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Today’s consumers have a world’s worth of information at their fingertips, anytime, anywhere. As of February 2012, half of mobile phone users have smartphones, and they’re accustomed to answering any question they have with a quick Google search or a barcode scan.

The information age has created some new challenges for retailers. To begin with, it’s now incredibly simple for a customer with a mobile phone to walk into an electronics store and scan the TV or camera she’s thinking about purchasing to do an instant price comparison against other brick-and-mortar or online retailers. This kind of behavior change is disruptive to retailers, and is forcing them to rethink their policies and business practices.

Millennial shoppers used to information on demand, and more globally aware than their parents and grandparents, expect greater variety and better quality, and they care about where their goods came from and how they affect the world. They want to know — or at least feel entitled to know — who stitched together their sneakers, whether the farmer who grew their coffee was fairly paid and the size of their potato chips’ carbon footprint.

For retailers in the grocery sector, demands for transparency are triggering bigger conversations. Take Proposition 37 in California — a bill that would have forced food suppliers to label genetically modified foods. Food suppliers stood on both sides of the issue. Agricultural powerhouse Monsanto was one of the largest funders against it, arguing that the bill would force unnecessary labeling of perfectly safe, common foods — a kind of Scarlet Letter. Meanwhile, yogurt manufacturer Stonyfield Organic donated in support of the bill, calling for transparency and less ambiguity in labeling. The bill was ultimately defeated by a fairly small margin (53.1 to 46.9 percent), and the issue has not been put to bed. The trend (or perhaps it’s a pendulum swing?) toward transparency is inexorable.

Another challenge posed by today’s torrent of information is the increase in “noise” compared to the “signal.” Facts that are easy to digest and easy to find don’t always tell the whole story. “Food miles” are a vexing example. When thinking about the carbon footprint of food, our natural instinct is to assume that the fewer miles the food travels, the better. Sometimes this is true — but when you’re comparing, say, tomatoes grown in Mexico to tomatoes grown in a greenhouse in New Jersey, food miles alone don’t tell the whole story. The reality is the energy spent heating a greenhouse may outweigh the fuel spent transporting the field-grown tomatoes from Mexico. In fact, transportation typically makes up less than 15 percent of the carbon footprint of produce.

For all the challenges retailers face as they adjust to the new reality of a digital age, there are also some enormous opportunities for those willing to adapt. Today’s consumers may be more skeptical, but they’re also accessible in new ways and are looking for personalization. Retailers now have the opportunity to move beyond mailing weekly circulars full of coupons — they can share local, real-time promotions on Facebook. A grocery store that’s just received a shipment of unusually sweet, juicy pineapple now has the means to tell that store’s shoppers about it instantly. Feedback is “ripe” to be transformed too. Who today would bother walking back to a store with a tasteless watermelon or soggy bag of salad to complain? But scan it with a mobile phone to give feedback to the store and grower (and get an instant coupon) — that is not only simpler, but actually generates more useful information for the store and supplier.

Some retailers in the grocery industry are already moving in this direction. The Kroger family of stores, which includes Kroger, Fred Meyer and Ralphs, has taken a progressive approach to consumer engagement and transparency. It was the first retailer to let shoppers trace produce back to the farm via the Internet and mobile apps — telling shoppers where their fruits and vegetables came from. In addition to building customer loyalty, this increased connectivity allows Kroger, in the rare event of a food recall in a category, to let shoppers know more precisely which products were affected. Retailers are also experimenting with scanning tunnels that can read more complex barcodes — including capturing information about freshness of perishable items.

As we move forward, retailers will figure out how to embrace consumer engagement. Instead of maintaining one corporate social media page, we can expect to see a much more nuanced approach, with local stores creating individual profiles where they can interact with local shoppers (they just have to figure out how to staff them). Instead of running a print ad for strawberries a few weeks in advance of Valentine’s Day, they’ll be able to push a timely nudge to their shoppers when the berries are abundant and at peak sweetness. The knowledgeable and friendly family greengrocer of the 1950s will be re-imagined with a smart algorithm that can make sensible recommendations based on what’s good today — and what the shopper’s personal dietary preferences are. It’s a more responsive approach, and could profoundly change the supply and demand dynamics in place today that favor availability above all.

Longer term, over the next decade or so, stores that sell faster-moving goods will face the same turning point that electronics, book and clothing sellers reached in the last decade — with fast, richly personalized online shopping now available, what’s the role of a physical store? Could the experience be replicated or improved online? I remember when the idea of shoe shopping online sounded like the opening line of a joke, but Zappos changed all that with brilliant logistics and piercing consumer insight. The same can and will happen for the grocery sector. In 10 years, I think we can expect to see grocery stores that focus less on staples like cereal and paper towels, and more on seasonal, sensory, impulse purchases. Today, produce makes up about nine percent of retail grocery purchases and shelf space. In the future, as more people turn to the Internet for the bulk of their groceries, produce could make up more like a third.

Whatever the next decades bring, it’s not much of a prediction to say that technology will reshape retail. Stores that can experiment with transparency, increase personalization, eliminate waste and build trust will win the hearts and shopping baskets of the millennial generation.

Elliott Grant is the founder and Chief Technology Officer 
for YottaMark. He founded YottaMark with the vision that giving products a unique identity is the foundation for real-time supply chain insights and recall management, as well as a powerful platform for brand owners to create new consumer connections. Previously, Elliott was VP of Operations for a $250M food-packaging manufacturer and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company. He holds a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge University.

Leap Commerce is hoping to create a place where consumers can go to ask questions and get answers from experts on all kinds of products. “There’s an entirely new evolution around how people are considering or are thinking about purchasing items,” said Amit Chatterjee, Leap’s CEO and co-founder.

He said people are increasingly deliberate when it comes to buying mid-range items, like a dress, a stereo or a refrigerator. It’s not quite a car, but it’s more than picking up a tube of toothpaste. In today’s world, he believes reviews are not enough — you want “consideration from friends, or a buddy.”

While many companies are trying to crack the code on social commerce — and most have failed — Leap Commerce has another spin on the concept, with a lot of its expertise coming from Facebook engineers. Last year, Chatterjee co-founded the company with Karel Baloun, one of the first senior engineers to join Facebook in 2005. He is now Leap’s CTO. Leap’s head of products, Kent Schoen, also worked at the social network, spending five years on product management, marketing and operations for Facebook ads.

On Black Friday, Leap Commerce launched the latest iteration of its shopping app, called Spark.

The application, which is available on iPhone and iPad, is strikingly similar to its first app, Best Decision, except for the ability to get advice from friends and experts. It allows you to search across many e-commerce players by aggregating sites like Amazon and Gilt Groupe. While there’s no shortage of items to browse, the experience is a little clumsy since full-sized product pages from around the Web are scaled down and embedded into the app. To make it easier, however, items can be added to one universal shopping cart, where they can be purchased quickly.

