Twitter's retooled business website makes it easier to buy ads, promoted content

Twitter relaunched its business efforts Wednesday to not only help companies more easily use the social media site, but also to sell more advertisements, Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts.

The retooled site includes a tutorial breaking down the basics of how to use Twitter, a guide on how to optimize your activity with tips on building a following for a business, and a section called Start Advertising.

Advertising revenue is a key factor in Twitter becoming a major force on the Web, alongside the Googles and Facebooks of the Internet, which pull in millions of dollars from ads on their sites. The reboot of business.twitter.com is Twitter's latest push to generate more revenue.

As a part of its renewed business push, Twitter is now offering analytical data for those companies who buy ads or promoted content on the site.

ECO ATM

ECO ATM founder Mark Bowles poses for pictures with his company's phone recycling ATM machine from the start-up office in San Diego, California April 20, 2010. The eco-friendly company is building ATM type kiosks that allow a person to be instantly paid for recycling their old cellphone.

Twitter Co-Founder Creates Square:'PayPal for Smartphones

Jack Dorsey, most famous for co-founding Twitter, is not content with having set the world of communication alight. Now he has turned his attention to transforming financial transactions using only a small white plastic square and little bit of clever code.
Appropriately named Square, his new business is enabling people to receive payments via their smartphones, using an app and a plug-in device. It started trading just under eight weeks ago. To some it is the future of mobile payment and, if it's a big hit Stateside, will surely come to Europe soon. The big card payment providers could also soon be looking over their shoulders.
Dorsey, presumably not as a clever piece of marketing, does actually live his life in a neat square. His new business premises are opposite his apartment, aptly next door to the US mint and centred around a lovely sun-filled square plaza, where people meet, talk tech and drink coffee.

Amazon gives Nielsen BookScan to authors

In a move to provide authors with a service their publishers have not, Amazon is making current Nielsen BookScan sales data available to authors on its site, the company announced Thursday. Authors typically wait six months or more to receive royalty statements from publishers, which contain book-sales information.

Authors with books for sale on Amazon who have signed up to use Author Central, the site's free author portal, will be able to see the book-sales information starting Thursday morning.

The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.

BookScan's sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.

Authors who use Amazon's Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.

This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn't been cheap. Nielsen's BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.

It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.

In recent years, individual authors have increasingly been asked to take part in the marketing and promotion of their own books. Publishers have faced budget cutbacks, and the Internet has provided authors with more ways of reaching readers -- and potential book buyers. Amazon sees the Nielsen BookScan data as a tool to that end. "The geographic view of print sales will help authors identify trends to help their promotion efforts and enables authors to develop more effective methods for reaching the widest possible audience," Amazon's Kinley Campbell wrote in an e-mail.
Just in time for Christmas, Amazon may be turning authors into an army of booksellers.

4 Apple products in Time’s Top 10 gadget listing

Apple‘s domination of the gadget market continued this year, according to Time magazine. In a series titled “Top 10 Everything” Apple Inc. has 4 for the top 10 gadgets.
Claiming first spot is the iPad, third spot goes to the new 11-in MacBook Air, sixth place is the iPhone 4, and the Apple TV is in seventh place.
That’s a lot of Apple love for a top ten list, and it seems that the only device that’s missing from their list is an iPod (if you don’t classify the iPhone as an iPod).
Personally I’d have Microsoft’s Kinect in the first or second spot. That thing has exploded this holiday season, and has quickly become the fastest selling consumer electronic device of all time. It’s a pretty accurate list, despite opinions about positioning. Most of these items have dominated the tech news this year.

The Top Ten Gadgets according to Time.

1. The iPad
2. The Samsung Galaxy S
3. 11 Inch MacBook Air
4. Google TV Via Logitech Revue
5. Nexus One
6. The iPhone 4
7. Apple TV
8. Toshiba Libretto Dual-Screen Laptop
9. Kinect
10. Nook Color

Google boosts 'nicer' brands with algorithm changes

Brands with poor online customer relations are to be penalised by Google following changes to its search engine.

