When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark.
According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.
In perspective the iPhone still only holds a small marketshare in the area that counts (sales) but those users are becoming a far more influential and reachable target audience than users of other phones, such as the LandRover iPhone campaign in our earlier post also shows. With a 3G version on the iPhone due in 2008 that will finally deliver broadband mobile browsing speeds to the handset, this is a product that will just continue to grow in importance.
(via Computerworld)
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A iPhone focused LandRover campaign powered by San Mateo based mobile advertising startup AdMob has seen some interesting results (video demo above).AdAge has some details on the campaign here, but I obtained some raw figures from AdMob. Of those users who clicked on the Land Rover advertisement, 23% responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page. 88% of those users watched the video, 9% entered their zip code to find a nearby Land Rover dealership and 3% used the click-2-call action, all of who were highly qualified leads. Of the 3% who clicked to call through the advertisement, 50% of the calls lasted more than 30 seconds and 20% of the calls lasted for more than a minute. Sales figures from the campaign were not available, but consider that the campaign was only 400,000 impressions; if LandRover had managed to sell one or two cars it would make the campaign more than effective.The results would seem to indicate that the iPhone has become a more effective means of targeted mobile advertising campaigns than regular phones; the integration with Google Maps and the display of video provides a richer experience for both the viewer, and for the company seeking to expose their product.
Paypal has launched the Paypal Storefront Widget, a web based widget that allows anyone to embed a store widget on a web site.
The Storefront widget offers a seamless e-commerce platform for those wishing to sell anything on their site, such as t-shirts, CD’s or other items
The widget (see pic right) includes:
An Index page that shows thumbnail images of all the items for sale through the widget
a product page that shows a larger view of the items/ products for sale
A shopping cart directly within the widget
About and policy pages mean that any conditions are also contained with the widget
Users can set the widget to “sold out” or “sorry we’re closed” from the central control panel, and comes standard with a sharing option; visitors are able to grab the html for the widget from the widget and display it on their own site should they so desire.
I spoke with Paypal prior to the launch and they emphasized that the product was focused on blogs and social networking sites. Paypal has a deal with SixApart that sees the widget being embeddable into TypePad blogs without the need to copy and paste, for everyone else though its no more difficult than any widget is to embed, presuming you know where to get at, and where to paste the html.
Initially there are some limitations with the service, for example you only get the choice of one size for the widget, and it currently only supports sales in US dollars. Paypal though will be seeking user feedback once the program takes off and they are open to expanding the options available in the future.
Paypal sees a lot of possibilities for the widget; for example it provides a seamless shopfront for bands on MySpace who may want to sell recordings. It may also be a substitute for donation buttons that are occasionally used by bloggers as well; Paypal admits that some of their previous embeddable shopping options haven’t been as user friendly as they’d hoped, where as the Storefront widget is focused on being simple to use for everyone.
I’ve had time to play with the setup features for the widget and there’s little doubt that Paypal got the easy part right. Drop down menu items for navigation compliment sample products to get users started.
There are some parallels to Tailgate, in that both are transaction on the page. The difference with the Paypal widget is that like any Paypal transaction payment is made on the Paypal website itself to guarantee a secure transaction; the widget is fully transactional only to the last purchase point. This is functionality usually delivered by often expensive merchant solutions where as Paypal is offering this service for free, except of course they get a standard cut from the sale itself.
I know when I first heard about Paypal’s Storefront Widget that my thoughts were: here we go, yet another widget offering, but this is impressive and quite unique in the marketplace. I’d think that this product will be warmly received by those with something to sell, or those who haven’t offered items for sale previously on their blogs or social networking pages due to the cost and technical knowledge required in doing so.
Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.
“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaing brands going forward” he added.
Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.
Hong Kong based Recruit.net, a job search engine we first wrote about in May, is expanding, and they’re still not interested in the United States.
Recruit.net aggregates job listing from partner sites for its main portal and also provides syndicated results for other sites, a model that sees the Recruit.net bringing in increasing revenues in a hyper-competitive vertical.
Recruit.net launched into Malaysia in September and will launch a New Zealand portal this week. Coming soon are sites for Vietnam and the Philippines in the first quarter of 2008. The company already provides sites for Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.