Chatterjee says where the app really shines is in providing a fun, collaborative shopping experience where crowds can chat about some of their favorite items, making it very similar to Quora, the question-and-answer site. For example, he said, if you are considering buying a pair of skinny jeans, you can bring in images and tags from the product inventory, and you can say, “I prefer this pair for the following reasons.” Others can quickly vote up or down, and there are 16 emoticons that allow users to provide quick feedback without having to type a lot.

It’s still early days, but since launching the day after Thanksgiving, Chatterjee said, 2,000 questions have been asked, including 167 in the past 36 hours. He said the goal of Spark is to reduce shopping cart abandonment, since consumers will feel more confident about making purchases. Initially, Leap plans to monetize the app through affiliate fees, but eventually, Chatterjee said, they will have enough data to provide insights on users to brands, which can also propose questions about products on the site to get consumer feedback.

Freshly launched WotWentWrong.com offers a way to send email feedback — positive or negative — after a date pulls a “fadeaway” (also known as the “never-call-again move”).

That’s so … wrong, you might be thinking. I tend to agree; If you can sit across from someone for an hour or two and divulge details about your life, you’re likely capable of speaking the words, “I’m sorry, but I’m not super interested.”

But if both parties are seeking more details, WotWentWrong.com provides a template for filling in the blanks.

To determine whether WotWentWrong is harsh or helpful, I staged a breakup, with the help of an accomplice. It began, as these things so often do these days, with a text message: “Hey. I’m going to send you an email. The idea is that I dumped you or you dumped me, okay?”

Okay, so now we’re not speaking, for some reason. But — what went wrong? Ding!

I signed up for WotWentWrong.com and indicated that I wanted to request feedback from “Weston.” There are a variety of request templates, ranging from “Cool” to “Flippant” to “Sincere.” I went with “Philosophical.”

Because, what better way to show someone you’ve moved on and are high on life again than to begin your email with a killer Benjamin Franklin quote?

In addition to the Ben Franklin quote, the body of the email was autofilled with a couple of sentences, and one question: “What went wrong with us?” I had the option to make changes within the template, but I left the letter as it was.

My full name was auto-signed at the conclusion of the note (just in case someone forgets your last name … or first name?)

At the next step, I was asked to rate — on a scale of one to five, five being the highest — how attractive I found my dating partner, whether I thought he was a good dresser, and what his conversation skills were like. Then I sent the email.

While waiting, I decided to also give feedback:

This template is supposed to help people who have a hard time articulating what was so wrong with their date, though the company says an emphasis is placed on “being nice” here.

Was the opt-out related to the person’s lifestyle habits? Was it a physical mismatch? Did the person disrespect you in some way? Is he or she too intense? The dropdown options get pretty specific.

I selected a few, then elaborated on some made-up problems, such as “You make me laugh too hard.”

Then I sent my feedback — but before I sent it, I was asked whether I wanted to throw in a couple positive remarks for good measure.

In the meantime, I got a response to my request for feedback. My problems, as it turns out: I’ve got a great personality and I’m too punctual. And I’m too tall. Also, there was some quote in there from “Billy Madison” — which was almost as deep as my Benjamin Franklin quote.

So there you have it — a trial run on WotWentWrong.com. While this particular example didn’t cause any flesh wounds, the app has enough feedback options to certainly shatter someone’s confidence after an already-bad date.

At the same time, in the age of digital dialogue, a site like this offers another way for someone to express things that might not be all that bad, or might help someone out next time.

Of course, the recipient doesn’t have to respond to your request for feedback at all. Which means, then, you’re just that person who asked for it. Through a dating app. One that spells “What” incorrectly.

WotWentWrong.com was created by Audrey Melnik, a developer based in Melbourne, Australia. Melnick bootstrapped the site herself, which officially launched yesterday. Currently, WotWentWrong is only available online and not through mobile applications, though users can access the site through a mobile Web browser.

The site is free to use, but don’t let that fool you: Dating sites are excellent at getting very personal — and even valuable — data from users. WotWentWrong plans to create an anonymous stats page, so users can check out the most popular breakup reasons, as well as other potentially useful nuggets of dating data.

Also, there’s unique advertising potential for a site like this, and Melnik is seeking strategic partnerships with dating experts and products. Say, for example, a user gives their dumped date the feedback that they had bad breath. A “suggested products” recommendation of breath-freshener items could appear.

If direct feedback and breath-freshener ads don’t cripple someone’s confidence, then I don’t know what will!

When you base your life on credit
and your loving days are done
checks you signed with love and kisses
later come back signed insufficient funds.
– Funkadelic

Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the metaphor “technical debt” is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back — with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind.

There also exists a less well-understood parallel concept, which I will call management debt.

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Also like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More importantly, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. For this post, I chose three of the more popular types among start-ups:

• Putting two in the box
• Overcompensating a key employee because she gets another job offer
• No performance management or employee feedback process

Putting two in the box
What do you do when you have two outstanding employees who logically both fit in the exact same place on the organizational chart? Perhaps you have a world-class architect who is running engineering, but she does not have the experience to scale the organization to the next level. You also have an outstanding operational person who is not great technically. You want to keep both in the company, but you only have one position. So, you get the bright idea to put “two in the box” and take on a little management debt. The short-term benefits are clear: a) you keep both employees, b) you don’t have to develop either because they will theoretically help each other develop and c) you instantly close the skill set gap. Unfortunately, you will pay for those benefits at a very high rate of interest.

For starters, by doing this you will make every engineer’s job more difficult. If an engineer needs a decision made, which boss should she go to? If that boss decides, will the other boss be able to override it? If it’s a complex decision that requires a meeting, does she have to schedule both heads of engineering for the meeting? Who sets the direction for the organization? Will the direction actually get set if doing so requires a series of meetings?

In addition, you have removed all accountability. If schedules slip, who is accountable? If engineering throughput becomes uncompetitive, who is responsible? If the operational head is responsible for the schedule slip and the technical head is responsible for throughput, what happens if the operational head thrashes the engineers to make the schedule and kills throughput? How would you know that she did that? The really expensive part about both of these things is that they tend to get worse over time. In the very short term, you might mitigate these effects with extra meetings or by attempting to carve up the job in a clear way. However, as things get busy the mitigation will fade and the organization will degenerate. Eventually, you’ll either make a lump sum payment by making the hard decision and putting one in the box or your engineering organization will suck forever.

