ReadWriteWeb

Watch Live: SpaceX Docks at International Space Station (+ Profile of Founder Elon Musk)

Richard MacManus — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:05:00 -0700

Sometime over the next 12 hours, the SpaceX capsule Dragon will rendezvous with the International Space Station for the first time. It's streaming live on UStream and you can watch it here. To prepare you for this historic event, we've profiled the stellar career so far of SpaceX founder Elon Mask.

The rendezvous is the latest milestone in SpaceX's 10-year journey. The launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket earlier this week ushered in a new era of private spaceflight. The decade long build-up to that launch is testament to the long-term vision of its founder Elon Musk.

Live video for mobile from Ustream

40-year old South African Elon Musk has had a stellar career. As well as SpaceX, he's founded or co-founded three other big idea ventures: the company which would become Paypal, electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors and a solar panel company called SolarCity. Retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank recently named Musk as one of only 3 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of this era to have created disruptive technology. The other two were Steve Jobs and Sebastian Thrun (who founded Google X, the research lab which has so far produced driverless cars and Google Glasses). So who is this man Elon Musk and what makes him tick?

Elon Musk's first company, which he co-founded with his brother Kimbal, was called Zip2 and sold online content publishing software to news organizations. It was acquired in 1999 by Compaq's AltaVista division, for $341 million. That same year Elon Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. Through an acquisition and Musk's leadership, in 2001 X.com turned into Paypal and was subsequently sold to eBay in October 2002 for US$1.5 billion.

SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) was the third company Musk founded. It began in June 2002 and Musk serves as both its CEO and CTO.

In the technology world, especially in Silicon Valley, we're used to hype and grand statements about the future. But nothing has ever compared to this 2008 statement by Elon Musk, about SpaceX:

"The Iraq war, the presidential election, and the debt crisis dominate today's headlines, but will amount to little more than a footnote in the long-term annals of history. To figure out what is truly significant, we need to take the longest possible view. There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness. The next big moment will be life becoming multiplanetary, an unprecedented adventure that would dramatically enhance the richness and diversity of our collective consciousness. It would also serve as a hedge against the myriad--and growing--threats to our survival. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball--or go extinct."

From most other people, that kind of talk would seem ridiculous. But the thing is, Elon Musk is actually walking the talk. The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a reusable spacecraft called the Dragon, is the first stage in SpaceX's goal to transport cargo and people to outer space.

SpaceX was the first private enterprise to launch a rocket into space. It has the backing of NASA, which retired its own space shuttles earlier this year. NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract in December 2008, for a total of 12 cargo flights. This week's launch wasn't part of that contract, but SpaceX plans to start delivering on it later this year.

The technology world needs big dreamers and Elon Musk is one of those. Check out the live streaming of Dragon's rendezvous with the International Space Station (see above) and remember that it took him 10 years to get to this point... and he's only just begun.

Image credits: Space.com; NISMO Stuff

Sign o' the Times: IBM, SAP Now Support Microsoft's Standardization Move

Scott M. Fulton — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:51:21 -0700

It's perhaps the one way that database interaction can work reliably using any format, any server and any client on the Web today. It happens to be a protocol created by Microsoft. But in a symbol of how Microsoft is now perceived today as just another major player instead of a dominant force, the leading platform makers are joining Microsoft in a formal move to standardize OData, the Open Data Protocol. The reason Microsoft and IBM are now on the same side? The real competition is no longer just amongst these old-line technology companies, but largely between them and a new breed of competitors often based around new mobile devices and consumer platforms.

Nearly six years ago one of the most bitter standards battles in all of computing was fought between OASIS, caretaker of the OpenDocument format, and Microsoft. The issue was whether, by making the document formats for Microsoft Office available as open standards, the company was unfairly leveraging Office's broad base of installation to unseat its only real competitor, the storage format behind OpenOffice.

That year, 2006, marked the turning point in Microsoft's public stance towards openness and interoperability. This despite bitter opposition led by IBM, which was working to resurrect the Symphony brand it had acquired through Lotus. IBM argued that Microsoft was undermining the standards process to suit its purposes. Just how much the computing environment has changed since then was made evident today as IBM (whose heart grew three sizes this day) joined with SAP and Citrix in backing a move by Microsoft to declare the OData HTTP-based database interaction prototol - also known as Open Data Protocol - an OASIS standard.

"OData is an application-level protocol for interacting with data via RESTful Web services," reads a white paper on an OData extension for XML published by OASIS (PDF available here). "An OData Service’s contract is defined by simple, well-defined conventions and semantics applied to the data model exposed by the service, providing a high level of semantic interoperability between loosely coupled clients and services."

Phrasing data in XML, ATOM or JSON format does allow it to be visible to many different database engines. They can see data in these formats, so that's not the problem. Essentially, how does a Web client (any browser on any device) request data from any server (any database engine or framework), and then initiate a dialog with that server so it can update or change one or more records? Remember, HTTP is a stateless protocol: Clients make GET requests and the occasional POST statement, and servers acknowledge and, when they can, comply.

So OData enables communication using any of these three formats for data expression, setting up the mechanism for clients to authenticate themselves and enter into a secure dialog. It already works. And as IBM discovered two years ago, OData was pretty much the only way of creating a single Web client for WebSphere data that worked with .NET, AJAX and PHP clients.

While an XML document contains the body of data, expressed explicitly within the markup, OData expresses the schema - the arrangement and relations between data in a database. It also allows for vendor-specific properties that enable features that one vendors database might utilize while another's does not, though these properties are typically flagged within the metadata using obvious vendor-specific tags; for example, sap:filterable.

Writing on behalf of the OData organization today, Microsoft's senior program manager for OData Alex James said today, "With interoperability front and center in OData we saw more and more technology stacks that started to work with it. Now there are a number of companies that use OData in their products to ensure the data they manage is easily accessible beyond the boundaries of their applications. Many of these companies regularly collaborate on the ongoing design effort for OData. While so far we’ve run the OData design process as transparently as we could (sharing designs, taking feedback through the odata.org blog and distribution list, etc.), we are at a point where the level of adoption and the scale at which organizations are betting on OData require a more formal commitment to shared ownership of the design of this protocol."

IBM sign by Simon Greig.

Why Facebook Just Launched Its Own Instagram

Taylor Hatmaker — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:35:38 -0700

Just a month after announcing its plans to devour hit app Instagram to the tune of $1 billion, Facebook has released its very own photo sharing app. But is two a crowd?

Camera, Facebook's brand new photo sharing app, is built to do precisely the same thing as its wildly popular stepsister, but it feeds directly into Facebook rather than into Instagram's walled garden, population 40 million and growing. It may not officially have Instagram DNA, but Facebook Camera offers up a palette of 14 filters to please any budding mobile photog, though they sport more literal labels ("Neon" and "Golden") than in Instagram's own moody toolkit.

