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pimg alt="blogger in draft logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/blogger_draft_logo_mar09.jpg" width="150" height="52" /Most hosted blogging platforms offer their customers a set of standard templates with relatively few options for customizing these sites. a href="http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/03/express-yourself-with-blogger-template.html"Starting today/a, however, bloggers on Google's a href="https://www.blogger.com/"Blogger/a platform will be able to take a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/express-yourself-with-blogger-template.html"full control /aover the layout of their sites thanks to Google's new Blogger Template Designer without having to edit a single line of HTML and CSS code. The Template Designer will give Blogger's users the ability to change the layout, fonts, colors and background images of their blogs through an easy to use WYSIWYG editor. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18665amp;cb=18665' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18665amp;n=18665' border='0' alt='' //a/p pFor now, the Template Designer will only be available through a href="http://draft.blogger.com/"Blogger in Draft/a, Google's experimental section for new Blogger features. /p pimg alt="blogger template designer" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/blogger_template_designer.jpg" width="610" height="237" //p h2Features/h2 pEvery template allows users to choose different body layouts with up to four columns. Google partnered with a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php"iStockphoto/a to bring more background images to Blogger. For now, Google won't allow users to upload their own background images yet, but advanced users can always use the CSS code to point to their own images. /p pIn the template designer, users can also change the size and number of the columns on their blogs and edit the design of their blogs' footers./p h2Change your Color Palette With One Slider/h2 pOne of the niftiest new features in the Template Designer involves the option to change the complete color palette of your blog with one simple slider. Based on your choice, the application will simply set all the colors of the fonts and other design elements on your site based on your preference while still ensuring readability./p pimg alt="blogger template designer color palette" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/blogger_template_color_palette.jpg" width="610" height="211" //p pAs Siobhan Quinn, Google's product manager for Blogger told us yesterday, Google's users really want to be able to customize their sites and make them look as unique as possible. Just offering a set of rigid templates, Quinn noted, simply isn't enough to give users the feeling that a site is truly theirs. Until now, customizing Blogger sites - while possible - was a bit of a hassle and making any major changed involved editing the HTML and CSS code a href="http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=enanswer=41954"by hand/a, which a lot of Blogger's users weren't quite ready to do./p pOther blogging platforms like a href="http://wordpress.com"Wordpress.com/a and a href="http://www.typepad.com/"TypePad/a and also allow their users to individualize their blogs to some degree. On Wordpress, however, editing the CSS code comes at a price ($15/year) and unless you are an advanced user, changing the layout of your blog on most hosted blogging platforms is going to involve a steep learning curve. /p pAccording to Google, Blogger currently has over 300 million active users and more than 388 million words are published on Blogger every day./p pobject width="560" height="340"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/r6haqZoivBQhl=en_USfs=1rel=0"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/r6haqZoivBQhl=en_USfs=1rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"/embed/object/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_blogger_template_designer_individualize_your_blogger_blog.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBqJxm-rQxvNMT8zo8rW_L72gfg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBqJxm-rQxvNMT8zo8rW_L72gfg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBqJxm-rQxvNMT8zo8rW_L72gfg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBqJxm-rQxvNMT8zo8rW_L72gfg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=47SIqufmML8:kP60YVCI04k:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/47SIqufmML8" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Germany loves co-creation" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/images/germany_cocreate_mar10.jpg" width="150" height="118"/Last week we talked about a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/03/managing-split-team-blank-label-danny-wong.php"managing split teams/a with Danny Wong of a href="http://blank-label.com/"Blank Label/a, a site for creating custom men's dress shirts and a startup in the growing field of co-creation. These types of startups, which have gained more traction overseas than in the U.S., run on a model of on-demand production, which allows them to become cash-flow positive in a relatively short period of time. Wednesday I had the chance to talk about co-creation with Carmen Magar, a German woman living in New York who works for a href="http://createmychocolate.com/"chocri/a, a German startup that sells customizable chocolates./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18656amp;cb=18656' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18656amp;n=18656' border='0' alt='' //a/p