Overcompensating a key employee because she gets another job offer
An excellent engineer decides to leave the company because she gets a better offer. For various reasons, you were undercompensating her, but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company, and the employee in question is not your best engineer. Still, she is working on a critical project and you cannot afford to lose her. So you match the offer. You save the project, but you pile on the debt.

Here’s how the payment will come due. You probably think that your counteroffer was confidential because you’d sworn her to secrecy. Let me explain why it was not. She has friends in the company. When she got the offer from the other company, she consulted with her friends. One of her best friends advised her to take the offer. When she decided to stay, she had to explain to him why she disregarded his advice or lose personal credibility. So she told him and swore him to secrecy. He agreed to honor the secret, but was incensed that she had to threaten to quit in order to get a proper raise. Furthermore, he was furious that you overcompensated her. So, he told the story, but kept her name confidential to preserve the secret. And now everyone in engineering knows that the best way to get a raise is to generate an offer from another company then threaten to quit. It’s going to take awhile to pay off that debt.

No performance management or employee feedback process
Your company is now 25 people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Plus, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt?

The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations:

CEO: “He was good when we hired him, what happened?”
Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.”
CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?”
Manager: “Maybe not clearly …”

However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weaknesses that they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.

In the end
Every really good, really experienced CEO I know shares one important characteristic: they tend to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues. Faced with giving everyone the same bonus to make things easy or sharply rewarding performance and ruffling many feathers, they’ll ruffle the feathers. Given the choice of cutting a popular project today because it’s not in the long-term plans or keeping it around for morale purposes and to appear consistent, they’ll cut it today. Why? Because they’ve paid the price of management debt and they would rather not do it again.

Special thanks to my friend Joanne Bradford who came up with the idea for this post and coined the term “management debt.”

Mobile-software developers have long complained about Apple’s limits on them. Chief among their gripes is Apple’s rule that developers registered through its standard developer program cap testing of their app to 100 devices before the software is sold in the app store. Developers say the rule curtails the amount of feedback they receive to improve their apps.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

Today, after Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations, its execs got on the horn with investors to explain how it plans to beat the Panda.

That would be the beastly name for Google’s rejiggering of its search algorithm, in order to rid search results of poor quality content.

Along with many other sites, Demand has gotten smacked by its raging paw.

Still, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company reported revenue of $79.5 million and six cents a share in adjusted net income.

Wall Street was expecting the company to report about $69.6 million in revenue for the three months, with four cents a share in adjusted profits.

On a GAAP basis, net loss per share was 13 cents compared to 94 cents a year ago.

Here’s the liveblog of the conference call:

2 pm PT: Demand’s investor relations dude came on and I immediately tuned out until CEO Richard Rosenblatt got on the line to talk about the results.

He was as perky as ever, launching right into the meat of the situation–how Demand was going to pretty up its offerings, such as a redesign of its flagship eHow site and its new editorial arrangement with another perky person, food lady Rachael Ray and the also perky fashionista/talk show lady Tyra Banks.

Gone will be user-generated content that Demand used to let people post at will on its eHow site that was, well, less than good.

As in, bad.

Instead, it’s “curation,” “editorial innovation” and feedback cycles.

We old-timers like to call that journalism and copyediting, complete with mean old editors who spiked said copy when it was crappy.

“Let me be clear,” said Rosenblatt, the Google changes did negatively impact Demand’s traffic. But Rosenblatt said the company dug into its content and has been improving it since.

2:17 pm: Now it was CFO Charles Hillard reading the results themselves. I am sorry, Mr. Finance Guy, but I can read it myself, so this is always the time in earnings calls when I check out and spend my time improving my content.

So when I heard words such as “stock-based comp,” I moved on to fixing all the typos that a very nice reader alerted me to, since I was writing too quickly.

Then, I briefly considered writing a high-quality post for eHow on how to write earnings and fix typos at the same time. I am that good.

2:30 pm: The CFO dude finished up and the Q&A with analysts started.

All Panda questions, natch!

Rosenblatt seemed calm, cool and collected.

“We think on this one, they did a very good job,” he said of Google’s search-fixing efforts, trying to soothe the savage beast. “We all continue to evolve.”

Which translated to: Google says jump and we say: “How high?”

Which is then followed by: “Please sir, can I have some more (traffic)?”

More Google algo change questions.

I suspect there is a new tactic afoot by Demand: Bore us into submission about the traffic devastation from Larry Page’s minions with endless questions about algo.

Finally, a question about mobile and international expansion. Apparently, Demand content is going to be translated into five different languages.

Yay! I am readying my version of “How to Boil Water” in French! (“Comment Faire Bouillir L’eau”!)

Mobile is going to be big too for Demand, which it is for everyone.

Then it was onto a question about improving content, including paying its writers more moolah, which would then eat into the Demand cheaper content business model.

I liked that question! I suddenly decided I was going to shift to a lugubrious post on the history of the Maginot Line in 132 parts!

Oops, Rosenblatt said the data has to show that the peeps want those longer pieces.

Back to the boiling water opus!

It’s on to some video questions and then back to search, as in diversifying away from relying on search to get traffic and premium prices for its advertising.

As in, how much are you going to cozy up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg?

“It’s less about where traffic comes from and more about where they land,” said Rosenblatt, except you just know he sent a lovely floral bouquet plus a hefty selection of citrus to Zuckerberg’s new house in Silicon Valley right after Panda roared.

Rosenblatt deflected a lot of questions in this arena. “We still think that search is a fantastic way” to gain traffic, he said, making sure Google’s Page did not chomp off his hand as he courted his social networking nemesis at Facebook.

But as the old Kikuyu proverb goes: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

More likely, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings: “Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.”

We’ll see which is which for Demand in the quarters ahead.

Until then, here’s Carpenter performing her song, “The Bug”:

Demand Media handily beat Wall Street expectations in its first quarter results today, released after the market closed.

The company reported revenue of $79.5 million and six cents a share in adjusted net income.

Investors were expecting the company to report about $69.6 million in revenue for the three months, with four cents a share in adjusted profits.

On a GAAP basis, the net loss per share was 13 cents compared to 94 cents a year ago.

The decent results could boost Demand’s stock, which has been hit hard since Google launched “Panda,” an overhaul of its search algorithm to improve results and remove poor quality content.

In a conference call at 2 pm PT today, which BoomTown will be liveblogging, most will be paying more mind to what the online content company’s top execs–especially CEO Richard Rosenblatt–have to say about the impact of the updates from Google to Demand’s various Web offerings.

As a first strike, some of Demand’s execs briefed the media earlier today on efforts to improve the quality of its content–you can read the official press releases here on that and also here.

In them, Demand said it will remove some online posts that were substandard and created under a now-suspended writers’ compensation system. It said it is also improving reader feedback tools and adding more substantive stories to its sites.

