Applications or apps have revolutionized the social media market in the last year, both on the web and on mobile phones. However, few applications allow users to access their personalized content between platforms. Sonic Boom, founded in late 2003, publishes “mobile social media,” which allows members of social networks like Facebook to generate and access their content on both online and mobile mediums.
“Having the mobile and web communities is novel, but it’s been done before,” says David Danon, founder and CEO of Sonic Boom. “We’re letting people create things to share across two mediums. Most people weren’t able to send stuff to a phone easily. Certainly for a phone to the web, it was complicated.” The New York-based enterprise is launching a suite of Facebook and iPhone apps later this year, including the first mobile trivia game for Facebook: “Name That Movie.”
With the proliferation of social applications on Facebook, MySpace and Meebo, Danon says that they have found viral marketing to be the best strategy in promoting their products. “What we’ve realized is that instead of having a marketing budget, what we do is spend marketing on building out these sites or Facebook applications that are complementary to our product,” Danon says. “It allows us to get the most exposure with the carriers to the demographic we’re both pursuing.”
Since Facebook apps have proven to be incredibly popular, many developers are testing the lucrative waters. Since the phone can serve as a billing mechanism, Danon says, it creates a “monetization bridge.” Danon uses the web as a gathering service and funnels people to an experience where they can ultimately purchase something. For example, if a user creates a graphic on the "Tattoo Shop" application on Facebook, he or she will then get a mobile notice on how to receive it on the phone. “We’re allowing people to discover our experiences on the web, but also allowing them to purchase the mobile version of it,” he says.”
Sonic Boom already has some iPhone applications in the works for the iTunes store, Danon says they’ll also bring their products to the Blackberry store when it opens and will be releasing some apps on T-Mobile by the end of the year. The company is also working on some new applications to help boost the music industry, as ringtones sales have plummeted. “They need to create a new product that energizes that retail space.”
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger got things rolling at North America’s largest solar industry conference, San Diego’s Solar Power International Expo 2008, with a keynote address last night. “We must not give into those who say that our environmental goals should take a back seat until the economy improves and comes back,” he said, “Quite the opposite. It’s short-sighted thinking and just plain wrong.”
The governor said that states and countries should double their commitments to green initiatives, and he praised the U.S. Congress for passing an 8-year extension on the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar energy, which includes the $2,000 cap on residential solar tax credits.
Today’s highlight events include a four-member CEO panel on solar market development, followed by a Solar Power Block Party in San Diego’s Gaslamp District.
Elsewhere at the expo, over 400 exhibitors will be displaying their solar products and programs. Some exhibitors include Kyocera Solar, Inc., which is debuting its most powerful solar module to date, and Xantrex Technology Inc., which is launching the Grid Tie Solar Power Inverter, a high-efficiency transformer. One development getting extra attention is a collaboration between SunPower Corporation and General Electric to install SunPower T10 solar roof tiles on five Hewlett Packard rooftops. Developers said that the new system will provide 10% of the facility's power load. According to a joint statement from the companies, “The system will reduce more than 60 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years, which is equivalent to providing electricity to 3,800 homes or removing more than 5,250 cars from the road.”
200 speakers will also present this week at 60 breakout sessions surrounding the topics of solar tax credits, efficiency and performance, and state and federal initiatives. Viewers can watch daily coverage on the official web site at RenewableEnergyWorld.com.
As we find ourselves amidst a global economic funk, no one has money to waste, especially on gifts nobody wants. One way to save your friends and family some time and money and organize your interests is MyRegistry.com, an online tool where you can register for, well, just about anything.
MyRegistry launched in November 2005 as the platform’s founders saw that there was a market for creating gift registries, outside of the realm of weddings and baby showers. “We’re such sophisticated, eclectic human beings on this planet that it’s impossible to find something for everyone all the time,” says Nancy Lee, president of MyRegistry.com. While weddings, babies and the holidays are the site’s staple portals, visitors can add all types of gifts, including cash. “If you can imagine it, you can add it,” she says.
Users can add gifts manually with their own images and descriptions or through an easy toolbar. If a person is looking at an online store, he or she just has to click on the browser button, which captures the image and hot links it back to the original location, automatically adding it to his or her registry. MyRegistry has partnered with over 1,000 stores, but 30% of new accounts spawn virally from people who have found things on other registries.