Tinker with your photo (you know you want to crop it into a square, go ahead), apply a filter to set the tone, tag a friend and send it straight to Facebook. Like Instagram photos on Facebook, it'll appear on your Timeline at full-width - and fast. Facebook Camera, which was built independently of Kevin Systrom and co., runs circles around the regular Facebook app in terms of speed and navigability. If you mainly use Facebook to share photos with friends, Facebook Camera is a sleek, lightweight way to beam your pictures to the social network - but it's no Instagram.

Or Is It?

Facebook Camera takes more than a few cues from the photo sharing service we all know and love, but it's got a leg up with that whole 90-plus-million-strong active userbase. But why did Facebook make its very own Instagram at all? Facebook has been building this app for the better part of a year, since well before it successfully put the moves on Instagram. In fact, at least some photo filter features were ready to roll last August, according to engineers involved with the project.

Facebook couldn't just sit on its hands while Instafever spread like so much Toaster-tinted wildfire. As the company made a move for the photo sharing app, it was smart to develop its own in parallel - it certainly has the resources to do so. Facebook Camera was insurance that the king of social won't look like a lumbering giant next to the hot photo filtering craze that has all the social media whippersnappers in a tizzy. Instagram innovated, and gave us something we didn't know we needed until there we were, huddled over an iPhone screen tweaking a teensy square photo with the zeal of a less digital artist. As ReadWriteWeb Editor-at-Large Dan Frommer puts it, "Facebook bought Instagram because it’s doing something new and different that’s special; because it represented the biggest existing threat to Facebook." It wanted to assure us that, as the true sovereign of social, it can meet the evolving needs of its vast kingdom - there's no need to let our eyes wander.

Is Facebook's new app Insta-redundant? The polished little in-house photo app - which was developed independently of the Instagram team - must have been burning a hole in Facebook's pocket. And the company might as well siphon off Instagrammers while it watches the clock - they'll all end up in the same place anyhow.

Beyond Instagram, Facebook Camera also throws some elbows in the direction of Google+'s slick photo features. Google+ is still floundering when it comes to engaging users, but the site has a dedicated base of photogs who enjoy tools like Instant Upload and the large lightbox photo view, which Facebook mixed into its own recipe in February.

Camera isn't Facebook's only spinoff app. Last year it released Messenger, another service that serves its purpose far better than the Facebook app itself. Just like with the ill-fated Pool Party and the advent of Google+, there likely isn't room for two.

It's hard to say what Facebook will do with its new set of photo sharing nesting dolls. Once the Instagram buy goes through (assuming it's smooth sailing), the social giant will have the choice of integrating the two, or deep sixing one altogether. And after Instagram's loyalist outcry, it'd be wise to handle both the popular product and the brand with kid gloves. May the best-loved app win.

A Poor Investment? VC Firm Targets the “Underbanked”

Tim Devaney and Tom Stein — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:30:00 -0700

There’s a lot of money in poor people. KPMG reports that America’s 88 million consumers who are “unbanked” (no bank account) or “underbanked” (no credit) earn $1.3 trillion a year. At least one venture capital firm is out to make money helping them out.

Despite the huge dollar amounts controlled by the underbanked, most financial institutions want nothing to do with them - too much hassle and not enough profit potential.

Core Innovation Capital has decided to help. The Minnesota-based VC firm has raised $45 million in funds it plans to use to back startups that give low-income consumers somewhere to go for financial services other than the local check-cashing shop.

“We operate as a ‘double-bottom line’ fund,” explains Core Innovation managing partner Mike Harris. “We seek excellent financial returns and a positive social impact on the lives of the underbanked."

Emerging Middle Class

The market opportunity is real, Harris says, and so is the social need. “This is an important category to target. It’s the emerging middle class of the United States.”

There are more check-cashing outlets in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s and Starbucks combined. They target low-income people and charge very high fees. And in the eyes of many observers, they’re self-perpetuating: They grow their market as they serve it by making poor Americans even poorer.

You may have thought debt bondage was a problem only in rural India. But it’s happening at a strip mall near you.

“When someone who is underbanked goes to pay bills or cash a check, what happens to them? They have to pay a fee,” Harris says. “They don’t get air miles or cash rewards like you and me. They pay $2 to $15 in fees just to pay a bill. Or they pay 2% of their paycheck just to convert it to cash. Go to a payday lender and see what the interest rates are. It’s ridiculous. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Core Innovation has funded three startups so far:

SavvyMoney, a website with free tools where people who are in over their heads can start digging out of debt.

Plastyc, which offers prepaid, low-fee, FDIC-insured bank accounts in the cloud, accessible online or via smartphone.

L2C, a credit-scoring company that uses alternative data to identify responsible consumers who should get credit but don’t because they’re not on the banking radar.

“Companies we invest in help people go from a vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle - and still make money doing it,” Harris says. “These are tech-based companies, innovators that are providing real value to consumers and developing long-term relationships with customers.”

To find more companies like that, Harris and his Core Innovation partner, Arjan Schutte, have launched an annual competition, the Underbanked Innovators Challenge. This year’s four finalists are Helping Loans, Juntos Finanzas, TIO Networks and Sociogramics, a project of Match.com founder Gary Kremen that uses text messaging to bring personal finance tools to first-generation U.S. Latinos.

Putting their compensation where their mouth is, Harris and Schutte peg their pay as VCs to the social impact their investments make. They collect information from their portfolio companies and submit it to an independent audit committee, which then helps to determine the partners’ compensation.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

ownCloud Growing Into Its Own With Versioning, APIs and Collaboration

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:30:00 -0700

The ownCloud project is adding features fast and furiously. The open-source file synchronization and sharing project announced the Milestone 4 release earlier this week, taking ownCloud in an interesting direction for corporate users. Forget Dropbox killer - ownCloud could be something even better, someday.

We all know that where the data is, the money is. What ownCloud is doing, then, is sort of surprising. The project (and the company behind it) is all about helping users and companies keep control of their data. That means giving up control of the software, and hoping that money comes from services and support.

Understanding ownCloud

Like Dropbox and others, ownCloud has a client piece that synchronizes data from your desktop to a server. The big difference here is that ownCloud also provides a server that's free software (under the Affero GPL), and ownCloud isn't in the business of storing user data at all.

Instead, it's up to third-party providers to offer hosting, or for companies to provide hosting for their employees.

The project provides a server and clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and (eventually) iOS. You can also access ownCloud via the Web to get to files and use its collaboration features.

What's New in Milestone 4?

The project is growing by leaps and bounds. The fourth milestone release includes versioning, encryption and drag-and-drop uploading from the Web client. Versioning and encryption are a big deal for business users, and something that the competition has had for a while.

