Now, a new app, called Enlocked, says it’s going to make email encryption at the consumer level even easier, by introducing a mobile and Web application that adds a one-tap encryption button to an existing email account.

Enlocked works by offering an encryption option that can be applied on a message-by-message basis. A user who has downloaded the Enlocked app would see the “secure send” option as they’re sending an email. If the sender opts to send it with encryption, the recipient then receives two emails: One informing him or her that an encrypted email is about to come through, and another that is the actual email.

The catch is that the first one prompts the user to download Enlocked in order to read the encrypted email (click on the image at left).

On mobile, Enlocked is available for iOS and Android devices; the company expects a BlackBerry app to become available in about 60 days. In terms of Web-based email services, Enlocked is available on Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, with a Safari plugin in the works, and it works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Live or AOL email. Interestingly, it also works with Microsoft Outlook (including Microsoft Exchange systems).

The big question with a “vanishing email” service like Burn Note is how or whether e-messages are recoverable. With Enlocked, the question might be how long a user would be able to send encrypted emails from a work-related Outlook account, before it grabs the attention of network administrators. The app can be applied to corporate Outlook accounts, said Enlocked CEO Guy Livneh, making it so email administrators can’t read sent emails. Even if someone were to hack into an account, the message would still be scrambled in outgoing mail.

It’s currently free to use, and Livneh says the plan is to keep the consumer-facing apps free, but Enlocked may eventually offer a premium service at a cost. The company said it doesn’t plan to serve up targeted ads in emails as a way to monetize the service. (Enlocked also said it doesn’t store copies of encrypted emails sent through its app.)

Enlocked was launched this week by co-founder Livneh, formerly of database security company Sentrigo, which was acquired by McAfee last year; McAfee’s CTO of database security, Slavik Markovich, is an investor and board member.

Livneh acknowledged that the standard, open-sourced PGP-encryption method behind Enlocked isn’t new. What is new, Livneh said, is how accessible they’re making it to consumers.

“We think we’ve created an easier barrier to entry,” he said. “The magic is supposed to be in the usability for consumers.”

There are other ways that people can send encrypted emails from personal accounts, though Livneh insists that Enlocked’s mobile apps and Web plugins are more convenient to use. There’s Hushmail, for one, but that’s an entirely separate email service and not an application that you apply to your existing email account, such as your Gmail or Yahoo mail. There’s also Sendinc and Lockbin. As with Hushmail, Lockbin requires users to employ its application for sending emails.

(Image courtesy of Flickr/MJ Nault Photography)

Twitter doesn’t have a formal rate card, but ad industry sources say the going price for a one-day promoted trends purchase has settled between $70,000 and $80,000, after starting out as high as $100,000 a day.

Now Twitter has started telling buyers the coming price hike will consistently push the ads into the $100,000 to $120,000 range.

Promoted trends give an advertiser a chance to essentially purchase a small sliver of Twitter’s site, by inserting their message at the top of the “trends” section of users’ pages. For now, Twitter sells only one per day, and has been selling the slot out with some frequency.

And promoted trends could become even more valuable for Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his company if they start carving the ads up into different geographies, giving them the ability to sell more than one per day.

If, say, Twitter could sell at least two different promoted trends, in two different territories each week, at $100,000 a pop, those ads alone could generate $20.8 million a year. Play around with those assumptions, and you can quite easily bite off a big chunk of the $100 million-plus ad revenue estimates we’ve seen floated.

Ad buyers also tell me Twitter has been bullish about its “Promoted Accounts” product, which it rolled out toward the end of last year.

When I first wrote about the concept last summer, and described it as a way to let marketers (or anyone) “buy” followers, the concept upset some Twitter traditionalists.

But they’re going to have to get over it, because it’s exactly what Twitter is selling: It prices the ads, which show up on users “Who to follow” list, on a “cost per follow” basis. Buyers pay between $1 to $3 for every new account that follows them.

The one Twitter ad product I haven’t heard buyers talk that much about is the first one Twitter rolled out. “Promoted Tweets” were supposed to work like Google’s AdWords–”organic” tweets, tied to keywords, that showed up in search results, and later in users’ regular streams.

That seemed like a promising tactic at first. But I’ve never seen a promoted tweet “in the wild”; the only time I’ve seen them is when they’re attached to the promoted trends.

But perhaps I’m just missing them. If you’ve bought one, or if you see one, please pass drop me a line (peter@allthingsd.com) and let me know.

Bubble Motion, which is funded by Sequoia Capital and others, is now launching Bubbly in the Philippines, after releases in India, Indonesia and Japan (chosen because of their deep mobile phone penetration). Its launch partner in the Philippines is Globe Telecom.

By the midway point of this year, Bubbly will be rolled out to all major carriers in those four countries, for a total potential audience of 800 million.

Bubbly allows users to send each other voice-based status updates. People who follow a user receive an SMS each time a new status message is posted, and pay to listen to the status message with a fee added to their regular phone bill. This can be used both for communicating with friends and family and for subscribing to updates from celebrities.

Users pay either a monthly subscription fee for celebrities in India and Indonesia, or per message in the Philippines and Japan, following the carrier billing styles in each country. The average user gets one to two messages per day.

Celebrities on Bubbly often have two to three times as many followers as they have on Twitter, bragged Bubble Motion CEO Tom Clayton on a phone interview on Wednesday. And that’s despite the fact that Bubbly costs money and Twitter is free.

Part of the reason is Bubbly has more reach than Twitter in the four countries it has launched in, Clayton said, given it is a mobile service and Twitter is often accessed over the Internet.

But grooming a stable of stars might not be defensible in the long term, given Twitter is ramping up its mobile efforts and celebrities may want to have a broader reach than they can achieve with local phone carriers and voice updates. Clayton said another edge his company has is the infrastructure it has built to deliver voice files–250 million of them since Bubbly was first launched–without overloading carrier networks.

Clayton said Bubble Motion, which has raised about $30 million in funding, is not profitable yet but is growing revenue with a direct correlation to its traffic, which is to say, doubling every quarter.

For one thing, once I gave out my new number to a handful of friends, I had this one goofy friend for whom I recorded a custom greeting. Every time he would call, I’d let it go to voicemail and he’d start every message laughing at some silly in-joke I’d leave for him in the greeting. Okay, I grant you not many people would go to the trouble to do that, but if you knew this guy, you just might. Update: A few readers pointed out in the comments that this feature is re-enabled in Google Voice, and they’re correct though it’s not exactly easy to find.

Ever since GrandCentral became Google Voice, it’s been a lot less fun to use. That custom-greeting feature is gone, as are some of the funnier Web calling buttons that GrandCentral had offered. Maybe that’s one of the reasons behind today’s acquisition by Google of SayNow.

Details are scant about what Google has in mind, but a source close to the deal tells us that the intent on Google’s part is to make Google Voice “even better in a world of Skype and Facetime,” which implies that the next step for Google Voice is some form of video calling.

