3 posts tagged “xobni”
For those of you that disconnected during Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year, etc… Welcome back. Here’s a summary of the most interesting social media and mobile news I read in the last few weeks:
Apple:
- 1/6/09: At Macworld….
- Apple announced tiered pricing for songs on iTunes that allows record labels to charge higher amounts for more popular songs… Their new pricing scheme, which will launch in April will offer songs at 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. When I heard this, I couldn’t help but think of the old Taco Bell commercials of the early 1990s… “.59, .79, .99” I know record labels need to make a buck, but I’m more inclined to pay $1.29 for a taco than I am for a new song on iTunes.
- On a happier note, songs will finally be DRM free and 256 Kbps AAC by the end of Q1. Today, iTunes store has 8 million DRM-free songs. By the end of March, they’ll have 10 million.
- And, if you’ve got an iPhone 3G, you’ll be able to download songs directly to your iPhone over the 3G network, and the songs will sync between your computer and your phone….Ahhh… Finally!
- In FY 2008, Apple sold 9.7 million Macs, and Mac sales increased at two times the rate of the overall PC market.
- The new version of iPhoto within iLife will have facial recognition software, which allows you to pick photos of a specific friend from your album without a text tag. And, iPhoto will be Facebook and Flickr compatible!
- 1/5/09: Steve Jobs told the world that his recent rapid weight loss is due to a hormone imbalance and not a return of pancreatic cancer.
Facebook:
- 1/2/09: Facebook sued Brazilian start-up Power.com for trademark and copyright infringement, violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, and unlawful competition. Facebook’s complain states that Power.com “is offering a product that solicits, stores and uses Facebook login information to access information stored on Facebook computers without authorization and to display Facebook copyrighted material without permission.” You can read the NY Times article that describes the suit here.
- 12/31/08: Proving that the “blue screen of death” is alive and well, Microsoft’s 2006 30GB model Zune experienced a massive failure on the last day of 2008, and users were not amused. The bug appears to have been fixed, though users are still unhappy about it.
Twitter:
- 1/5/09: Twitter was hacked over the weekend, and 33 high profile accounts were hijacked. There was also a separate phishing scam through the direct message capability. You can learn more about it on Twitter’s blog.
UIQ:
- 1/5/09: Symbian partner, UIQ filed for bankruptcy.
Verizon:
- 1/5/09: BusinessWeek reports that “The $5.9 billion acquisition of cellular carrier Alltel Corp. by Verizon Wireless will close on Jan. 9”. This will mean that Verizon trumps AT&T as the largest US mobile operator with ~ 78 million subscribers.
Xobni:
1/5/09: Xobni (inbox spelled backwards), the company behind a very cool outlook plug-in that turns your email inbox into a social network, announced $7M in Series B funding from new investor Cisco Systems and Xobni’s existing investors.
Layoffs:
1/6/09: Clearspring, which plays in the widget distribution space laid off 20% of its workforce in early December, and their President/COO, Jay Rappaport is leaving.
Misc. Social Media & Mobile News:
- I just learned about Twtpoll, which lets you poll your Twitter followers. Looks like a great idea if you’re a brand that wants feedback from its community of users.
- 1/1/09: California passed a no-text messaging while driving rule, which became legal on Jan 1. I can’t help but wonder how it can be illegal to text while driving, and yet, it’s perfectly okay to fiddle with your radio, AC, or GPS. Not that I’m advocating texting while driving. It just seems like an inane law, given the many distracting things you could be doing while driving.
- 1/3/09 The 1.0 version of a Firefox add-on called Power Twitter launched, allowing “search, search scoped to a specific user, status history peeking on mouseover, Facebook status updates, inline YouTube, Flickr, and TwitPic, url expansion, url translation to page titles, and open web update (news feed) mapping.” It sounds interesting to me and gets good reviews, but I’ve heard a few complaints from people I follow on Twitter, so I’m waiting until the next release.
