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CloudCrowd is a new crowdsourcing service that comes hot on the heels of CrowdFlower. Just like its
competitor, CloudCrowd aims to let any company increase its efficiency by having these tasks which
are necessary but that could be delegated taken care of by a virtual workforce. In this particular
case, what CloudCrowd does is to assign and distribute any task commissioned by its customers into
its virtual taskforce - a team that already has over 100,000 members.
Palm’s woes continue to balloon after the handset maker announced its earnings for Q3 2010.
As a recap, Palm reported $349 million in revenue with a $22 million net loss for Q3 2010 which
looks rosy when compared to the $90.6 million revenue and $98 million net loss reported in Q3
2009. Though revenue has increased and net loss has narrowed year over year, Palm continues its
downward slide with net loss increasing from $13.7 million in Q2 2010 to the $22 million quoted
above. Palm shipped 960,000 handsets in Q3 2010 which represents a 23% increase from Q2 2010 and
a 300% increase year over year. This abundance of handsets is Palm’s downfall as the
handset maker revealed that it has only sold a mere 408,000 units in Q3 2010, leading to a
standing inventory that some estimate to be a staggering 1.15 million. Palm has put handset
production on hold (told
you so) while carriers sell through the current inventory which is equal to six months worth
of retail sales at last year’s rate. As a result, Palm’s Q4 2010 outlook is dire with
the company projecting revenue of only $150 million, a figure that falls far short of the $305
million that was expected. Read on after the jump.
Palm’s stock has plummeted a staggering 18% to under $5 since its poor Q3 2010 earnings and
its dire Q4 projections were announced. Like a pack wolves, analysts are jumping all over the
Sunnyvale, California company, issuing stock price targets as low as $0. Peter Misek of Canaccord
Adams, who issued the $0 value, defends his pessimistic view of Palm by writing,
“We believe Palm’s troubles will only accelerate as carriers and suppliers
increasingly question the company’s solvency and withdraw their support.With what appears
to be roughly 12 months of cash on hand, an accelerating burn rate, a complete lack of earnings
visibility, and substantial debt and preferred equity, we no longer see any value in the
company’s common equity.”
Palm is at the edge of a precipice and needs either a miracle or a very wealthy suitor to save it
from what appears to be inevitable self destruction. Anyone with a Pre or Pixi in good condition
may want to box that puppy up and put it in a drawer as it may be a collector’s item
someday. We’re half kidding. Kind of.
Patent system supporters regularly point (slightly misleadingly) to the claim that the patent
system gives patent holders the right to exclude others from using their inventions. And, thus,
most lawsuits we see around patents revolve around cases involving a company manufacturing a
product that includes a patented invention. But what about a lawsuit for a company that
deliberately chose not to license or use a patented technology, because it was too
expensive?
Welcome to today's world.
A few years back, there was a lot of attention paid to videos from a company called SawStop that
made a pretty cool product that protected your fingers from a table saw. You may have seen the
videos: The company tried to license the invention to various table saw makers, but after
evaluating the technology, many were not convinced how well it worked and felt that the cost was
way too high (both for themselves, and for consumers). In fact, some appeared to fear that if they
did adopt this technology and then someone still got hurt, they were asking for a big lawsuit for
promoting this technology as a safety feature.
But what about the other way around? Could someone be so bold as to actually sue for using a table
saw that did not have this technology?
ChurchHatesTucker alerts us
to the story of a lawsuit in Boston that involved a guy whose hand was damaged in a table saw
accident while using a table saw from Ryobi. The guy's complaint was that Ryobi should have included this technology and that it should be required
to protect hands. And, amazingly, the jury sided with the guy.
Yes, you read that right. The jury effectively claimed that any table saw maker is liable for
injuries if it does not license this technology and build it into its table saws.
That, of course, conflicts with that basic "exclusivity" part of patent law -- and would
effectively mean that SawStop has now been given total defacto control over who can be allowed to
sell table saws in the US. That clearly is not what the law was intended to do. The government
should never require companies to have to purchase a patent license for a technology they don't
believe the market wants. And, in this case, the ruling has resulted in numerous other lawsuits
against other table saw makers -- and a near guarantee that the price of table saws will go way up.
Old saws can't be retrofitted, and table saw makers need to totally change their manufacturing
process and greatly increase costs to offer this technology.
This seems blatantly wrong. If the government is going to require companies to use a patented
technology, it seems that the only reasonable solution is to remove the patent on it and allow
competition in the market place.
The health-care bill released by congressional Democrats today leaves out a federal agency proposed
by President Barack Obama to fight health-insurers’ premium increases.
Karsa Fulltext Search Manager is a desktop application thanks to which you can increase
efficiency, reduce errors, and work faster when creating fulltext search. The desktop manager
serves for setting the search and subsequent generating of saved procedures on the MS SQL Server.
You therefore do not need to register any dlls or input the .net code on the SQL Server, because
the standard T-SQL script is run and the wide possibilities of the SQL Server iFTS are used every
time.
BBC sites are responsible for 40 percent of the visits to iPlayer, according to Hitwise.
The BBC will make viewing of its on-demand videos more social by adding Facebook, Twitter and
Bebo integration into its widely popular iPlayer online video application, according to a report
in the
Daily Telegraph. The addition of more social sharing features has the potential to greatly
increase usage and viewer engagement for the iPlayer, which continues to post record numbers
month after month.
In an interview with the Telegraph, the BBC’s director of future media and technology, Erik
Huggers, said that social sharing features would be built into the iPlayer 3.0 beta, which is set
to launch soon. According to Huggers, partnerships with the various social networking sites have
already been signed, but the Beeb has been waiting until the release of the newest version of its
player before making the new features available to users.
The integration will allow users to easily share what they are watching or listening to with
friends and contacts on the social networking site. But for the integration to work, they will
have to first register an account and log into the BBC iPlayer before adding their Facebook,
Twitter and Bebo information to that account. Once that information is stored, they will no
longer have to log into the services separately to post updates to their account from the
iPlayer.
