pick sides.

Last night, several blogs including Venturebeat and NYT's Bits Blog noticed something was amiss on the website of the world's largest retailer: Amazon suddenly stopped selling books from Macmillan, one of the world's largest book publishers.

Not every Macmillan book is gone, but popular ones such as The Gathering Storm are no longer sold by Amazon, either in physical or Kindle form. You can still find the Amazon pages for Macmillan's books you just can't order the actual books.

According to The New York Times, the reason the books were pulled was the iPad. Macmillan told Amazon that it wanted to change its pricing and compensation agreement, upping the price of some books from $9.99 to $15 and splitting sales 70/30, the same model Apple uses for the iPhone app store and its upcoming iBooks store. Amazon's apparent response was to flex its muscle and pull countless Macmillan books off the virtual shelves.

The Dynamics of the New E-book War

Ever since we got word of the iPad's existence, we've known that Amazon and Apple were on a collision course. Apple saw an opportunity to not only create a new category of device, but to get its hands into the publishing market. In the same way Apple has transformed music, the computing giant would reshape books and become the primary distributor of e-books worldwide.

Back in September, we wrote a lengthy piece explaining why we believed Apple's tablet would eat the Kindle's lunch, displacing Amazon's lordship over e-books. We argued that its multipurpose functionality, color screen, and sexier interface and look would put it over the top. Now that we know the iPad's starting price ($499), our opinion hasn't changed. While the Kindle will survive, its sales will likely never be the same.

Publishers like Macmillan apparently agree with us as well, otherwise it wouldn't so boldly demand price changes from Amazon. Before the iPad was revealed, Amazon was the only player in the game. You played by its rules or you could take a hike. Now with a viable alternative only months away, publishers can run to Apple, where they will have more freedom over its e-book prices.

Amazon's clearly worried, which is why it's launching an app store and used its earnings report to remind us that the Kindle is far from dead. But if publishers decide to abandon the Kindle, then Apple will have won the war by default.

That's why Amazon decided to use its biggest weapon, Amazon.com itself, against Macmillan to send a message to every publisher: If you don't play by its rules, then you can't be in its store. While a publisher can likely survive without the Kindle, the same cannot be said for Amazon.com. Publishers simply cannot afford to leave the world's largest online retailer.

The Kindle and the iPad offer different experiences. The Kindle's battery life and e-ink are strong selling points for the device as a reader, but the iPad offers so much more. Apple's banking on those extra features and its undeniable reach to turn the Kindle into an endangered species.

Publishers now have to either choose a side or walk the tightrope between the two companies. The end result will be a long, drawn-out war that will both help and hurt consumers. How it will end is anybody's guess.

Tags: amazon, apple, Apple iPad, Apple Tablet, ebooks, iBooks, ipad, Kindle, Macmillan, Tablet, trending

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

I was messing around with the iPad simulator, and I noticed that I could fit 6 icons in the dock. There was no modding involved. Since the iPad has a roomy screen, this could be very plausible. And since I am a jailbreak person, I know how uncommon this kind of thing is. But it goes along pretty well with Apple allowing the modification of the background.

TUAWHow many icons on that iPad dock? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

We're not going to see the iPad hit stores for another two months, but it is already changing the ebook game and forcing publishers and consumers to pick sides.

Last night, several blogs including Venturebeat and NYT's Bits Blog noticed something was amiss on the website of the world's largest retailer: Amazon suddenly stopped selling books from Macmillan, one of the world's largest book publishers.

Not every Macmillan book is gone, but popular ones such as The Gathering Storm are no longer sold by Amazon, either in physical or Kindle form. You can still find the Amazon pages for Macmillan's books you just can't order the actual books.

According to the New York Times, the reason the books were pulled was the iPad. Macmillan told Amazon that it wanted to change its pricing and compensation agreement, upping the price of some books from $9.99 to $15 and splitting sales 70/30, the same model Apple uses for the iPhone app store and its upcoming iBooks store. Amazon's apparent response was to flex its muscle and pull countless Macmillan books off the virtual shelves.

The Dynamics of the New Ebook War

Ever since we got word of the iPad's existence, we've known that Amazon and Apple were on a collision course. Apple saw an opportunity to not only create a new category of device, but to get its hands into the publishing market. In the same way Apple has transformed music, the computing giant would reshape books and become the primary distributor of ebooks worldwide.

Back in September, we wrote a lengthy piece explaining why we believed Apple's tablet would eat the Kindle's lunch, displacing Amazon's lordship over ebooks. We argued that its multipurpose functionality, color screen, and sexier interface and look would put it over the top. Now that we know the iPad's starting price, ($499), our opinion hasn't changed. While the Kindle will survive, its sales will likely never be the same.

