via venturebeat.com
The HTC Rhyme
The HTC Rhyme is something of a delicate matter, as it is HTC's firstphone that is said to have been designed with a female audience in mind. Yet it comes in dull colours and looks quite a lot like every other HTC handset we’ve seen so far.
PENTAX Q-REVIEW
Let’s get one thing straight from the start. The Pentax Q is quite an incredible camera to behold. It’s tiny. But not only is it tiny, it also looks great.
NIKON 1 V1
Nikon has announced two new compact system cameras: the Nikon 1 V1 and the Nikon 1 J1. We got our hands on both new cameras today, so until we can bring you our Nikon 1 V1 review
The ULTra Personal Rapid Transit System
"Think of it as a horizontal lift," says Fraser Brown, managing director of ULTra, the company that has built a new way to travel to Heathrow Terminal 5 from the business car park
THREE MIFI HSPA
Three has updated its MiFi range with the new Huawei E586 complete with HSPA+, and we have managed to get our hands on one to test out all its mobile internet goodness
Friday, September 2, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
How Stickers Saved The Social Media Club
Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at a Social Media Club Masters Class in Atlanta and caught up with the club’s founder Kristie Wells.A very interesting take on the club’s rapid rise, including an insight on their number one promotional weapon … which has NOTHING to do with social media — Stickers!
And by the way, I will be teaching the same class in Toronto October and I’d love to see you there! Some people even suggested my presentation “tore down the room” in Atlanta!
Hope you enjoy this little video!
The case for the iPad’s future
You have read comments “along the lines of all entrants to the tablet market are already doomed”, because it is not entirely clear that there is (yet) a “tablet market”.
I think you are quite right about the potential for multiple iPads/”tablets” per household and thus a potentially larger market than PCs. But you said it yourself when you shifted emphasis between your second and third paragraphs — from iPad alone, to “tablet market”.
What commenters are saying: There IS an “iPad Market”; the jury is still out on there being a “tablet market”.
Like Horace said, “Tablet” manufacturers have to first compete with the netbooks, smart phones and iPod Touches. That’s one of their barrier’s to entry. These other three things (even netbooks) are good enough when it comes to the jobs that generic tablets may be hired to do.
But no-one really wants a netbook (a dumbed down PC) after seeing an iPad. So the other companies have to make tablets to move forward into the post-PC world. But why would anyone want an ill-conceived tablet, if it is essentially the same thing as the dead netbook in a slightly different form factor, and no better than my phone or iPod?
These tablet makers are faced with rethinking their products with a new business mindset. It’s a new paradigm: Different OS, different apps, ecosystems, cloud computing, seamless syncing, different and new uses, etc. Companies are going out of business, or getting out of the business, left and right after trying their hand…
Personally, I just don’t see how these PC Guys can just walk into the “tablet market” and make tablets that sell; when Apple, as an engineering and software company, have been doing it for ten years.
————————–
I am wondering if the same thing won’t be true of the “ultra-light laptop market”. There we have another potential market that PC Guys are having a hard time just walking into. Of course this is an evolution of the wider laptop market, and it is not an entirely “new” category like tablets (take 2); but “ultra-light” now seems to be a definable market segment that is replacing the now defunct netbook market. Like phones and the smartphones replacing them in Horace’s countdown, there will at some point be no “ultra-lights”, just laptops. But it’s not as easy as it looks to make good ones.
via asymco.com
sony's new Reader Wi-Fi is the world's lightest 6-inch e-reader with multitouch screen (update:
Boss of the Year Entry Form
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
via engadget.com
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Why Affiliates Love Justin Bieber | Finch Sells
Oh yes, they do.
There’s nothing the affiliate world loves more than a good fad to ride all the way to the bank. Justin Bieber encapsulates the affiliate marketer’s wettest dream, and that’s a dangerous sentence if ever I wrote one.
There are tons of affiliate offers that can be spun and peddled using Bieber’s bandwagon of fans – some that directly use his name, and others that need only be implied. It’s not the most reputable marketing tactic in the book, to monetize a brand that’s not your own, but we’re not the most reputable marketers in the first place. It’s going to happen.
Besides, the landing page H1s just roll off the tongue.
“How much do you know about the Biebs?”
“Pick the right answer for a chance to meet the Biebs”
“Lose half your body weight in 28 days to look attractive… to the Biebs”
“Sign up if you’re a BBW whale and like meeting rich men… like the Biebs”Some niches may be more suitable than others, obviously, and that sentiment becomes even more relevant when you’re talking about traffic sources. Facebook and Google aren’t the best places to parade Justin Bieber as your CPA’s fake celebrity ambassador. Indeed, it’s not sensible to portray a relationship to any degree.
But for PPV, this kind of marketing bait and switch has become the norm for drawing eyeballs to offers that are hyper targeted to a certain demographic. One of the things that makes Bieber such a marketing hero is the immense loyalty he receives from a never ending pool of fangirls and floppy haired pretenders.