pAccording to Magar, Germany is quickly becoming a hub for co-creation startups while the U.S. and the U.K. have been much slower to adopt them. Before setting up shop in the U.S., custom t-shirt company a href="http://spreadshirt.com/"Spreadshirt/a actually began as a startup in Germany. Magar, who has spent significant amounts of time in both countries, says that while the difference in cultures has been an influence, the main reason that co-creation has taken off in Germany is the country's smaller market which allows startups to make a larger impact./p p"What happened in Germany is that there were a lot of startups doing co-creation; a lot of companies that didn't have a production process in place that were really flexible and could talk to their customers directly," Magar told ReadWriteWeb on Wednesday. "In the U.S., the way it was proselytized was that soon in the future every big company would change their production process to enable mass customization, but that's actually a really risky thing to do. What I think will happen is that the startups, the small companies that are nimble, will lead the way to bring that control to the consumer."/p pimg alt="Chocri homepage" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/images/chocri_page_mar10.jpg" width="552" height="294" class="aligncenter"//p pAnother reason why co-creation and mass customization may have taken root in Germany is that the country, like many in Europe, suffers from a severe lack of seed level funding, while the U.S. has incubators and VC firms across the country targeting early stage companies. As we mentioned last week with Blank Label, most co-creation startups use a business model that lets them produce products only as they are ordered, keeping costs down and allowing the company to have an early cash flow. /p pIn a region like Europe, the need to bootstrap businesses from the ground up like chocri (which started with €25,000) is much higher, and co-creation is a great way to accomplish this. American startups may be less likely to go down the route of co-creation because the investors are more willing to take risks on less proven businesses. /p pMagar, who lived in Germany most of her life and came to America to get her MBA, believes that Germany's propensity towards mass customization is also part of what led chocri to hire her as their representative in America. The company just happened to be looking to expand their presence to the U.S. when Magar called to express her interest in the company./p p"I think why they chose to have a German on the team is because I saw a lot more of this happen, and I understand more about mass customization," says Magar. "Because I live here I've experienced the American market, but it was more important to them to bring in an understanding of the concept."/p pThis is an important concept for startups to grasp, both in the U.S. and abroad. When looking to expand overseas, it is important to find someone with familiarity in both regions who can survey the new market and who can grasp the core values of your business. As a German, Magar completely understood chocri's co-creation strategy, and studying in America made her a great choice to help the company find a presence there./p pIs co-creation finally beginning to catch on in the U.S. with companies like Spreadshirt and Blank Label? Or perhaps co-creation is more alive in America than we realize? Or is mass customization a startup model that will continue its struggle to gain traction in America? Let us know what you think about co-creation and spreading startups overseas in the comments below!/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/03/is-america-on-the-verge-of-a-co-creation-invasion.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/V0WN9Zh4eafTRzOLGYRpZFz9aoI/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/V0WN9Zh4eafTRzOLGYRpZFz9aoI/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/V0WN9Zh4eafTRzOLGYRpZFz9aoI/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/V0WN9Zh4eafTRzOLGYRpZFz9aoI/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73mNj1CbT5E:C8TpxQUyzlY:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/73mNj1CbT5E" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="iphone2.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/iphone2.jpg" width="146" height="149" hspace="5px" vspace="5px" /AppleInsider is a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/11/apples_iphone_4_0_software_to_deliver_multitasking_support.html"reporting/a this morning that some trusted sources are predicting a "full-on solution" to multitasking in the iPhone 4.0 OS, which is set to be released this summer. Already, the iPhone shows that it is capable of multitasking with bundled apps like iPod and Nike+, but the update is said to handle a number of security and interface issues./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18663amp;cb=18663' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18663amp;n=18663' border='0' alt='' //a/p pAlready, a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_jailbreak_the_iphone_to_firmware_312.php"jailbreaking/a the iPhone shows how the device is fully capable of multitasking, but opens up the device to malware and poorly designed third-party apps that can make a full restore necessary./p pAs AppleInsider points out, the real benefit of closing off the iPhone to multitasking is that there are no malicious apps running in the background, hijacking your phone. You are, after all, carrying a constantly GPS enabled multimedia recording device with you. At the same time, it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to