The Front Fell Off
June 26th, 2009
Here is a good laugh for your Friday – a real interview in 2007 (Best quality I could find):
Bing Bing – Microsoft Finally Got Search?
June 24th, 2009
Hey – did you hear that Microsoft has upgraded their search engine named Bing? If you haven’t, you either don’t pay attention to the blur of TV commercials as you fast forward, or you don’t watch anything on Hulu. So, I thought I would give a post to you people of how bing compares. First I did a simple search:
It found Google, that’s a good start! =) It even lets you search google from Bing. Maybe that’s how I should start to search now…
No seriously, Microsoft has actually done well at this new search engine. Much better than their Live.com & MSN.com. I came across this site called BlindSearch by Michael Kordahi. It lets you enter a search query then it shows the results from Google, Yahoo, & Bing side by side. However, he doesn’t show you which search engine is which, so you can have a good “Blind Search”. The site will let you reveal the engines after you choose to.
So, I thought I would give my own test. Searching for things like Amazon or IRS worked fine, but do give different results than Google or Yahoo on more difficult querys. So, the conspiracy theory that Microsoft is just using Google search is probably false. So, I thought I might try the most important search – “brentb blog”. (-ha!) The results did not impress me to the Bing side.
Not even in the top 5? Come on! Well, they covered a lot of ground, but they haven’t won my search business. (However, I may be looking for competitive search advertising-please post a comment if you have any experience with Bing advertising.)
Dylan Ratigan Says Goodbye to CNBC
June 19th, 2009
Dylan Ratigan best known for his hosting of the very popular show Fast Money on CNBC. I will admit, I got very hooked on this show with the great diversity of the people at the desk. However, I noticed that I was not seeing Dylan on the show any more – and thought that was a pretty long vacation. Come to find out, he had not renewed his contract and has walked out on CNBC at the end of March.
Since I have been watching this show for over 2 years, I had noticed a change in Dylan the way he talked about issues on the show. He was pretty positive the whole show, but the last 3-6 months he started to get pretty heavy in the policial discussions, which would be hard to do when one word from Congress would sway the market.
Some people thought that it was some disagreements with some of the other staff at CNBC that made him decide to leave, like this argument on air with Charlie Gasparino:
I think Dylan did a great job of trying to remain professional – but what caused Charlie to get so defensive on a innocent comment like “Charlie, what do ya got”. Obvisously Charlie is not wanting to be “talked down to” by Dylan.
As to the real reason Dylan left – he answers with an interview with Henry Blodget at the Business Insider:
Blodget: So, you’re one of CNBC’s biggest stars. You’re running one of the most successful shows they’ve got. And you bolt. Why?
Ratigan: A lot of things came together. One, it became apparent to me that there had been some major policy failures in America. While clearly pursuable at a place like CNBC, in my opinion, they are more broadly pursuable from a wide variety of other news platforms.
Mr. Ratigan you will be very missed at CNBC – and I hope they can find a good replacement for you at Fast Money!
Get your Facebook URL
June 13th, 2009
On June 12th, at 11:00PM CST you were able to get your own custom URL address from Facebook for your profile. http://www.facebook.com/username. This will replace your numeric ID that you had before to view your profile (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789). I think this move was overdue.
Not everyone can get a username yet. Here are the requirements from facebook:
Eligibility is limited to anyone who joined Facebook before usernames were publicly announced at 3 p.m. (EDT) on June 9, 2009. These users will have the chance to claim usernames at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009.This limitation is temporary. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.
Make sure you go out and grab your username, because this will be worse than the days of AOL when you had to make your username brentb3887. I am still kicking myself, however since I was not home that night – so I forgot to register for my desired name brentb until the next night and it was gone.
WWDC Apple Updates
June 9th, 2009
Apple presented at the WWDC at noon today. I missed my lunch watching the live updates come from MacRumors (thank you and great job, guys!). For those that did not want to miss their lunch – here are some updates I thought were interesting:
- Steve Jobs did not make an appearance
- iPhone OS 3.0 will be released for the older models June 17th (Free for iPhone users – iTouch will be $9.99)
- iPhone OS 3.0 New Features (Copy/Paste/Undo, Cross Program Search, MMS Support (Not until possibly late summer for AT&T customers, PC Tethering (Yep, not suppored by AT&T again), website form autofill support, and more Landscape keyboards
- New iPhone 3GS will be released June 19 (Faster hardware, Better auto-focus camera, records video, and voice control)
- New Pricing with the iPhone 3GS Release - 3G 8GB: $99, 3GS 16GB: $199, 3GS 32GB: $299
- Apple Reports Current Apps offered on each platform: iPhone (50,000), Andriod (4,900), Nokia (1,088), Blackberry (1,030), Palm (18)
UPDATE: Here is a link to the actual full video keynote from Apple.
Google Wave Preview
June 6th, 2009
At the Google I/O Conference they talked about all their Web Elements that developers can use, and trying to increase development for their Andriod OS with a new bribe, I mean challenge, to try to catch the ever-growing iPhone. All these things are still great – but the one thing I took from reading of this conference was this brand new product they are making called Google Wave.