It’s an interesting corporate strategy, not only from the tech/ revenue viewpoint but from the complete lack of desire to enter the US market (I understand it, but others with a US focus may not). Recruit.net’s Maneck Mohan told me that the company sees a growing internationalization of web services, and that their focus on Asia is timely given the growing economic power of the region at a time when the US economy is in trouble. Countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines still have relatively low internet penetration levels (20% and 16% respectively) but this is changing as more people come online as both see a growing middle class. Even Malaysia, long considered to be one of the more prosperous South East Asian countries has only recently passed 50% internet penetration (52% currently) out of a population of 28 million; Vietnam and the Philippines have populations of 85 million and 87 million people. As Mohan said to me in an email: “why enter a crowded market like the US and compete with existing players, when white hot emerging markets like Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam are wide open and under serviced?”
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The National Center For Health Statistics (NCHS) says that there are approximately 2.2 million marriages in the U.S. every year. Some of those marriages work out well. But a big percentage of marriages - up to 1.4 million per year - end in divorce.
There are sites that help people plan for marriage, like the $400+ million market cap TheKnot.com. And when the time comes, BabyCenter, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, will help them through the process of having a baby. There’s even Caring.com, which helps people plan for aging and death.
But if your blissful union ends in a dissolution, there aren’t many places to turn on the Internet for help in getting through the process. And that’s a shame, because the average participant spends up to $15,000 in the months leading up to and after a divorce. Houses are sold or refinanced, new bank and credit card accounts are opened, and someone has to furnish that shabby apartment that dad has been booted to. And it doesn’t stop there, or course. Revenge sex and, eventually, the ridiculous hope that the next relationship will end better than the previous one leads divorcees to start checking out the online dating services, too.
That’s why new Florida-based startup Divorce360 makes so much sense. These people are confused, lonely and need to make major financial decisions fast. Divorce360 will help them, just like TheKnot helps with marriages and BabyCenter helps with having a baby. And like those sites, Divorce360 will find ways make money through advertising, classified listings and lead generation.
Site Overview
The site is broken up into time based categories, from Deciding (to have a divorce) through Moving On (at the end of the process). Each category has four sub-categories (legal, financial, emotional, children). Each page has content relevant to the category - paid contributions by journalists, blog posts by users, a Q&A section (with questions and answers provided by users) and video. The professional content is clearly there to seed the site. The user generated stuff, including user profiles, blogs and questions/answers, help builds community on the site. That community can help provide a crucial support network for the newly divorced.
A directory for service providers is coming. The company says listings will be free to ensure rich content. Later, premium listings will help generate revenue. The site also has other resources for divorcees: checklists, budget calculators, a glossary, links to relevant state laws and resources and an abuse hotline.
Here’s one of the smartest features - the site has an area for users to keep private notes that are not viewable by others - a sort of private journal and incident report. In the early stages of a breakup privacy is often a real problem since the couple cohabitate and any notes or files, even if stored on a computer hard drive, may be seen by the enemy (your wife or husband).
Advertising for now is basically a mixture of display and text ads. But over time, the company says, they’ll be able to generate revenue more intelligently by recommending services, classified ads in the directory and other lead generation.
Divorce360, which has six employees, was founded by Cotter Cuningham, who was previously the COO of publicly held BankRate.com (Cunningham says he’s never been divorced, by the way). The company is headquartered in Palm Beach, Florida. They raised a $2.5 million Series A round of funding in September 2007 from Austin Ventures and a number of angel investors. Austin Ventures’ Tom Ball joined their board of directors.
Woodlands, Texas based startup Insightory is setting its goals high, with the aim to do for management knowledge what Wikipedia has done for general knowledge.
The service itself joins a growing list of document uploading sites that include Scribd and Docstoc, although the company claims that unlike these services Insightory is more targeted and heavily moderated. The content is aimed at management professionals, professors and graduate students and comes from a variety of sources including users from within the United States and elsewhere.
Insightory believes that companies need a constant supply of management knowledge and that their service can provide this; certainly it does help to get other opinions when in management so the service may find a willing audience.
The service is currently in alpha with a beta version to be launched this month and collaboration and networking tools coming in the first half of 2008. Insightory is holding a Contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to the site with prizes ranging from $100 to $3000, more details here.
The strike by the Writers Guild of America continues to drag on, with the writers this week rejecting a new proposal from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that offered $130m in additional compensation to writers.
The sticking point continues to be compensation for online sales and revenue, with the Writers Guild claiming that the new offer of $250 for a year’s reuse of an hour long program streamed on the Web was not enough when compared to the normal $20,000 payment made per year for re-runs of a program.