The v4 release also includes useful collaboration features. ownCloud now has a tasks application, and this release also improves its calendaring features. For individuals, the release includes improvements to the gallery features, so users can not only sync photos - they can also create a Web-based gallery via ownCloud.

Perhaps most importantly, this release includes publicly defined APIs - stabilizing the server side should make it much easier for third-party developers to create applications against ownCloud. Now the company just needs a compelling developer program.

Finally, the Milestone 4 release offers migration and backup features so organizations that are deploying ownCloud can develop an effective strategy for their users' backups.

Not Quite There Yet

The ownCloud folks are making impressive progress, but there's still a few rough edges around the project. If you ask the ownCloud folks, they'll say that they're not a Dropbox competitor. But Dropbox is still the gold standard for users when it comes to easy file sharing and syncing.

The lack of a LAN sync option, which Dropbox has had for years, is a problem. The ownCloud clients are also a bit primitive compared to Dropbox and not entirely stable. Testing the ownCloud client on Linux, the client kept shutting down due to a segfault.

The opportunity is large, and ownCloud is something the market really needs - an open-source set of tools that allow users and companies to keep full control of their data and the ability to modify and extend the tools as needed. The question now is whether the ownCloud team can build a sufficient community and do the necessary development to get ownCloud to the stage where it's ready for adoption.

Here's hoping.

Why Yahoo's Axis Is Going to Fail

Jon Mitchell — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:30:00 -0700

Axis, Yahoo's "new kind of browser" that launched yesterday, is an attempt to do something noble and important. Yahoo has taken away the search results page, the intermediate step where a search engine makes most of its money, in order to get the user straight to where she's going. Axis is a gamble to redefine search. Unfortunately, Yahoo lost the bet.

On paper, Yahoo played Axis just right. It skipped trying to compete with the dominant desktop browsers, instead offering a plug-in that works on all of them. That enables Axis users to extend their browsing habits to the Axis apps for iPad and iPhone, which is much less settled territory. Mobile and tablet browsing is the next frontier, and Yahoo is wise to focus the next stage of its business there.

But what does that business look like?

Axis tries to reinvent search by getting rid of the results page. When you search, it displays a bar next to the page you're on with little previews of the sites it finds. This is supposed to be faster and more convenient, since the user can just look for the right preview, tap it once and load the page.

The convenience and speed of this search concept are supposed to be what hooks people into using Axis. What keeps them there is the way Axis syncs browsing history between the desktop and mobile versions, so users can switch back and forth easily between devices. Once you're in love with Axis, Yahoo can sell you all its services by promoting them heavily in the app and its search results.

But there are two intertwined problems with this. One is that it doesn't actually make search faster. In practice, these previews are devoid of information for many kinds of queries, and they often don't load images at all, just awkwardly cropped text. You still have to tap around to find what you want.

A search results page is not an inherently bad thing. If the most important feature of a search engine is to get the user to desired information as quickly as possible, it shouldn't matter where that information is.

Google has gone the opposite way, providing so much information on the results page itself that it often isn't even necessary to click through to a page. So what? The user got what she wanted, and it loaded incredibly fast because that's Google's highest priority. That search history is even synced across devices, just like history in Yahoo Axis.

But the second reason Axis fails should be familiar to Google. We can call it "the Google+ Effect." Axis privileges Yahoo's own services so much that people who don't use them will be frustrated. This is the same problem Google creates when it stuffs Google+ social features into its other services. People who already use and love Yahoo will be happy, but people who don't will have a worse experience.

If Axis was a mind-blowing search tool, maybe it would convert some users. But since it isn't, this product probably won't do much at all to help Yahoo regain relevance.

Read/Write Daily: Building the Real-Life Starship Enterprise

Jon Mitchell — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Today's theme is real artists ship. Everyone wants their tech to be fun. iPads get close, but it's quite another thing to build actual space stations or robot exoskeletons... or the actual Starship Enterprise.

But people are going for it, anyway.

A man named Dan with a lot of time on his hands has drawn up detailed plans to buld an actual, working Starship Enterprise.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, confirms that it plans to build a moon base.

The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) combat exoskeleton is almost ready for field trials in Afghanistan.

Here are detailed specs and videos of what the HULC can do.

The privately built Dragon capsule has made its first fly-by of the International Space Station, thanks to SpaceX founder and real-life Iron Man Elon Musk.

It's time to let go of our nostalgia for the space program of old and make room for even wilder possibilities.

Image credit: Chris Martin of Evil Starship Factory via BuildTheEnterprise.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

New Prize for Bio-Sensors Announced by X Prize Foundation

David Strom — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:30:00 -0700

Today the X Prize Foundation announced a $2.25 million Nokia Sensing X Challenge to produce a new generation of health care and biometric sensors. This adds a new health-related prize to their roster of other scientific challenges, including a $10 million prize to produce a wireless health monitor like the Star Trek Tricorder, another $10 million prize for gene sequencing, and a $30 million prize sponsored by Google to bring back robotic lunar landers.

Bio-sensors have lagged behind other kinds of sensors. Robert McCray, the CEO of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, mentioned how many sensors could be found in your average car or phone, which eclipse what is available in the life sciences market. For example, your typical cellphone includes sensors such as a camera, a microphone, a GPS, haptic/touch and an accelerometer. The alliance claims to be the only trade organization focused exclusively on identifying collaboration opportunities within the wireless health sector, and was holdng its annual conference this week in San Diego.

As with other of its prizes, this one attempts to stimulate a revolution and create an ecosystem of innovators in the bio-sensing area. "We want to give inventors a platform to show their stuff to the entire planet to help expand health care to move beyond disease management," said the CEO of X Prize Foundation Peter Diamandis (shown) at the launch of the new competition. Entries will be judged on several metrics, including validity, usability, originality and affordability. Sensors can be developed in several categories, including biofluids, kinematics, body physics, mood and emotion detection.

This contest is partnered with the Tricoder competition. Diamandis mentioned that the sensors coming out of the Nokia challenge could be put into handheld consumer devices that will be developed for these Tricorders. So far, 185 teams from 25 countries have signalled that they will be entering the Tricorder contest, which was announced in January at CES in Vegas.

According to the contest website, "As sensing is an enormous, heterogeneous field, there will be no specific benchmarks established for any of these criteria. Instead, the Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE will rely on the judges’ expert knowledge and the teams’ submitted material to establish notability."

Cartoon: Why Social Media Matters for Your Customers

David Strom — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:00 -0700

It is time for another look at enterprise IT from our friends Chief and Chuck. If your management still thinks Facebook and Twitter are fads, then perhaps this cartoon will hit home. After all, if we could only just not be bothered all the time from our customers when they have problems, right? One way is to just ignore them, and the message from this cartoon is clear: You do so at your own peril.