Those are all good ideas, since Google’s tweaks have been chewing away at a range of Web sites–such as those owned by Demand–which rely heavily on search engine optimization to bring in huge traffic.

One big hit for Demand, due to Panda, has been to its flagship eHow site.

All the mishegas has hurt the Santa Monica, Calif., company’s stock. It’s down just over 30 percent since Demand’s IPO in late January, as bearish investors fret over the implications of Panda.

Still, in its report, Demand said its content and media revenue was up 72 percent to $51.9 million, compared to $30.2 million last year.

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

That’s the idea behind a new commenting system being introduced in Google Docs today. Comments have been converted into what Google is calling Discussions. And these discussions are comparable to the streams in so many social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, complete with the Twitter-like convention of “@ mentions” (A sample comment is pictured) but they’re also linked to email, so you can participate in the discussion without having sign into Google Docs. You can also tell who made a comment and when, as it includes timestamps, profile pictures and email notifications make it easy to keep track of the feedback process.

The feature is going live today, but only on new documents, and for those Google Apps users who have opted for the Rapid Release track on new features–those who haven’t will get it over the next week or so. A two-minute video below gives you a pretty good idea of what it looks like.

BoomTown always enjoys the maiden voyage of a newly public company, so liveblogging Demand Media’s first quarterly earnings seems like a must-do.

It’s also the first public outing for CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who has sold off his previous entrepreneurial efforts.

And it seems like a good start, as the Santa Monica, Calif.-based online content company, which had its IPO in late January, finally out to rest some controversy about how much is actually earns by posting $1 million in net income in the last three months of 2010.

Okay, that is a weensy amount, to be sure, but it beat expectations, as well as for revenue, with sales of $73.6 million for the fourth quarter.

Of course, Demand wants Wall Street to look at “Adjusted OIBDA” results, which was up 88 percent, and which it is a much prettier $20.1 million in earnings.

Also on deck, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kakfa noted today:

“Expect to hear at least one riff on whether or not the company feels threatened by Google and changes the search engine is making to push “content farms” out of its results. CEO Richard Rosenblatt insists that his company is not a content farm, and that Google is just fine with his stuff, but I have a feeling the issue won’t go away just yet.”

We’ll see–here we go:

2:05 pm PT: It took me a bit to get into this conference call, since I could not get the live broadcast from the Web site at all and the teleconference operators were snoozing.

And I tuned in just as Rosenblatt (pictured here) was talking about how Demand was helping people get information about how to ripen avocados.

No, really.

(Memo to self: Curb the snotty journalist tone, especially since I love me a good, ripe avocado.)

Rosenblatt, who seems only a little nervous, pressed on by talking about its massive eHow site, as well as Cracked.com and other major branded sites Demand has.

The latest is TypeF women’s health and beauty site, which is guided by supermodel Tyra Banks.

Rosenblatt then linked it all to advertisers and how much they want to spend on sites like this.

“We are not limited to just a few key verticals,” he said, touting its sales staff, including Rosenblatt’s daring raid of Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford from Yahoo.

“The company is well positioned to capture an increasing share of brand revenue,” said Rosenblatt.

2:18 pm: Rosenblatt then zeroed in on the juicy issues, which center around the quality of the content Demand churns out.

Or, as critics have argued, lack of quality.

“The level of specificity is arcane to some,” noted Rosenblatt, using the example of flying paper lanterns and how to make a roof rake as examples of the kind of niche content Demand produces.

Arcane is right, but it takes all kinds!

Plus, insisted Rosenblatt, it’s good! Accurate! Edited! Useful!

He took the gloves off here, which made me want a Demand piece about taking care of leather gloves (linseed oil?).

“We’re just getting started,” said Rosenblatt, about the company and not the glove care tips.

2:24 pm: The CEO turned it over to the CFO, Charles Hilliard, which meant I was off on my critical Web search about taking care of my gloves.

That’s because he immediately said: “Adjusted OIBDA.”

Which-let’s be honest–sounds like a communicable disease.

Essentially, said Hilliard, it’s up, up, up for Demand, in terms of revenue, earnings, page views and more.

You can read all these gory financial details in the press release here.

For some reason, Hilliard is using the retail term, “same store sales,” as a comparison. I covered retails for years, so it is a surprise for this to be the metaphor, but Demand obviously sees itself as a content store.

2:39 pm: Q&A time and the Google-fights-spam question came first!

Rosenblatt said he welcomed it and appeared unconcerned. His avocado-ripening, roof-rake-making, flying-lantern company needed to make no excuses!

The next question is about expansion, including internationally. Sure, Western Europe.

Then, a sneaky follow-up on content farms.

“We consider ourself very white hat,” declared Rosenblatt.

I wonder what the best way to clean a white hat is?

Voila! It’s right here on eHow:

“1. Wash your white hat in the washing machine if it is made of cotton or polyester. Just add laundry detergent and one cup of bleach. Wash the hat using the hot water setting. Do not put the hat in the dryer. The hat will shrink and then it won’t fit your head.”

Call the Pulitzer Prize committee!

(Wait, snotty again! I also love clean, white hats.)

I was so riveted by the white-hat thing, I completely missed the next question, but tuned in again to one about revenue momentum.

Essentially, Bradford–who looks great in a white hat, I might add–is on the case.

Then some internal technical questions and about guidance for Q1. CFO Hilliard said that the company was guiding for growth, despite more public company expenses.

(Needless to say, you can find out about how to run a public company here on eHow.)

The last question was about how much branded advertising will make up total revenue. Between five and 10 percent of 2010, said Hilliard, but it is the fastest category of growth.

And also one about curation of content and use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for feedback.

Rosenblatt said that feedback can even become content, which will be part of new eHow redesign to come.

Want some tips on that? Of course, Demand Media has the answer, at least to this easy question.

The tutorial, which runs 40 minutes, is up on YouTube, but it’s unlisted and is only accessible via a private link. Thanks to a helpful reader, I’ve been able to watch it myself, and I’ve uploaded it at the bottom of this post so you can see it, too.

But it is 40 minutes long–and most of you don’t need to watch all of it. Here’s what you need to know if you’re interested in advertising, technology and Twitter’s first attempts at making real money:

Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s first big ad product, hasn’t taken off.
Instead, at least for now, Twitter is pushing customers to spend most of their money on Promoted Accounts, its pay-per-follower product it rolled out at the end of last year. Twitter tells advertisers they ought to spend $4 on Promoted Accounts for every $1 they spend on Promoted Tweets–the original Google-style ad concept CEO Dick Costolo introduced last year. Twitter says that’s because it’s a lot easier to buy the former than the latter, because there’s a lot more inventory available. (And because Promoted Accounts will “turbocharge” Promoted Tweets.)