While the iPlayer could see a boost from social sharing, the video catchup service is doing just
fine on its own, posting record numbers (again!) for the month of February. The iPlayer site was
visited by an average of 1.4 million people per day , with 3.5 million requests for TV and radio
programs during the month. But the most telling stat might be the amount of time viewers spent on
the site. iPlayer viewers spent more than an hour — 64 minutes — catching up on TV
programs online.
A group of researchers have proven
something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a
meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the
researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million
accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these
accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those
with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not
necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don't always mean someone
is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.
Sponsor
The findings from this research project have been published in an research paper available
here
on the project's homepage.
How the Data Was Analyzed
The data the researchers had access to is astounding: 54,981,152 user accounts,
1,963,263,821 social (follow) links and 1,755,925,520 tweets. In order to collect this
massive store of data, the researchers contacted Twitter and asked permission to crawl Twitter's
service. Twitter granted them access and white-listed the IP address range for the 58 servers
that were used in the data collection. In total, the crawler was able to scan 80 million Twitter
accounts during the month of August 2009. Only 54+ million of those accounts were actually in-use
at the time, which, in and of itself, is an interesting finding about how many people create a
Twitter account and then abandon it. Only 8% of the active accounts were set to private, so they
were ignored during the data analysis. The researchers also used the Twitter API to gather
additional information about a user's social links and tweets.
The study focused on the largest part of the Twitter network - the "single disproportionately
large connected component," notes the paper, that contained 94.8% of users and 99% of all links
and tweets. Within that large network of "in-use" accounts, the researchers further narrowed down
the data to focus on the "active users." These users where those who had more than 10 tweets and
had a valid screen name that could be retweeted by others. (Interesting - it's possible to have
an account and not a screen name?) That left "only" 6,189,636 active users out
of the initial 80 million to examine.
To measure the influence of these 6+ million users, the researchers looked at how the entire set
of the 52 million users interacted with these active users.
The Three Measures of Influence
After examining the data, the researchers found that the most followed individuals spanned a wide
variety of public figures and news sources and included accounts like CNN, New York Times, Barack
Obama, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and others. However, the most retweeted
users tended to be content aggregation services like TwitterTips, TweetMeme, and, interestingly
enough, they counted the tech blog Mashable as an aggregation service, too. Other heavily
retweeted users included Guy Kawasaki, the humor site The Onion and again, The New York Times.
Meanwhile, those users with the most "mentions" - not a direct retweet including the original
content of someone else's tweet, but just a casual mention of their name - were celebs.
These three measures of influence - followers, retweets and mentions - has surprisingly little
overlap when looking at the top influentials. The top 20 lists from these three categories only
had two users in common: Ashton Kutcher and Puff Daddy.
The researchers also examined the ability of Twitter users to influence others. They determined
that the most influential users hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed
to being experts in just one area.
Examining the 233 "All-Time Influentials"
Out of the 6 million active Twitter users, the researchers picked the top 100 users in each of
the three categories. Due to the overlap, there were only 233 distinct users on
these lists. These were dubbed the "all-time influentials." Some of these accounts belonged to
news organizations or celebs, but others were just regular users. Regarding that last group - it
appears that those users who limit their tweets to a single topic are the most likely to increase
their influence scores.
In the end, what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy
measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some
heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size
doesn't reveal an account's ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe.
According to the project's homepage, the researchers are hoping to make the data they collected
available to the community at large. Before doing so, they will discuss it with Twitter in order
to determine that their data sharing plan agrees with the company's policy. They plan to have an
update on this situation - possibly the data itself - by May 2010.
Appearing as a guest host on Fox & Friends, Dana Perino asserted that the health
care reform bill's Medicare investment tax on those making over $200,000 a year is "so disturbing
... because the people who make that money are the small business owners." In fact, fewer than
1.3 percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax.
Perino claimed "small business owners" are "the people who make" over $200,000
Perino: Medicare investment tax on wealthy is "so disturbing" because "the people who
make that money are the small business owners." From the March 19 edition of Fox News'
Fox & Friends:
PERINO: One of the most disturbing things to me is a 3.8 percent tax on unearned income, so
that's all your investment income, if you make over $200,000 a year. The reason that's so
disturbing is because the people who make that money are the small business owners, and they're
the ones who create the jobs. And so this will feel like, as I've said, a lead-blanket on
economic growth and then supposedly the administration's next priority is going to be increasing
jobs in the states.
In fact, fewer than 1.3 percent of small businesses make enough to be affected by
the tax
Medicare investment tax does not apply to those earning less than $200,000. The
House Rules Committee's section-by-section analysis
of the health care reconciliation act states that the 3.8 percent Medicare tax on investment
income -- which
takes effect in 2013 -- "does not apply if modified adjusted gross income is less than
$250,000 in the case of a joint return, or $200,000 in the case of a single return":
Sec.
1402. Medicare tax. Modifies the tax to include net
investment income in the taxable base. Currently, the Medicare tax does not apply to net
investment income. The Medicare tax on net investment income does not apply if
modified adjusted gross income is less than $250,000 in the case of a joint return, or $200,000
in the case of a single return. Net investment income is interest, dividends, royalties,
rents, gross income from a trade or business involving passive activities, and net gain from
disposition of property (other than property held in a trade or business). Net investment
income is reduced by properly allocable deductions to such income.
Fewer than 1.3 percent of those who claim small business income would
be affected by Medicare investment tax. Despite Perino's claim that "small
business owners" are "the people who make" over $200,000 and would therefore be affected by the
Medicare investment tax, according to the Tax Policy Center's table of
2009 tax returns, 457,000 of the 36,064,000 returns that reported small-business income -- or
1.3 percent of them -- were in the top two income tax
brackets, which include all filers with taxable incomes high enough to trigger the investment
tax in the health care reform bill.