It’s the loyalty that should hold your attention. This is what we should be pursuing.
Click prices are rising across most demographics on most traffic sources, but there will always be opportunities for the marketers who are skilled at monetizing the Under 16 demographic. I’m using Justin Bieber as an example, but to tell you the truth, he’s probably not the best case study. While his army of fans continues to grow, so does the number of advertisers who are keen to jump on the monkey – and not just affiliates, but commercial brands too.
Looking further afield, it doesn’t take too much market research to pinpoint the names and shows that are exploding in popularity with the Under 16 market. How can it be? These are some of the most loyal followers of any demographic, and can be found posting their shit on Twitter 24/7.
There are huge opportunities for affiliates to jump on these trends. It just takes a little creativity, where affiliate offers don’t already exist, to match them to suitable campaigns.
I hate to use the phrase, but “like taking candy from a baby” springs to mind.
A regular pet project of mine is to snatch up domains for fansites of these young stars, turn them in to very basic blogs, then to simply splash the shit out of them with gaming ads and quiz offers. You may think the competition level from crazy eyed fans is too high to make a decent return, but in reality, you only need a tiny slice of the market when the market is so huge. And if you’re smart, you can convince the hardcore fans to work for you by seeding these projects with their own devoted content.
Sinister, right? I’m going to Hell? As long as the Devil crosses Baby off his playlist, that’s perfectly fine by me.
I remember when Michael Jackson died, there was a similar explosion of MJ themed offers. For the dirty scumbag affiliates of the world, it was easy pickings. Lock and load, and help yourself to some commission. I did just that, and I’m sure many other affiliates did too.
Where will the next craze emerge from? He or she is out there now, slowly accumulating an army of fans that will one day reach a tipping point when Ca-Ching – the money rush begins. Better get your ears to the ground!
These opportunities to reach huge demographics of highly concentrated users don’t appear every day, but when they do, you’ve gotta cash in.
Recommended This Week
If you’re looking for a good place to seek out Justin Bieber offers, look no further than EWA Network. EWA is clearly no stranger to the Biebs. “Bieber” Web Assets has been a running joke of regular hilarity on WickedFire. Remarkable physical similarities aside, Ryan Eagle is running one of the best houses in the industry for an affiliate to get his tracking links from. Sign up now for a peek.
Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.
via finchsells.com
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Seth's Blog: Form design
The purpose of a form is not to treat the human as a computer, who will dutifully fill in each and every box just the way you want.
No, creating a form is like hosting a party for words.
Those little boxes (one per letter) are on some forms because it communicates to you that you should slow down and write clearly, because a human being is going to have to read what you wrote and type it in for you.
The large lined area on the application implies that you're supposed to write more than one sentence.
Online forms work the same way. When you use big type and big boxes, you're telling the visitor something, talking in a certain tone of voice. The local DMV site feels very different from a web2.0 company that happens to be collecting almost exactly the same data.
We're all looking for clues, clues about what you want, who you are, whether we trust you. Even in a simple form.
My semi-educated guess on the Amazon tablet – Marco.org
My semi-educated guess on the Amazon tablet
In last week’s Build and Analyze, we speculated about what the future Amazon tablet might be, fitting the most credible rumors we’ve heard so far. (This is basically an expanded version of that, so if you listened, parts will be repetitive.)
Dan Provost made some great points in response, and I think he’s on target except for the screen technology. I don’t think color e-ink is product-ready yet. Even if it could match the resolution and response time of today’s grayscale e-ink displays, that’s still nowhere near good enough to play video, animate anything, or smoothly scroll a page. I doubt that color (or probably even grayscale) e-ink will ever be fast enough for those roles. So I’m ruling out its use for a rich-media tablet, and I think that’s what the Amazon tablet will be, so I’m betting on an LCD screen.
Here’s what I’m guessing the Amazon tablet will be, and I don’t think we’ve heard any credible rumors that suggest that any of the major points are wrong:
Hardware
Something similar to the Nook Color: an inexpensive, low-end 7” tablet with a backlit color LCD capacitive touchscreen covered in glass. (Or, in layman’s terms: like the iPad, but slower, smaller, and cheaper.)
Amazon will go to great lengths to get very good battery life, even at the expense of thinness or lightness. While it won’t match the e-ink Kindles, it will probably provide at least 12 hours of reading time at low brightness.
Like the Kindle 3, it’s going to feel cheap, but most people won’t care, because it will be cheap.
Software
Android. But not the way you might assume.