We've written many articles on the need for using social media to engage your customers, including the analysis of Oracle's acquisition of Vitrue earlier this week and this infographic we linked to last year that shows customers want to use social media for support. Maybe it is time you re-examined your own policies to make these tools both easier and more popular in your enterprise.

CA Technologies' CHIEF & CHUCK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.ca.com/cdit.

Keeping Your Cloud Presence Straight: Spiceworks Launches Free Detection Feature

David Strom — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:03:00 -0700

If your boss asked you to identify all of the various SaaS-based providers that are being used across your corporate network, how long would it take you to put together a report? This isn't academic: As more of your end-users sign up for these cloud-based services, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the appropriate enterprise security policies as the number and kinds of files stored there increases.

One solution is to set up stringent firewall policies to block these services, or at least make using them more onerous. But there is another way: better and easier reporting. That is the route that Spiceworks is taking today with an enhancement to its v6.0 service that includes cloud discovery services.

“Knowing which cloud services are running on my network is essential to maintaining security and helping save money,” said Andy Phelps, an IT Manager at HPS Group and a Spiceworks user. “The new free cloud service discovery features offered by Spiceworks make it simple for me to monitor cloud services usage and to find out more about the various offerings available for my business.”

The service supposedly can detect "up to more than 40 different providers," including Amazon's S3, Carbonite, Checkpoint, Citrix, Dropbox, LogMeIn, McAfee, Mozy, Rackspace, Sophos, Symantec and VMWare. You can automatically scan your networks to see exactly which cloud services are in use and by whom. Spiceworks is a large community-driven monitoring and troubleshooting service, all of which is free of charge.

The Psychology of Being Unfriended on Facebook

Dave Copeland — Thu, 24 May 2012 08:02:00 -0700

Social scientists are increasingly looking at online friendships and trying to figure out if they carry the same emotional baggage that real-world friendships do. A preliminary study suggests that breaking up, even if it’s on Facebook, is hard to do.

The more you use Facebook, the more likely you are to experience “rumination and negative emotion” when someone unfriends you, according to a study published in the July 2012 edition of the scholarly journal Computers in Human Behavior. The study by Chapman University researchers Jennifer L. Bevan, Jeanette Pfyl and Brett Barclay is one of the first to look at the psychological consequences of so-called relationship termination on social networks.

Other factors that increased the pain of being unfriended included:

How close the person was to the person that had removed them from their friend list.
Whether they were able to figure out who unfriended them, as opposed to just seeing a drop in the number of active friends they had.
Who initiated the initial friend request.

The researchers also measured people’s perceptions on why they had been unfriended, asking if they felt it was because they posted too frequently on Facebook; posted polarizing views; made crude comments; if they had been unfriended for an upsetting, offline event; or because the person did not know them well.

“Intense Facebook usage may mean that users are particularly invested in their relationships with their Facebook friends and thus may respond with greater rumination and negative emotion when they lose one of these friends, which compromises how they are presenting themselves and being perceived by others online,” the researchers concluded.

When Being Unfriended Hurts Most

While the most common reason given for being unfriended was an offline event, people experienced the most negative emotion when they believed they were unfriended for Facebook-related reasons, such as posting too frequently, posting about polarizing topics or making crude comments.

People also seemed to be hurt more when they had made the initial friend request and were later unfriended by the recipient. “To some extent, being the individual who initiates the Facebook friendship – a clear, direct online act that is signified with a marker – places an individual in a less powerful position, as they must wait and see if their friend request is accepted, rejected or simply ignored. Individuals who are unfriended by someone they initially 'friended' may wonder why the unfriender even accepted the friend request, and such thoughts could give rise to rumination and negative emotion,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers found that people who spent more time on Facebook were most likely to be hurt when a Facebook friendship went south. That seemed to stem from the notion that those people, by spending more time on Facebook, had more invested in the online friendships.

The Parent Trap

Generally, people were most hurt when unfriended by someone they considered to be close to: family members, and current or former friends or romantic partners. To a certain extent, former romantic partners expected to be unfriended in certain circumstances.

The one differentiation from the above patterns was a user's parents. The researchers noted “some close relational partners, such as parents, can be unwelcome Facebook friends for undergraduates... how relationships that are close offline are uniquely negotiated on [social networks] seems to be evolving.”

It may also suggest people view relationships with people they see regularly offline as different in an online context.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook IPO: Who Are the Real Losers?

Antone Gonsalves — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:00:00 -0700

PayPal co-founder and Facebook pre-IPO stockholder Peter Thiel

Facebook's tainted public offering, which has attracted the attention of federal securities investigators, has grown a bit darker with the filing of a class-action lawsuit. Los Angeles-based law firm Glancy Binkow & Goldberg filed the suit Tuesday in state court in San Mateo County, Calif., on behalf of all investors who lost money in the IPO.

The suit rides on allegations that days before Facebook raised the price range on its soon-to-be-public stock, executives warned the lead underwriters that their financial estimates for the company were too high. The bankers, which included Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities and Goldman Sachs, lowered their estimates and then told a handful of large investor clients, leaving everyday investors in the dark.

"At best, this 'selective disclosure' of the estimate cut is grossly unfair to investors who bought Facebook stock on the IPO (or at any time since) and didn't know about it," said Henry Blodget, Wall Street observer and Business Insider founder. "At worst, it's a violation of securities laws."

During the height of the pre-IPO frenzy, individual investors clamored for more Facebook stock, while more knowledgeable institutional investors were talking about paring back stock orders. For investors who didn't know about the revised estimates, Facebook's opening stock price last Friday was a sucker's deal.

The losers, and potential plaintiffs, were the millions of individual investors who bought the stock for $38 a share or more and were looking at an investment worth $32 as of the close of trading Wednesday.

The winners included venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who were among the pre-IPO stockholders that collectively received about $9 billion in the offering, according to the law firm.

While no one has said any crimes have been committed, the smoke from the dealings before the IPO has prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to consider an investigation to look for the fire. The lead securities regulator in Massachusetts has reportedly subpoenaed Morgan Stanley.

Facebook has yet to clearly state why estimates had to be lowered. But the company's amended SEC filing before the IPO hints it's related to the growing number of users accessing the site through mobile devices and Facebook's failure to date of monetizing the shift through advertising.

While many questions remain, the Facebook IPO is pointing to what many Occupy Wall Street supporters have said: Banks pull the financial strings, and the rest of us are the puppets.

Blowing the Cloud Wide Open: Box.net to Begin Negotiable Enterprise Licenses

Scott M. Fulton — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:02:00 -0700

The generally accepted definition of "cloud services" - even the one prescribed by the U.S. Government (PDF available here) - includes the existence of metered or measured service - usually a flat rate that scales along with the service consumed. Now one of the cloud's most prominent competitors is opening up its enterprise license program to negotiation, enabling big customers - perhaps including the government itself - to name their price and enter into long-term, fixed-price deals.