TPC: "[N]ot everyone who receives small business income should be classified as a small
business owner." Ben Harris wrote on the Tax Policy Center's TaxVox blog that "0.5
percent of small business owners both fall into the top two marginal tax rates AND derive more
than half their income from a small business." From the April 2009
post, which addressed Obama's proposal to "allow the top two marginal income tax rates to
revert to their pre-Bush levels":
Allowing these rates to rise would hurt very few small business owners. In 2009, about 36 million
taxpayers have small business income - defined as taxpayers who report a gain or loss on tax
schedules C, E, or F. This group includes not only sole proprietorships, S corporations and
partnerships, but also taxpayers who receive royalties, rental income, and income from trusts. Of
these 36 million small business owners, just
1.3 percent (about 457,000) fall into the top two tax brackets-indicating that approximately
99 percent of small business owners fare better under the President's proposed changes to the
statutory tax rates. Estimates by the Treasury Department and Joint Committee on Taxation reach a
similar conclusion.
And not everyone who receives small business income should be classified as a small business
owner; most derive the bulk of their income from other sources. TPC estimates show that only
about 174,000 taxpayers, or 0.5 percent of small business owners, both fall into the top two
marginal tax rates AND derive more than half their income from a small business. This group makes
up 0.1 percent of all taxpayers, meaning that the chances of being in this group-a small business
owner getting at least half of total income from small businesses and being subject to a tax
increase-is about one in a thousand.
UK government 'shamefully' refuses to support Kenyan proposal for a ban aimed at reducing
elephant and rhino poaching
The Conservatives today criticised the government for failing to support proposals from a number
of African countries to impose a 20-year ban on any legal sales of ivory.
The plan, led by Kenya, is being discussed at the meeting of the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in a bid to tackle the poaching of elephants and rhino.
It counters a bid by Tanzania and Zambia to hold one-off sales of their legally held ivory and
"downlist" their elephants from the highest level of protection.
The UK government said it was initially "sympathetic" to the Kenyan proposals, subject to a
review after 10 years of the scheme, but the EU, which votes as a bloc at Cites, decided not to
back it. But on a Cites vote this
week on whether to ban the international trade in bluefin tuna, the UK acted alone rather
than as a bloc with Europe and chose to support the Monaco proposal of opposing the ban.
There are concerns that, if the one-off sales of ivory from four African countries in 2008
results in a lower demand for illegal ivory, a 20-year moratorium would not be a positive step.
But conservationists have raised fears over a rise in illegal trade and poaching following the
sales, which they believe stimulate the market and provide a cover for traders to offload illegal
stocks.
Shadow environment secretary Nick Herbert said the government had "shamefully" refused to support the
Kenyan proposal for a ban on sales and continued to back stockpiling of legal ivory - for example
from animals which had died naturally.
"Instead of flooding the market with more ivory and legitimising the trade, these stockpiles
should be destroyed. We should be choking demand for ivory, not stoking it," he said.
The UK opposes the bids by Tanzania and Zambia to have one-off sales of their ivory, but EU
countries are still considering their requests to "downlist" their elephants from Appendix I to
Appendix II of the convention.
Such a move would not allow a trade in ivory, but could let other elephant body parts be traded
internationally and the sale of live elephants, for example to safari parks elsewhere, could go
ahead.
It could pave the way for a potential ivory sale in the future.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) spokeswoman said: "The EU has agreed
with the UK's position to vote against the proposals from Tanzania and Zambia to sell ivory
stocks in a one-off sale.
"The EU has decided not to support Kenya's proposal for a moratorium of ivory sales for 20
years."
She said that, regardless, the UK would not consider other sales of ivory until the effects of
the 2008 one-off sale of ivory, which was intended to reduce demand for illegal poached ivory,
had been fully analysed.
That would take at least another six years, she said.
The 20-year ban would extend an existing nine-year moratorium, agreed at the time the four
African countries were given the go-ahead to sell their legal ivory stocks, on any further sales.
Genome informatics. International Conference on Genome Informatics, Vol. 22, No. 1. (January
2010), pp. 69-83.
The high osmolarity glycerol (HOG) signalling system in yeast belongs to the class of Mitogen
Activated Protein Kinase (MAPK) pathways that are found in all eukaryotic organisms. It includes at
least three scaffold proteins that form complexes, and involves reactions that are strictly
dependent on the set of species bound to a certain complex. The scaffold proteins lead to a
combinatorial increase in the number of possible states. To date, representations of the HOG
pathway have used simplifying assumptions to avoid this combinatorial problem. Such assumptions are
hard to make and may obscure or remove essential properties of the system. This paper presents a
detailed generic formal representation of the HOG system without such assumptions, showing the
molecular interactions known from the literature. The model takes complexes into account, and
summarises existing knowledge in an unambiguous and detailed representation. It can thus be used to
anchor discussions about the HOG system. In the commonly used Systems Biology Markup Language
(SBML), such a model would need to explicitly enumerate all state variables. The Kappa modelling
language which we use supports representation of complexes without such enumeration. To conclude,
we compare Kappa with a few other modelling languages and software tools that could also be used to
represent and model the HOG system. Clemens Kühn, KV Prasad, Edda Klipp, Peter Gennemark
"With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of
their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems,
suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at
Microsoft."
Boeing Co., the world’s second- largest commercial-plane maker, will accelerate planned rate
increases on both the 777 and 747 programs because of increasing demand from customers.
TheReal_sabret00the notes a TechRadar piece reporting that Opera Software has seen a doubling from
normal download numbers on average since Microroft's browser-choice screen lit up in Europe. The UK
saw an 85% increase and for other countries it was larger still: Poland 328%, Spain 215%, and Italy
202%. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, said "A multitude of browsers will make the web more
standardised and easier to browse".
TheReal_sabret00the notes a TechRadar piece reporting that Opera Software has seen a doubling from
normal download numbers on average since Microroft's browser-choice screen lit up in Europe. The UK
saw an 85% increase and for other countries it was larger still: Poland 328%, Spain 215%, and Italy
202%. Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, said "A multitude of browsers will make the web more
standardised and easier to browse".