The Nook Color runs Android, but you’d never know it: it’s buried under B&N’s completely custom interface and applications. There’s no Android Market to download apps, no Gmail, no Google Maps, no Google-anything. Saying it “runs Android” is like saying the HP TouchPad “runs Linux”: it’s more of a low-level technicality than any indication of what its customers see and use.1
I see Amazon doing the same thing: Android 2.x under the hood, but an Amazon UI with Amazon apps for all core functionality. And, importantly, the Amazon Appstore — and not Google’s Android Market.
This is almost certain, because in all likelihood, they don’t have a choice. Amazon probably wants to have so much control over the software (which is wise) that they’d never pass Google’s “compatibility” requirements for being an officially branded Android device, so Google won’t let Amazon use their standard (and very closed) app suite.
It’s better for Amazon this way: they can control the entire experience, their Appstore will gain a large captive audience, and they won’t rely on Google for any technical or branding dependencies. Few customers would ever realize that they’re using an Android device.
Content
All of Amazon’s content stores will be available and prominent: ebooks, newspapers, magazines, music, video, and apps.
The content, not games or apps or communication or productivity, will be the focus in the tablet’s marketing and its interface.
Video and news-browsing will be major upselling points from the e-ink Kindle and will likely be emphasized in the interface.
Availability and positioning
Kindle is a very strong and successful brand for Amazon. The name will include “Kindle”, such as Kindle Touch, Kindle Color, or Kindle Tablet.
It will be available within the next year, possibly very soon for the holiday season.
It will not replace the e-ink Kindle, but will be an additional product above it, like a “deluxe” Kindle.
It will cost around $249 unsubsidized or $199 with ads (“Special Offers”).
In other words, it will be very similar to the Nook Color, but with the strength of Amazon’s content stores and retail power behind it, which I think will make it a much bigger success than the Nook Color.
I see it taking over much of the low-cost market: people who buy inexpensive gadgets on Black Friday at Wal-Mart, currently served by a bunch of awful, dirt-cheap tablets that geeks like us have never heard of from companies like Sylvania. (But if Amazon can’t or won’t sell it in big-box stores, that’s going to inhibit this role.)
Relevance to the iPad
With aggressive pricing and heavy promotion on Amazon’s site, they’re going to sell a lot of these. It’s certainly going to be inconvenient for the iPad, because some buyers will unquestionably pick the much cheaper Kindle tablet instead. It will probably be the only non-iPad tablet that will sell in enough volume anytime soon that anyone needs to think about it.
But I’m not sure that it will significantly hurt iPad sales. It’s probably not targeting the same market. If people want an iPad, they typically want an iPad — they don’t first decide that they want “a tablet” and then go find the tablet that they like best.
And the iPad’s entry price won’t always be $499. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a cut to $399 for the holidays, and I bet the next iPad’s entry-level price will be $399. But I don’t think Apple plans to (or wants to) compete in the $200-tablet market for the foreseeable future.
The Amazon tablet will be much more like the Kindle: an alternative, inexpensive device dedicated to Amazon’s content stores, bought and used primarily for reading books, browsing the newspaper, and watching movies.
Some people who would have bought an iPad will buy the Amazon tablet instead, but many people will buy it in addition to an iPad, and many of its exclusive buyers wouldn’t (or couldn’t) have bought an iPad instead.
Nothing’s getting “killed”, except maybe some of those cheap Sylvania-etc. tablets, but it’s going to be an important and successful product that will deserve our attention.
Nook Colors can be rooted to run a more typical Android environment, but most customers will never do this. ↩
via marco.org
How we ruined the tomato - Agriculture
iStockphotoAmericans love tomatoes. As our second-most-popular produce item, we’re accustomed to the sight of them: plump and bright red, marble to soft-ball sized, and piled in abundance year-round in the refrigerated fruit and vegetable aisle of the grocery store. Many of us eat tomatoes every day: if not au natural, in ketchup, salsa, or marinara sauce.
Yet our favorite fruit may not be quite as innocuous and delicious as it appears. In his new book "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit," journalist Barry Estabrook writes the biography of the modern tomato, revealing the environmental and human costs of big agribusiness. Estabrook traces the history of the tomato from the wild tomato berries that once grew in abundance in the rocky foothills of the Andes to the most familiar salad staple on the planet. A true tomato devotee, Estabrook explains why our love for tomatoes is hurting not only field workers and the environment, but our taste buds, too.
Salon spoke to him over the phone about what the tomato—and its taste—really says about us.
Why did you decide to write a book about tomatoes?
I wanted to write about our screwed up food system, and if you’re looking for the poster child for everything that’s wrong with modern industrial agriculture, you can’t get any better than a supermarket tomato. Supermarket tomatoes are generally tasteless and grown at a tremendous cost to the workforce.
How did tomatoes get to be so flavorless and have so many hidden production costs?