Box.net's move, announced this morning, opens the door for potentially very large customers to enter into long-term arrangements that would otherwise be quite expensive. Think businesses with tens of thousands of users - for example, P&G.

The Return of Deal-making

"It's not at all uncommon for software providers to have an enterprise license agreement [ELA], but very atypical to date in the world of cloud," acknowledges Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, Box's general manager for enterprise products, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "What we're doing is formalizing a program around enterprise license agreements for Box. Like a typical ELA, this is about purchasing for a wide array of users, with a prenegotiated price, potentially in a multiyear arrangement that locks in a really good price for the customer, so that they're getting the most cost-advantageous deal and that they simplify their overall purchasing with us."

Up to now, for very large customers with tens of thousands of seats, the flat scale of cloud service pricing has actually not been very cost-effective. ELAs remain attractive for this class of customers mainly for this reason, and it could be why they opt to stay with all-on-premise resources and applications. But the on-premise choice leaves big businesses' IT departments stuck in the previous century, especially in terms of procurement (some of which still takes place on paper), installation, testing and deployment. "Why would you buy an ELA up front if it's going to take you a super-long time to roll out to end users?" Bouck asks.

"Usually you'd buy-as-you-go until maybe you hit the halfway mark of rolling out to users, and then consider an ELA," she adds, "which means those first-half purchases you're making are probably pretty expensive."

Managing Larger Boxes

Box's updated administrative console, whose availability also begins today, will enable high-level customers to enter into long-term ELAs, which fix their prices at negotiable, set amounts in advance, and then deploy the entire service to all users immediately after signing. The new console represents the next phase of Box's adoption of a cloud-based version of group policy, where administrators set privileges and capacities, and marshal the storage process for employees who use the service as part of business.

"In the past, our administrator certainly allowed a privileged administrator to go in, see and manage content by user if necessary," Box's Bouck explains. "Imagine if one of 10,000 users had a problem; they'd go to the administrator and say, 'Hey, I forgot my password,' or, 'I'm no longer on this project any more; could you please transfer all my content to the new project lead.' But we didn't make it very easy for administrators to easily do that in a large-scale user deployment, when you need to manage content across many user accounts. Those one-off types of things are easy, but what if I need to query for content across all 10,000 of my employees that fit a certain set of criteria? Or pull all the image data from the month of June across all users? That type of functionality wasn't there in our admin console. Now we have it."

The addition of an "All Files" tab, she goes on, lets admins scan lists of stored files across one or more users in the list. Files can be dragged and dropped between accounts. And an enterprise search field lets admins query files across a broad array of users.

"Especially for things like e-discovery, this is crucial," states Bouck, whose last job involved managing an e-discovery suite for EMC. "If I need to pull all the content related to a particular legal matter, and be able to search by keyword, user name, content type, date range, whatever - across my entire portfolio of Box users, or maybe some group of them, I can pull off all that content and hand it off for legal processing as part of that discovery."

Bouck admits this doesn't make the Box service a complete e-discovery tool just yet, though it does enable and even encourage partners such as Autonomy to develop services that make use of the audit tables that Box does generate, and mine those tables for actionable data for e-discovery purposes.

What It's Like for an App in Apple & Google's Crosshairs

Jon Mitchell — Thu, 24 May 2012 05:00:00 -0700

UpNext Maps for iPhone is beautiful. It's the smoothest, fastest map I've ever used. It renders 3D buildings for virtual exploration of certain cities. Its look and functionality are distinctive. It's free. And both Google and Apple want to build these features themselves. Is this a kamikaze mission for UpNext?

"We've been hobbyists in maps since 2004," says UpNext co-founder Raj Advani. "At the time, I was fond of coding video games, and the gulf in interactivity between the video game experience and the digital mapping experience was striking. A video game world is animated, alive, interactive; things can change. There are weather patterns, sunsets, noise and immersion. In the digital mapping world back then, there were just roads - and ugly, static roads at that."

UpNext's goal from the outset was to write a vector-based mapping engine. Traditional mapping systems, including Google, Bing and OpenStreetMap, are tile-based. They download whole pieces of the map as you need them. UpNext works more like a 3D gaming engine; it's downloading raw data and then rendering the maps itself.

"The difference is key," Advani says, "because being able to decide, in real time, how data is rendered is what makes vector maps so compelling. It enables a map to change in response to the actions and the environment of the user."

The idea was ahead of its time in 2004, but now that there are smart, fast mobile devices with lots of native computing power, UpNext Maps for iPhone demonstrates what this approach can accomplish.

What Does UpNext Maps Do Differently?

For the user, UpNext Maps just feels nicer than the built-in map. Everything happens faster. It snaps into position smartly, so it's impossible to lose your place, and it's easy to tilt back and forth between 2D and 3D views. The 3D buildings - only available in some cities - took some time to load in my tests, but that didn't take away from exploring the maps themselves or slow the process down.

UpNext focuses on what the user is doing. It shifts the colors and emphasis of the map based on what you're searching for. If you're looking for Italian restaurants, those glow, and the rest of the map fades out. If you tap a subway station, it animates actual trains and displays estimated arrival times. While the dominant map systems concentrate on roads, UpNext shifts to emphasize whatever information the user needs.

UpNext Maps for Android is coming soon. For iPhone users, UpNext ties in with VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn directions powered by Verizon. That service costs $4.99 per month, and Android users have turn-by-turn built into their phones. But until Apple offers its own turn-by-turn features, this combination with UpNext definitely outdoes the iPhone's stock navigation options.

The key difference between built-in maps and UpNext is the toggle between "immerse" and "explore" modes. It's not just a navigation tool like Google Maps, nor is it just a world-exploring tool like Google Earth. It's just enough of both at once, and it performs better.

The app is not perfect. It doesn't yet include much of the Earth, for one thing, but the U.S. is there. It has a pretty hard time finding places by search, whereas Google Maps figures out what you're looking for almost every time. But as a way of browsing a map, UpNext has no peers. It tilts seamlessly from 2D to 3D, and you can turn the place-browsing layer on and off as needed. But the most amazing part is the performance. It loads so fast and scrolls so smoothly that Apple and Google look like novices in comparison.

Bootstrapped Maps

UpNext does have considerable experience behind it. Three of its four co-founders have experience building 3D graphics for games. Its founders have been working on maps since 2004 - before Google Maps launched - and formally founded UpNext in 2007. For four years, they forged ahead as a bootstrapped company until Chris Sacca came aboard as an angel investor a little more than a year ago.

Was that a crazy investment?