Lee says that since MyRegistry’s is not a retailer, they have the opportunity to take advantage of many things that retailers can’t. For instance, the site has a sophisticated e-card system in which users can login to Facebook accounts and instantly send an e-card to their friends. “Easy is key -- especially in this economic environment.”
Despite the economic turmoil the country is facing and many people cutting their shopping budgets, Lee is optimistic, saying that she expects they will do just fine as people will be looking for easier ways to shop. “When you create a list, you kind of liberate your friends,” she says, “They’re not driving around wasting time and energy.” She adds that there are certain occasions, such as weddings and baby showers that are just too important to skimp on, regardless of the economic climate. “When you’re getting married, economy problems or no economy problems, you’re going to get what you want.”
MyRegistry has also found success with a new type of registry: green shopping. Green is popular these days, but it is hard to find big stores where one can find lots of eco-friendly items for affordable prices. “We found that there’s enormous amount of traffic on our site for green registries because there is no green superstore,” Lee says. Users can add items like recycled glass dishware, a trash compactor, or even donate to various charities.
With the holiday season quickly approaching, it’s probably time to start writing that wish list. “In the end, it’s really great to get something that has sentimental value, but there’s also no point in getting someone something they don’t want.”
As banks and financial services firms continue to fail, one has to ask who was heading the shop and how did they drop the ball. A lot of people agree that we need to pay closer attention to Wall Street from now on. ExecDex is a new social media monitoring and reputation management system, graphically illustrating both public and media perceptions of the top executives of Fortune 500 companies, including key Wall Street financial firms and execs.
Rankings are based on coverage in the mainstream media and blogs. “It’s essentially a perception or combination of buzz and tone of coverage,” says Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics, Inc., the text analytics and sentiment analysis technologies company behind the product. “What do people like or dislike about this individual and is there a lot of it? If you’re getting no news, that’s not particularly great either. A lot of visibility should come through the CEO.”
Executives are graphically represented by ranking and news story volume. Catlin emphasizes that it’s a medium for analyzing what’s being written about the company versus what’s being written about the executive. One telling comparison is matching up stock prices with coverage.
People aren’t just concerned about leaders in financial sector. For instance, Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple, who has dropped from number 2 to 99 in the rankings this past week. In his profile, a graphic represents that Apple’s stock has dropped significantly since Friday. Now given the current economic climate, this is to be expected. But the drop also coincides with the news that Jobs possibly had a heart attack, and many insiders and tech critics are wondering (and worrying) about the fate of the Silicon Valley corporation without him.
Catlin expects that the people who will find the service interesting are in marketing, public relations or employees of the business sector tracking particular industries and companies. He concludes that its not just about finding macro trends in the media, but looking at what sorts of stories are being picked up and drilling into that information.
Learning a new language as an adult is never an easy task. While there hundreds of language-learning software products on the market, it’s often difficult to differentiate between any of them. One product trying to stand out from the crowd is Tell Me More, produced by Auralog. Geared towards individuals with 10 levels of vocal and grammatical instruction, developers guarantee that students can reach a level of fluentness where they can hold normal conversations with native speakers.
“[W]e are a truly immersive product,” says David DeCouto, a language solutions consultant at Auralog, adding that the software contains hundreds of hours of language learning and dozens of programs. Premium-level software starts at 850 hours and performance-level shoots up to 2,000. Along with voice-recognition software as well as cultural and grammatical components, Tell Me More has a unique feature in which a student can see the soundwaves of his/her voice in comparison with a native speaker’s voice intonations to determine how much they match up.
In comparison with other language-learning programs like Rosetta Stone, DeCouto says Auralog’s product is superior because “its all inclusive in one box,” and it can take someone from “absolute beginner to advanced.” Developers have found that with every 50 hours of language learning, 95% of students move up at least one level (there are 10 total). “It’s a matter of being diligent and keeping at it,” DeCouto emphasizes.
Tell Me More software is available in nine languages including Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. While the software is only available for Windows-compatible computers at the moment, developers are planning for a Mac version in the future.