- 12/31: TechCrunch did a great piece on the Top Social Media Sites of 2008, which summarizes data from comScore. Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore):
- Blogger (222 million)
- Facebook (200 million)
- MySpace (126 million)
- Wordpress (114 million)
- Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
- Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
- Flickr (64 million)
- hi5 (58 million)
- Orkut (46 million)
- Six Apart (46 million)
- Baidu Space (40 million)
- Friendster (31 million)
- 56.com (29 million)
- Webs.com (24 million)
- Bebo (24 million)
- Scribd (23 million)
- Lycos Tripod (23 million)
- Tagged (22 million)
- imeem (22 million)
- Netlog (21 million)
- 12/31/08: TechCrunch has an interesting article on the rise of Y-Combinator, start-up Scribd. Scribd allows users to post and share documents online. TechCrunch reports: “According to the comScore numbers, it has more unique visitors worldwide than imeem and almost as many as Bebo, with 23.5 million visitors in November, 2008. (In the U.S., it had about 4 million visitors).” And, Scribd grew “218 percent from November, 2007. Pretty incredible stats for a company that initially only raised $300,000! “
- 12/31/08 The UK loves watching the TV show “Big Brother,” and rumor has it, they may be forced to live a frightening real-life version of it in the future. The Guardian reports,
“The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound database of all UK communications traffic into private hands would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses.”Even though the report hasn’t yet been published, critics of its rumored contents are speaking out against it including Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions.
- 12/31/08: Obama’s Change.gov site is getting great use. According to TechCrunch, “more than 74,031 people have submitted more than 53,369 questions (and counting) for his administration and voted 3,122,015 times to prioritize the questions in a Digg-like fashion.” You can see the top list of questions here.
- 12/30/08: Hitwise reported 3 interesting holiday social media trends in the UK:
- “Facebook accounts for 1 in 22 UK Internet visits on Christmas Day”
- "Video site YouTube received more UK Internet traffic than Microsoft Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) for the first time during Christmas week 2008.”
- “social networks accounted for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits during Christmas week.”
- 12/26/08: Amazon.com announced it’s best Christmas season ever with “6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15, which is a record-breaking 72.9 items per second.”
- 12/15/08: BusinessWeek reports that Palm will launch its new Nova OS at CES. After several layoffs, many ups and downs over the years, I find it amusing that they decided to name it Nova (“no va” means “no go” in Spanish.) Chevrolet learned how disastrous that name could be when it launched the Chevy Nova years ago. I’m not sure if this was lost on Palm’s marketing team, if it was an inside joke, or if they knew about it and decided to buck tradition and go with the name anyway. I love Palm, and I’m keeping fingers crossed they find a way to make this work. I think it’ll be tough in to re-gain developers’ trust after several false starts in recent years.
Apple:
- iPhone 2.2 Firmware was released. MobileCrunch’s review is here. Excerpted summary of the article: “Safari’s address bar/search … tweaked a bit, apps now request a rating upon deletion, over-the-air podcast downloads …, various video and audio quality tweaks, and assorted bug fixes throughout… Google Maps has been upgraded to include Street View and directions for public transit and walking - if you have an iPhone rather than an iPod Touch…According to early reports, 2.2 for the iPod Touch brings everything but the Google Maps upgrade.”
- The SEC gave Facebook permission to stay a private company, while having over 500 shareholders. This will allow Facebook to continue to issue options and restricted stock to its current and future employees.
- Facebook launched its verified app program, which requires developers to pay $375 to have their app “verified”
- Google Mobile: John Gruber reports that Google seems to be using an undocumented API for the voice search feature in its recently updated Google Mobile iPhone application. Normally doing this is against the SDK Guidelines. So, the questions are: Did Google get Apple’s permission to use this API? Did Apple not realize that that Google was using an undocumented API, or did they turn a blind eye to the usage. You can read about the saga on John Gruber’s post here. You can see the Google video demo of the Google Mobile update here.
- YouTube: A researcher is claiming that he’s discovered the key to predicting the success of YouTube videos. TechCruch’s summary is very good: “Crane claims every time a YouTube video turns into a hit, the development takes the form of an “attention spiral”, a geometric pattern that partly follows physical laws. He discovered that a decrease of popularity with certain videos, for example, can be explained through methods usually utilized in modeling the aftershocks of earthquakes.”
- Motorola launched the "MOTODEV Widget Developer Challenge" for it’s mobile Linux platform.
- MySpace for RIM’s Blackberry is which launched on Nov 12 has apparently been downloaded more than 400,000 times! You can get it here.
- Check out the real-time results of Guy Kawasaki’s ongoing survey that asks people how much they’d be willing to pay for Twitter. So far, more than 662 people say they’ll be willing to pay $5 or more a month for Twitter. 1,780 say they won’t pay and would rather Twitter go away than start charging.