Further talks between both parties are set to resume this week, but unless one party backs down from its current position the strike will go on over Christmas and into the new year.
The immediate effect of the strike saw a number of topical daily talk shows go off air, including NBC’s Tonight Show and Late Night, CBS’ Late Show and Late, Late Show and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The networks had stockpiled scripted drama and comedy shows prior to the strike, but as the strike drags on these stocks are running out. Viewers in the United States won’t be presented with static, but they will soon be presented with reruns and cheap to produce reality TV shows and gameshows as the networks scramble to fill the gaps.
Younger audiences are already switching off TV, with varioussurveys indicating that a growing number of viewers prefer the internet over television. Consider that during the last Writers Strike in 1988 television lost roughly 10% of its audience after the strike, and at a time where there was fewer alternatives for entertainment. Today a viewing audience presented with reruns and reality TV has alternatives, and the internet will be the number one alternative; a switch away from TV today could be as big or even bigger than it was in 1988 and would benefit nearly every part of the long tail of online content providers.
Here’s a quick list of TV shows that will go off air in the coming months. Even if the Writers go back to work tomorrow the networks have already started firing staff so it will take time now to re-hire staff resulting in a delay in restarting production.
House (FOX): three episodes left scheduled for January
Samantha Who? (ABC): six episodes left
Family Guy (FOX): mix of new episodes and repeats through January
CSI x 3, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Without a Trace and Cold Case (CBS): four or less episodes each
Ugly Betty, Pushing Daisies and Grey’s Anatomy (ABC): two episodes left
Desperate Housewives (ABC): last episode to be shown Sunday
The Office (NBC): 0
Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Two And a Half Men, Rules of Engagement: 0
24 (FOX): postponed indefinitely
Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.
First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.
We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).
Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).
* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.
* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.
* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.
* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.
* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.
* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.
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An interesting article over at the NY Times details the failure of Coca-Cola to follow through on its initial commitment as a Facebook partner in Beacon. Coke had been named as a “Landmark Partner” in Beacon along with Verizon and Blockbuster when Facebook announced Beacon November 6.
Notably Coca-Cola didn’t realize that Beacon wouldn’t be opt-in, and this was key in their withdrawal of support, and continued absence from the program:
“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing, this morning..“I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”
As we know Facebook has now flipped on Beacon, switching to an opt-in model after widespread criticism from users and groups including Moveon.org. The evolving story though is how Facebook got to this point, particularly given key partners were led to believe that the program was opt-in, suggesting that someone, or something caused Facebook to switch to an opt-out model at the 11th hour.
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When Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone, he promised that it would revolutionize the mobile browsing experience. Roughly 1.4 million sales later it barely registers than more than a blip on global mobile phone sales charts, but its users a making their mark.
According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.
In perspective the iPhone still only holds a small marketshare in the area that counts (sales) but those users are becoming a far more influential and reachable target audience than users of other phones, such as the LandRover iPhone campaign in our earlier post also shows. With a 3G version on the iPhone due in 2008 that will finally deliver broadband mobile browsing speeds to the handset, this is a product that will just continue to grow in importance.
(via Computerworld)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Paypal has launched the 
Initially there are some limitations with the service, for example you only get the choice of one size for the widget, and it currently only supports sales in US dollars. Paypal though will be seeking user feedback once the program takes off and they are open to expanding the options available in the future.
Paypal sees a lot of possibilities for the widget; for example it provides a seamless shopfront for bands on MySpace who may want to sell recordings. It may also be a substitute for donation buttons that are occasionally used by bloggers as well; Paypal admits that some of their previous embeddable shopping options haven’t been as user friendly as they’d hoped, where as the Storefront widget is focused on being simple to use for everyone.
I’ve had time to play with the setup features for the widget and there’s little doubt that Paypal got the easy part right. Drop down menu items for navigation compliment sample products to get users started.
There are some parallels to 
The site is broken up into time based categories, from Deciding (to have a divorce) through Moving On (at the end of the process). Each category has four sub-categories (legal, financial, emotional, children). Each page has content relevant to the category - paid contributions by journalists, blog posts by users, a Q&A section (with questions and answers provided by users) and video. The professional content is clearly there to seed the site. The user generated stuff, including user profiles, blogs and questions/answers, help builds community on the site. That community can help provide a crucial support network for the newly divorced.
The strike by the Writers Guild of America continues to drag on, with the writers this week rejecting a new proposal from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that offered $130m in additional compensation to writers.
Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for 