TechCrunch50
startup CrowdFlower has been attracting a lot of attention,
even raising $5
million in funding recently. CrowdFlower is a labor as a service startup that helps
businesses outsource mundane or repetitive tasks to the cloud. Now the startup has attracted a
competitor, recently launched CloudCrowd, which also
promises increase efficiency and lower costs to companies by breaking large projects into smaller
tasks, and distributing them to its virtual workforce.
Once a client assigns a task to CloudCrowd, the company will distribute tasks its work force of
more than 100,000 workers. With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that
determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don’t have a rating yet are
assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each
separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal.
Tasks range from content moderation, internet research, audio and video transcription to data
entry. Since the company’s launch a few months ago, CloudCrowd has completed over 500,000
tasks for a variety of clients, including USC and RentCycle.
As I wrote above CloudCrowd will face competition from CrowdFlower, but it seems that the model
is attracting the attention of businesses to perform mundane tasks, so there should be room fr
several players in the space.
"With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of
their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems,
suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at
Microsoft."
Tribbi 1.0Tribbi is a game of falling pieces, played against two walls of the
board. When rows are cleared, the board rotates 90 degrees. As you progress through the levels, new
pieces are unlocked, and the pace of gameplay increases.
There are three board sizes to choose from, detailed highscore stats, and spatialized sound
effects for increased immersion. Try Tribbi today and see how long you can last!
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Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical, Vol. 111-112 (11 November 2005), pp. 494-499.
An increase in hydrogen peroxide concentration in exhaled breath (EB) of patients, who suffer from
some diseases related to the lung function, has been observed and considered as a reliable
indicator of lung diseases. In the EB of these patients, hydrogen peroxide is present in the vapour
phase together with water, thus one of the approaches of monitoring hydrogen peroxide in the EB is
to condense it and then to perform the hydrogen peroxide measurement in the condensate. Earlier, a
hydrogen peroxide sensor based on an electrolyte metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor
( E MOSFET) has been investigated. The sensor shows the possibility to measure hydrogen peroxide at
a concentration of micro-molar level. Due to its miniaturizability, the sensor is able to detect
hydrogen peroxide in a small volume and is thus especially suitable for monitoring of hydrogen
peroxide in the EB. In this paper, a simple set-up for condensation of hydrogen peroxide in the EB
is introduced. The set-up consists of a cooling tube using a Peltier element for condensation of
the exhaled breath air and the E MOSFET-based hydrogen peroxide sensor. Using this cooling tube,
primary results on the collection and measurement of hydrogen peroxide in artificial EB are
given. D Anh, W Olthuis, P Bergveld
Escherichia coli has evolved an intracellular pathway to regulate its motion termed as chemotaxis
so as to move towards a favorable environment such as regions with higher concentration of
nutrients. Chemotaxis is a response to temporal and spatial variation of extracellular ligand
concentration and randomness in motion induced by collisions with solvent molecules. Previous
studies have reported average drift velocities for a given gradient and do not measure drift
velocities as a function of time and space. To address this issue, a novel experimental technique
was developed to quantify the motion of E. coli cells to varying concentrations and gradients of
methyl-aspartate so as to capture the spatial and temporal variation of the drift velocity. A
two-state receptor model accounting for the intracellular signaling pathway predicted the
experimentally observed increase in drift velocity with gradient and the subsequent adaptation. Our
study revealed that the rotational diffusivity induced by the extracellular environment is crucial
in determining the drift velocity of E. coli. The model predictions matched with experimental
observations only when the response of the intracellular pathway was highly ultra-sensitive to
overcome the extracellular randomness. The parametric sensitivity of the pathway indicated that the
dissociation constant for the binding of the ligand and the rate constants of the
methylation/demethylation of the receptor are key to predict the performance of the chemotactic
behavior. The study also indicates a possible role of oxygen in the chemotaxis response and that
the response to a ligand may have to account for effects of oxygen. Rajitha Vuppula, Mahesh Tirumkudulu, Kareenhalli Venkatesh
In Genetic Variation , Vol. 628 (2010), pp. 75-102.
The analysis of cancer genomes has benefited from the advances in technology that enable data to be
generated on an unprecedented scale, describing a tumour genome’s sequence and composition at
increasingly high resolution and reducing cost. This progress is likely to increase further over
the coming years as next-generation sequencing approaches are applied to the study of cancer
genomes, in tandem with large-scale efforts such as the Cancer Genome Atlas and recently announced
International Cancer Genome Consortium efforts to complement those already established such as the
Sanger Institute Cancer Genome Project. This presents challenges for the cancer researcher and the
research community in general, in terms of analysing the data generated in one’s own projects
and also in coordinating and interrogating data that are publicly available. This review aims to
provide a brief overview of some of the main informatics resources currently available and their
use, and some of the informatics approaches that may be applied in the study of cancer genomes. Ian Barrett
ChipMOS Technologies expects its revenues for the first quarter of 2010 to stay flat or increase by
a single-digit percentage from the fourth quarter of 2009 thanks to increasing demand for backend
packaging and testing services from DRAM, LCD driver IC and mixed-signal IC makers, according to
company chairman and CEO SJ Cheng.
Sales of AMD-based desktop PCs have accounted for more than 40% of the desktop segment in China,
pushing first-tier motherboard makers Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology and Micro-Star
International (MSI) to increase the proportions of AMD-based products in their shipments to China,
according to industry sources.
Budget
enhancements to this month’s SBM finally reflect last year’s price increases, allowing
the return of liquid cooling at the high-end and Core i7 for the mid-priced systems. With big
improvements to its bigger brothers, can the low-cost PC still win?
The world's
second Internet of Things Conference is scheduled to take
place at the end of November in Tokyo. The deadline for papers was just extended to June 1 -
which gave us an idea. Conference planners have put together a list of suggested topics for papers. We took that list and then rounded
up our ongoing reporting and analysis for each of the eight topics as a way to help you
understand how vast and far reaching IoT will end up being.