The company has amended its algorithm to expose hundreds of advertisers it believes deliver a bad user experience. These will consequently appear lower in search results, which, according to Google, will benefit online consumers.

Google said it made the change in response to a US newspaper article that claimed online retailer DecorMyEyes deliberately abused customers so that the complaints and negative reviews generated boosted its prominence in results.

It said that the possibility of introducing user reviews and ratings alongside search results is 'still on the table'.

Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Launches Jumo Social Network

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes -- yes, he is featured as a pivotal character in The Social Network movie -- is up to something new.

His startup, Jumo -- a philanthropic endeavor that works to match people with political movements, nonprofit organizations and other causes -- formally launched today. (Jumo means "together in concert" in Yoruba, a West African language.)

Hughes, who spearheaded My.BarackObama.com, the organizing online platforms for the Obama presidential campaign, says the site's mission is simple.

Office 365 Beta

Microsoft's Office 365 is a major re-branding and relaunch of the company's business cloud services. Previously offered as Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), Office 365 brings together the 2010 releases of Exchange and SharePoint, along with the Lync unified communications platform. It's not just an online solution: depending on the service bundle you choose, there's an option to use a subscription version of the Office 2010 desktop productivity suite.

Microsoft plans to offer Office 365 in a number of service tiers, ranging from a stripped-down small-business version to one packaged for large-scale enterprises. The most attractive tiers bundle a full license to Office Professional Plus 2010 for each user, which is arguably Microsoft's greatest advantage over online-only competitors such as Google Docs. 

WikiLeaks Changes Domain Name After Cyber Attacks

While still accessible by typing in the domain number, people trying to access the site by typing WikiLeaks into a search engine or their browser will not be successful.
The US-based provider, EveryDNS.net, took the controversial site offline earlier today, claiming that the constant hacking attacks were so powerful that they were damaging its other customers.
It said it had become the "target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks" which threatened the stability of its structure.
The domain name is currently inaccessible. However, the site is still available through the url:http://46.59.1.2/. Also, WikiLeaks has said it had registered its new domain name in Switzerland. 

The action by EveryDNS, which provides around 500,000 Web sites, followed a decision on Wednesday by Amazon.com Inc. to expel WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization, from its servers, although it remains on the servers of a Swedish host, Bahnhof, as it continues to anger the United States by publicizing a huge array of some 250,000 leaked State Department documents relating to American foreign policy around the globe.

How doodling evolved at Google

Google doodlers are a small team of artists who create the decorative logos for the company's home page, images that celebrate events as varied as the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man and the 70th birthday of John Lennon to the invention of the bar code and the landing of the Mars rover.

It all started with Dennis Hwang, who grew up in Korea and came to the United States in middle school, not speaking a word of English. After doodling his way through school, Hwang graduated from Stanford with degrees in art and computer science. In 2000, working as an intern, Hwang was asked by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to do a doodle for Bastille Day.

Hwang realized, "Something that used to be frowned upon -- my drawing -- turned out to be my greatest asset."

Page and Brin had started the doodle tradition in the summer of 1998 as a way to alert users they were "out of office," at the Burning Man festival. In case the site crashed, they wanted users to know why no one at Google was answering the phone. Using clip art, Page and Brin created a small stickman figure placed behind the second "O" in Google.

"Larry and Sergey had done some of these themselves," Hwang said of the first doodles. "And they used freelance artists. The doodles didn't have any consistency, and they covered mainly the big U.S. holidays. So when I joined, we started a slightly more formal process and looked at how to have more fun with it."

He continued: "Since early on, our users have been very passionate about the doodles. In April 2003, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the understanding of DNA. I created something I thought was pretty aesthetically exciting and proudly posted it. Within minutes, I started to get e-mails from around the world, with scientists saying this is not a double helix. It was a couple of pixels off in terms of the crossover point."

Hwang, now a webmaster at Google who continues to consult with the doodle team, believes that the Google home page, in essence, is the face of the company. "I think when users see the face changing to reflect the holidays and occasions they too are celebrating with their families, it gives them a connection and reminds them there are people working hard behind the scenes."