SayNow made a name for itself by giving celebrities like Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers (remember them?) and the cast of “Glee” a phone number for fans to call and hear the occasional message. And at the start of the football season, ESPN used it to send the message embedded below from former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka to some 1.6 million fans on Facebook. Another feature gave celebs a way to hold live conference calls that fans could dial in and listen to. The biggest SayNow client was the rapper Soulja Boy, who racked up 50 million calls totaling some 100 million minutes of call time. If nothing else, Google can learn from the team at SayNow how to promote the service and get people interested in using it.

SayNow also has a serious side, an enterprise application called Big Call, aimed at making conference calls for businesses easy. The company says it was built by an intern in a week.

The deal for SayNow comes on the same day that Google made its long-awaited number-porting feature official, suggesting that Google Voice is going to be the focus of a lot more time and attention in the coming months.

Ditka’s season-opening greeting for Facebook users is below.

In any case, there is a cottage industry developing for products that help those who want to stop texting and yammering on their phones, but need some help.

In the latest such move, T-Mobile plans to start offering a program for Android phones called DriveSmart Plus that allows subscribers who opt-in to have their phones automatically tell when the user is driving and put the phone into a driving mode that disables most texting and calling features. Calls can be set to go straight to voicemail, and a text message can be sent to people who are calling or texting to let them know that the recipient is driving.

Of course, all of this requires users to opt-in, so it will only help those who recognize that they have a problem and actually want to do something about it. And there are ways to override it, which is useful if there is an emergency or the cellphone user is a passenger in a moving car.

But, hey, it is a start. T-Mobile will offer DriveSmart Plus initially only for one phone–the LG Optimus T–but said it plans to expand the service soon. DriveSmart Basic, a free version of the app, is available for free on some T-Mobile phones, although that app requires users to tell the app when they are driving. DriveSmart Plus, the new premium program, will cost $4.99 per month and covers all lines on a subscriber’s account.

DriveSmart Plus is from a venture-backed start-up called Location Labs. T-Mobile is also launching another Location Labs-developed service, dubbed FamilyWhere, for tracking children or family members via their cellphones. It’s apparently useful for monitoring an elderly family member or keeping tabs on school-age kids (or perhaps tracking that cheating spouse, if they are foolish enough to opt-in to the service).

The last time Jobs went on medical leave, in January of 2009, Apple shares tanked, falling some eight percent to $78.50. But in the months that followed, they rose more than 50 percent, despite continued concerns over his health. By the end of June, Jobs was back at work. By September he was appearing onstage at Apple events.

Then came the iPad. And the iPhone 4. By October of 2010 the company’s shares had risen above $300 for the first time ever. And today they stand at $348.48.

In the end, Apple really didn’t miss a beat the last time Jobs stepped away to focus on his health, despite all the hysterical speculation that it might. And it’s not likely to this time, either — regardless of the open-ended nature of his leave and what some folks are describing as a “less optimistic” tone in his message to employees.

“Steve Jobs’s third medical leave raises the possibility, however remote, that he may not return to Apple,” Needham analyst Charlie Wolf told me this morning. “Jobs’s absence should have no measurable impact on Apple’s financial performance for several years, if ever. It took John Sculley, arguably one of the worst managers in the country’s history, three years to erase Jobs’s legacy in the 1980s. Today, starting with Tim Cook, Apple has one of the deepest and strongest managerial benches in this country. Tim Cook has matured into one of the leading managers in this country (see video below). However, no one can replace Steve Jobs, arguably the leading innovator in the past century, beginning with the Mac, then the iPod, iPhone and iPad in the past decade. What Apple loses in Jobs’s absence is the opportunity and ability to disrupt and redefine still other industries.”

Charlie’s point is a good one, though I disagree that Apple risks losing its ability to disrupt and redefine in Jobs’s absence. I think that Jobs baked those things into the company, its culture and executive leadership long ago. In fact, one could argue that it’s Apple, not the iPhone or iPad, that is Jobs’s masterpiece product, a company designed to set the bar for the industry, regardless of whether it’s him leading its day-to-day operations or not.

Below, Tim Cook speaks at Auburn University’s spring 2010 commencement.

PREVIOUSLY

• Steve Jobs Asked for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time
• Apple Shares Down Nearly 8 Percent in Frankfurt on News of Jobs’s Medical Leave
• Citing Health, Steve Jobs Steps Away From Apple, Again
• Deutsche Bank Joins the Running of the Apple Bulls
• Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Apple Investors Are Wusses
• When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish
• AAPL Sauce
• Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I Have Decided to Take a Medical Leave of Absence”
• The Entire Letter: Steve Jobs Explains His Health Problem: “Hormone Imbalance”–Predicts Recovery by Spring and Will Stay On as CEO
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, AT&T executive Ralph de la Vega said that the company plans to release 20 4G devices this year both for the LTE network and for its current HSPA+ network.

De La Vega said just after that that the company will have devices on the Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. (Update: 12:12 p.m.: While some in the audience, including Mobilized, heard an implication that there would be a 4G iPhone, an AT&T representative said De La Vega was only saying that the iPhone would be part of AT&T’s smartphone lineup and not suggesting a 4G version.)

Among the devices that will be on AT&T’s HSPA+ network is the Motorola Atrix 4G, a dual-core-powered Android phone from Motorola. The phone, which also packs 1GB of RAM, was launched by Sanjay Jha, CEO of newly split-off Motorola Mobility. one of the more interesting features is the phone’s optional “lap dock,” which allows the phone to power a small laptop capable of running a desktop version of the Firefox browser, among other programs.

AT&T will also have a new phone from HTC that will include a new version of the company’s Sense user interface and also connect to a new HTCSense.com Web portal.

“HTCSense.com makes your smartphone even smarter,” HTC CEO Peter Chou said, demonstrating a feature that lets you ring your phone when it is lost in the house or send a lost-and-found message to appear on a phone you left in a cab.

By building both HSPA+ and LTE networks, De la Vega said that the company will offer more speed and flexibility.

“More importantly, we will deliver an experience our competitors will not be able to match,” De la Vega said.

Offline instant messages and group video chat services remain offline, he said.

Bates said Skype now knows what caused the crash, but he didn’t disclose it. He ruled out the possibility of some kind of malicious attack, and said it’s conducting a detailed postmortem.

This would probably be the worst time for Skype to experience a high-profile outage. Though the Skype service is working today, lots of people who might have used it to call family members heading into Christmas may have made alternate plans.

However, the failure, whatever its cause, is also a reminder that Skype isn’t always in charge of its own ability to stay online. In 2007 an otherwise routine Windows security update issued by Microsoft forced an abnormally high number of PCs running Skype around the world to restart at roughly the same time. A software flaw prevented the Skype peer-to-peer network from compensating properly and the service crashed for two days.

This incident will also hurt its reputation with two key constituencies: Prospective business customers and potential investors. Business customers will rethink plans to deploy Skype. And potential investors will question whether this company has its act together, hurting the potential benefit from its forthcoming IPO.