listen to Pandora while using the MapMyRide app to track your bike ride across town, or any other number of combinations currently unavailable./p pBut beyond security, AppleInsider discusses the issues of user interface that we might not think of right off the bat. In other operating systems, switching between apps is simple, by way of a taskbar or system dock. On the iPhone, multitasking is often handled by a small strip added at the top of the screen, but this would become messy for multiple applications. Perhaps we'll see a new hardware solution to accompany this issue with the next iPhone "4GS" this summer. And, as a href="http://gizmodo.com/5490977/iphone-40-firmware-to-bring-multiasking-this-summer"Gizmodo/a points out, if we get multitasking for iPhone, can we really be expected to accept an iPad that can't do the same?/p pWhile AppleInsider says that its sources have predicted this "full-on solution", it notes that the much called-for feature has been falsely rumored, by their own articles nonetheless, on three separate occassions over the past year. In addition to this, it says that two of the biggest problems - resource conservation and battery life - were not addressed by their sources. Would we really want these features if it meant a bogged down device we had to charge every hour on the hour? And is this just another case of the boy who cried wolf? Let's hope not./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/potential_summer_blockbuster_iphone_40_multitaskin.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/osoqv3ShwqYQz45qwhx2TKmJ_U8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/osoqv3ShwqYQz45qwhx2TKmJ_U8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/osoqv3ShwqYQz45qwhx2TKmJ_U8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/osoqv3ShwqYQz45qwhx2TKmJ_U8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=EIQddj1JgA0:EPxzCMHpFn0:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/EIQddj1JgA0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/iphone_logo_aug08.jpg"According to a href="http://www.localytics.com/blog/post/iphone-analytics-show-peak-mobile-app-usage-on-nights-weekends/"recent data analysis/a from mobile analytics firm a href="http://www.localytics.com"Localytics/a, iPhone application usage peaks in the evenings and on weekends and is much lower during the hours of a typical business day. From this, the firm concludes that the iPhone is still primarily a personal gadget as opposed to one that's used for business purposes. /p pBut is app usage the true measure of the device's success at making corporate inroads? Or does it just show that people don't play with their iPhone apps while at work?/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18664amp;cb=18664' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18664amp;n=18664' border='0' alt='' //a/p pIn the Localytics study, which mined U.S. and Canadian app usage data for a period of two months, iPhone applications peaked at 9 PM EST during the week and maintained peak usage throughout the weekends. Also on weekends, they found that iPhone users generate 7% more traffic than on weekdays. On Saturdays in particular, app usage traffic starts at a morning low around 6 AM and then hits over 90% of peak usage by 11 AM. On weekdays, however, app usage is more concentrated in the evenings, slowly ramping up during the workday to reach peak usage by 9 PM EST. /p pimg alt="Localytics-iPhone-hourly-chart.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/Localytics-iPhone-hourly-chart.png" width="595" height="337"/p h2Localytics: iPhone is Still More of a Personal Device/h2 pIn reviewing the results, Localytics believes that the iPhone "continues to be a personal device most heavily used outside of working hours." While we'll agree with their conclusion that these results offer developers insights which can impact their marketing, advertising and promotional strategies, we're not so sure that app usage offers a direct correlation to how much iPhones are used in the workplace. After all, like the Blackberry devices before them, the iPhone's primary work-related task may not be app-related at all - it's probably email and phone calls. And neither of those items, obviously, were tracked in the Localytics study. /p h2iPhones in the Corporate World/h2 pEver since a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/03/06iphone.html"Apple licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync technology/a for full Microsoft Exchange support back in spring 2008, the Apple smartphone has been slowly gaining ground in the corporate world. In April of last year, for example, a href="http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/66337/forrester-iphone-corporate-users-happier-more-productive"Forrester Research presented case studies/a on three major corporations that had deployed thousands of devices to their customers. The three companies -#160; Kraft Foods Inc., Oracle Corp. and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. - said that "the benefits of iPhone over other mobile devices include a happier, more productive workforce and lower support costs," noted Forrester analyst Ted Schadler in the report. /p pA later report, this one by a href="http://www.db.com/index_e.htm"Deutsche Bank/a analyst Chris Whitmore published in November, a href="http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/11/02/the-iphone-dons-a-suit-and-tie/?section=money_technology"said/a that the iPhone "is making inroads into the Enterprise." Specifically, he estimated that 2 million iPhones would be sold to big businesses by