The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia - a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard (English version here). Those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, Wikipedia says. English is still the most popular language on Wikipedia, with 2.3 million articles (they reached 2 million English articles in […]
The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia - a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard (English version here).
Those ten million articles have been written across 250 different languages, Wikipedia says. English is still the most popular language on Wikipedia, with 2.3 million articles (they reached 2 million English articles in September 2007). After English, the next most popular languages are German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
Want to talk to the people visiting your blog in real time via a chat request? That’s just one of the features of new stats/analytics startup Woopra. Think Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time. The product includes real time statistics (”tiny details on every single visit and/or visitor, where they came from, what pages […]
Want to talk to the people visiting your blog in real time via a chat request? That’s just one of the features of new stats/analytics startup Woopra. Think Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time.
The product includes real time statistics (”tiny details on every single visit and/or visitor, where they came from, what pages they visited what keywords they used etc.”), chatting with users on the site at any time (and tagging them for future identification). Cali Lewis interviewed the founder at Wordcamp Dallas today. The video demo is below (and is significantly better than the officially-worst-demo-video-ever produced by the company).
Woopra is currently in private beta and will only take blogs with less than 10,000 page views/day. Like Google analytics and most other hosted analytics services, integration occurs via a javascript addition to the sites you want to track. The evolution of analytics condinues (I still remember the days of MeasureMap, which was awesome when it actually worked).
By Andrew Liszewski I’m sure these days a built-in GPS unit is an option for even the smallest of Cessna or Piper aircraft. But if your plane was taking to the skies well before GPS technology was available to the average consumer, you can retrofit it with this new Garmin unit specifically designed for flying. The […]
By Andrew Liszewski
I’m sure these days a built-in GPS unit is an option for even the smallest of Cessna or Piper aircraft. But if your plane was taking to the skies well before GPS technology was available to the average consumer, you can retrofit it with this new Garmin unit specifically designed for flying. The GPSMAP 495 is actually a slightly more affordable version of Garmin’s GPSMAP 496 since it lacks the pre-loaded City Navigator NT database and real-time XM weather data. So basically if you also wanted to use the unit for navigating in a car or boat you’d have to manually load the city map or marine chart data for your location.
But it does include all the features you’ll need for flying like SafeTaxi airport diagrams, the AOPA airport directory, enhanced terrain warning, Smart Airspace and a database of private airports and heliports. The 495 also updates the map data and instruments at 5 Hz which is a significantly faster update rate providing an almost real-time presentation of the aircraft’s analog indicators. I have to assume all these features are a great thing to have since I never completed or even started flight school. (But I can fly through hoops in PilotWings on the SNES like you wouldn’t believe.)
The GPSMAP 495 will be available sometime in April for $1,595.
Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Most of their applications are free or significantly less costly than competitors. Other […]
Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Most of their applications are free or significantly less expensive than competitors.
Other applications include web conferencing, and most recently a portal to manage human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, etc.
This is certainly not the first on the internet invoicing tool. But the value in Zoho is, increasingly, the fact that they’ve so many services under the same brand/sign on. The invoices product will be free for users who send up to five invoices per month. Paid packages range up to $35/month.
A swift way to comprehend which Zoho applications are free and which have a fee - the productivity applications listed on the left hand column are free, the business applications on the right will have a fee.
Researchers at Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute have recently received a $270,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make this a reality: That’s right… Forget the lines, hooks, bait, nets, all that crap. Just call them, and when they show up, scoop them up into a big net and eat ‘em. Supposedly, it’s nothing […]
That’s right… Forget the lines, hooks, bait, nets, all that crap. Just call them, and when they show up, scoop them up into a big net and eat ‘em. Supposedly, it’s nothing more than classic Pavlovian conditioning: the researchers feed a group of fish in a tank right after playing a tone underwater. After repeating the 20 second tone 3 times a day for 2 weeks straight, “you have remote-control fish,” says Simon Miner, a research assistant on the project. “You hit that button [to play the sound], and they go into that [feeding] area, and they wait patiently.” The big question is whether or not the fish will remember. Preliminary results suggest that the fish will retain the the behavior for 5-10 days, but nobody is really sure what’ll happen when they try the same thing with 5,000 fish out in the ocean this spring. Even if they can only train half the fish to return until they’re large enough for market, it’ll still be more profitable than current fish farming methods. And, I’m sure, way tastier.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to check out an upcoming Los Angeles-based startup called Intent, which should launch publicly this summer. And while Intent is a for profit startup, the founders say their goal, like Causes, is to help people along the road to making money. The intent founders, which include Deepak Chopra’s […]
A few weeks ago I had the chance to check out an upcoming Los Angeles-based startup called Intent, which should launch publicly this summer. And while Intent is a for profit startup, the founders say their goal, like Causes, is to help people along the road to making money.