Publishers like Macmillan apparently agree with us as well, otherwise they wouldn't so boldly demand price changes from Amazon. Before the iPad was revealed, Amazon was the only player in the game. You played by its rules or you could take a hike. Now with a viable alternative only months away, publishers can run to Apple, where it will have more freedom over its ebook prices.

Amazon's clearly worried, which is why it's launching an app store and used its earnings report to remind us that the Kindle is far from dead. But if publishers decide to abandon the Kindle, then Apple will have won the war by default.

That's why Amazon decided to use its biggest weapon, Amazon.com itself, against Macmillan to send a message to every publisher: If you don't play by its rules, then you can't be in its store. While a publisher can likely survive without the Kindle, the same cannot be said for Amazon.com. Publishers simply cannot afford to leave the world's largest online retailer.

The Kindle and the iPad offer different experiences. The Kindle's battery life and e-ink are strong selling points for the device as a reader, but the iPad offers so much more. Apple's banking on those extra features and its undeniable reach to turn the Kindle into an endangered species.

Publishers now have to either choose a side or walk the tightrope between the two companies. The end result will be a long, drawn out war that will both help and hurt consumers. How it will end is anybody's guess.

Tags: amazon, apple, Apple iPad, Apple Tablet, ebooks, iBooks, ipad, Kindle, Macmillan, Tablet, trending

Gatis Kurzemnieks is an up-and-coming Latvian illustrator, graphic designer, painter and sculptor. Here we have a interesting piece he created and dubbed Noodles.' Displaying a buoyant-bellied man, enjoying the noodles from his bowl, Noodles is a humorous mixed-media piece made by layering Sculpey on top of a metallic column that is set on a wooden base. We love the glossy skin with its human-like rolls and creases that make this piece so lively and interesting

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For his keynote presentation, Steve Jobs shared the stage with a vintage Le Corbusier chair and small Saarinen table. Beyond the aesthetic compatibility of mid-century furniture and Apple design, what makes the detail notable is that in past years Steve always delivered Apple keynotes standing. Here, each time he went to demo an aspect of the iPad, the CEO sat downa subtle shift that speaks volumes about how this new device might fit in to our lives.

Not meant to replace computers used on desks or the phone that goes with you everywhere, it's an in-between device. The gadget's design makes it perfect to use in the living room, on an airplane or during morning commutes (as Apple illustrated in this video).

At first glance, the wide, black bezel surrounding the iPad's screen perplexed me; it seemed to be a step backwards from my long-standing belief that the evolution of screen technology is full-bleed. Upon using the device, however, it became clear that that the edge necessarily gives you a place to grip it without accidentally touching the on-screen interface. It turned out that the 9.7 inch, 1024x768 pixel screen looks so gorgeous that I quickly forgot about this concern all together, instead immersing myself in content.

For all intents and purposes, this 1.0 version of the iPad is a large iPod Touch, a development that lends the new device familiarity and ease-of-use. The iBook store and touch versions of iWork applications are a welcomed addition and the ability to run iPhone applications out-of-the-box is more necessity than benefit.

Pictures and videos really show off the beauty of the device's screen and benefits of its connectivity; the redesigned version of Apple's media apps are perfectly tailored to the postures and situations where we'll be using our iPads. And the touch-keyboard really does work well.

What I'm most excited about, however, is simply web browsing. While the lack of Flash presents an issue, sites built for modern computer-based browsers fit, look and perform beautifully on the iPad. Especially thrilling, was previewing how beautiful the upcoming Cool Hunting redesign looks on the device. (Pictured at right.)

Less than 100 tickets remain for Mashable's Social Media Week event, NextUp NYC The Future Journalist on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 92YTribeca.

Join us for networking and a conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan (Professor and Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor of DNAinfo.com) and Vadim Lavrusik (new media journalist and digital media graduate student at Columbia University Journalism School).

Details

Location: 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013

Socialize: Facebook Event Page

Pricing: $20 in advance, $25 at door. Tickets on Sale Now.

Food and drink: Full cash bar and food menu available

Schedule

• 6:00 7:15 = Open Networking
• 7:15 8:45 = Conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik
• 8:45 Bar Close = Open Networking

A Conversation and Q&A with:

Sree Sreenivasan Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor, DNAinfo.com.

Sree Sreenivasan is a tech evangelist and skeptic specializing in explaining technology to non-techies. He is a professor and dean of students affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program. Sreenivasan is contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan-news startup he helped launch in 2009 with Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade and whose family just bought the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field. He also has been a fixture on NYC-area television. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV and now occasionally appears on various TV shows (on CNN, NBC's Today Show, CNBC and elsewhere) to talk tech. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. You can find him on Twitter at twitter.com/sreenet and on the Web at sree.net.

