RSS is Not Mail
1. RSS is not mail. 2. RSS is not mail… Use Fever to effectively filter your filters; http://eicker.at/RSSIsNotMail
Updates from September, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Kindle vs. iPad
Amazon will offer a Kindle Tablet on Android: at $250 it might become a challenge for the iPad; http://eicker.at/KindleVSiPad
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Gerrit Eicker
TC, Siegler: “Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Is Very Real. I’ve Seen It, Played With It. … It’s called simply the ‘Amazon Kindle’. But it’s not like any Kindle you’ve seen before. It displays content in full color. It has a 7-inch capacitive touch screen. And it runs Android. … Again, the device is a 7-inch tablet with a capacitive touch screen. It is multi-touch, but from what I saw, I believe the reports that it relies on a two-finger multi-touch (instead of 10-finger, like the iPad uses) are accurate. This will be the first Kindle with a full-color screen. And yes, it is back-lit. There is no e-ink to be found anywhere on this device. … So how much will the 7-inch Kindle cost? $250. – Yes, Amazon has been able to trim the cost of the device to half of the entry-level iPad. And it will be the same price as Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, which this will very obviously compete with directly. Both have 7-inch color touch screens. Both run Android. … The interface is all Amazon and Kindle. It’s black, dark blue, and a bunch of orange. … But the key for Amazon is just how deeply integrated all of their services are. Amazon’s content store is always just one click away. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). … Oh and one more thing: Amazon has been working on a multi-touch screen/e-ink hybrid tablet device. But that’s nowhere near completion, I’m told. So for now, this new Kindle will have to do.”
TC: “I threw together the mockup above based on what he shared with me. … From this, we’ve learned at least one thing: competing with the iPad by trying to be the iPad.. doesn’t really work. … But they’re not. Rather than taking on Apple on their own court, they’re moving to keep a lock on a game they’re already kicking butt at (the e-reader market), while upping the odds that anyone weighing ‘iPad or Kindle?’ will be swayed in their favor. By launching with a 7” tablet (and only a 7” tablet), Amazon is making it clear: they don’t want the Kindle tablet to be the iPad. They want it to be everything the iPad is not. – They want it to be small, and comfortable to read in bed. This is a Kindle, after all. For many folks who just want something to read in bed or throw into their bag to read on the train, the iPad’s nearly 10-inch display can feel a bit gigantic. – They want it to be cheap.”
GigaOM: “Instead of a full-fledged Android tablet, Amazon’s new Kindle slate runs a forked version of Android under the hood that no user is likely to ever see. – The 7-inch tablet takes a cue from the Barnes & Noble Nook Color; arguably the most successful non-iPad tablet if it fits your definition of one, and likely to see a hardware refresh soon. Amazon’s tablet will use a completely customized interface, not have Google apps of any kind, nor will it access the Android Market. It will run apps from Amazon’s AppStore. … Those wanting something smaller than a tablet but bigger than a standard phone may be more interested in the newly announced Samsung Note.”
VB: “So what of the rumored 10-inch Amazon tablet? That device, which is said to run a quad-core processor and be a more direct competitor to the iPad, is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year if the 7-inch tablet does well enough. – Amazon may forgo releasing a touchscreen version of the traditional Kindle, Siegler says, but that’s still speculation so far. Intriguingly, he also says that Amazon is working on a multi-touch tablet/e-reader hybrid device that runs on an E-Ink screen.”
pC: “Even if Amazon is cutting out some bells and whistles out of its tablet, it is offering users a lot more: a host of usable cloud services; some free services; and a low price. This may finally turn out to be the Android(ish) tablet fit to fight the iPad stronghold.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Google’s Graveyard II.
Google once again expands its graveyard: Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, Notebook, Sidewiki…; http://eicker.at/GooglesGraveyard
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t. So, as Larry previewed on our last earnings call, today we’re having a fall spring-clean at Google. – Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. … This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products. As for our users, we’ll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them. … Aardvark, Desktop, FastFlip, Google Maps API for Flash, Google Pack, Google Web Security, Image Labeler, Notebook, Sidewiki, Subscribed Links”
VB: “Under the direction of new CEO Larry Page, Google declared that it would re-prioritize its product offerings. Part of that includes the shut down of Google Labs, what Google previously referred to as ‘a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas.’ – Aardvark was acquired by Google for $50 million back in February 2010. The service let users ask and answer questions from people in their personal social network through a Google Chat window. A day after the acquisition news came through, Aardvark was moved to Google Labs. – Google says although Aardvark is closing, Google will ‘continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.’ The Aardvark team appears to have moved most of its focus to the Google+ social network.”
GigaOM: “Google’s doing a bit of house cleaning today, announcing on its blog that it’s shutting down a handful of properties and projects, including a big one they shelled out $50 million for. Social search company Aardvark is getting the axe just 18 months after being acquired. The explanation? It was just an experiment. It’s also a sign that Google is beginning to sharpen its focus on meaningful projects. Today’s news follows the closing of Slide, Google Health, Google Power Meter, Google Labs, and others since Larry Page became CEO in January.”
TC: “Well, it looks like the brooms and axes are out at Google today, for a little late-summer cleaning. The company announced via its blog today that some of its products and features will be riding into the sunset in the very near future. This news was previewed by CEO Larry Page on Google’s quarterly earnings call in July, who said at the time that the search giant would be doing a wee bit of spring, er, early fall cleaning.”