To its credit, Skype did manage to restore service much faster than it did in 2007, as SkypeJournal notes here.

System failure is one of the risks that Skype admits to in its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Of the 2007 failure, Skype says in its filing:

“We experienced significant adverse publicity and lost net revenues as a result of this outage, and any similar outage in the future would likely harm our business. As we increasingly introduce products particularly targeted at business customers, any system failures could have a significant impact on our ability to attract or maintain our relationships with business customers.”

Bates’s video message to customers is below.

It’s really convenient for senders. With just a press of a button, they can dictate the equivalent of a text message and know that it will reach the person. It’s like sending a voicemail without having to listen to that annoying message or–heaven forbid–talk to someone. You can even share your thought with various groups of people.

As for the recipients, I’m not sure how they will take to an influx of “thoughts” should their friends or company really start digging the new messaging option.

In any case, Thoughts is a free download due shortly at the App Store, so it won’t cost a thing to try it out. You don’t even need a headset, though it integrates well with Jawbone’s gear and software. However, the goal of the software is to make headsets more versatile.

Plantronics is also trying to expand the device’s utility, in its case expanding from a cellphone-only headset to one that can talk to Skype and enterprise phone systems, in addition to cellphones.

Live Notes

4:15 pm: Aliph/Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman takes the stage with Walt and Kara.

4:16 pm: He starts taking out the Jambox, a wireless speaker system and speakerphone in one.

4:17 pm: Aliph is offering 40 percent off the device to D: Dive attendees.

4:17 pm: They transition to the real demo.

Rahman says they are usually talking about headsets, but today they are here to talk about an app they have developed.

4:18 pm: He says we all live in a distracted life.

“People are constantly bumping into stuff now, with all the touchscreen stuff.”

4:19 pm: He says they love texts because they are asynchronous and you don’t have to get back to people immediately.

He says they love voice because it is the oldest method of communication. “It’s better for expressing emotion,” says Rahman.

4:20 pm: He opens Jawbone Thoughts on his iPhone 4.

The app is a hybrid between texting and voicemail–quickly sending a voice message to an individual or group.

4:21 pm: Rahman sends a message, and now we switch to the receiver’s phone.

The interface is slick, and avatar-driven. Feels like playing song demos in iTunes–just a snippet to get a quick idea.

4:23 pm: The app also has a text-to-speech engine for text messages.

Kara asks, “Can you control it with voice…so no tapping on the screen?”

“Soon. We are waiting on some APIs,” says Rahman.

4:25 pm: The app can also send voice messages or texts to people who don’t have the app. It just sends a text message or email.

The demo ends with a mention of version 2.0 for the app.

Here’s Aliph’s own demo video of the Thoughts app:

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101207/jawbone-you-wont-pay-a-penny-for-our-thoughts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101203/google-buys-phonetic-arts-to-make-machines-sound-human/ http://allthingsd.com/20101203/google-buys-phonetic-arts-to-make-machines-sound-human/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:06:05 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=158 Google is beefing up its voice services with today’s acquisition of Cambridge, England-based Phonetic Arts.

Google’s view is that voice will be critical in making mobile devices with small screens and keyboards more useful. Already, it’s launched a number of services that let people use their voice to conduct a Web search, compose emails, play songs on a phone or get directions.

The acquisition of Phonetic Arts will help in the reverse situation–when the computer speaks to you, a.k.a. voice output, the company said in a blog post.

Voice interaction is a field in bloom. There are safe-driving applications that speak your text messages to you, so you can keep your eyes on the road, and Google’s own translation “speaks” text in multiple languages. Currently, Nuance Communications is one of the leaders in the voice-recognition space.

Google says Phonetic Arts’ team of researchers and engineers will focus on making the interactions less robotic and more natural by using small samples of recorded voice.

Terms weren’t disclosed, but Phonetic Arts will be joining Google’s engineering center in London.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101203/google-buys-phonetic-arts-to-make-machines-sound-human/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101018/cablevision-complains-very-quietly-about-news-corp-s-web-blackout/ http://allthingsd.com/20101018/cablevision-complains-very-quietly-about-news-corp-s-web-blackout/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:49:08 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24737 Over the weekend, News Corp. briefly pulled down Fox shows from Cablevision customers’ Web browsers.

That’s an unprecedented move in the ongoing fight between cable providers, broadcasters and networks over programming fees. And the news was a big deal for the digerati and people contemplating the future of video.

But it doesn’t seem to have registered in the broader world, and you have to work hard to find any mention of the story in old-media news outlets. And even Cablevision, which uses any ammo it can in the PR fight against Fox and News Corp. (which also owns this site), hasn’t said much about it.

Here, for instance, is Cablevision’s newest message to its customers. If you fast forward to the 1:35 mark, you’ll find a two-sentence description of the Web blackout. But hard to believe many Cablevision customers will be sticking around to hear this one:

At the very least, blacking out part of the Web sounds scary. So why is Cablevision so (relatively) quiet on this?

Two theories, which are not mutually exclusive:

• It’s not worth complaining about because this stuff doesn’t really resonate with consumers–at least, not in the way that losing access to NFL games and play-off baseball does. No one spent Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon in a bar because they couldn’t watch “Glee” on Hulu.
• It’s not worth complaining about because Cablevision and News Corp. are actually on the same ideological page when it comes to this stuff. Neither side is really that happy about free TV shows on the Web. The only real difference the two sides have is about money: News Corp. wants to get more of it for its programming, while Cablevision wants to pay less.

On a related note: I still don’t understand why News Corp./Fox backed off so quickly on Saturday, once news of the blackout got out.

There’s no official reason, but there were mutterings about the technical difficulty of cutting off access to Cablevision TV subscribers while leaving Cablevision’s Internet-only subs alone. But hard to believe that News Corp. didn’t think that one through in advance. Same goes for any “optics”-related reason–the whole point of a move like this was to generate publicity, right?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101018/cablevision-complains-very-quietly-about-news-corp-s-web-blackout/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101005/yahoo-acquires-ad-start-up-dapper/ http://allthingsd.com/20101005/yahoo-acquires-ad-start-up-dapper/#comments Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:17:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=34924

Yahoo doesn’t just shed top execs–it actually buys stuff related to its core online advertising business!

Thus, today, it announced the purchase of Dapper, an ad creation and optimization start-up.

Dapper, Yahoo (YHOO) said, “enables advertisers and agencies to quickly and easily build dynamic ad creative, leveraging data to automatically show the right product, offer, or message with each impression.” Which means it’s similar to Teracent, the ad optimization startup that Google (GOOG) bought in November 2009.

Dapper is based in San Francisco and has received $3 million in funding from Accel Partners and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor.

Terms of the acquisition were not released.