By now, Google seems to have maps well under control for the entire world, and Apple is known to be building its own maps, which will have to be even better than Google's. Among Apple's mapping acquisitions was C3 Technologies, which built eye-popping 3D maps that are sure to dazzle users of existing immersive maps, including UpNext. What keeps UpNext working on maps despite the risk of getting stepped on by one (or both) of the mobile platform titans?

A Dearth of Innovation

It was only a year after these four founders started making maps that Google released Google Maps. "Our fledgling project was already on the ropes," Advani says. Google began to dominate, and investors began to run from mapping apps. All the VC money and press attention ran to social applications. "If you were working on 'raw tech,' you'd have a very difficult time raising money in this period," says Advani.

Consequently, UpNext found itself with very little competition from startups. Apps that needed location would just build on the Google Maps API. Google Maps became "safe," as Advani says. With all the attention on Google, UpNext kept building quietly.

"At some point," says Advani, "after several near-death experiences, we became inured to this fear of being steamrolled. We began to believe that while Google could evolve, they just couldn’t be radical. That’s what’s kept us going."

Google hasn't stopped innovating on maps. Street View is a different kind of immersive experience than 3D. It's a snapshot of the real place frozen in time but with photographic realism. Additionally, it has begun to push indoor maps into the Android version and add more Google Earth integration for 3D experiences. But it has also started sewing up the business aspects of maps. That wonderful API upon which developers depended now costs money to use.

Maps is becoming a core business for Google, and that may be hurting its ubiquity and user experience. UpNext should be overjoyed about that. But there's one problem, and it's a little company called Apple, Inc.

Screenshot of C3 Technologies street view (via MacRumors)

Apple Maps: The Looming Shadow

We can pretty much bet on Apple revealing its new, Google-free maps at WWDC next month as part of iOS 6. Siri already asks Yelp for restaurants instead of Google, and now it will be able to give its own directions. And the 3D imagery acquired in the C3 Technologies deal will probably allow iOS users to forget about Google Street View. Where will that leave UpNext?

"We think C3 is the wrong direction," Advani says. "It’s essentially an improved satellite view - satellite with a third dimension. We believe maps are about more than maximizing realism; they’re meant to be immersive and evocative.

"Think of an amusement park map: You look at it, and with just a glance, you get a feel for the different areas. Realism is not what we’re after. What we want to do is bring that old-school sense of wonder back to maps."

Next month's news will escalate the platform battle between Google and Apple over mapping, which is a crucial mobile feature. But UpNext is finding more investor interest than ever before. With Apple and Google so concerned with the business of mapping, UpNext has a chance to deliver a better experience.

The Web's Original TV Show Ramp-Up Continues on Hulu and YouTube

John Paul Titlow — Thu, 24 May 2012 04:30:00 -0700

Web-only, original programming. If there's one trend in TV this year that has the potential to shake things up moving forward, this is it.

Throughout 2012, we've seen headline after headline about players like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube investing in the production of video content that feels more like the stuff we used to switch on our TVs to watch. The latest example is Hulu's announcement that it will start streaming ten new original shows next month.

It's not the first such news from Hulu. They got started earlier this year with Battleground, right around the same time Netflix launched Lilyhammer, a drama series that felt like it would have been right at home on HBO. Hulu has since unveiled one set of new programs after another, giving viewers more reasons to turn to the Internet for their TV needs.

These aren't just generic, low-budget productions starring no-name talent. Each press release out of Hulu's headquarters reads like a who's-who of TV industry veterans, from producers to actors. Among the shows set to begin next month are a travel series featuring veteran indie film director Richard Linklater and a movie review program hosted by Kevin Smith, the famed director responsible for movies like Clerks and Mall Rats, among others.

It's clear that premium video content is a serious endeavor for Hulu, just as it is for Netflix and YouTube.

For its part, Google's gigantic repository of user-generated video is morphing slowly from a source of amateur content into one that could give television networks a run for their money. One successful example is Machinima, a channel of TV-quality shows about gaming. For the existing army of amateur content creators already publishing to YouTube, Google is trying to help them ramp up the quality of their productions using Creator Hub, a collection of resources for video publishers.

The success of these new shows is hard to gauge this early in the game, but if viewers are receptive, it could help bolster the Web's momentum as an alternative to traditional pay TV. This would come something of at a pivotal time, just as those legacy content providers are beginning to rethink the sort of Web streaming models to which they committed themselves a few years ago. Hulu itself is rumored to be considering a new model, which would require users to authenticate using credentials from a cable or satellite provider.

Wozniak, Circa 2004: Google's Value Is "Not Likely to Appreciate"

Dave Copeland — Thu, 24 May 2012 04:00:00 -0700

Steve Wozniak, two years later

It’s been fun to watch the normally exuberant tech press go through the rationalization process of what went wrong with Facebook’s IPO, starting with claims that Friday’s flat opening meant the IPO was perfectly priced to outright ignoring the story. It’s been almost as much fun as watching the business press declare Facebook dead on arrival.

Before we dig too deeply into either discussion, let’s remember that the same doubts, along with the same proclamations that an issue had chilled the tech IPO market, were being bandied about eight years ago in the days after Google went public.

''I'm not buying,'' Apple Computer co-founder Stephen Wozniak told The New York Times in August 2004. ''Past experience leaves the taste that a few people - never ourselves - will make out the first day, but that it's not likely to appreciate a lot in the near future or maybe even the long future.''

Google, as we all know, now trades at more than $600 per share, up considerably from its first-day close of $110 in 2004. That’s despite technical glitches that delayed the IPO (much like Facebook faced technical glitches that delayed the start of trading on Friday) and jaws dropping when it first announced its initial pricing, which valued the company at $36 billion on its first day of trading.

“The price range - stunning even by Silicon Valley standards - is based on the assumption of continued rapid growth by Google, whose revenue has soared from $439.5 million in 2002 to $1.46 billion last year and which had a profit of $105.6 million in 2003,” The New York Times wrote in 2004. “But Google's dazzling growth has lately shown signs of slowing. And the popularity of its search service has attracted a range of competitors, with others, including Microsoft, soon to follow.”

The takeaway is simple: Stocks go up and stocks go down, and we’d be making the same point if, rather than having dipped below its IPO price, Facebook rose to dizzying heights in this first full week of trading: The life of a publicly traded company, particularly one with a market capitalization of more than $100 billion, is long. It’s way too early to call Facebook a success or a bust. For that matter, it’s arguably way too early to call Google a success or a bust.

Woz photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.

Axis Ain't No Browser - It's Yahoo's Latest Shopfront

Richard MacManus — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:25:00 -0700

shopfront: the front side of a store facing the street; usually contains display windows (Dictionary.com)

Yahoo's search app Axis, launched earlier today, is being marketed as "a new kind of browser." It's not a browser though, it's an app that is available on PC, iPhone and iPad. On the PC, it's a plug-in (which is a type of app) for actual browsers, like Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. So what is Axis, exactly? It's a new shopfront to entice people to use Yahoo. Yahoo has always been a shopfront, from the online directory in the mid-90s to the personalized homepage of the past few years. What's different about this new shopfront is that it's a group of apps, instead of a webpage. The question is: will people use it? Let's give it a test drive...