Promoted Tweets should get a big push in the next month or so.
Until now, the only way you’re going to see a Promoted Tweet is if you click on a search term that someone has purchased, or if you’re using Twitter app HootSuite. But Twitter says the ads will start running in users’ regular “timelines”–the primary Twitterstream they see–on its own Twitter.com site, by the end of Q1. That’s going to make them much more visible, and should hopefully help with the inventory problem noted above.

Twitter is telling customers to expect an “engagement rate” of 1 percent to 3 percent.
Ad buyers are usually trying to measure success by figuring out how many people looked at or clicked on an ad. Click-through rates for most Web ads are very tiny, and according to an ad buyer who has seen Twitter’s presentation, the company says a realistic click-through rate is 0.3 percent. But “engagement” rates–which measure when a user retweets an ad, or likes it, etc.–are supposed to be much higher. My tipster, by the way, says Twitter is requiring new ad buyers to make a purchase of at least $5,000 worth of inventory in order to participate in the company’s beta tests.

Twitter is warning buyers that some users will have a problem with their ads.
At the end of the presentation (around the 35-minute mark), the company takes time out to coach buyers about “dealing with negative user feedback,” which it more or less assumes they’ll be getting. “People are averse to change, especially when it comes to advertising, and this type of feedback is to be expected,” Twitter’s off-screen instructor explains. The company’s suggested coping strategy: Don’t worry! The complainers are an “extremely marginal percentage of the total.”

[UPDATE: So how do the ads actually work? A Twitter ads tester would like to share their experiences with the rest of the world, but can't.]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/inside-twitters-sales-machine-a-secret-guide-for-advertisers-video/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20110121/google-on-bad-search-results-%e2%80%98we-can-do-better%e2%80%99/ http://allthingsd.com/20110121/google-on-bad-search-results-%e2%80%98we-can-do-better%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:45:33 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=35424 Have you been frustrated lately by search results on Google? If so, you’re not alone, and Google knows it.

There’s been a drumbeat of criticism of Google’s search results coming out of Silicon Valley–and now the Internet giant has responded, saying it has heard “the feedback from the Web loud and clear” and believes it “can and should do better.” In particular, the company is talking about stopping “content farms,” which provide low-quality, often unreliable and sometimes plagiarized information on a certain topic, just to get traffic from search.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110121/google-on-bad-search-results-%e2%80%98we-can-do-better%e2%80%99/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:49:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27773 Twitter has crossed the threshold from Web novelty into something substantial. Now Dick Costolo’s job is to turn it into a business–one big enough to justify the sky-high valuation investors have given the messaging company.

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.

But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.

The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”

Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]

Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.

Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”

Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/live-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-at-dces/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/youtube-adds-personalized-channels-to-lengthen-living-room-sessions/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/youtube-adds-personalized-channels-to-lengthen-living-room-sessions/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:30:01 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=944 YouTube today is launching a personalization update to its Leanback viewing mode, which is meant to be played on televisions. The new “Personalized Channels”–which is honestly a feature I assumed Leanback already had, given the Google-owned site has been experimenting in this area for a while–will queue up videos for any keyword to play continuously.

Leanback users can give feedback on whether or not they like recommendations, and the channel will refine future suggestions automatically. It seems very similar to streaming music on Pandora. The idea is to offer users a never-ending stream of videos they like, so they’ll watch YouTube longer.

Leanback is not a platform-specific app, but rather a full-screen version of YouTube accessible through any browser. It’s intended for Web-connected televisions.

The “user base [of such devices] is small by YouTube standards,” said YouTube Group Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman, but he added that YouTube users who watch through Leanback already spend 30 minutes per session on average, two times longer than sessions on the Web.

Of course, 30 minutes happens to be the length of many traditional television programs.

Leanback at present doesn’t have much in the way of social features, and it doesn’t include specialized ad formats for the living room. It is also not the default YouTube option on Google TV. Rajaraman said all these things are likely to be added in the future. YouTube has recently been doing all sorts of launches around Leanback, including adding overlay and pre-roll advertisements, showing more premium videos from partners and providing a remote control app for Android.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/youtube-adds-personalized-channels-to-lengthen-living-room-sessions/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/its-a-new-day-and-newenterprise-is-here/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/its-a-new-day-and-newenterprise-is-here/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:10:45 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=11

Welcome to NewEnterprise, the latest in the ever-growing stable of offerings at All Things Digital.

I am Arik Hesseldahl and I’ll be following the world of information technology with an emphasis on the enterprise. This is a deliberately loose definition that encompasses a lot, so I expect I’ll have a lot of room to roam.

Consider for a minute all the different threads that can reasonably fall under the umbrella term “Enterprise IT”: Everyone loves Twitter and Facebook and Google, but when some part of them fails to work right, phrases like “Fail Whale” enter the popular lexicon, and careers, reputations and investments are all at risk.

When they do work, the people who assembled all the hardware and software become the unsung heroes. I’m fascinated by both scenarios, because in their own way they’re both great stories that others can learn from.

You can expect me to pay a great deal of attention to developments in the burgeoning cloud computing industry, and in the traditional enterprise IT business of selling computers and other products and services to large companies.

Beyond that I’ll be looking deeper at the chips and other components inside them, and the companies and people who make them.

And I’ll also be keeping an eye on issues relating to computer and network security, an issue that has suddenly taken on significant heft, as computer worms have evolved from stealing credit card numbers to attacking nuclear plants.

Plus, I’ll be on the lookout for new start-ups aiming to change the way things are done in the workplace.

I’ve covered technology for more than a decade, most recently for Bloomberg Businessweek, and for Forbes.com before that. In those years I’ve learned to treat buzzwords and hype cycles with suspicion and to question the so-called conventional wisdom wherever possible.

So, I promise to tell you what I think is going on in straight and simple terms, and in a jargon-free manner.

In short, I think we’ll have a great deal to talk about. And that’s where you come in. I’d like to hear from you. Give me feedback. Tell me what I’ve missed and where I could do better and also whether or not you agree with what I’m saying, or where you think the next important story is.

Leave a comment here or send an email (Arik@AllThingsD.com).

What I need most are thoughtful ideas and feedback from the people on the front lines at tech companies, and those making tech-related decisions at non-tech companies.

Remember those unsung heroes I mentioned before? They’re you. And NewEnterprise is nothing without you.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/its-a-new-day-and-newenterprise-is-here/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:05:26 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1552 It’s official, the holiday shopping season has begun and it’s time to get serious about gift lists. This week, I took a closer look at some online services that could help you—or those shopping for you—find and buy the right gifts.