Sponsor
'Green by Internet of Things / Green of Internet of Things Technology'
Our recent list of
6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home, looked at the IoT from a domestic
standpoint. From handling toxic waste, to watershed management, to building design, to
transportation, to the smart energy grid, a whole new green way of thinking is going to be made
possible by IoT.
'Future sustainable technologies linking the physical and virtual world'
Different industries have have
already been able to increase the efficiency of freight shipping by using sensors to tell
them the location and condition of their product in real-time. This includes FedEx's
SenseAware, which is designed to constantly keep track of the vital signs of all its
packages. In future posts we'll be covering IoT-driven growth in the fields of virtual factories,
digital cities, agriculture and forest management.
'Novel services and applications to facilitate environmental responsibility'
Did you hear about the guy who wired
his house up to a Twitter account so that it alerted him whenever an appliance was used?
Following that experiment, Matt
Morey figured out a way to use iobridge to turn that one-way Twitter alert system into a
two-way system that makes it possible to turn appliances on and off via Twitter. These ideas,
which may seem novel at first, signal the direction towards the development of whole new
industries.
'Emerging Internet of Things business models and process changes'
Companies as large as
IBM have invested heavily in IoT. It has a website called Smarter Planet, which is dedicated to "smarter solutions," of
which they say they've already developed 12,00 hundred. We've also written about ThingD,
which is creating a registry of things, as well as REZZ.IT, which is building a business based on
the idea that "things have a network and their own audience."
'Communication systems and network architectures for the IoT'
Pachube is the IotT business that has earned the most coverage and analysis
from us. Pachube is a service that stores and shares real-time sensor
data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. MQTT, which stands for
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, is also noteworthy. It is "a platform-agnostic system which
can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." More recently, Google launched an API for
PowerMeter, which allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. Also
worth mention is our
article on Arrayent that aims to be the "Cisco of small things" - which is basically
middleware for companies wanting to connect their products to the Internet. In particular it's
targeting smartphones.
'Experience reports from the introduction and operation of networked things in areas such as
healthcare, logistics & transport'
IoT is still so new that we have only just begun to see the results of research. But with RFID,
for example (which is one of the more mature IoT technologies), we've reported on how there
have been enough challenges to limit predicted growth. There also a range of user experiences related
to IofT location-based services.
'Emerging applications and interaction paradigms for everyday citizens'
From preventing
lost luggage, to the latest IoT
gadgets, telling the story of what a person's everyday daily life is an integral part of IoT.
Most notable is the presentation by Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-imagineer Jesse Schell, who
describes
how sensors in everything may one day mean the sensor in your toothbrush gives you online gaming
points if you brush for the full three minutes. He also envisions sensors that track if you are
watching TV commercials and again rewards you with online gaming points. Core to Schell's ideas
is the belief that these incentives may seem a bit creepy, but they have potential to help us
create a less corrupted, more accountable and ethical world.
'Social impacts and consequences: security, privacy, opportunities and risks'
In our What The Internet of Things Means For You series we covered privacy issues related to the
use of RFID and barcode readers. The latest reports show
how advertisement, RFID and geolocation have combined to raise serious privacy concerns.
Additionally, location-based data can be a threat to personal privacy in the context of how the
U.S. congress has started to
draft location-based privacy protection laws.
Are you going to the Tokyo for Internet of Things Conference? What do you hope to learn there?
Let us know in the comments, or by emailing tips@readwriteweb.com, what we should be discussing in the
months leading up to the event.
ESCONDIDO, Calif., March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- According to Nielsen, Bing's market share was at an
all-time high in February, when it reached 12.5% of search engine providers worldwide. What
is so remarkable is that this number was a 15% increase from Bing's market share in January of this
year.
Sales of digital downloads have not been enough to make up for the decline of CD sales since its
peak in 2000. Universal Music Group plans to soften the fall of CD sales by dropping prices across the board,
to a maximum of $10.
The company plans to test lower prices beginning next month and continuing throughout 2010.
Nearly all of UMG's CDs will priced between $6 and $10. UMG is hoping that increased volume will
make up for the price drop, and the company plans to create more higher-priced "deluxe" versions
for more hardcore fans.
"We think [the new pricing program] will really bring new life into the physical format,"
Universal Music Group Distribution president and CEO Jim Urie told Billboard.
Retailers have been clamoring for lower retails prices, with many believing that $10 is the magic
number to spur sales. (I'll admit, I rarely buy a physical CD for more than $10 these days). A
recent test from Trans World Entertainment showed that a $9.99 price point doubled CD sales in
over 100 of its stores.
Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan thinks labels may have to consider pushing prices as low as
$5 to further slow the decline of CD sales. "The CD is a dying music product format, but it
has some life left in it because downloads haven't generated the format replacement they were
expected to," he wrote. "With all previous music formats the successor format was firmly in the
ascendancy by the time its predecessor was in terminal decline."
However, digital downloads won't ever generate format replacement. Music on CDs is
already in digital format—if you own the CD already, there's no benefit in "replacing" it
with a digital download. Furthermore, it will be hard to justify spending $10 on a compressed
digital download over $6 for an actual physical disc that can be ripped into iTunes or any other
media software in a matter of minutes, and can be done using lossless encoding (if so desired).
Effectively what UMG is doing—and what other labels will do if they also decide that
lowering prices will prop up dying CD sales—is giving consumers the expectation that albums
should cost even less than $9.99. Because once consumers become accustomed to getting a whole
album in physical form for $6, you'll have a much harder time convincing them to buy downloaded
albums for more money later. Lowering prices on CDs will increase sales in the short
term—good for labels because CD sales still account for about 65 percent of their
revenue—but it will only slow its demise, and slow the uptake of
digital as a primary format.
Bruce Willis has
found his next feature film buddy. Deadline Hollywood
reports that Jamie Foxx
will star with Willis in the upcoming videogame adaptation Kane & Lynch. Well,
actually, they happened to spot the news on Kyle Ward's
Twitter, a leaked little goodie that has since been deleted. However, as Deadline writes:
"There's no room for rewrites in the Twitter world, so the news is officially out there."