Here is the official Yahoo press release:

Yahoo! to Acquire Dapper; Extends Leadership in Display Advertising with Dapper’s Ability to Drive Performance and Efficiency with Creativity and Science

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–October 5, 2010 –Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced the company has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dapper (www.dapper.net), a technology platform providing dynamic display ad creation and optimization. Dapper enables advertisers and agencies to quickly and easily build dynamic ad creative, leveraging data to automatically show the right product, offer, or message with each impression. Dapper’s capabilities combined with Yahoo!’s already deep consumer insights will further enhance Yahoo!’s ability to deliver customized and relevant advertising.

“Yahoo!’s unique combination of Science, Art and Scale connects advertisers with consumers in ways that drive results,” said Frank Weishaupt, VP, North America Ad Marketplaces at Yahoo!. “Smart Ads will continue to be an important component of display advertising and the acquisition of Dapper will help Yahoo! to more efficiently deliver dynamic and personalized ads for customers across more of our network.”

The acquisition builds upon Yahoo!’s current display advertising leadership and will accelerate the adoption of Yahoo! Smart Ads. Yahoo! currently partners with Dapper, along with others in this space, and owning this technology will help the company deliver innovative solutions to an even broader range of advertisers and integrate dynamic ad serving into key Yahoo properties. Yahoo! is committed to the Smart Ads program and remaining open to working with innovative third parties in addition to providing a proprietary solution with the acquisition of Dapper.

“Yahoo!’s product strategy is focused on creating engaging and meaningful experiences that keep users entertained and informed,” said Dev Patel, VP, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Yahoo!. “Utilization of consumer insights to deliver relevant consumer and advertiser experiences are built into our technology from inception and Dapper’s capabilities will further enhance the experiences we deliver.”

Dapper was founded by Eran Shir and Jon Aizen in 2006 with a vision to transform display advertising with personalized, relevant content.

“The Dapper team is thrilled to be joining Yahoo!, already the largest and most successful force in display advertising,” said James Beriker, President and CEO of Dapper. “The addition of our technology platform will bring advertisers and agencies a highly scalable solution for building and optimizing dynamic ad campaigns with the reach and quality of Yahoo!’s network.”

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Yahoo! expects to complete the acquisition in the fourth quarter of 2010.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101005/yahoo-acquires-ad-start-up-dapper/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20100708/another-teaser-trailer-for-the-facebook-movie-100-percent-more-poking-of-zuckerberg/ http://allthingsd.com/20100708/another-teaser-trailer-for-the-facebook-movie-100-percent-more-poking-of-zuckerberg/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:08:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30362

Here’s another teaser trailer for “The Social Network,” which makes it clear that the movie is going to be a warts-and-all-and-then-more warts portrait of the beginnings of Facebook.

Most maligned: Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to be portrayed as a social networking sociopath.

Unlike the first–which uses single words such as “punk” and “genius,” foreboding music and some dialogue about the Web that sounds downright scary–this one uses a series of typed Wall messages on Facebook among its founders, including Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin.

Also making a special guest appearance: The Winklevoss brothers, who have claimed Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook (and whom BoomTown has affectionately dubbed The Winklevii!)

It’s all very intense, as you will see, especially the last line, uttered like there is some sort of sharp weapon involved: “You better lawyer up, since I’m coming back for everything!!!”

Rut-roh!

The marketing of this film about the Silicon Valley phenom should be pretty interesting to watch. Yesterday, I reported that Sony (SNE) studio unit Columbia Pictures will not be using Facebook to advertise “The Social Network,” due to issues around its advertising parameters.

But there are fan pages for the movie on Facebook, so apparently all is fair in, well, war and war.

Adding more fuel to the fire, it was just announced today the movie will open the New York Film Festival on September 24th (Elliot, will you attend with me?)

So, until the movie is out, here’s the new video of the trailer, with the first below it:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100708/another-teaser-trailer-for-the-facebook-movie-100-percent-more-poking-of-zuckerberg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100419/yahoo-gets-set-to-unveil-rejiggered-ad-campaign-after-first-one-stumbled/ http://allthingsd.com/20100419/yahoo-gets-set-to-unveil-rejiggered-ad-campaign-after-first-one-stumbled/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:38:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26934

Yahoo is close to rolling out a new version of its pricey advertising campaign, said several sources, after the one featuring the tagline, “It’s Y!ou,” seemed to flag.

One of the rejiggered versions being considered is centered on the concept that the Web is “personal,” with specific references–via flying tiles–to all kinds of apps and services you can use on Yahoo (YHOO), including third-party ones such as Facebook.

Yahoo launched its initial marketing effort earlier this fall with splashy events in New York and slick rollouts all over the U.S.

But not everyone at the Internet portal loved it–including CEO Carol Bartz, who criticized its effectiveness in a meeting with reporters at the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s HQ earlier this year.

“We didn’t have a really good call to action,” she said in March.

While Bartz noted that the campaign raised awareness of the Yahoo brand in international markets, it had less impact in the key U.S. market, largely because it was very unspecific about exactly what “Y!ou” meant.

Many inside the company had long worried about whether the motto and ad effort had enough punch and point to get Yahoo back on track.

But execs in charge of the effort have maintained that Yahoo was staying on the “Y!ou” message as it moves into the latest phase of the multiyear effort. However, they also promised more specific “product proof points” that focus on Yahoo’s “hero products,” such as search, email, homepage, mobile and more.

Sources said marketing head Elisa Steele is expected to give a look at the new ad direction sometime in the next week to Yahoo employees, perhaps at an all-hands meeting Wednesday that will follow its first-quarter earnings release Tuesday.

Yahoo’s new lead creative team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has been working on the next direction.

The San Francisco-based Goodby, owned by the Omnicom Group (OMC), is known for its innovative ideas and has done high-profile campaigns like the terrifically memorable “Got Milk?” campaign.

Previously, the job of goosing Yahoo’s tarnished brand, as part of the recently launched $100 million marketing push, was helmed by Ogilvy & Mather, a unit of the WPP Group (WPPGY).

Yahoo declined to comment when asked about the ad campaign.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100419/yahoo-gets-set-to-unveil-rejiggered-ad-campaign-after-first-one-stumbled/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100316/xobni-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20100316/xobni-review/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:08:08 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1117 In the same way cellphone address books helped people stop memorizing phone numbers, the magic of auto-complete helped them stop memorizing email addresses. This feature, which is built into most email programs, lets users type as few as one or two letters before seeing and selecting from a list of addresses that may or may not be saved in the email program’s address book. Too bad auto-complete on your mobile device doesn’t work the same way.

On mobile devices, the suggested names in the “To” line only include those of contacts that are saved in a device’s digital address book. This leaves people stuck mid-thumb, trying to remember an email address, or worse, being forced to wait until they return to their desks to send a message.

This week, I tested an app that generates contact information for every person a user has ever communicated with in Microsoft Outlook—or if Outlook isn’t a factor, just with the device. I tested Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry, available as of March 16 at http://xobni.com/mobile. Xobni Mobile costs $10 as a stand-alone app from Xobni Corp. or $7 if it’s bought with Xobni One, the company’s new cloud-based storage service that costs $4 monthly. One year of Xobni Mobile with the Xobni One service costs $40.