While there are many services around, I’ll just touch on a handful of them, including some that take advantage of social networking and group buying.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List. Starting Wednesday, this feature lets people add items to a saved wish list by simply check-marking an on-screen box in shopping search results. Shopping search results are displayed by clicking the Shopping tab in Bing search results or by selecting Shopping on Bing.com and going from there. Once an item’s box has been checked, a small, in-browser visual of all items added to the wish list is displayed in the lower left corner of the browser window. Lists are saved between sessions, so you can close your browser and open it another time and work with the same saved list.

In addition to collecting a list of wished-for items, the Bing Shopping List lets people share those lists with their Facebook friends, giving them a chance to see and buy items from someone else’s wish list. Or people can use Bing Shopping Lists to select just a couple items, share them with the Facebook community, and ask for friends’ opinions about which product is better. Users may get feedback from friends they wouldn’t otherwise know were experts in certain areas.

A Microsoft spokesman said the impetus for this came from trends the company saw taking place on the Web—specifically, people using Facebook to solicit opinions about what to buy and to tell others what they want.

A downside to the Bing Shopping Lists is that they don’t yet offer a way to share items with only certain people, which might mean sharing a private gift with all your Facebook friends. And you can’t yet create multiple lists. A way to share items with only certain people and options for create multiple lists are on the product road map for next year, according to a company spokesman.

Speaking of social networks, Sears is taking a unique approach to the group-buying concept with Wish Together, a program launched in mid-November. With Wish Together, Sears puts at least one new item on its Facebook page (facebook.com/sears) each day. If enough people click on the item’s “Like” button before a certain time, a steep discount on the item becomes unlocked, like a diamond necklace that originally cost $285 will cost $100 at its Wish Price if it gets the required 200 “likes.” People can see the number of necessary “Likes” and time remaining (down to the second) displayed on the item’s Wish Together Facebook page.Once a Wish Together deal is unlocked, it’s available to everyone—not just those who originally “liked” it. But those who “liked” the item get an email notification from Facebook as soon as the deal is unlocked so they can buy it while supplies last.

Bing is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List

The tried and true Amazon Wish List, which has been around for 11 years, can be used to add wish-list items from any website, not just Amazon.com. This works using the site’s Universal Wish List. It can be set up by dragging an “Add to Wishlist” bookmark (http://3.ly/G82n) into your browser’s bookmark bar. Then you just click the bookmark whenever you’re on the specific Web page of an item you’d like to add to your Wish List. A small pop-up menu lets users designate a specific Amazon Wish List or add their own notes about an item. Universal Wish List browser extensions, or shortcuts built right into a Web browser, are available for Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Some online retailers like ModCloth.com, save you a step by offering “Add To Amazon Wish List” buttons right on their websites. Amazon Wish Lists can be shared to friends through Facebook or Twitter using a link on the list’s webpage.

There are many Facebook apps for creating wish lists and sharing them with Facebook friends. I tried a couple apps, including a basic one called Fulfill My Wishlist (http://3.ly/3u3d). It let me search a shopping portal (that uses Google Shopping in the background) for items to add to my wish list, or let me copy and paste a link for any item to appear in my list. A notes section for each item allows room for describing details like preferred size or style. This list can be emailed to friends or viewed through the Facebook app by friends who use it.

If you’re planning to go in on buying a pricey gift with several other people, a group-gift option like eBay’s might be the right tool for you. EBay introduced its Group Gifts feature (groupgifts.ebay.com) in November. It lets several people pool their money to buy one item without one person chasing down those who owe money.

One person chooses an eBay item and selects the Buy It Now option (auction prices aren’t applicable when you need to tell the group how much they’ll definitely owe). The initiator tells the group how much he or she will pay and then shares the item with others via email, Facebook or Twitter, in hopes of getting contributions. A PayPal account is required for at least one person in the group to ultimately pay for the item, but gift contributors can chip in using credit or debit cards, and they can add their own notes to a gift.

Thanks to technology, there are many ways to direct your friends and family toward exactly what you want for the holidays, taking much of the guesswork out of giving and receiving this year.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100915/the-importance-of-tweeting-oscar/ http://allthingsd.com/20100915/the-importance-of-tweeting-oscar/#comments Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:50:33 +0000 Elizabeth Holmes http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=29675 Sushi makes her crave chocolate. She spent a summer wielding power tools and drinking Rolling Rock beer. And more than 14,300 people follow her on Twitter.

Erika Bearman is OscarPRGirl, Oscar de la Renta’s director of communications and the woman behind the august designer’s lively Twitter feed.

From when she wakes in the morning, Ms. Bearman, 29 years old, is on the short-form social networking service, giving her digital acolytes a breezy blend of personal musings and insider detail about the label: “fact: Oscar de la Renta’s first show had six models. They did their own makeup, and brought their own shoes,” she tweeted last Sunday.

Ms. Bearman is one of several executives who tweet on behalf of luxury fashion brands, masking their marketing in a Carrie-Bradshaw-esque life-stream. Dozens of labels now have a presence on Twitter, the benefits of which are seen most clearly during New York Fashion Week. Tweets come fast and furious during the shows, providing designers with instantaneous feedback from attendees and giving the events a much bigger marketing stage, albeit a virtual one.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100915/the-importance-of-tweeting-oscar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100319/apple-now-accepting-ipad-app-submissions/ http://allthingsd.com/20100319/apple-now-accepting-ipad-app-submissions/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:28:20 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=36870 The next app gold rush is on. Moments ago, Apple invited developers writing applications for its forthcoming iPad tablet to begin submitting them to the App Store for approval.

“iPad will begin shipping soon and your opportunity to be part of the grand opening of the iPad App Store starts today,” Apple (AAPL) said in a message to developers. “Submit your iPad app now for an initial review by the App Review Team and receive feedback on its readiness for the grand opening.”

Apple’s set a March 27 deadline — at 5 p.m. PST — for developers to submit their apps if they hope to have them available for the initial iPad release.

An encouraging sign. Sadly, most of the apps submitted, at least initially, will have been developed on Apple’s iPad simulator software and not on the device itself, which has been given to only a few select partners. Let’s hope these early apps don’t suffer too much from a lack of hands-on testing.

[Image credit: Apple Insider]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100319/apple-now-accepting-ipad-app-submissions/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/motorola-backflip-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/motorola-backflip-review/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:47:23 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1103 Touch screens are now prevalent enough on mobile devices that I find myself touching the screens of every new gadget I see. My trusty index finger of a stylus is ready at all times to swipe, pinch, double tap and scroll since these are natural gestures.

Yet touch screens have some downsides. Finger gestures leave smudge marks on the glass screens and monopolize screen real estate, making it hard to show the screen to someone while navigating. Also, touch screens often require two hands.