The main feature of Axis is search. In the apps, you search for things - just like you would on yahoo.com or google.com. A key part of Axis is that it syncs a user's search activity across computer, iPhone and iPad. It also taps into one of this year's biggest trends, the Visual Web, by showing visual previews and promoting sharing via image-based social network Pinterest. Another noteworthy feature is its "personal homepage," where you can save articles and webpages.

Axis in Action

When you start using Axis, it becomes apparent that Yahoo is prioritizing its own web properties in search results. For example a search I conducted on my iPhone for "Spiritualized" (a British band I've come to like) had a Yahoo Music page as the first result. This is a dangerous practice for a shopfront. People expect a search engine to be unbiased and to provide the best result first. Sure, Google has flirted with its users' trust too, by ranking its own properties like YouTube and Google News high in search results. But Axis takes it a notch further, by nearly always making a Yahoo property the top search result.

Despite the bias in search results, Axis is a slick product and feels great to use. The visual previews are attractive and it makes searching fun. The Axis iOS apps are also very well designed, for example using swiping navigation effectively.

The so-called "personal homepage" is disappointing. This is supposed to be a home page for you, where you can access websites and pages that you have bookmarked. But for a company which prides itself on its personalized portal, My Yahoo!, the Axis homepage feels bare and unoriginal ("Read Later" - why would I want to use that, when I have Instapaper or Pocket?).

The sharing functionality in Axis is also curiously threadbare. Only Pinterest and Twitter are available. The biggest sharing service on the planet, Facebook, is nowhere to be seen. I also found the Pinterest functionality to be buggy on iPad - it attempted to open the iPhone app for Pinterest first and only after various closing and cancel clicks, did the iPad version of Pinterest display.

The Verdict

So does Axis stand a chance against Google (the search king), or Facebook and Twitter (where millions of people discover content these days)? Axis is a slick product and the sync functionality is nifty. But there are a couple of main reasons why Axis won't take off:

The search is too biased. It may appeal to heavy Yahoo users (of which there are still millions), but it won't appeal to others.
The plug-in and app paradigm is very dependent on people a) downloading the plug-in and/or app; and b) opening the app regularly. The browser plug-in at least is persistent, via the search box that displays in the bottom-left of every webpage you're on. But iOS apps need to be manually opened and very few of them are every day. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of apps I open on a daily basis, on either iPhone or iPad. Also it should be mentioned that this is iOS-only at this stage, another limiting factor.

I applaud Yahoo for trying to adapt to the mobile era with a well-designed group of apps. This is the Yahoo we all want to see: one that innovates with technology, instead of in-fighting and trying to make money with patents.

Axis has some nice features, such as visual previews and solid sync. But I think it's stretching it to call Axis a "browser". It's a shopfront for Yahoo search, but there really isn't enough reason to use it over Google search (whether by app or HTML webpage, Google covers all bases). Also people are already using Facebook as a shopfront for Web content. So, Axis has its work cut out to make an impact in this landscape. Let us know your thoughts on Axis in the comments.

Photo credit: Bellaphon

What Yahoo's New Axis Browser Gets Wrong - and Right

John Paul Titlow — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:13:00 -0700

Yahoo just joined the browser game. The veteran Web company, which has been struggling to define its focus for years, is suddenly betting on the mobile space with a new browser called Axis.

The product combines an iOS Web browser with a plugin for most major desktop browsers that syncs a user's Web history and bookmarks across their devices. How does Axis stack up?

Effective Design and Seamless Cross-Device Syncing

One feature that Axis offers - and should be standard in any tablet or smartphone Web browser - is its ability to sync bookmarks and recent activity across devices. Safari does this to some extent, but could go further. Frankly, this is one area in which Google could do a better job on iOS. Its official iPad app could almost serve as a Web browser, but it doesn't sync with a user's Chrome browsing or search history.

Web browsing is far too fractured across our desktops, smartphones and tablets. Axis makes a noble attempt to address this issue.

Yahoo has taken great care to ensure that Axis takes advantage of the tablet form factor when it comes to design. It reimagines search results and instead of presenting them as a list of links, shows tiled thumbnails that preview each page.

The design could be more mind-blowing, but it does a better job of being tablet-centric than a lot of other search and browsing apps.

Too Yahoo-Focused

We understand that the whole purpose of this product is to keep users engaged with Yahoo's brands (and ultimately drive search volume and ad dollars), but its aggressive efforts feel excessive.

For example, when we type the letter "f" into the search query box, the auto-suggestions are Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Fantasy Baseball, Yahoo Horoscopes and Flickr. Not Facebook. Not any commonly-used search query term that start with "f." This is something that Google would get lambasted for doing. It doesn't serve the user anywhere near as well as it serves Yahoo.

Social Integration: The Pros and Cons

Like any Web browser worth using, Axis has social sharing options built right into the toolbar. Twitter is there, of course. Its Pinterest integration is tighter than we've ever seen in a browser, which is nice to see with such a young social network.

Conspicuously absent, however, is the world's largest social network. Facebook doesn't make an appearance in the browser's default sharing options, nor does Tumblr or any other popular tool besides Pinterest, Twitter and good old-fashioned email. Weird.

Social integration in any app needs to go deeper than simple sharing buttons at this point. The Dolphin browser is a good model to follow in this regard.

Wait, Is This a Browser or a Search App?

Yahoo is marketing this as a new browser, but is it really? Sure, it can navigate to any URL on the Web, but it feels more geared toward searching, which makes sense considering who built it.

People who uses Yahoo's Web services - and there are quite a lot of them - will likely find Axis to be pretty useful. Any hope Yahoo had of making headway into the mobile browser space, however, is limited by Apple's refusal to allow users to change the default browser on iOS devices.

There's so much potential that exists in the tablet browser space in particular. Apple certainly hasn't fulfilled it. In launching what sometimes feels like a glorified search engine for iOS, Yahoo doesn't quite fulfill it either, but overall the effort is a step in the right direction.

Oracle Bets Big on Social Message Management, Acquires Vitrue

Scott M. Fulton — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:45:00 -0700

There's a belief (which, for some, has metastasized into a desperate hope) that how you say something online, not so much what you say, directly translates to whether you'll read it. Today, a corporation that's notorious for never changing the way it says anything, announced it's acquiring a company whose business is message adjustment for brands in the social media space.