Interested consumers can find the language aides at Tell Me More’s online store. Performance-level software lists for $499, and the premium-level lists at $295. The online store routinely runs promotions, however, so keep an eye out. It’s recommended you buy the software through the company to be eligible for the money back guarantee, which gives the customer 90 days to open the box, review it, and if he/she doesn’t like it, one can return all content with a sales receipt for a refund or replacement.
The pop princess has returned to her throne and it’s about time. Fans (including myself, and I am not afraid to admit it) have been waiting for four long years, through the many, MANY trials and tribulations of Britney Spears, but it looks like America’s fallen sweetheart is finally back on top and building up her brand again.
Fresh off three wins at the MTV Video Music Awards, Spears has been touring New York City this week, from debuting her new single, “Womanizer” (Wonder who that could be about?), to even visiting school kids at the Bronx Zoo. The songstress also announced plans for a new world tour this past Monday on New York’s Z100 radio station. Ms. Spears’ longtime label, Jive Records, launched a brand new site this week in preparation for her seventh album, Circus, to be released on December 2, the singer’s 27th birthday. Full of song clips from past albums, new releases and an enormous amount of media and forums to choose from, fans will be entertained for hours.
BritneySpears.com, sporting a big “beta” stamp on the top of the homepage, recognizes a revamped webpage, and probably, a revamped star. Judging by her cleaned-up act and look, its hard to believe that less than a year ago, Spears was in and out of hospitals and having every mishap photographed for the world to see. While the paparazzi still follows her every move, at least now she's taking charge of her career again.
Breaking into the media publishing industry without a portfolio is extremely difficult, if not impossible. However, one citizen journalism site is looking to make portfolio-building easier and more lucrative. Helium.com, is a competition-based model in which writers can post articles they’ve written, and publishers can buy them all in one spot.
“The internet has always offered this promise of connecting everyone,” says Mark Ranalli, CEO of Helium.com, “Unfortunately, in practice that hasn’t happened. 70 million people blogging is just people screaming. No one is hearing anything.” Coming up on its two-year anniversary this October, Helium has grown to 130,000 community members since 2006. It boasts 100,000 unique topics and over 800,000 articles are published on the site. Writers’ backgrounds range from university students trying to get first clips to stay-at-home parents looking to break into the industry.
Helium’s rating structure and payment model sets it apart from other citizen journalism sites. Using a combination of peer review (Helium writers in the same expertise) and a relative-ranking system set up by developers allowing good content to rise and bad content to sink. Publishers can also submit queries directly to Helium. The site will post the query, and in a few days there will be 6-12 responses. The end result is a publishing platform that rewards participants and builds partnerships as well, Ranalli says.
“It creates a dynamic where good writers find Helium valuable to them platform for recognition and reward that they’re looking for,” Ranalli says. “Ultimately as a publishing platform, we are enabling people who do not have an established position in the industry.”
Paper resumes are things of the past. If you want to get stand out and get ahead, you have to get online. At least that's the idea behind FutureResume.com, the new job board that let's job seekers use video resumes and videoconferencing and lets employers view a candidate's personality and professionalism before the interview.
FutureResume.com launched in July for job seekers and candidates, who can now post resumes and video resume introductions on the site. Speaking via another one of their online tools, GreenJobInterview.com, co-founders and brothers, Greg and Theo Rokos, insist the site is not a job board, but an aide to the hiring process in a competitive market and puts candidates "in a different stack than a paper resume."
"Basically what I saw was an opportunity for companies to do a better job of assessing candidates on front end before flying them across the country," says Greg who has worked for the past 17 years in helping partner executives with companies, "Video was an efficient solution to do that."
The online utility is not industry-specific, but the CEOs acknowledge that certain industries would find a video tool more advantageous in determining candidates' articulation and presence. "It may sound grandiose, we really have the ability and technology to change the way companies interview and hire people," Greg says.
Job seekers who want to produce a professional video made can do so at the FutureResume.com offices in Newport Beach, Calif. for free, versus the original $99.95 fee. Any company can post openings for $299.00 per month. Companies will also be featured in short video profiles to allow them to communicate their brand and background to job seekers.
The database has grown to a few hundred job seekers since the launch, and the execs hope to have approximately 5,000 by the end of the year, as well as 200 companies looking for candidates. In 2009, the goals are anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 job seeker profiles and 1,000 companies. The execs say that FutureResume has a much different game plan from other large job sites, like Monster. "We want a smaller resume base that a company can come in and find five people," Theo adds, "We want a 100 percent match to deliver a better resume to the company."