- Jerry Yang stepped down as Yahoo!’s CEO, and Yahoo! Is now on the lookout for a new leader.
- Yahoo is rumored to still be thinking about buying AOL.
- Recent Layoffs:
- Strands and Qik lay off 10 % of their staff.
- Palm Inc. A friend reports that over two thirds of the business development and developer technical support teams were affected
- Industry News:
- Mobile advertising company AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report just came out. You can download it here. Highlights of the report include: “The iPhone is now the #1 device worldwide in the AdMob Network with 4.1% share of requests in October. Since AdMob launched its ad units for iPhone sites and applications, iPhone requests have increased from 28 million in July to 236 million in October. This month, we break out iPhone requests by country and region.”
- Appterra, a mobile advertising company just closed a $10.5 Million round of financing and announced that former Yahoo! senior executive David Karnstedt joined its board of directors.
- “Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007. While double-digit annual growth continues, the quarter-to-quarter curve remains relatively flat compared to recent past performance.” Read more here. This is very good news for the technology industry, which largely monetizes through advertising. I’ve been concerned that since advertising was one of the first industries to decline in the 2000-2001 dot com fall out that the decline in internet advertising between Q4 07 and now may signal challenging times ahead for the monetization of online properties. This study is a re-assuring sign that Internet advertising is on the rise after a brief decline.
- Videoegg extended its online advertising reach to the iPhone.
- Technology announcements:
- Citysearch overhauls mobile and web sites, maximizing on Yelp's bad press. They also went social by integrating with Facebook Connect in this new beta version of Citysearch.
- SnapTell: This is a new, free iPhone application that gets great reviews from TechCrunch: “take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game, and the application will automatically identify the product and find ratings and pricing information online.“ It just launched on the iPhone.
- Sony adds social networking to the Playstation in the form of its Home virtual world.
- OpenTable released an iPhone app available in the iTunes store.
- Xobni, an Outlook plug-in that helps you organize email conversations, contacts and attachments just added integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers.
- According to a new study, 22% of consumers are unlikely to respond to email social marketing. 12% will click on messages on social sites.
Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards), officially opened to the public yesterday. If you use Microsoft Outlook, it will change your life... Xobni is a utility for Outlook that analizes your email - things like:
- Who emails you most and when
- Who responds fastest to your emails
- Who you respond to fastest
Xobni makes it easy for you to find files you’ve exchanged via email – regardless of where they’re buried within the thousands of emails in your inbox.
Besides being a really valuable productivity tool, it turns your inbox into a social network. Without having to type a thing, in two clicks, you can initiate and send an email to anyone in your "network" (i.e. anyone you've exchanged email with). There are also pre-populated notes that enable you to:
- Ask a friend/colleague for their phone number, or
- Request time on a friend/colleague's calendar - Xobni pulls down data from your calendar and inserts your availability into an email... You can even customize what days/times you want Xobni to search for your availability.
Downsides? I hate to admit it, but Xobni is actually making me like using Outlook! The only thing I dislike about Xobni is that it's not available in more places. You can't use it on a Mac or or web-based mail systems like Gmail (sigh). There is no mobile application or WAP compatability, so it doesn't work on a mobile phone.
What would I like to see in the future besides broader availability on other email platforms?
- More control over email templates... I'd love to be able to create my own email templates. For example... "Thank you" emails that I can send to people that, say, had me to dinner, or who I invited to a party.
- Integrations to my favorite web sites. For example... I'd like to be able to set-up an evite from within Xobni and send it out to everyone on my network. Even better, I'd like Xobni to track my interactions on all of my favorite social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) AND multiple email accounts AND IM AND phone calls (i.e. with a mobile integration)
- Group/ List functionality - that is - the ability to set up groups of people and have the ability to email them all at the same time. (i.e. my "best friend group" my "project X group", etc.)
- Greater integration with Calendars and Address Books. For example, I'd love to see the scheduling template be more interactive and actually allow a user to book time on my calendar, without me having to enter the time into the calendar, upon receiving their reply to my email. I'd love it to work like Outlook invites work... Allow recipients to click on one of the available times listed in an email and automatically book it.
Yep - I think I'm love. Get it, and it will change the way you look at your inbox.