year-end for a total Enterprise market share of 7%, up from 2% in 2008. Whitmore attributed the surging popularity to a combination of four factors: user satisfaction, the onscreen virtual keyboard, enterprise-ready applications and sluggish competition in terms of developer support on other platforms./p h2Conclusion? iPhones Live in Both Worlds/h2 pAlthough it's probable that iPhones are still used more as personal devices as Localytics suggests, it's clear that business usage is trending upwards. /p pIn order to determine the iPhone's true "business usage," though, we would need to see recent numbers of iPhone deployments in the corporate world in addition to numbers that show how many people use the iPhone's email application for business-related communication purposes. Combined, that data would paint a clearer picture of how little or how much the iPhone is used as a work-related tool. Application usage alone cannot show this. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_the_iphone_still_more_personal_than_professional.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1hX15mmsFHn4C6sFsOdHhYB_pS8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1hX15mmsFHn4C6sFsOdHhYB_pS8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1hX15mmsFHn4C6sFsOdHhYB_pS8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1hX15mmsFHn4C6sFsOdHhYB_pS8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OnEcs3jjET0:2FXRFpydgVU:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/OnEcs3jjET0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="superglued-logo.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/superglued-logo.jpg" width="150" height="52" hspace="5px" vspace="5px" /If you've ever done a href="http://www.sxsw.com"SXSW/a before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven't, let us tell you now - there's a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?/p pa href="http://www.superglued.com"SuperGlued/a, which has integrated with both a href="http://www.foursquare.com"Foursquare/a and a href="http://www.twitter.com"Twitter/a, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18660amp;cb=18660' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18660amp;n=18660' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="sg-showlisting.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/sg-showlisting.jpg" width="280" style="float: right;" /SuperGlued is a can't-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new "Where My Friends At" feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it's any better. br / br / A new partnership with a href="http://www.bandsintown.com/home"BandsInTown/a not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing./p pAside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you've seen long after they've ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week./p p"The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there - it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought," said Doshi. "We built SuperGlued to be that place."/p pimg alt="sg-twitter.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/sg-twitter.jpg" width="280" style="float: left;" /SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website. /p pDoshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn't there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house./p pBeyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/superglue/id333223352?mt=8"iPhone app/a and go see some live music./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/if_youve_ever_done_sxsw.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/l9jUZ00CyKQtPKiHiYzbkzZk3As/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/l9jUZ00CyKQtPKiHiYzbkzZk3As/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/l9jUZ00CyKQtPKiHiYzbkzZk3As/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/l9jUZ00CyKQtPKiHiYzbkzZk3As/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=73RJt7hnULI:74JNtsoJeiI:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/73RJt7hnULI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/manifesto-chatroulette.jpg"That didn't last long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A a href="http://manifesto.frenchconnection.com/2010/02/challenge-chat-roulette/"Chatroulette contest/a launched by international clothing brand French Connection. According to a href="http://manifesto.frenchconnection.com/chat-roulette-challenge-terms-and-conditions/"contest rules/a, participants are asked if they can "conquer the sinister world of Chatroulette" by charming a member of the opposite sex. (Initially, the contest was for men only, but due to a href="http://manifesto.frenchconnection.com/2010/03/chatroulette-update/"protests/a, the rules were adjusted to permit women the opportunity to try and seduce men, too. Oh joy.)