I tested Xobni Mobile on my BlackBerry Curve 8900 and used the Xobni One service to connect with Outlook, which was running on my PC with Xobni’s desktop program installed. This app makes a big difference for people like me, who rarely sync their devices with their PCs, don’t primarily correspond with people in their corporate Exchange networks and don’t like taking the time to manually add names, email addresses and phone numbers into the Contacts section of the BlackBerry. This app also uses Xobni’s analytics feature to rank people, thus returning results sorted according to how much a user emails with someone.

More Meshing

Xobni Mobile could stand to do a better job of meshing with the BlackBerry’s operating system, especially considering that the company worked with Research in Motion (RIMM) to build a deeply integrated app. I’ll admit that it comes close—a finger swipe up on the email-compose screen opens the Xobni app. But as my high-school economics teacher always said, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. The process required to open the app, type the contact’s name, select the name from within the Xobni app and return to the compose screen can feel too long and a bit clumsy.

Another downside is that the Xobni Mobile app doesn’t yet integrate with text messaging or dialing numbers, so rather than pull up a phone number from within the device’s texting or dialing interface, users must open the app and select a contact before calling or texting. A Xobni representative said the company is working with RIM on deeper integration.

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) started a couple years ago with its namesake product, a downloadable add-on for Outlook that analyzed and indexed all emails and ran in a side panel within the email program. Since its introduction, Xobni for Outlook has added enhancements, including the built-in ability to display an email contact’s Twitter and Facebook profiles. And some of these spill over into the mobile app.

Souping Up a Device

The Xobni desktop program currently works only on PCs (not Macs) that have Outlook installed, and runs only on high-end BlackBerrys, including the Curve 8900, Tour, Storm, Bold and Bold 2. The Xobni Mobile app connected to Xobni for Outlook using Xobni One considerably soups up the experience, adding an average of 10-times more contacts than the BlackBerry alone. The top 6,000 contacts (according to the analysis of who you email the most) will be stored locally on the device, as well as each contact’s photo, which gets pulled in from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook or a Xobni account. Additional services connected to Xobni include Hoovers, Twitter and Salesforce.

People who don’t use Outlook and/or don’t want to pay for the Xobni One service can still use the app by itself with Web-based email programs running on the BlackBerry.

Finding Mom

I found myself using Xobni on my BlackBerry a lot, despite its extra steps and slightly cumbersome interface. For instance, it gave me three different emails for my mom, rather than the one outdated email of hers that I long ago manually stored in my BlackBerry Contacts and hadn’t updated since. I also liked Xobni’s way of pulling photos for many contacts onto my device.

I didn’t see a noticeable change in my BlackBerry’s battery life while using the Xobni app, though its battery will be taxed when it grabs large bunches of contacts and photos from the server. By default, this only happens when the BlackBerry is charging.

The Xobni One service demonstrates the company’s move into the increasingly crowded realm of backup software programs. When the BlackBerry is charging, this service updates the PC’s Outlook program with any changes on your BlackBerry and sends new contact data added to Outlook to the BlackBerry. If I lost my BlackBerry tomorrow or changed jobs next week, I’d still be able to retrieve several years’ worth of Outlook contacts and their profiles on a new BlackBerry using my Xobni One log-in credentials. (These same credentials, an email and password, are required when installing the app on the BlackBerry.)

Xobni hasn’t announced any definite plans for integration with other mobile devices, but a representative said that the company is considering making iPhone and Android apps.

If you use a PC, Microsoft Outlook and a BlackBerry, Xobni offers a smart solution for automatically organizing all of your contacts into one place and allows for your contacts to be stored somewhere other than just in Outlook or just on your mobile device. If it was a little easier to access on the BlackBerry, I’d like it even more.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100316/xobni-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100310/dear-foursquare-boomtown-is-mayor-of-gossip-girl-and-youre-not/ http://allthingsd.com/20100310/dear-foursquare-boomtown-is-mayor-of-gossip-girl-and-youre-not/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:17:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25340

On Monday night, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley posted a Flickr photo of a BlackBerry screen featured on the latest episode of the red-hot television potboiler, “Gossip Girl.”

The text message on the screen (which I took a picture of here) reads, “Elizabeth Fisher just checked in at the Algonquin Hotel.”

Wrote Crowley in the image title, which he also posted on Twitter: “Checkins on Gossip Girl? No mention of foursquare, but hey, still pretty hot.”

Not hot at all, actually, because there have been zero checkins on Foursquare in the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite as yet!

If you watched the show, you also would know they are too busy hooking up in an endless round-robin, with an occasional Belgian prince drug dealer thrown into the mix, to claim domain mastery of Geisha or Henri Bendel.

(If you don’t believe me, see a clip from this episode, titled “The Hurt Locket,” below, in which Blair Waldorf is dressed up like a porn version of “Anna Karenina.”)

But way to try to ride Serena van der Woodsen’s hip Prada coattails, Dennis.

In fact, the note–which was sent to billionaire playboy Chuck Bass, who is searching for his possibly-not-dead-in-childbirth-for-which-he-has-blamed-himself-mercilessly mother, after running into a suspicious lady at his father’s gravesite on the first anniversary of his tragic car-accident death, who was carrying flowers and then dropped a locket with an engraved “E,” for Elizabeth, which was also his mother’s name…you get the idea–was from Bass’s private investigator, simply telling him she had checked into the hotel.

As in, “Gimme a key and extra towels.” And not as in: Trying to be Mayor of the Algonquin Hotel.

None of the characters on “Gossip Girl” would try to be mayor of anything, since they own the town.

Which is also pretty clear if you watched the show–which just returned from a painfully long hiatus–as closely as BoomTown does.

And? who am I, besides a keeper of the “Gossip Girl” integrity?

That’s a secret I’ll never tell.

You know you love me.

XOXO

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100310/dear-foursquare-boomtown-is-mayor-of-gossip-girl-and-youre-not/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100120/how-can-we-miss-fail-whale-if-it-wont-go-away-twitter-down/ http://allthingsd.com/20100120/how-can-we-miss-fail-whale-if-it-wont-go-away-twitter-down/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:23:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23273 Twitter went down early this morning, as you can see from the picture of the infamous fail whale below, which is now gracing the microblogging site’s front page.

A message read: “Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”

UPDATE: It’s back!

Here’s Twitter’s explanation of the 90-minute outage: “A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100120/how-can-we-miss-fail-whale-if-it-wont-go-away-twitter-down/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090924/gmail-outage/ http://allthingsd.com/20090924/gmail-outage/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:38:04 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=25396 So much for those Gmail-reliability improvements Google promised us earlier this month. The service, which was felled by a major outage just three weeks ago, is once again suffering from accessibility issues. It’s not yet clear what, exactly, is amiss. Some users say they can’t access contacts and chat. Others can’t get into the service at all.