So, assuming Mr. Screenwriter isn't just imagining things and deleting things to increase intrigue,
Foxx will play the schizophrenic psychopath/ticking time bomb to Willis' Kane, a mercenary who is
broken out of prison and given "72 hours to recover a doomsday device," with his kidnapped wife and
daughter used as incentive. Yes, it was once a stolen fortune, but why deal with that tired pile of
gold when you can help move the doomsday clock forward another notch? ...especially when your main
source of help is a psychopath!
Simon Crane is directing Ward's script, and I imagine production should start soon; last
October, production was slated to begin this month. Willis is said to have thought the script
was killer, so let's hope this will be a juicy little psychotic role for Foxx, and not another
shmehfest like Cop Out.
Version 196.75 of
Nvidia's GeForce/Ion drivers were indeed responsible for fan overheating problems reported by
users. That's the verdict from Nvidia, which in a second round of responses to customer concerns
has released version 197.73, which it assures users doesn't have the problem.
According to a
frequent contributor to Nvidia's support forum, the problem was with the release version of
the driver (other contributors reported no such problem with the beta). Specifically, version
196.75 ran the on-board graphics chip fan at 40% speed like it's supposed to. But when the card
got hotter, the speed boost failed to kick in.
As one tester verified, "Up to 72° [Celsius], the fan remains at 40%. At
73° it increases to 41%, at 74° to 42%, and at 75° it varies
between 44 and 45%."
To its credit, Nvidia's response has actually been quite swift. Over the past few days,
registered driver users received e-mail messages advising them to roll back to an earlier
version. One Dell
XPS M1730 customer tried that, only to find that certain data left behind from a simple
uninstall made it impossible to reboot his computer except into Safe Mode -- where, after a short
time, it would freeze. A volunteer pointed out the M1730 is a laptop...and the 196.75 drivers
were for desktop PC cards.
Other volunteers suggested the use of driver cleaning utilities such as Guru3D Driver
Sweeper. Meanwhile, they advised others to use manual utilities to monitor their processor
temperatures.
Though some long-time forum members were prematurely lamenting about how long they'd have to wait
to see software fixes, they actually did come within a few days. But that wasn't good enough for
some who complained they lost their cards entirely. Over the weekend, prior to Nvidia's
announcement, one forum contributor commented, "I have filled out an error report form and it
seems that all I (we) can do now is wait. The possible fixes I have heard include: RMA video card
for a new one; buy a new video card. These seem like rather poor fixes."
Sensing the onset of a possible customer revolt, forum contributor ImNutz4NvSLI
(who, we can assume, is nuts for Nvidia SLI) attempted to put out the flames: "Paying attention
to your GPUs temps is your responsibility. I can't imagine a situation in which my GPUs
would get to over 100c and I wouldn't know about it. I am not trying to be cruel or insensitive,
I am just stating it like it is. In this world today people are always looking for something for
nothing, and looking to pass blame and not take responsibility for their own actions. While this
driver may have broken automatic fan control on some users GPUs, certainly not all, fan control
was still there to use and was working, all you had to do was pay attention to the temps."
The contributor pointed to a thread he set up last Saturday, containing illustrated instructions
for setting up manual temperature monitors in Windows. Utilities such as EVGA Precision, for
instance, show little temperature indicators in the Windows system tray, and can even overlay
game screens with temperature monitor information on-demand.
The B2B Marketing series is supported by the
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, where you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of social media
as part of your overall B2B marketing mix. Register today!
When we write about how companies or individuals are using
social media in their marketing strategies, it’s usually in the context of a business to
consumer relationship. However, business-to-business (B2B) marketing is really getting a boost
from social media as well. According to a recent study, 60% of B2B marketers plan to increase social media
marketing spending this year.
As we discussed earlier this week in the context of PR professionals and
social media, even non-B2B-centric services like Twitter and Facebook can still offer great
opportunities for B2B shops. Sometimes, the approach is the same as it would be in non-B2B
marketing, sometimes it can be very different.
Figuring out how to best implement and harness social media in the course of B2B marketing can be
difficult but we’ve put together ten tips to help get you on the right track!
1. Use Twitter Effectively
This may seem like a no-brainer, but plenty of businesses and even B2B marketers aren’t on
Twitter. Get an account on Twitter and start engaging. While having profiles on other social
media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn can be equally important, Twitter remains one of the
best ways to find and engage with others.
How do you do that? Start by searching for phrases relevant to your business and by monitoring
those searches regularly. Look at what people are saying and join in the conversation. If people
aren’t necessarily looking for your business offerings right away, start joining other
conversations of interest. The more you build bridges, the more likely you are to be noticed.
Second, use hashtags. The #B2B hashtag, for example, will connect you with several other like-minded
businesses who are also trying to leverage Twitter to build an online presence. Don’t
overdo it, though. There are some people #who #tweet #like #this.
We’ll discuss this in the next point, but consider Twitter to be an informal medium. With
social media, businesses can (and should) be human again. That’s why it’s safe to use
Twitter not just for pure self promotion but to build a meaningful relationships with those who
you are likely to do business with you in the future. If you feel comfortable using your business
Twitter feed to talk about what makes you tick (versus purely promoting your business), you might
be pleasantly surprised to see that your audience might very well be receptive to that messaging.
What’s great about Twitter, especially from a B2B perspective, is that you can follow just
about everyone. Take advantage of the opportunity to follow your industry influencers, connect
with potential customers, and keep a heads up on the competition.
A great example of Twitter usage from a B2B perspective is @salesforce. Salesforce has used its Twitter feed to share
relevant news, to empower current customers, and to offer customer support.
2. Figure Out Your ‘Social Voice’
Social media works best when it is personal and authentic, and thus, it’s important to make
sure that the way you communicate when using social media tools comes from a personal and
authentic place.
Kevin Dugan, the Director of Social
Marketing for Empower MediaMarketing recently wrote a blog post about finding your social voice. I spoke with Dugan about establishing a social
voice, and he had this to say:
“It is critical that brands understand a social voice is different from brand voice. Social
voice reinforces the brand voice indirectly. Social voice doesn’t follow communication
guidelines or identity standards. That’s because a social voice equates to a person. A
brand voice is anonymous while a social voice can be found on Google. They must also have an
understanding of the brand and a passion for it.”