/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18661amp;cb=18661' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18661amp;n=18661' border='0' alt='' //a/p pAccording to a href="http://manifesto.frenchconnection.com/2010/02/challenge-chat-roulette/"the initial company blog post/a about the contest, "if you rise above the seas of failing men and charm a woman on Chatroulette," the company promises to give you a voucher worth 250 pounds which you can spend at the company's retail stores. The blog post then provides an example of what they mean by a "seduction attempt" by way of a a href="http://manifesto.frenchconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/manifesto-chatroulette.jpg"screenshot/a of a Chatroulette chat session - and be warned, it's not what we would consider safe for work. Instead, what French Connection is promoting is essentially a nod to the often perverse nature of the popular webcam-surfing site./p h2Chatroulette for Marketing: Risky or Brilliant? /h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/chatroulette_data.png" align="right"Although the French Connection brand may pride themselves on their youthful, hip nature, it's an arguably risky move to promote themselves via a service as odd, off-the-wall, and yes, occasionally emvery/em disturbing as a href="http://www.chatroulette.com/"Chatroulette/a. Like a href="http://vimeo.com/9669721"Casey Neistat recently explained/a in a charming video demo of this latest Internet craze, on any given day, Chatroulette is 71% male, 15% female and 14% pervert. /p pIn fact, it's the possibility of running into something odd - or rather emsomeone/em odd doing emsomething/em odd- that makes Chatroulette so exciting for its users. Like the game of Russian Roulette from which its name is derived, most of the time nothing remarkable happens - you run into another bored voyeur looking back and you and maybe even have a casual conversation. But every now and then...embang/em! /p pAnd it's the embang/em that seems to appeal to French Connection. They want to send out their customers into the wild, wild west of Chatroulette to become the very sort of creepy perverts that make the site so darned intriguing. So now, dear Chatroulette users, you'll have to wonder whether that freaky guy/gal hitting on you is doing so because they're actually a weirdo or if they're just trying to win a few bucks to spend at a clothing store. /p pimg alt="chatroulette_chats.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/chatroulette_chats.png" width="600" height="291"/p pThanks to French Connection's bravery, they have the honor of being the first brand to attempt using Chatroulette for marketing purposes. However, if the contest goes well (i.e., it generates a lot of press), other marketers will likely soon follow suit. /p pIs that a good thing? We're not so sure. At least, it's not good for us, the Chatroulette surfers. Marketers, though, may think it's a downright brilliant move. And maybe it is - after all, who would have thought that anyone could have figured out how to promote a brand on a service like this? Still, we sort of wish the marketers would leave this one alone. Stick to Facebook and Twitter and the other straight-laced social sites of the Internet - leave Chatroulette and all its unrestricted debauchery alone. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/chatroulette_being_used_for_marketing.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7i2sZ9Hrk0LUFum4J1P_uUVxfck/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7i2sZ9Hrk0LUFum4J1P_uUVxfck/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7i2sZ9Hrk0LUFum4J1P_uUVxfck/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/7i2sZ9Hrk0LUFum4J1P_uUVxfck/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1SXdMOioJjs:lfqckI82acg:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/1SXdMOioJjs" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/evri-logo.png"Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup a href="http://Evri.com"Evri/a will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today./p pEvri launched a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/evri_beta_launches_search_less.php"just short of two years ago/a and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18659amp;cb=18659' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18659amp;n=18659' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg src="http://img.skitch.com/20100311-qaw7xxedyh6xbgawyyemjwcng8.jpg"/p pWe profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/reports/real-time-web.php"The Real-Time Web and Its Future/a. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_i_loved_and_lost_an_aardvark.php"How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark/a) /p pHere's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:br / blockquoteEvri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics./p pEvri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots./blockquote/p pEvri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of a href="http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/04/part-i-hot-startups-to-watch-in-2010-2/"his top startups to watch for 2010/a, even a year and a half after it launched./p pWe haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_developing_real_time_index.php"our coverage/a) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move./p pA number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages. /p pTake that, semantic web doubters./p pWe'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vHHRzCr9Xc"6 part video series on YouTube/a wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science Engineering./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paul_allen_backed_semantic_service_evri_has_been_a.