Perhaps it’s time to put that beta tag back on.

Google (GOOG) is aware of the issues and is working on a fix, according to a Google Apps Status message:

“September 24, 2009 7:29:00 AM PDT
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 8:29:00 AM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

UPDATE: Google says it has resolved the issues affecting Gmail “for some users” and expects a resolution for the remaining ones within the hour. One caveat though: “Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google Outage Caused by Asian “Traffic Jam”
• New From Google Labs: Seriously Offline Gmail
• Hotmail Users Unable to Access Spam for Second Week

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090924/gmail-outage/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090924/gmail-outage-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090924/gmail-outage-2/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:38:04 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=25396 So much for those Gmail-reliability improvements Google promised us earlier this month. The service, which was felled by a major outage just three weeks ago, is once again suffering from accessibility issues. It’s not yet clear what, exactly, is amiss. Some users say they can’t access contacts and chat. Others can’t get into the service at all.

Perhaps it’s time to put that beta tag back on.

Google (GOOG) is aware of the issues and is working on a fix, according to a Google Apps Status message:

“September 24, 2009 7:29:00 AM PDT
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 8:29:00 AM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

UPDATE: Google says it has resolved the issues affecting Gmail “for some users” and expects a resolution for the remaining ones within the hour. One caveat though: “Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google Outage Caused by Asian “Traffic Jam”
• New From Google Labs: Seriously Offline Gmail
• Hotmail Users Unable to Access Spam for Second Week

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090924/gmail-outage-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090716/viacom-says-its-cracked-the-online-web-ad-riddle-using-lots-of-online-web-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20090716/viacom-says-its-cracked-the-online-web-ad-riddle-using-lots-of-online-web-ads/#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:59:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9325 Want to make Web video watchers and Web video advertisers happy? Do it with a short ad at the beginning of the clip, and then another ad that pops up while the clip is running.

So says Viacom’s MTV, which reached that conclusion after testing various ad units in more than 50 million video clips it ran across its various sites. Viacom (VIA) says the intro-and-overlay package works best for advertisers’ “brand lift,” which it defines via metrics like unaided awareness, aided awareness and purchase intent.

And, it insists, customers like it, too! You can see an example at the bottom of this post, as well as a schematic that shows the order and timing of the ads.

This isn’t necessarily groundbreaking stuff: Overlays combined with another ad message have been popular with advertisers for some time. And when a company that makes its money selling ads boasts about how great its ads are, it’s best to accept those claims with just a pinch of reserved skepticism.

But these kinds of studies and promotions are taken seriously within the ad business, and Web publishers of all sorts are eager to find new ad formats (see–or try to ignore–the new ginormous ads rolling out this summer).

Meanwhile, as MediaPost notes, Publicis’s VivaKi is working with video providers, including Hulu, CBS (CBS), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO), to produce its own “killer ad unit,” which is expected to debut next year. And Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which once avoided ads like the plague, is now trying every possible combination it can find.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090716/viacom-says-its-cracked-the-online-web-ad-riddle-using-lots-of-online-web-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090629/bing-marketing-dollars-at-work-farewell-michael-jackson/ http://allthingsd.com/20090629/bing-marketing-dollars-at-work-farewell-michael-jackson/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:46:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=15156 Where is Microsoft (MSFT) spending its $100 million in marketing for its new Bing search service?

Well, here’s a photo that was forwarded to me showing an advertisement on top of a taxi in Manhattan of a goodbye message from Bing, as well as GE (GE) entertainment unit NBC, to the late pop legend, Michael Jackson.

It was a joint effort from Bing and NBC, said a Microsoft source. The software giant and NBC have a strong partnership surrounding the launch the search service.

Done by Show Media, which specializes in this form of advertising, the text–with a picture from Jackson’s “Thriller” album–reads: “We will miss you Michael.”

Presumably, enough of a condolence to get fans to search about him on Bing–instead of on Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO)–and get news updates from NBC’s many media outlets.

Jackson’s sudden death last week caused a massive surge of activity all over the Web, including at search engines.

Here’s the taxi-topper image (click on it to make it larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090629/bing-marketing-dollars-at-work-farewell-michael-jackson/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20081208/google-makes-its-first-real-stab-at-mobile-marketing-adwords-on-iphones/ http://allthingsd.com/20081208/google-makes-its-first-real-stab-at-mobile-marketing-adwords-on-iphones/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:08:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1828 Say this for Google: If the company’s revenue really does contract next quarter, it won’t be because it’s not trying–the company is rolling out a steady stream of tweaks and improvements to goose incremental advertising spend.

The latest: An announcement that advertisers who buy AdWords–Google’s main revenue engine–can now automatically buy mobile advertising, too. The company says AdWords buyers can choose to have their AdWords automatically show up on phones that support “real” Internet browsers like T-Mobile’s G1 phone and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Here’s an example:

These ads will reach a relatively small slice of mobile phone users. But that population will increase rapidly, particularly if Apple really does start selling cut-price phones at Wal-Mart (WMT). Which means that Google (GOOG) really may be the first company to make inroads toward the supposedly-huge-but-so-far-mythical mobile ad market.

Release from Google’s Daniel Rubin:

Today, we’re announcing a new campaign-level option that allows you to extend the reach of your text and image ads to show your AdWords ads on the T-Mobile G1, the iPhone, and other mobile devices that have full (HTML) Internet browsers. This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. We hope this option will help you more effectively reach your audience with the right message at the right time.

G1 and iPhone ads have many of the same benefits as our standard mobile-format ads, such as allowing you to deliver mobile-specific calls-to-action and reaching your audience when they’re on the go. Showing ads on the G1 and iPhone also have additional advantages for your advertising. Users are performing a lot of searches on these devices, and searches are likely to go up during the holiday season. Last Christmas, the iPhone drove more traffic to Google.com worldwide than any other mobile platform.

Unlike standard mobile ads, you don’t need to format your ads for mobile phones to show your ads on the G1 and iPhone. Because the G1 and iPhone has full Internet browsers, you’ll be able to display your standard AdWords ads and landing pages on these devices without having to modify them.

With this new option, you’re opted-in to show ads on the G1 and iPhone, and you’re also eligible to show on additional devices that use full Internet browsers as these devices enter the market. If you want to change your settings to only show ads on G1s and iPhones or to not show ads on these devices, follow these steps.

If you’re running standard mobile ad formats, they won’t be affected, and they’ll continue to run on mobile phones with mobile (WAP) browsers.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081208/google-makes-its-first-real-stab-at-mobile-marketing-adwords-on-iphones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081202/birds-of-a-feather-twitter-together/ http://allthingsd.com/20081202/birds-of-a-feather-twitter-together/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:20:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081202/birds-of-a-feather-twitter-together/ If you’ve heard of Twitter but don’t exactly know what it is or how it works, you’re in good company. In the past two months a bunch of my friends, ranging in age from early 20s to late 30s, have asked me about Twitter — or Tweeter, as one person accidentally called it.