Vadim Lavrusik Online journalist and M.S. candidate in Digital Media at Columbia Journalism School

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media journalist and social media consultant studying digital media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is launching NYC 3.0, a tech start-up news site as part of his Master's project. He's reported for publications like the Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, the Mpls./St. Paul Business Journal and most recently was a guest feature writer for Mashable.com, where he covered trends in news media, and contributed to Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/lavrusik and the Web lavrusik.com.

Thanks to our Sponsors

Pepsi believes in the power of people and their ideas to make positive change. That's why Pepsi is giving away more than $20 million this year to fund good ideas, big and small, that move communities forward. The Pepsi Refresh Project invites individuals to share their ideas about how they can refresh the world. The public votes for their favorite ideas and Pepsi will give out up to $1.3 million each month to fund the winning ideas. Pepsi is leveraging the power of social media platforms to inspire ideas and encourage individuals to participate.

Zemoga is an award-winning digital innovation agency that specializes in the creation of meaningful and engaging interactive experiences and applications. With offices in the US and Colombia, Zemoga empowers customers with groundbreaking solutions through a model that provides efficiencies at every level. Zemoga's clients include Sears Holdings, HBO, ING, Yahoo, Viacom, A&E Television Networks, Toyota, SONY Music, and Rodale.

Thanks to our Partner

Tags: Events, nextup-nyc, social media week

The iPad And The World Of Tomorrow

For those who spent yesterday glued to the State of the Union address instead of tech news feeds, Gizmodo has a terrific summary of Apple's new device. To break it down: The iPad looks basically like an iPhone, but with a 9.7 inch screen. It runs the same software as the iPhone, can connect to the internet, and seems to work nicely for reading books, newspapers and magazines, watching video, checking Google maps, reading your email, surfing the web, and casual gaming. Like the iPhone, it has no keyboard - you can touch-type on the screen.

Why is this outsize version of the iPhone so important that the internet basically exploded over it yesterday? Mostly because Apple's last two new mobile devices - the iPod and the iPhone - changed the way people think about computers. They really did change the future, by making it glaringly obvious that computing devices are not all desktop PCs - they can be specialized music players, or telephone/internet toys that put the web in your pocket. They are the beautiful, cool poster gadgets for the mobile computer generation; they are what we imagine when we think of tomorrow's machines.

The Mythical Convergence Device

The iPad promises to be just as revolutionary as its predecessors, for one reason. It embodies, as much as possible, the mythical convergence device that technophiles have been craving for almost two decades. The convergence device, which people began to discuss seriously in the 1990s, would be a unified gadget where you could consume many kinds of media, especially TV and the web, with the same gadget.

This is exactly what the iPad does, helped along by the fact that so much television is available online already. And you can add books to this convergence, too (the iPad even has a Kindle app). The iPad is also the perfect shape for a convergence box. Its screen is about the size of a quality paperback or small television set. There's none of that scrunching your forehead as you peer into the teeny screen of the iPhone to read a book or watch YouTube.

What I'm saying is that the iPad appeals to a very deep and longlived fantasy in the consumer electronics world: A device that does it all. At least, if all you want to do is consume media.

And there's the problem.

Reinventing The Television

Apple is marketing the iPad as a computer, when really it's nothing more than a media-consumption device - a convergence television, if you will. Think of it this way: One of the fundamental attributes of computers is that they are interactive and reconfigurable. You can change the way a computer behaves at a very deep level. Interactivity on the iPad consists of touching icons on the screen to change which application you're using. Hardly more interactive than changing channels on a TV. Sure, you can compose a short email or text message; you can use the Brushes app to draw a sketch. But those activities are not the same thing as programming the device to do something new. Unlike a computer, the iPad is simply not reconfigurable.

The iPad emulates television in another way, too: You can channel surf through the Apps Store, but you can't change what's playing. Every single app that's available for the iPad has to be approved by Apple first, just like apps for iPhones. That means censorship of "offensive" apps, no apps that compete with Apple (i.e., no Google Voice), and no random app you wrote to do whatever obscure shit you want to do. So you've got thousands of channels and nothing on. And because you can't reconfigure the iPad, you can't change that. You can only keep flipping through the channels, hoping in vain to see something other than reruns of Cheaters and Alf.

As futurist Jamais Cascio told io9:

This is Apple's big push of its top-down control over applications into the general-purpose computing world. The only applications that will work with the iPad are those approved by Apple, under very opaque conditions. On a phone, that's borderline acceptable, but it's not for something that is positioned to overlap with regular computers.

The iPad has all the problems of television, with none of the benefits of computers.

Back To The Shopping Mall

So if it's not a computer, what exactly is the iPad? It could be just a really tarted-up ebook reader, which w