Social networks are now helping to put the “human” back in businesses again. The
traditional messaging of yore has been replaced by businesses who actually appear to show that
they care about their customers. With a social voice, informal is perfectly acceptable. Having a
social voice, as opposed to just a generic “brand voice,” is an important step when
connecting with potential customers. Prospective customers want to connect with businesses who
think just like them.
Just because your clients are other businesses doesn’t mean that the “social”
aspect of social media needs to disappear.
3. Take Advantage of Opportunities on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is continuing to get bigger and bigger
— and it continues to be a great resource for businesses and employees to connect with one
another.
One of the best things about LinkedIn is the Shared Connections feature. This feature
makes it possible to find people — like potential clients — and then see what
connections you have in common. Shared Connections then makes getting a virtual introduction that
much easier.
Building up a strong LinkedIn network and being willing to introduce others (in good faith, of
course — always use your best judgment) can also increase what opportunities you can get in
the future.
B2B marketing is often built through trust and word of mouth. Having a shared connection is a
great way to start establishing some of that trust from the very beginning.
LinkedIn also has a community of active participants. LinkedIn Answers serves as a
knowledge base where business representatives can establish authority and expertise by
participating in the ongoing discussions. LinkedIn Groups is an opportunity for business
professionals to interact with other topics relevant to his/her interests. One business successfully used LinkedIn Groups as a way to build business leads. This
business opted to engage in relevant industry discussion and offered business services when
requests were made, thereby bringing in a highly targeted business lead. Actively participating
in LinkedIn is often one of the best ways to not only help people out, but also to make a
connection for your service and even generate leads.
Answering questions across LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Groups doesn’t mean to simply put
out the marketing blurb, but to really engage and offer feedback and solutions. Again, social
media is most effective when it is genuine.
4. Start a Blog
Social media provides the opportunity for companies to promote themselves but also to welcome
commentary from a community of peers. By starting a blog, you give your readers an opportunity to
see you with your social voice outside the typical corporate website’s newsroom. Blogs
become platforms where you can announce new product releases, share personal company stories,
answer any specific questions from your customers, and empower customers to achieve success with
your products and service offerings. Blogging can also establish business professionals as
thought leaders in their field, thereby aiding with client acquisition.
Blogs can build up qualified prospects through search engine rankings too. Be sure to update your blog regularly with
valuable content and follow up with the comments written on each individual post.
5. Monitor Your Industry
Social media means that content is being posted everywhere, and businesses have a unique
opportunity to gather intelligence to make well-educated and informed business decisions.
Google Alerts is a great tool to keep up
with what’s happening in relation to your company, your industry and your competitors. You
can get updates via e-mail or in RSS (and even in real-time) about new search results or news
stories for a certain query or topic.
Further, free tools like Social Mention
and YackTrack will monitor the social sphere for other
mentions of your business on social sites, especially. BackType will take that a step further and monitor phrases in comments on blog
posts. All of these aforementioned services can be emailed to you in a daily digest format which
your team can evaluate to find opportunities.
If you don’t already have alerts set up on these services for your company name, do it now.
Also set up a more generic alert for your industry as a whole to see what people are talking
about. If you want to see what your competition or other big industry players are doing, add
those to the mix as well.
Monitoring can also be useful because you can then highlight the big stories on your own social
media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, etc.
6. Be Consistent and Don’t Be Afraid to Follow Up
While you don’t want to be creepy (see below), it’s important to not let potential
opportunities slip by when using social media. If you’ve answered someone’s question
on LinkedIn or on Twitter, don’t be afraid to reach back out to that person to ask if they
have any follow-up questions or if you can send them more information. There’s an abundance
of opportunity to strengthen a business relationship but it starts by initiating and then making
sure that your business is fresh in your prospects’ minds.
Staying engaged and staying communicative is really important. Social media is not about setting
it and forgetting it. It’s about being social, so don’t be afraid to reach out and
check back in with potential leads you meet using social media. Similarly, don’t be afraid
to direct message your followers on Twitter when an opportunity presents itself. They followed
you because they want to hear from you. Use that opportunity to your advantage but don’t
overdo it. Auto-DMs are a no-no.
If you’re going to blog, don’t leave that blog stagnant. Provide valuable content on
a regular basis. Give employees of your company an opportunity to help build your brand. You can
get a lot of great blog content by involving many company employees in the process. Similarly,
get many employees of your company to utilize the social networks and to be continually
responsive to customer inquiries. Remember, the more visible you are on the social networks, the
more likely you are to be remembered when another business actually needs to utilize your
services.
7. Leverage Your Analytics for Business Metric Measurement
After you’re involved enough in the social space, you’ll likely see tweets, retweets,
traffic, and social network links that point to various parts of your company website. Take a
look at your website analytics and start seeing where you’re making a difference,
especially as it relates to ROI
measurement. Don’t lose sight of your business metrics and start considering
practical social media measurement to assess clickthroughs, popularity of links, and other
important metrics.
As part of measurement, consider using URL shorteners. Not only do they make links
more manageable (and limit the number of characters in a Tweet or Facebook message), they also
can be a great way to track data as many URL shorteners provide valuable statistics about the
performance of each individual shortened URL. Monitor this data throughout the process with your
main website analytics package to see if your message attached to the shortened URL resulted in
conversions.
When looking at conversion trends or successful tools in building leads with social media,
reviewing analytics data is crucial. It gives you insight into content that performs very well in
the social space but also through other marketing techniques, such as search engine optimization.
Use the data as an opportunity to improve your content or your social media/search marketing
efforts.
8. Find and Follow Industry Influencers
B2B social media marketing is often about connecting with the right people and about building
relationships. Social media makes both of these actions simple and painless. Being aware of who
the influencers in your industry are and then following them, whether it’s on Twitter,
Facebook or their own blogs, is the first step to building a connection with those influencers.