To clear things up, I’ve put together a basic Twitter guide that explains how to use it, Twitter lingo, privacy options, mobile applications that can be used with the service and problems that it has. Let’s get started.

Twitter limits social-networking updates to 140 characters or less. The service is surprisingly useful, but leaves room for improvement.

What is it? In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they’re currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters.

Lingo: Twitter is the name of the service. The term twittering describes the activity of updating a Twitter account. A tweet is an individual Twitter update. Twitterers are people who use the service.

Followers, not Friends: Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace use the term “friend” to refer to people who are connected with one another, but Twitterers can simply follow one another’s messages by finding a person’s username and selecting a “Follow” option. This alerts the person that you’re following them, and they can reciprocally choose to follow you, or not.

Why use it? While some people primarily use Twitter to post updates about their activities or comments on the news, I use the service more as a follower, allowing me to see quick snippets of news as it occurs. Most tweets are written by real people, while others, such as updates from news organizations that you’ve selected, are automatically generated. Many tweets include the addresses of Web sites with relevant articles that tell readers more on a topic.

Where is it? Twitter works on your Web browser at Twitter.com, where user updates appear in a simple list form as they are submitted. After you’ve signed up and started following other people, those people’s updates, or tweets, will appear when you log onto Twitter.com using a username and password.

Twitter also works on mobile phones, where the 140-character limit allows messages to be sent and received via SMS text messaging. Tweets can also be sent and received via email. Users with smartphones like BlackBerrys or iPhones can use one of the many popular mobile applications for accessing Twitter, which offer much richer options than simple SMS does; I’ll get into these later.

Privacy: Unlike other social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter isn’t focused on holding and sharing personal information about its members. Indeed, the service operates with a majority (80%, according to the company) of users opting to keep their updates public, that is, follow-able by anyone, without permission. This openness encourages people to follow one another or to see who others are already following, and then follow the same people.

However, users can opt to protect their updates, meaning they must grant permission for others to follow them. If you’d like to sign up for Twitter, but aren’t comfortable putting your first and/or last name on the site, you don’t have to; instead, just tell others your username.

Twitter Page Personalization: Each user has a Twitter page showing all of his or her updates, or tweets. (Mine is twitter.com/kabster728, and you can follow me.) This page also shows the number of people a user follows, how many people follow her and how many total updates she has posted.

Twitterers can customize their Twitter page by uploading a photo to be used as the background. The icon representing each user can also be personalized, and this is important because it appears beside that person’s tweets on Twitter.com, where followers recognize and appreciate its familiarity. Some people, including me, use pictures of themselves as their icons, while others use random shots.

Apps/Clients: Twitter works on any browser, and will also work on a mobile browser. If you have a mobile device like the BlackBerry or iPhone, you can jazz up the experience by downloading a third-party app like TwitterFon, TwitterBerry, Tweetie or Twitteriffic. Twittervision, another mobile app, plots points on maps to show where tweets originated. Desktop clients also abound, including Twhirl and TweetDeck. Twitterfeed will set your blog to automatically post content to Twitter.

@Replies, Direct Messages: Each tweet that appears in your Twitter feed can be replied to using a shortcut arrow that appears beside the tweet, and these responses to tweets are called @Replies. So if JoeSchmo tweets to say he saw the new James Bond movie and hated it, you can reply to this with a tweet of your own that says, “@JoeSchmo I still adore Daniel Craig.” These @Replies appear for everyone to see, and must start with @ plus the username of whomever you’re responding to.

Direct Messages differ from @Replies because they can be sent only between people who are following one another. These messages aren’t posted publicly. They appear on your Twitter.com page in a right-side section labeled Direct Messages and will also be sent to your mobile device if you have one registered with Twitter.

Favorites: If you read a tweet that you really like, you can save it as a favorite by selecting a small star beside the tweet, thus adding it to a Favorites section on your homepage. Anyone can see anyone else’s Favorites, regardless of whether or not they’re following one another.

Problems: Twitter’s bare-bones approach gets to the point quickly, displaying tweets in a simple, quick-read format. But the site is lacking in many areas. It used to enable searching for people on Twitter, but that capability is currently down. Now, to search for friends on Twitter, you must upload your email contacts from a Web-based mail service. The company says it plans to have people-search working again by the end of the year. Meanwhile, search.twitter.com enables keyword or location searches.

Twitter lacks the ability to sort tweets according to what the user wants. If I just want to see tweets from real people and not those that are automatically generated, I’m out of luck. Same goes if I want to keep certain friends’ tweets in a prominent place on my homepage; Twitter has no way of doing this.

Twitter users aren’t notified when someone responds to their tweet with an @Reply. I recently happened to look at @Replies on my Twitter homepage and found three from people who follow me (I don’t follow them).

If you’re adding a Web address to a tweet and the characters in the URL take up too much space, Twitter will automatically use TinyURL behind the scenes to shrink your long link into a shorter one when you post your tweet. But this works only if you have enough remaining characters in your tweet to fit the long version of your link. A built-in TinyURL converter on the page would help immensely.

Twitter says it’s working to make @Replies more effective. It also says it plans to do more with filtering and sorting, so that the Twitter interface is more useful. In the meantime, Twitter does a good job of giving people simplified news about others and the world around them. If you’re often in a rush, Twitter can be a great resource for fast information.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081202/birds-of-a-feather-twitter-together/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071108/ford-microsoft-create-car-system-that-lets-you-ask-for-a-song/ http://allthingsd.com/20071108/ford-microsoft-create-car-system-that-lets-you-ask-for-a-song/#comments Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20071108/ford-microsoft-create-car-system-that-lets-you-ask-for-a-song/ Under the hood, modern cars are packed with computers. But in the passenger cabin, they remain analog islands in a digital world. For some, this may be a blessed relief. But others want to bring their digital music and digital messaging into the place where they spend hours every week. Unfortunately, that’s still too clumsy a process.

Yes, more cars are making it easy to connect wirelessly with Bluetooth-equipped cellphones so drivers can make hands-free phone calls — but not hands-free text messaging. And that results in the dangerous practice of texting while behind the wheel.

And, yes, you can pipe the sound from your portable music player into the car’s speakers. But you usually have to control the song selection and skipping by handling the player itself, and that’s another dangerous distraction.

Some car makers solve this music problem with integration kits that transfer control of the music player to the dashboard or steering-wheel controls and display song information on a dashboard screen. But this option is most common in luxury cars and is typically designed only for Apple’s iPods.

Now, Ford Motor, working with Microsoft, has come up with a system that’s a big step forward in integrating cellphones and portable music players into cars. It’s highly versatile and works with numerous devices on a wide range of Ford models.

I’ve been testing the $395 option, called SYNC, with multiple cellphones and music players. It’s quite good and indicates that the digitally backward auto industry finally may be getting it.