This week, I tested a smart phone with a solution for two of the three touch-screen problems. The Motorola Backflip (http://3.ly/Ku9), which became available March 7, lets people navigate its screen by touching a panel behind it, thus keeping fingers off of the screen. This trackpad-like panel is appropriately named the Backtrack and works like magic: On-screen objects are selected, text scrolls and screens open, but you can’t see the fingers manipulating the screen because they’re hidden behind it.

The Backflip, which runs on AT&T’s (T) 3G network, costs $100 after a $100 mail-in rebate and a two-year agreement. Its name comes from its design: The Backflip’s screen seems to flip backward when the QWERTY keyboard flips down for use. In the device’s “closed” position, the keyboard flips back up and is automatically turned off.

I’ve been using the Motorola Backflip for emailing, Web browsing, social networking, taking photos and making phone calls. While I applaud its creative design and the idea of the Backtrack, I think it sacrifices functionality for form. Take, for example, its QWERTY keyboard, which has a subtly handsome design when the Backflip is closed. But when used for typing, its shallow keys don’t give much tactile feedback and are tough to use. Likewise, the Backtrack is clever, but only works when the phone is the flat, opened position, forcing people to reach around both the keyboard and the screen to use it. I often found myself giving up and just touching the screen directly, which also works.

Other companies’ mobile devices have found ways around actually touching their touch screens, silly as it may sound. Palm’s (PALM) Pre and Pixi models use a gesture area beneath the screen to navigate—with just one hand holding and swiping.

The Backflip in opened position.

I easily set up two email accounts and Twitter and Facebook accounts on my Backflip. There are also shortcuts for setting up accounts for Picasa, Photobucket, Bebo, LastFM and MySpace.

The Motorola Backflip runs Motoblur, the company’s social-network and message-consolidating software, which I found to be an attractive interface with intelligent capabilities. For instance, if it senses you’re checking it a lot, it will update the displayed messages more frequently. Motoblur also uses images from contacts, like their Facebook or Twitter photo, and displays these as small background icons behind Motoblur messages from that person. This is a small detail, but it brings an extra spark of life to everyday messages.

But Motoblur lacks one of the most popular Twitter functions: the ability to re-tweet, or re-message someone else’s tweet (Twitter status). A Motorola (MOT) representative said re-tweet is under evaluation, but won’t disclose details about timing. Motoblur has been available for six months, first seen in the Motorola CLIQ.

Oddly, the Backflip runs the Android 1.5 operating system, not the newest Android 2.1. A Motorola representative said the company plans to update this but wouldn’t say when. It seems strange for a brand-new device not to run the newest operating system.

Phone calls were clear and loud, and photos captured on the five-megapixel, flash, digital zoom camera looked great. I enjoyed using the Backflip’s bright, 3.1-inch screen with 320×480 pixel resolution. Though I wasn’t crazy about typing on its keyboard, I did like the keyboard shortcut keys for the Web browser, home, email and search. With the Backflip in its opened position, I used the Backtrack—the trackpad behind the screen—to skip around from one thing to the next. Double tapping on anything selected it, and I swiped my fingers down on the Backtrack to scroll a long news story on the browser.

The Backflip is designed so that whenever it’s plugged into its wall charger or set at a 90-degree angle, it goes into Tabletop mode, showing a large digital clock with the local weather, date and options for setting an alarm. This mode also offers a button for watching the device’s photos in a slow-panning, Ken Burns-like slideshow, which is useful for sharing with friends.

Monthly AT&T plans that work with the Backflip include a combination of the carrier’s required $30 unlimited data plan and a $40, $60 or $70 voice plan. It comes with a 2-gigabyte memory card, though it will work with one that holds up to 32 gigabytes. Its internal memory is 512 megabytes, and the memory available for apps is 220 megabytes, though certain apps can offload some data they use onto the roomier card.

Motorola deserves credit for trying an innovative design and for offering a unique way of moving fingers off of the touch screen. But the Backflip device seems unfinished because of several features that don’t work as well as they should.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/motorola-backflip-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/msn-homepage-exits-beta-set-to-hit-all-of-u-s/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/msn-homepage-exits-beta-set-to-hit-all-of-u-s/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:00:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25201

MSN, which launched a beta version of a radical new homepage design in November, is releasing it to all its 100 million monthly U.S. customers within the next two weeks.

The wide rollout by the Microsoft (MSFT) portal will include its most significant online marketing program yet on sites such as the Hulu video and Pandora radio services–although it won’t cost nearly as much as the $100 million the tech giant is spending to hawk its Bing search service.

While the new MSN homepage is not radically different than the preview version Microsoft has been testing on 10 percent (and, more recently, 25 percent) of its user base, after consumer and testing feedback, it includes: A larger search box; more local features, such as hyperlocal Twitter feeds; and more multimedia content, including in-line videos.

“We have gotten a lot of great response to the new site, so we think everyone should be using it,” said Scott Moore, MSN’s U.S. executive producer. “We’re particularly encouraged about how usage of light and medium users has grown.”

Presumably that’s because the new MSN homepage has been drastically simplified, with a white, cleaner look that calls to mind the design ethos of Apple (AAPL).

I suppose if you can’t beat them…

The launch was the first major upgrade of the MSN main page in a decade, part of an overhaul the software giant has been doing throughout its money-losing online services division to spur innovation.

That includes the launch of Bing last May, which has been a relative success for Microsoft, adding a small amount of search market share and, more important, some much needed respect to its long-beleaguered consumer Web efforts.

Whether putting the new MSN in front of all its consumer will work or not remains an open question. Together, MSN and Windows Live have about 100 million unique monthly visitors, putting Microsoft typically third behind Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

Here’s the official blog post from Microsoft, as well as more videos that you want to see of MSN senior execs in Microsoft-made interviews about the changes:

New MSN Homepage offers search, news, local and social networking–all in one place

Today is an exciting milestone for MSN. We are beginning the launch of our new homepage to our customers in the US. The new MSN homepage offers search, news, local and social networking–all in one place. We encourage you to try the new homepage today and learn more about the many cool features.

Since the preview of our new homepage began in November, we’ve been very busy gathering over 70,000 pieces of customer feedback and introducing over 30 updates in our quest to deliver the best homepage to stay in the know.

Here are a few things we learned and new features we introduced to address customer feedback:

Bing, Bing, and more Bing. We’ve seen double-digit increases in Bing search queries coming from the new homepage. People wanted even more Bing, so we:

· Increased the prominence of the Bing search box to make it easy for you to search from the MSN homepage.

· Added a new TrendWatch feature to highlight the day’s top movers on Twitter.