A tomato grower said to me: "Barry, I don’t get paid a cent for flavor, not one cent. I get paid for weight." The horticulturists I talked to all agreed that over the past fifty years or so commercial tomato breeding has been geared towards weight. To do that, they need to grow quickly, and they need to have resistance to disease. So, the genes that give tomatoes the wonderful flavor of a summer tomato from your garden or farmer’s market have simply been lost in commercial breeding.
As for labor abuses, these enormous chains, Walmarts, supermarkets, and fast food companies, are driving tomato prices as low as they can go. At the same time, the makers of chemical pesticides and fertilizers are pushing prices upwards. The only place farmers can squeeze their budgets is the workforce. They’ve been doing that steadily. Even now, a tomato picker makes the same wage he did in 1980. And every week, workers are sprayed with chemicals while they’re picking.
You write that 1/3 of industrial tomato production takes place in Florida, where they’re basically grown in sand.
They are grown in sand. The agricultural officials would like to call it sandy soil, but it’s sand, every bit as sandy as Daytona Beach. Florida is the worst place in the world to grow a crop of tomatoes. It never gets winters, so bugs are present year-round, it’s notoriously humid, and fungi thrive. Everything in the ground is killed before the tomatoes are planted. All Florida tomatoes live off of are fertilizers and chemicals that are injected into the soil. Like broiler chickens, Florida tomatoes are designed to grow, grow, grow. They don’t have the genetics to pack in a lot of flavor. When these tomatoes are picked, they’re absolutely green and hard. They’re still hard by the time they get to the grocery store, but by then, they’re also orange. They’re called "mature greens," the slang for them is "gas greens."
Because they’re gassed with ethylene, right?
Right, they’re bathed in ethylene until they turn the right color. It doesn’t give them any more flavor, though. It doesn’t add any acids or sugars or flavor compounds. That means that even though they’re called mature greens, a certain percentage of them are not mature. A tomato is not meant to be picked today and then eaten three weeks from now. When you pick a tomato, sometimes it bursts on contact; the seams split. You go to a farmer’s market and buy tomatoes, and they’re ready to eat.
Do you think that’s part of the solution? People growing more, or any, of their own food?
I encourage anyone to grow tomatoes. They really want to grow! If you’ve got a sunny place, you can grow tomatoes, whether you put them in a pot, or put half a dozen plants in your backyard. This will do two things: it will connect you with the soil. And it will also give you amazing tasting tomatoes. If for some reason you can’t or don’t want to grow your own tomatoes, buy them from the local farmer’s market. And if you must buy an out of season tomato … I hesitate telling people to do this, but if you are geographically and financially able, shop at a Whole Foods store. I hate to advertise for Whole Foods, but the fact is, they’re the only grocery store chain that’s made any effort to alleviate the problems of the workers.
It sounds like you’re saying that we shouldn’t eat tomatoes at all when they’re not in season.
You wonder why someone would.
Well, I think because we go to the grocery store and we expect to be able to get everything all the time. We’re used to convenience and variety. People expect to be able to get arugula, and bananas, and tomatoes and mangos at the supermarket whenever they want them.
There’s also an element of food pornography in the true sense of the word. People see these beautiful, flawless bright red tomatoes, and they don’t go through the thought process: wait a second, those look nice, but they don’t taste like anything. It’s odd.
What do you think it says about the way Americans eat that we’re willing to buy tomatoes that taste like nothing and are so bad for workers and the environment?
The reaction I get when I give talks or from people who’ve read the book is "I can’t believe this is happening." I don’t think word has gotten out. I don’t think tomato pickers get the kind of media coverage they would if the workers were fair-skinned American citizens. They’re a group that doesn’t vote, doesn’t go to the police, tries to be as low profile as possible and that makes it very easy to take advantage of them. As for the question of taste, you can Google tomatoes and consumer complaints, or consumer satisfaction, and you’ll come up with dozens of academics studies that show that tomatoes are at or near the top of the list of produce people buy but are disappointed in.
And yet we still continue to buy them. How did tomatoes become so popular in this country?
Tomatoes became medicinal novelties in the early nineteenth century. Then, during the Civil War, canning technology became widespread. Soldiers in the Civil War ate tons of canned tomatoes. By the end of the nineteenth century, plant breeders created fruits that were uniform and tasted better, and tomatoes became very popular.
In general, do you think Americans are becoming more or less aware of the costs of factory farming?
A small sector of the population definitely is more aware. But it’s easy when foodies get together to think that the whole world is that way, and it’s not. It’s a small percentage of the population.
That seems to be the larger problem inherent in the locavore movement, the organic movement, slow food, etc. These tend to be privileged food conversations.
On the other hand, a growing segment of the population is concerned with these issues, just look at farmer’s markets. Ten years ago, if I’d recommended that people try to buy tomatoes at farmer’s markets way more people would say "What Farmer’s markets?" Now there’s what, five thousand of them? Now no one can say, "You can’t buy good tasting tomatoes anywhere," because you can, when they’re in season.
via salon.com