The intent founders, which include Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika Chopra as well as Sarah Ross and Sal Taylor Kydd, will aim to fill a niche between lifestyle sites and medical properties - a destination for wellness content, a syndication platform, and a branded hub for people seeking to share their intentions (personal, social, spiritual and environmental). The site will include original content from wellness category luminaries, medical professionals, media personalities, and pop culture icons. They aren’t willing to disclose much more for now.
The company has raised under “less than $1 million” in an angel round of financing that included Richard Wolpert and other unnamed investors. The Intent blog is here.
Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of […]
Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother.
Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content.
As with Hulu, Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. The process from start to finish is easy enough; just copy and paste the URLs of the videos you want, and drag a few sliders to indicate where each should begin and end. The only real beef I have with the tool is that (oddly) you can’t move the “start” slider to exactly where you want it; it only moves in 8-second increments. The “end” slider doesn’t have this problem.
The second innovation Omnisio brings to online video is a new commenting system that places comments within videos as popup bubbles. To be fair, these aren’t entirely new to the web; iminlikewithyou users are altogether too familiar with them. But they’re fun nonetheless, and it’s nice that you can use them to annotate videos with friends without interference from the mob that overruns YouTube.
Finally, the guys behind Omnisio are developing technology for combining slides with videos and tagging interesting people and highlights. The presentation functionality will essentially sync slides with various points within a video and show those slides in a dock below the video where you can click on them to skip around.
Omnisio is a Y Combinator company founded by Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner. Expect even more capabilities from them down the line intended to put a “spine” into online video.
By Evan Ackerman I decided a few months ago that the first incarnation of Asus’ EEE laptop was not quite enough machine for me. I loved the small form factor and the fact that it has everything necessary to be completely usable (and not much more), but I wanted just a tiny bit extra, like a […]
By Evan Ackerman
I decided a few months ago that the first incarnation of Asus’ EEE laptop wasn’t quite enough machine for me. I loved the small form factor and the fact that it has everything necessary to be totally usable (and not much more), but I wanted just a tiny bit extra, like a larger screen and a little bit more storage space. Asus has announced the new EEE 900, which looks like it’s going to be pretty much the perfect laptop for my needs. Overall it’s the same size and weight as its predecessor (the speakers have been moved from the sides to the bottom), with an 8.9″ 1024 x 600 LCD, 1gb of ram and an 8gb SSD with Windows XP in the base configuration, and it should offer a battery life of 2.5 - 3 hours. It also may be using Intel’s Atom platform (900mhz Celeron M), which is supposed to be adopted in Q2 of this year.
Supposedly, the EEE 900 will also include a resistive touchscreen (!). However, based on the FCC filing, Gizmodo states no, while DigiTimes quotes Asus’ VP of Sales as saying that the “second-generation Eee Personal computer lineup will include touchscreen panels and possible GPS support.” What it will definitely include is a multi-gesture touchpad like the one on Macbooks (except less fancy), allowing you to use two fingers to zoom in and out on pictures and stuff.
On release (May or June), the 8gb/XP model should retail for $499 in the US.
In China, the money isn’t in Web advertising. It is in micro-transactions. At least that is the case for Tencent, which operates the largest instant-messaging network in China and is one of the largest overall portals. Tencent—which includes the QQ IM service, QQ Show (an avatar social network modeled after Korea’s Cyworld), and […]
In China, the money isn’t in Web advertising. It is in micro-transactions. At least that is the case for Tencent, which operates the largest instant-messaging network in China and is one of the largest overall portals. Tencent—which includes the QQ IM service, QQ Show (an avatar social network modeled after Korea’s Cyworld), and QQ Pet (virtual pet portal)—is the No. 21 Web property in the world and the second largest in China after Baidu (the two keep switching the No. 1 and No . 2 spots). According to comScore, it attracted 66.2 million unique visitors in February, half a million less than Baidu and about 10 million less than all the sites run by New York Times Digital (which includes NYTimes.com, About.com, Boston.com,and a bunch of other newspaper sites).