· Increased the prominence of Popular Searches, where our editorial team highlights the most interesting and topical searches of the day.

· Increased editorial programming of search-related content, including videos and images.

· And, we’re currently testing a Search History feature so you can more easily find information you typically search for.

Local is a home-run. We knew people craved local information, but we’ve been surprised by how quickly our local offering has taken off. The MSN Local module on the homepage is driving over 50% more traffic to our new local offering, MSN Local Edition. This site already has over 9 million unique users every month, making it the #4 online newspaper in terms of unique users, and the leader for page views. MSN Local Edition, which uniquely covers the entire country across 42,000 zip codes, continues to innovate, introducing new features like:

· Hyper-local Tweets, which uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location

· My Cities lets you personalize MSN Local and save up to 3 cities to follow–making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country.

· With partnerships with NBC Local Media and Hearst Television, MSN Local Edition now offers 3,000 news video clips a week across 36 local markets.

You love images and news. The main module on the new homepage, which features a prominent image, receives over 50% more clicks than our original homepage. We’re continuing to offer more multi-media on the new homepage–including launching the availability of in-line HD video today. Now you can watch HD video in-line on the MSN homepage with minimal buffering. We also learned:

· The design of the new page was largely positively received, but we heard from some MSN loyalists that they missed our traditional blue background. So, we tested many different versions of our design–including an entirely blue background–and it turns out most people prefer the clean, white background we introduced with the preview–with a touch of blue highlighting the top of the page.

· The tabs on the new homepage allow us to highlight different categories of news and many different headlines with less clutter–we learned you love lots of news headlines to choose from, so we added more tabs and made the navigation easier so you can easily access the wealth of information on MSN.

· Social networking is handy to have on the homepage. Most of you appreciate the all-in-one offering of the new MSN homepage–including the ability to check your Hotmail, Messenger and favorite social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, right from your MSN homepage. We realized we could make social networking even easier, so now our social network module defaults to the social network tab you use most frequently (Facebook, for example).

These are just a few of the many themes we learned and have been working on over the last few months.

Because we want to ensure every customer has a great first experience, we’re taking our time to roll it out, but all of our 100 million customers in the US will have the new homepage within the next few weeks. Today marks an important milestone for us, but we’re going to keep working hard to hear your feedback and deliver more great experiences across MSN.

Bob Visse (general manager, MSN Product Management Group):

Cyrus Krohn (director of online services programming, MSN):

Erik Jorgensen (corporate vice president, MSN):

Scott Moore (U.S. executive producer, MSN):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/msn-homepage-exits-beta-set-to-hit-all-of-u-s/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20100216/epic-files-ftc-complaint-over-google-buzz/ http://allthingsd.com/20100216/epic-files-ftc-complaint-over-google-buzz/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:25:50 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=34949 While well-intentioned, Google’s “sorry, we didn’t get everything quite right” apology hasn’t absolved the company of the bungled launch of Buzz, its new social networking service and its foolish decision to transform our private Gmail address books into public social networks. On Tuesday afternoon, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming Buzz violates federal consumer protection law.

“EPIC urges the Commission to investigate Google, determine the extent of the harm to consumer privacy and safety,” EPIC said in its complaint. “[And it asks that the Commission] require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service, require Google to give Gmail users meaningful control over personal information, require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in the future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief.”

Another embarrassing blow for Google (GOOG), which has spent the better part of a week being pilloried for its unfortunate misstep. Responding to EPIC’s complaint, Google again stressed its efforts to improve Buzz and, somewhat ironically, thanked the group for airing its concerns.

“We designed Buzz to make it easy for users to connect with other people and have conversations about the things that interest them,” the company said. “Buzz was launched only a week ago. We’ve already made a few changes based on user feedback, and we have more improvements in the works. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind. We also welcome dialogue with EPIC and appreciate hearing directly from them about their concerns. Our door is always open to organizations with suggestions about our products and services.”

Evidently, Buzz is a work in progress to which all are free to contribute–even if they do so in the form of an FTC complaint.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100216/epic-files-ftc-complaint-over-google-buzz/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100212/comparing-the-eharmony-and-match-com-experiences/ http://allthingsd.com/20100212/comparing-the-eharmony-and-match-com-experiences/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:09:36 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=21309 Just in time for Valentine’s Day, a new study examining Match.com and eHarmony suggests that both have their faults.

Catalyst Group, a New York usability-research firm, reviewed the two popular dating sites with an eye toward how they walk customers through profiles, finding matches and making contact.

The study considered feedback from eight users of each site (four men and four women) who had been a date with someone they contacted through it in the past month.

Among the findings: eHarmony, which markets itself to people seeking serious relationships, “was preferred by people who would prefer a high degree of handholding,” but experienced users find the profiles “formulaic.” Some also bristle at how they see potential matches — as chosen by eHarmony, not by a search of their choosing.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100212/comparing-the-eharmony-and-match-com-experiences/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091201/nice-comment/ http://allthingsd.com/20091201/nice-comment/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:25:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21222

BoomTown gets guff about a lot of stuff, but no one is more passionate than those who wanted us to make our comment system better.

And they were right.

So while we never move fast enough, even for ourselves, tonight we have launched a new comments tool to improve the user experience on AllThingsD.com.

It lets you do cool things, such as log in using Facebook Connect, comment easily from a mobile phone and comment via email.

The tool we chose is called Disqus, and it’s used pretty widely on the Web (see Fred Wilson’s site, A VC, for a good example).

In fact, you might already have a Disqus profile that you use on other sites.

But, because we know how annoying change can be, we were able to port over all of the old comments from our site to the new system, although there might be a glitch or two (which we will fix!).

In addition, those who have already signed up as commenters on ATD can continue to comment as they always have always without further sign-ups.

We hope the change makes it more fun (and interesting) for you to comment and interact with us and with one other.

Please let us know if you have any problems at all and we will get to them asap!

Let the feedback begin!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091201/nice-comment/feed/ 41 http://allthingsd.com/20090625/immersion-full-d7-demo/ http://allthingsd.com/20090625/immersion-full-d7-demo/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:20:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://d7.allthingsd.com/?p=2247

Immersion (IMMR) is the innovative company behind haptic, or touch feedback, technology for some videogame consoles and mobile phones.

At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Immersion demoed its TouchSense for touchscreen keyboards and Immersive Messaging.

With TouchSense, the user is not only supposed to be able to get haptic feedback, but can also feel the virtual keys.

Immersive Messaging will also use haptic feedback, as well as gesture recognition, to send messages that employ physical senses rather than text.

See Walt Mossberg and the Immersion guys trade digital hearts. No, really, they did.

Also, I “twiddled.” Don’t ask.

Here’s the video of the full D7 demo:

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