Prior to Facebook's IPO last week, there was considerable talk about whether its main value proposition - that companies can realize value by approaching their customers as people - would, coupled with six bucks, buy you a cup of coffee. For the last six years, a company called Vitrue has built a business around social relationship management for consumer-facing companies. Not really CRM in the strict sense, its service has evolved around utilizing social media to craft marketing messages that better reach customers through social media. Which seems sensible enough: testing the river before sticking your boat in it.

This morning, for an undisclosed sum of cash, Oracle announced it is purchasing Vitrue and integrating it into its broadening portfolio of cloud-based services, which last February absorbed workforce talent management powerhouse Taleo. With Vitrue comes some unique and sometimes controversial tools, including one that estimates the ROI of your Facebook branding campaign in dollars.

Vitrue made its first public splash in 2007 with a promotion that urged consumers everywhere to produce their own Pringles potato chip commercials, as mashups mixing their own homemade tapes with a stockpile of snack food-related content. At that time, the company was marketing itself as "YouTube for brands." (Vitrue's founder and CEO, Reggie Bradford, has a background in television.) Since that time, the rise of Facebook prompted Vitrue to become an early supporter and advocate of its platform.

In its now widely known September 2010 white paper, "Anatomy of a Facebook Post" (PDF available here), Vitrue makes a compelling case that Facebook users expect a different attitude from what they read there, not just from people but from companies as well.

"As a general rule of thumb, marketers adapt their messages and content to different marketing communication channels," the white paper reads. "The content and format used in direct mail will not necessarily be effective for a direct e-mail. Also, within each marketing tactic, a marketer must determine the best format for that specific channel, i.e. e-mail with HTML or text or variations of subject lines, which results in an extensive 'test and learn' iterative approach to marketing effectiveness for a particular marketing tactic."

That paragraph seemed to imply that as people's attitudes vary with the use of different channels, certain attitudes with social channels will be more colored by individual personalities than by a collective, herd mentality. It's that implication which seemed in stark contrast to the production of its ROI calculator tool, which Google Analytics product marketing manager Adam Singer called out in April 2010, on his blog TheFutureBuzz.com, for cattle-prodding not only individuals but also entire vertical market segments into the same corral, and assuming each unit in that corral is worth the same dollar value.

"The power of Web analytics and data isn’t about coming up with normalized numbers to apply blandly across hordes of consumers, but about segmentation, detailed analysis and accountability," Singer wrote at the time. "It’s about understanding and activating your true fans, and not even treating them all the same. They are not all created equal, after all. These unscientific data points are why companies are blindly chasing bigger numbers for numbers sake – when in reality they are increasing KPI [key performance indicator] metrics and not necessarily objectives."

Vitrue's Bradford appeared to address Singer's argument in an interview with blogger Rob Birgfeld the following month. Said the CEO, "Nothing is an exact science, especially with social media. We developed the Evaluator to help provide a marketer directional and quantifiable information. But increasingly marketers can and should derive their strategies based on solid data, which is what we do here at Vitrue."

One immediately wonders how all that valuable data will be put to use at Oracle, a company notorious for rarely, if ever, modifying the tone or even color (red) of its customer-facing message over the last quarter-century. In early 2010, Oracle explained the motivation behind its acquisition of Sun Microsystems as centering around the creation of a "seamless experience for developers." Later that year, in its acquisition of e-commerce and cell-center platform maker Art Technology Group, Oracle XVP Thomas Kurian stated it was in response to customers needing "a unified commerce and CRM platform to provide a seamless experience across all commerce channels." And earlier this year, after acquiring customer service platform maker RightNow, Oracle assessed the RightNow platform as "help[ing] companies power great customer experiences in a seamless, personalized way across all channels and customer touchpoints: including on the web, in a store, over the phone or via mobile devices."

So it becomes uniquely interesting not just how Singer announced this morning's news on Vitrue's corporate blog, but how he said it. "As you know, marketers have largely led their businesses into social and they are now looking to develop strategies that can help them deliver more meaningful customer engagement. Increasingly, other groups within the enterprise are also utilizing social media to build relationships with today’s socially connected consumer. Enterprises need a more comprehensive social relationship management platform that connects marketing, sales, commerce and customer service together, for a seamless brand experience. Together, Oracle and Vitrue’s comprehensive social relationship management platform will improve companies’ return on investment for social by integrating sales and marketing across paid, owned and earned media; and enhancing customer service through seamless, real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement."

I suppose corporate statements have one way of reaching an audience, and Facebook pages another. Who knows, really? It's not an exact science.

Oracle sign by mrjoro; stock image by Shutterstock

Google's New iPhone App Shows That Search Is Still King

Jon Mitchell — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:34:30 -0700

Google updated its search app for iPhone today with a complete redesign that makes it more like the iPad version. This was already Google's best iOS experience by far, and now it's faster, more attractive, and consistent across devices. This month, it looks like search is back in the driver's seat at Google.

The start screen is now the same as on the iPad app. It is the classic Google search box reimagined for the touchscreen. It's just a plain, off-white background, the iconic Google name (and even a mobile-friendly version of the day's Google Doodle), and three other buttons: "Apps," "Voice" and "Goggles." Voice search lets you speak your query aloud, and it's impressively accurate. Goggles lets you search visually using the camera. It recognizes text and objects, and it's learning more over time.

The "Apps" section is a launcher for all the various Google Web apps, which is probably why this app is so good. Google's other native iOS apps, like Gmail, Translate and especially Voice are weird, hobbled versions of what Google's Web apps can do in the browser. Google+ was, too, until its recent redesign, which is pretty but still slow and lacking features. The main Google app for iOS has always been fast, pretty and rock-solid. You get the impression that Google wants users to do all their Googling inside it.

For most people, "Googling" means searching, and Google for iOS is almost a better search experience than the desktop. The iPhone now has the benefit of the full-bleed, high-resolution image search and the tappable, swipe-able panels for additional, rich information, which we've had in the iPad version since its update in November.

Google clearly wants this app to be nothing less than the primary way iPhone users look for anything. It's much faster to get a result from this app than from opening Safari and tapping the search box. As long as you're loading Google pages, it just feels impossibly fast. That's because Google is constantly preloading things in the background.

"I think touch screens are going to really proliferate. I think you're going to have a lot of touch surfaces in a lot of places, and it's going to be interesting to see how people interact with multiple modes of info."
- Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley

But the best is yet to come to this app. Last week, Google launched the Knowledge Graph, a new layer of information on top of search that pulls together information about the thing you're searching for right on the page, instead of just listing Web results for it. It already works on the mobile Web version, so if you search in mobile Safari, you'll see facts and background information there for certain searches.

Google's Johanna Wright told ReadWriteWeb that those features are coming to the native search apps as well. The Google iOS app is becoming the fastest, best-organized gateway to everything Google does on mobile. Everything except Google+, that is. Despite a shiny redesign this month, Google's "social layer" still doesn't get as much attention as search, which is Google's crown jewel.