Tencent is publicly traded. In 2007, it made $523 million in revenues, and $224 million in operating profits. That gives it a 43 percent operating margin. In contrast, Yahoo’s operating margin is 10.4 percent.
A big reason for the difference in this profitability is that advertising makes up only 13 percent of its revenues. The rest are in micro-transactions for digital goods, online games, and other services that Chinese Web surfers gladly pay for, as well as mobile services. Here is how Tencent’s revenues break down:
Internet services (digital goods, games, micro-transactions): $344 million (66%) Mobile services: $110 million (21%) Online ads: $67 million (13%)
Total Revenues: $523 million
Digital goods are a big revenue driver for Chinese Web companies and are extremely profitable. In the U.S., with a few exceptions (the virtual economies in virtual worlds and online video games), Web surfers don’t really like to pay for digital goods. Is this a cultural thing, or can it change? It is important to remember that there are other ways to make money on the Web besides advertising.
WiMax is going nowhere fast but that is not stopping a consortium of cable and tech companies from considering a plan to invest $3 billion more into a proposed bailout-through-merger of Sprint Nextel’s WiMax business (known as Xohm) and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. The consortium that is reportedly being put together would include Comcast ($1 […]
WiMax is going nowhere fast but that is not stopping a consortium of cable and tech companies from considering a plan to invest $3 billion more into a proposed bailout-through-merger of Sprint Nextel’s WiMax business (known as Xohm) and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. The consortium that is reportedly being put together would include Comcast ($1 billion), Intel ($1 billion), Time Warner Cable ($500 million), Bright House Networks and Google ($500 million).
WiMax is a promising technology and these are early days. But even an extra $3 billion won’t be enough. Building out a nationwide WiMax network could cost as much as $8 billion to $12 billion. And there could be more technical hiccups. (An Australian WiMax provider is already giving up).
Clearwire, which is already operating its broadband wireless service in parts of the country, lost $727 million last year, on revenues of $151 million. So far, it has raised at least $2.75 billions dollars through private investors ($900 million in 2006), an IPO ($600 million), and a $1.25 billion line of credit. As for Xohm, it has only soft launched with employees in three cities. Nevertheless, last year it cost Sprint Nextel $577 million in capital expenditures and operating expenses.
I can see why Google might throw its hat into the ring here—anything to promote more broadband wireless networks. But Comcast and Time Warner Cable should stay away. The logic behind the investment seems to be that the cable companies could use the WiMax network to counter the moves by Verizon and AT&T into their turf (with TV service over phone lines). It is being suggested that the cable companies would be able to launch their own white-label mobile phone and high-speed Internet services over WiMax , or use it to distribute their TV content to computers and new digital devices.
Here’s where that logic breaks down:
1. WiMax is more an alternative to fixed broadband Internet access than it is to mobile phone service. Verizon and AT&T have a huge head start and customer lock-in when it comes to cell phone service. WiMax mobile phones would take decades to chip away at that even if they do offer fater data speeds. Today, Clearwire is only offering at-home phone service, not mobile. As for broadband Internet and home phone services, Comcast and Time Warner already compete effectively against the phone companies today with their alternative services over cable.
2. It no longer makes sense to try to own all the pipes because pipes are becoming a commodity. Yet pipes are an expensive commodity. If the idea is to create a new way to stream TV and movies to people, the cable companies no longer have to build out the infrastructure themselves to do that. It would be much cheaper to let the WiMax business prove itself to be viable on its own and cut deals for distribution.
The ten millionth article has been written on Wikipedia - a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard (English version here).
By Andrew Liszewski
WiMax is a promising technology and these are early days. But even an extra $3 billion won’t be enough. Building out a nationwide WiMax network could cost as much as 
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