Google "Chief Doodler" Micheal Lopez leads a small team of doodlers who create variations on the Google logo to mark anniversaries of various events around the world

Samsung launches open mobile platform

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, today announced the launch of its own open mobile platform, Samsung bada [bada] in December. This new addition to Samsung’s mobile ecosystem enables developers to create applications for millions of new Samsung mobile phones, and consumers to enjoy a fun and diverse mobile experience.

In order to build a rich smartphone experience accessible to a wider range of consumers across the world, Samsung brings bada, a new platform with a variety of mobile applications and content.

The name ‘bada’, which means ‘ocean’ in Korean, was chosen to convey the limitless variety of potential applications which can be created using the new platform. It also alludes to Samsung’s commitment to a variety of open platforms in the mobile industry. Samsung bada also represents the fresh challenges and opportunities available to developers, as well as the entertainment which consumers will enjoy once the new platform is open.

The Brutal Decline of Yahoo!

The Brutal Decline of Yahoo! examines the troubled history of Yahoo! in search, advertising and acquisitions.

Taken from (http://www.scores.org/graphics/yahoo)

India’s first projector mobile phone

Intex Technologies has launched INTEX ‘V.SHOW’ – a path- breaking mobile handset with an inbuilt projector to combine projection with mobility. Priced at Rs.16,000, this is India’s first projector phone to be launched by a domestic mobile handset company.

Barnes & Noble's Color Nook Takes on the Kindle

In December of 2009, brick-and-mortar book-selling powerhouse Barnes & Noble got into the e-reader game, two years after Amazon.com's Kindle jump-started the category. Their tablet will deliver more than two million digital books, magazines, newspapers and children's books in gorgeous color -- all in one beautiful, thin and highly portable device- The NooK.

Sharp made an entry in Mobile Handset Market

Japanese consumer electronics giant Sharp Corporation has launched a set of mobile phones in India with an eye on taking advantage of the 3G spectrum about to be introduced into the country. Sharp claims that its phones are aimed at ''trendy yet price conscious'' consumers. The phones have features like full touch LCD screen, G-Sensor, shortcut to social networking services, LED illumination, Bluetooth, FM radio, dual-SIM facility, and camera. 

The phones will be available in a variety of form factors such as the cycloid phone, screens which rotate a full 180 degrees and the classic clamshell. Sharp unveiled four models namely the Alice, Blink, Tango and Cyborg. The company has however, not elaborated on the features each of these phones would offer have.

Players in the market

Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Spice, Micromax, Videocon, Intex, T-Series, Zen, Fly, Karbonn and others.

Bytes:-

PC maker Dell Inc. has also jumped in the Rs30,000-crore Indian mobile handset market. The US-based firm unveiled two 3G smartphones, based on the Android operating system from Google. The smartphones XCD 28 and XCD 35 carry price tags of Rs11,000 and Rs17,000 respectively.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

The chart is made by Matt Mckeon, a developer in IBM’s visual communications lab has created quite a stir in the interwebs. 


Read More: http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Nokia is losing and MicroMax is gaining

Domestic players are increasingly having a major share in the Indian mobile handset market with Micromax notching a position in the top 5 list for Q2 2010, as per the IDC's reports. Their recent research paper shows that local vendors have consolidated their position in the domestic mobile handset market, with a collective market share of 33.2 per cent.

Even though Nokia retained the number 1 spot in India, with a marketshare of 36.3% of units shipped. Samsung was number two, and surprisingly, Chinese brand G’Five emerged as the number three player in India.

During the last 6 months (January-June 2010) the top five mobile handset vendors in India were Nokia, Samsung, G’Five, Micromax and Spice.

Infographic: The Phenomenal Growth of Facebook

We have been posting few infographic, now we just thought of increasing the frequency going by the public demand. Here is a very nice work on the facebook growth.

Source: website monitoring.

Infographic: Learn How Google Works

This Infographic is taken from http://ppcblog.com/how-google-works

Google's Acquisition Appetite

From Scores.org, a data-heavy Google(graphic) by Jess Bachman