With a genuine relationship, these influencers may be able to help you make your mark in the
social media marketplace. This is especially true of influencers who may already have your target
audience at their disposal.
This doesn’t mean you need to retweet every tweet or share every blog post on Facebook, but
it does mean that you should be aware of who the movers and shakers are. By following them and
then reaching out when appropriate or just to get to know them further, you have a much better
shot at getting some attention.
Even if you’re not necessarily connecting to influencers, social media affords the
opportunity to connect with other people in your industry and your customers. Use the various
social media platforms as an opportunity to connect with these industry colleagues and peers and
build upon each other. Consider celebrating your colleagues’ or customers’ success.
Make it known that you’re here to help them — not just yourself. Repeat this process
with anyone of interest and you’re bound to attract eyeballs.
9. Use Social Media for Giveaways and Promotions
Sometimes, the
hardest part of social media is sticking out from the sea of other users. Giveaways and
promotions are a great way to help differentiate yourself and your business. Using Twitter,
LinkedIn and Facebook, you can target your desired customer base and then let them know (if
appropriate) about different promotions or giveaways related to your product. If you offer a
service, consider giving a free year to a loyal customer. If you manufacture products, give some
away.
Offer a coupon on your company’s Facebook Page and pair it with a lead-generation form for
future contact. Let people know on Twitter about specials or contests that are going on and
follow-up with those that show an interest. Perhaps you can have a retweet contest where you can
monitor responses or host some trivia on your Facebook Page. You can also open an online survey
to get feedback about your offerings and reward participants. The possibilities are endless.
Creativity in this capacity breeds success.
Companies like Wildfire make it really easy
to build these sorts of promotions directly inside your own social media channels.
10. Don’t Be Creepy
If you use social media like a keyword searching robot, you are going to come across as creepy
and turn off potential clients. Don’t be creepy.
Use best judgment and common sense when approaching people using social networks. If you
wouldn’t want to be approached the way you are approaching another user, don’t use
that approach. It’s as simple as that. Social media
etiquette isn’t much different than real life relationships, so what won’t work
in “real life” probably won’t work online.
Respecting boundaries doesn’t mean you can’t still answer questions, engage and
follow-up with potential leads, it just means that if it’s clear that the other party
isn’t interested, or more importantly, if the context of their communication really
doesn’t involve or seek out input from your company, don’t do it.
Context is really important in social media and it is something that is very, very easy to
overlook. While we think that using keywords and Google Alerts are good methods for keeping atop
of your field, that doesn’t mean you can automate your responses or just go into autopilot
based on those alerts.
Your Tips
There are many different social media marketing opportunities for B2B, and there’s great
potential for success as more companies jump on the social media bandwagon. How do you use social
media in B2B marketing? What tips can you suggest to others? Let us know!
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Fox News immediately responded to cost estimates of health care reform legislation by devoting
far more attention to the estimate that the legislation would increase spending by $940 billion
over 10 years than it did to the estimate that, including cost savings and revenue increases, the
bill would actually reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the same period. On-screen graphics
throughout Fox News' initial coverage referred to the cost estimate, while no graphics mentioned
deficit reduction.
Fox focuses on cost estimate
Fox shows nearly 10 minutes of on-screen graphic spelling out $940 billion cost estimate,
none on deficit reduction. During the 9 a.m. ET hour -- when reports of the
Congressional Budget Office's preliminary cost analysis of health care reform legislation first
leaked -- Fox News repeatedly aired an on-screen graphic stating, "CBO: Health Care Will Cost
$940 Billion Over 10 Yrs," showing the graphic for a total of 9 minutes, 44 seconds. At no time
during the 9 a.m. hour did Fox News show a graphic referring to the $130 billion
deficit-reduction estimate.
Cost estimate mentioned three times as often as deficit-reduction estimate.
During the 9 a.m. hour, the $940 billion cost estimate was mentioned 12 times -- by co-hosts Bill
Hemmer (three times) and Martha MacCallum (twice), Fox News contributors Karl Rove (twice) and
Juan Williams, guests Joe Trippi and Kevin Madden, and by Rep. John Boehner (twice) during Fox
coverage of the GOP press conference in response to the CBO estimate. By contrast, CBO's estimate
that the bill would reduce the deficit was mentioned only four times -- by Hemmer, Williams, and
Rove, and by Rep. James Clyburn during Fox coverage of the Democratic press conference in
response to the CBO estimate.
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A group of researchers have proven
something we already expected to be the case: your Twitter follower count is somewhat of a
meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence. To reach this conclusion, the
researchers examined the Twitter accounts of over 54 million active users, out of some 80 million
accounts crawled by their servers. They then went on to measure various statistics about these
accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those
with the largest number of followers may be "popular" Twitterers, but that's not
necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don't always mean someone
is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.
TechCrunch50
startup 
Budget
enhancements to this month’s SBM finally reflect last year’s price increases, allowing
the return of liquid cooling at the high-end and Core i7 for the mid-priced systems. With big
improvements to its bigger brothers, can the low-cost PC still win?
The world's
second 
Bruce Willis has
found his next feature film buddy. 
Version 196.75 of
Nvidia's GeForce/Ion drivers were indeed responsible for fan overheating problems reported by
users. That's the verdict from Nvidia, which in a second round of responses to customer concerns
has released version 197.73, which it assures users doesn't have the problem.
When we write about how companies or individuals are using
social media in their marketing strategies, it’s usually in the context of a business to
consumer relationship. However, business-to-business (B2B) marketing is really getting a boost
from social media as well. According to a recent study, 60% of B2B marketers 
Sometimes, the
hardest part of social media is sticking out from the sea of other users. Giveaways and
promotions are a great way to help differentiate yourself and your business. Using Twitter,
LinkedIn and Facebook, you can target your desired customer base and then let them know (if
appropriate) about different promotions or giveaways related to your product. If you offer a
service, consider giving a free year to a loyal customer. If you manufacture products, give some
away.
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