TNW: “All Google Notesbooks content is being rolled into Google Docs, the company announced today, as part of a wider revelation that it is pulling the plug on several of its popular products. Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Analytics: New Source Starts New Session
Google Analytics now starts a new session when any traffic source value for a user changes; http://eicker.at/GASession
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Beginning today [August 11, 2011], there will be a small change [sic!] in how sessions are calculated in Google Analytics. We think this update will lead to a clearer understanding of website interactions. We also want to explain how these changes might impact your reports. … Currently, Google Analytics ends a session when: More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor. At the end of a day. When a visitor closes their browser. – If any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session. – In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when: More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor. At the end of a day. When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gelid. – As before, if any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the user will be the start of a new session.”
Kaushik: “A minor version of the butterfly effect occurred, one small change in a part of the system caused a few other smaller changes in other parts of the system. Some people freaked out. Others wondered what the fuss was all about. Still others wondered what they were going to eat for lunch. :) … Change is always hard to accept, especially when it comes with even the slightest impact on status quo. But if there has to be progress in life, then change is just the thing that puts us in a higher, more optimal orbit. It makes a better existence possible. – Go give the new data and reports a try. Thinking in a new way will require effort and brain power. But real happiness is worth it.”
Whitaker: “As with any model, it’s not so much about being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but whether the model is useful. Does your model help you understand your customers a little bit better and make smarter decisions? If there is a better model then you should change to that one. – Ironically, the data causing higher visit numbers was there all along! It was just hidden due to the way Google Analytics used to count visits, pageviews, etc. Anyone remember 0 visits? … Finally, I am not a huge fan of visit-based metrics anyway. Who cares if your dear customers take 1 or 2 visits before placing an order? The main thing is that they accomplished their goals during each visit, i.e. browse in the first visit, have a cup of tea, then buy in the second visit.“
Gerrit Eicker
Social CRM (SCRM)
Gartner: The market for Social CRM [SCRM] is on pace to surpass $1B in revenue by year-end 2012; http://eicker.at/SCRM
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “Social CRM is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers. As an emerging discipline, interpretations of Social CRM vary, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Paul Greenberg: ‘Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.‘ – Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly. However, this is too narrow an interpretation, as Social CRM also includes customer communities managed by the organisation themselves.”
Greenberg: “What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Its a dramatic change in what it adds to the features, functions and characteristics of CRM but it is still based on the time honored principle that a business needs its customers and prefers them profitable and that same business needs to run itself effectively too. – The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.”
Gartner: “The worldwide social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010… Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011. … Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases. Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes… The need for integration will favor more-traditional CRM vendors that add social capabilities. Integration did not matter much when enterprises were just experimenting with social CRM… [C]ompanies are asking for the integration of social data with other customer data within sales, marketing and customer service processes, which will require the integration of social CRM with applications such as a knowledgebase for customer service, multichannel campaign management, sales force automation or e-commerce, Web content and Web analytic applications, master data management, and even back-office applications.”
TC: “While the market is clearly competitive, Gartner says that certain factors can help differentiate Social CRM offerings, including interoperation between public social networks and internal collaborative communities, integration with established CRM products, analytics and more. – There’s no doubt that there is growth in the social enterprise in general. And there’s a lot of movement already taking place in the space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, and Salesforce is making big bets on the space with Chatter.”
Gerrit Eicker
Mikrofinanzwesen
Das Mikrofinanzwesen umfasst neben Krediten auch Versicherungen: wichtig bei Katastrophen; http://eicker.at/Mikrofinanzwesen
Gerrit Eicker 09:18 on 6. September 2011 Permalink |
ARS, Cheng: “On the surface, RSS seems great for those of us who want to keep up on everything happening on the Internet—and I mean everything. … Twice in as many weeks during the month of August, I was forced to go without my precious RSS feeds. … Dare I say it, but the quality of my life and work improved when I went without RSS. And I think it might for you, too. … Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you’re constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task. Even if it’s a brief task, the very act of breaking your concentration means it will impact the focus and flow of whatever got shoved to the background, and it takes longer to resume that task later when you’re done with the RSS scan. … Forrester Research told Ars that, according to its most recent RSS usage numbers, only six percent of North American, Internet-using consumers used an RSS feed once per week or more. … I highly recommend taking a break for a few days to find interesting content the “old fashioned” way. You might find that RSS is slowly nickel and diming your time away, one feed at a time.”
Arment: “RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. … RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to. – I currently subscribe to 100 feeds. This morning, I woke up to 6 unread items: one each from 6 of my feeds. Granted, it’s a Sunday on a holiday weekend, so this is a pretty low-activity day. On high-activity days, I usually wake up to about 25 items.”
Winer: “I read yet-another article about how RSS readers do it wrong, and reward people for using Twitter as their feed reader. This pains me, because it’s not RSS’s fault, it’s the fault of people who designed RSS readers to work like mail programs. RSS is not mail, and when you try to make it mail, you make something that doesn’t work. … If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying ‘Joe you haven’t read 1,942,279 articles since this paper started.’ It doesn’t put you on the hook for not reading everything anyone has ever written. The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?”