FutureResume.com execs announced August 6 that they would be expanding from their Southern California location and using their own technology to hire a national sales team, along with a few additional positions. Interested candidates can go to the website for further details.
As the music biz starts tossing out jewel cases by the busload as they try to jump on the green bandwagon, a Canadian enterprise is also looking to clean up the music industry. Yangaroo, a Toronto-based venture, is innovating the way labels sell their products to radio stations with a digital alternative.
Launched in 2003 in Canada and 2005 in the United States, Yangaroo's Digital Media Distribution Service (DMDS) works as the middleman between music labels and radio stations, delivering music and promotional information the green way: via e-mail to radio stations. "I saw the change coming with Napster, people starting to move music around on the Internet," says Cliff Hunt, COO of Yangaroo, who worked in the music industry for 25 years. "I knew there had to be use for a technology like this that was efficient broadcast quality and secure."
Security is a three-part process. The first part is keystroke recognition, then identifying and sending to a specific individual -- not a machine. Second, files are mailed in encrypted form, should someone hack into the system. Finally, developers incorporated watermarking, so if the file is leaked after being received, it can be traced back to the source.
Standard industry practice is producing and packaging CDs and promo materials, and sending it off to radio station contacts. Yangaroo estimates that the entire process consumes about 0.7 pounds of fossil fuel per CD.
Currently, over 600 Canadian radio stations are receiving promo packets from such major labels as EMI, BMG Canada, Universal Music Canada, and Warner Music Canada via DMDS. In 2007, Yangaroo distributed 2.3 million songs to DJs and programmers at radio stations across Canada, and 1.3 million in the United States.
Canada's entire music distribution system is digital now, Hunt said, and now Yangaroo is trying to do the same in America. "This just helps them to be more efficient in every way," Hunt says, "Its much less expensive, much faster, and the time saving is enormous. Plus, it's so much more environmentally friendly." The company already has a patent in Canada and is pending one in the United States, which Yangaroo execs expect to receive by the end of September.
As for global expansion, Yangaroo already has a partnership set up in the United Kingdom with the London-based advertisement firm, Adstream, and hopes to expand to the rest of Europe following the near future.
One of Britain's top furniture companies has arrived stateside this week, as Mark Wilkinson opened his first American showroom in New York on Thursday.
Located at 7 Hanover Square in the Financial District, the luxury furniture store includes several sample kitchen layouts, ranging from modern to an English country house. Who would have known you could have a kitchen drawer just for cakes? Wilkinson says he settled on New York because it "is the most vibrant, wildest town. We found some people we trust and get along with it. Its as simple as that." One of those people was Mary Brouder Murphy, a high-end interior designer who got started at high-end design companies in Ireland, before starting her own business in Ridgeway, New Jersey about 10 years ago. Murphy said they approached Wilkinson last year because of the fine detail in his work. She also shared a love of Lower Manhattan as it has become more residential in recent years, making it a good spot for a furniture showroom.
Wilkinson commenced his furniture business in 1981, and the brand has grown to 14 exclusive showrooms in the United Kingdom and locations in Paris and Moscow. And beyond that, his clientele has expanded to Britain's top celebrities and members of the British monarchy.
The high-end collections span across a spectrum of different styles, including "Mai," which is influenced by the Japanese Third Sung Dynasty, the 15th Century Gothic and 18th Century fine English furniture. However, one constant is that the styles remain timeless. "We don’t produce fashion," he says, "We produce real living styles of furniture."
The company also places a strong emphasis on social responsibility. For instance, they exclusively use hard wood with World Wildlife Fund certification, including American White Oak and Maple. Most timber used is bought from North America, imported to Britain where the furniture is made, and then sold back into the United States. As Wilkinson's clientele base has grown enormously in the last few decades, reducing their carbon footprint has become a priority. "The more we clients we have, the more timber we use, the more we take on the responsibility of planting," the British designer says. The company plants two trees for every order.
While Wilkinson's work is in luxury furniture stores in several major American cities, plans for additional exclusive showrooms are still in the works. "We haven’t got plans to do any more openings at the moment, but we have discussed the possibility," he concludes with a chuckle.