SYNC combines the often separate cellphone and music-player functions into one unified interface that can be controlled by a voice-recognition system that works well. You can command it by voice to play a single song out of thousands on your iPod or other music player. With some phones, it will even read your incoming cellphone text messages to you, and properly pronounce text-message shortcuts such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud.)

Ford isn’t limiting this system to luxury cars. It’s available on a dozen models — including the company’s least-expensive car, the Ford Focus. I tested SYNC on a Focus.

SYNC simultaneously handles multiple cellphones and music players from a variety of companies. It imports and remembers the address books and song information for up to 12 phones and four players, so that as you connect and reconnect a remembered device, wired or wirelessly, it is ready to go. It doesn’t have a hard disk and doesn’t store your music.

Unlike other approaches, the Ford system doesn’t require a special cable or proprietary connector. It uses a standard USB port and the cable that came with your player. SYNC will even play music directly from a USB thumb drive. There’s also an audio-in jack for players that don’t support USB, or which require both.

SYNC can even stream music wirelessly, over Bluetooth, from the cellphones that support this feature. However, due to limitations in Bluetooth, it doesn’t transfer song selection controls, or the song information display, to the dashboard in this scenario. The same limitation applies if your player can be connected only with the audio-in jack.

I tested SYNC with two music players and four cellphones and the system handled them all effortlessly. I used a year-old iPod and a new Samsung P2 as my test music players, and SYNC quickly transferred their song information and allowed me to select playlists, artists, albums, genres and individual songs by voice command.

I tried the cellphone functions with an Apple iPhone, a Motorola RAZR, a RIM BlackBerry and a new HTC Shadow phone and, again, all worked properly. While phone calls and address-book imports were handled easily on all the phones, some of SYNC’s advanced functions, like the reading of text messages and the streaming of music, aren’t widely supported on all phones. For example, only the RAZR worked with the text-message feature.

The iPhone test was especially interesting because it is both a Bluetooth-equipped phone and a full-fledged iPod. The SYNC treated it as both, simultaneously.

I found the voice-command system surprisingly reliable. In four days of testing, I encountered only a few instances in which my commands were misunderstood.

SYNC has some limitations. While it can read text messages on compatible phones, Ford didn’t build in the ability to dictate and send text messages. You can send only canned messages, like “Be there in 20 minutes.”

But there are a lot of advanced features — too many to list here. And Ford plans to add others, which owners will be able to install at home. Detailed information on the system is available at syncmyride.com.

Alas, I did discover one glitch. Twice during my testing, SYNC mistakenly declared that a music player had been unplugged when it hadn’t been. The system recovered with a little fiddling, but Ford needs to fix this.

Still, SYNC is a very well done method for integrating digital devices into a car, and in a model that most people can afford.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071108/ford-microsoft-create-car-system-that-lets-you-ask-for-a-song/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071004/voice-mail-gets-a-lot-more-fun-with-free-services/ http://allthingsd.com/20071004/voice-mail-gets-a-lot-more-fun-with-free-services/#comments Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Sarmad Ali http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20071004/voice-mail-gets-a-lot-more-fun-with-free-services/ The days of “leave a message after the beep” could soon be a thing of the past. New Web services are giving cellphone voice mail a fresh sound with features that let users personalize outgoing messages for individual callers and eschew unwanted calls. I’ve been testing two such free services, YouMail and GrandCentral, that let you customize phone-mail features through wireless Internet communication. They’re like your voice-mail service on steroids.

Overall, I found the services fun and easy to use. There is no limit to how many personalized voice mails you can record, so everyone on your contact list can hear a greeting just for them. It’s labor-intensive to set up, but online forms are easy to navigate. The services make money by selling ads on their sites.

In addition to tailored greetings, YouMail lets you save your voice-mail messages, email your saved messages via audio files, share messages using a URL link, retrieve deleted messages, and see who called you and when and whether they listened to your message. You can do all this online, or from your phone — if it has Internet service.

You check your voice mail by phone or over the Internet. As with your carrier’s voice-mail service, you can simply dial an access number and listen to messages. I logged into my account at youmail.com and clicked on “My Voicemail.” The sound quality was superb, as it was when I listened to the audio files that were sent to my Yahoo inbox. (I gave my email address when I signed up.)

I also checked messages from other phones by dialing the access number. The service doesn’t interfere with voice mails already saved on your regular carrier’s system.

YouMail gives you the option of keeping your voice mails indefinitely. Messages are stored in your online account and offer you an email audio file as backup.

One fun feature in YouMail is DitchMail, which blocks messages from certain callers. They don’t even get a chance to leave a message. You ditch a caller by double-clicking on their names in your online phonebook and checking the DitchMail option, or by pressing 86 on your phone after hearing a message from a person you don’t want to hear from again. When dumpees call your number, they’ll hear either a standard message — “This number has been disconnected” — or one you record.

Users can record special greetings or upload ones online if their computers have microphones; otherwise, they just press 0 on their phone keypad to record.

Signing up on YouMail.com is simple. You just register your mobile number and email address, and receive a confirmation code via text message on your cellphone. Switching from your main carrier’s voice mail to YouMail takes a few minutes and switching back is just as simple. Instructions are available on the site.

YouMail has its drawbacks. The access number you use to retrieve messages is long distance, so it can get costly with some plans. And depending on your text-messaging plan, you’ll likely be charged for the alerts you get whenever someone leaves a message. But you can turn off the text-message option.

GrandCentral is even easier to use when it comes to recording multiple greetings and dumping unwanted callers. One caveat: GrandCentral is in a beta, or testing, phase. You must be invited by a member to sign up.

The service gives users another phone number, based on their ZIP Code, to which they can link their cellphone, office and home numbers. You can hand out GrandCentral’s one unified number and check just one mailbox.

I like GrandCentral’s Web interface better than You Mail’s. The features are very simple to use. You start by adding contact numbers online and recording greetings for individuals. When people call your unified number, all the phones you linked ring so you can pick up any of them. When you answer, you hear a recorded message telling who is calling and giving you options of how to handle that call. Meanwhile, the caller hears only the phone ringing.

The service recognizes each caller in your address book; new callers have to say their names the first time they call, and from then on, the service recognizes them, too.

I like the feature that lets you screen calls. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, your phone displays Caller ID information. When you pick up, a recorded message states the caller’s name and offers fours ways to handle the call: 1 to answer, 2 to send the caller to voice mail, 3 to listen in while a message is being recorded, or 4 to accept and record the call. If you press 3 and then decide you want to answer a call, you can press the star key to pick up.

Blocking a caller is similar to that YouMail feature. The callers can’t leave a message, and they hear a prerecorded message that your number is no longer in service. But unlike with YouMail, your phone won’t ring and you can’t leave the blocked caller a customized message.

Both services spice up your voice mail. And considering they’re free, they’re worth a try.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation. Find all of his columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Email me at Sarmad.Ali@wsj.com.

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