Google Wave is like a personal outlook, social network and work space all put together. You create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can exchange text, photos, special gadgets, and much more. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly while you are watching it in real time.
Here are some main points that I thought were interesting from the keynote:
- Created by the same Project Managers as Google Maps
- Currently 1.5 years into development
- Building it as a open architecture for others to develop new plugins or host their own version
- Live updating chat windows
- Word or iPhone like spell check that updates live as typing
- Can playback revisions of any “wave” from beginning of wave to oldest version
- Can insert a reply into any part of original message
- Just drag images into the wave to post a colection of images to share
- Post to a blog from a wave and allow blog visitors to post comments from your blog directly to your wave
- Can have a space that is shared among different users where they can be all editing at the same time – showing the changes of all users to all users as they are happening
- Another developing plugin called “Rosy” can translate what is being typed to another language as you type the sentence
- When typing a link location, plugin called “Linky” can automatically turn text into a link when the link is verified as a real URL, and can even tell what the link is going to. If “Linky” detects a video, it offers to just embed the video instead of a link
If you would like to watch the over 1 hour keynote yourself, you may watch it below:
Microsoft Reveals XBOX Project “Natal”
June 2nd, 2009
With the gaming world constantly evolving and with the ever so popular Wii system by Nintendo the other gaming companies are looking for the new next thing. I really thought the next thing will come from Nintendo again with their success, but after seeing what Microsoft has coming - I think Microsoft might have it!
Yesterday Microsoft revealed their Project Natal for the XBox 360 at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Instead of trying to just copy or enhance the new popular controllers of the Nintendo Wii like Playstation is looking to do – Microsoft is going even farther. Getting rid of controllers all together! Using a combination of cameras the Natal box can model you and your movement in 3D. It also includes a microphone so that it can use it’s speech recognition to enhance the experience. Here is a video Microsoft made to demo the new technology – it feels very Wii-like in the way they are marketing it with having “family fun”.
As you can see – Microsoft is also might be looking at getting into the movie rental market to take some share away from the iTV. Microsoft already announced that they will be able to offerstreaming music service by Last.fm and give XBox users access to social networking sites Facebook and Twitter sometime this fall. These sites will be integrated into the Xbox Live interface.
After looking into presentation at E3 a little more – I found this video that shows off some even more exciting technology that uses Natal with a boy character called “Milo”.
I am not a “extreme gamer” by any stretch of the imagination. I do enjoy the more easy laid back games like the Wii offers since I don’t have a lot of time to play games, and learn the controls for each game. I love the idea of this Natal project, and even more of what it can do to enhance new experiences in games. With the ability to stream my Netflix movies already to the XBox – I am starting to think I need to add this console to my living room.
iTunes 8.2 Released
June 1st, 2009
iTunes 8.2 was released with the major update offering support for the iPhone 3.0 operating system. I have been a registered iPhone developer for some time, so I have been playing with the new iTunes while in beta.
iTunes hasn’t changed too much, which I was a little disappointed. I would like to see some development with the management of the Applications. You can make Playlists for music – but you can’t sort Applications in iTunes other than it’s default alphabetic. I love the iPhone, but I want a mouse when I have 8-9 pages of Apps on my phone that I want to sort. Matt with usrlocal.com posted that after he restored his configuration from before the beta upgrade, the order of the applications on your iPhone are not saved to iTunes. So, if you spent a good amount of times getting all those apps in the right spot, currently those apps will go back to default order. I will be upgrading my phone with the release as soon as it comes out – so I will report if this is still true out of beta, but I have a sneaky feeling it will act the same.
With the iTunes update coming out this week – it is looking very good that the iPhone 3.0 will be annoced at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference next week. Rumor has it, that Steve Jobs will be there as well. I do hope he will show up for this important release (and also a release of a Apple Tablet? Hmm….)
Why Advertisers Should Not Be Scared of Hulu
May 29th, 2009
As I was watching another TV show on hulu with my TV sitting dark in my living room – I started thinking about how TV has already started this major shift to a new medium. When a full hour show on normal broadcast TV is cut down to by more than 15 minutes by skipping past all the commercials on my DVR, I started to wonder how will these advertisers let this content shift to a medium where they have less advertising time?
I have been pondering this until just last night. When watching a episode of Family Guy for a nice laugh – I noticed that I didn’t even care that I was actually watching the small commerical spots inserted several times during the show. Not only can you not fast forward through them – but hulu is kind enough if you have already watched the ad and you back the video back up before it – it will not play the ad again.
I believe that advertisers will actually pay more for the spot on hulu than on broadcast TV for several reasons:
- The viewer is actually going to watch your ad
- You can target your ads to certain demographics that hulu provides you (ie: they could show different ads depending on who is watching the same show)
- Better tracking of when and where their ads are being shown (today they have to rely on Nielsen to estimate how many viewers are watching. With hulu – they know how many people have watched their ad)
Bottom line – I don’t think Advertisers or the content creators are going to be the losers of this new medium shift. The losers are going to be the cable & satellite providers trying to charge $50-75 for something people can get in like quality on demand. These companies can only make it becoming the best Internet provider offered for the customer.