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OzMDeuOu9-NuWpHrsb1wskPz9f4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OzMDeuOu9-NuWpHrsb1wskPz9f4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OzMDeuOu9-NuWpHrsb1wskPz9f4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OzMDeuOu9-NuWpHrsb1wskPz9f4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=OAdG4gBTZfM:3G9Hq-7mKlY:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/OAdG4gBTZfM" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:4KBA3HE_DP7cvM:http://asia.cnet.com/i/r/2005/dc/39294428/kiwi_love_sc.jpg"For a href="http://twitter.com/ricmacnz"obvious reasons/a, we care about what goes on in various parts of the world, particularly New Zealand and other areas that are underserved in terms of Internet access./p pSo, we were quite excited to learn this evening of a new proposal that would give New Zealanders - including a couple RWW staff members - a better broadband experience. According to NZ website a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/3435625/Top-business-figures-in-bold-broadband-bid"Stuff/a, a halndful of well-known innovators and entrepreneurs are teaming up on a $900 million dollar project that would give Kiwis (and their Aussie neighbors) "virtually unlimited" broadband access via an international cable that would run across the Pacific Ocean. Just how much of a difference would this cable make compared to current Internet access?/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18658amp;cb=18658' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18658amp;n=18658' border='0' alt='' //a/p pThe difference would be significant, as Stuff's graphic shows:/p pimg src="http://static.stuff.co.nz/1268279149/022/3436022.jpg"/p pThe plan is to construct a 5.12 Terabits per second-capacity fiber cable to connect Australia and New Zealand to the U.S. - a cable that would deliver data at five times the speed of the current network./p pThis proposal puts a href="http://thewarehouse.co.nz/"Warehouse/a founder Stephen Tindall, a href="http://www.trademe.co.nz/"TradeMe/a creator Sam Morgan, entrepreneur Rod Drury, and techies Mark Rushworth, John Humphrey and Lance Wiggs in competition head-to-head with Southern Cross Cable, a large network partially owned by Telecom New Zealand. The team, called Pacific Fibre, hopes to complete the project by 2013./p pOf course, the next step is figuring out the exact cost of the proposed cable - the group thinks $900M might be a highball figure - and find investors. However, as Tindall eloquently noted, you have to spend money to make money - something anyone with an interest in NZ's economic future and global competitiveness must consider./p p"The New Zealand Institute identified billions of dollars in economic potential by unleashing the Internet," he said, "and it is beyond time to address the issue. This is necessary and basic infrastructure - we must decrease the distance between New Zealand and the international markets. /p p"Doing so will be incredibly valuable for New Zealand and Australian businesses and consumers. If we are able to deliver on this cable this it could be as valuable to our NZ economy as the quantum leap refrigerated ships were to our export trade many years ago."/p pHow feasible do you think this project will be? Is 2013 a realistic time table? And where do you think Pacific Fibre's investors will be found? Let us know your opinions in the comments./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kiwis_to_bring_900m_in_bandwidth-building_cables_t.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/01qrRQhu7cblxC3Lmce1hU7kwD8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/01qrRQhu7cblxC3Lmce1hU7kwD8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/01qrRQhu7cblxC3Lmce1hU7kwD8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/01qrRQhu7cblxC3Lmce1hU7kwD8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=1Q09EhhSGbA:mhTBYi8Xa08:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/1Q09EhhSGbA" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/rww-sxsw-2010.jpg"When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties./p pThey might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px;"script type="text/javascript"tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_thread_why_go_to_tech_conferences_anyway.php';tweetmeme_source = 'rww';/scriptscript type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"/script/div- but strongare there still valid reasons for shelling out a thousand dollars or more to spend a few days "partying" with your peers?/strong/p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18657amp;cb=18657' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18657amp;n=18657' border='0' alt='' //a/p pThe greatest thing I've ever gotten out of conferences is friendship - mutually beneficial, educational friendship. And the greatest task a conference organizer can hope to accomplish - swag, parties and panels be damned - is getting the right people into the same set of rooms so those friendships can be formed./p pAside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself. /p pIn other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that's a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by "the same old douchebags," as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we're not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity./p pTo be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There's no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it./p pWhat do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? strongHow would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date?/strong Let us know your opinions in the comments./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_thread_why_go_to_tech_conferences_anyway.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6Yg5LsOZBYVWqV4_TGHpTJIvsQE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6Yg5LsOZBYVWqV4_TGHpTJIvsQE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6Yg5LsOZBYVWqV4_TGHpTJIvsQE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6Yg5LsOZBYVWqV4_TGHpTJIvsQE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=GRTHkkUuGOc:9xYA1kTUYOs:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/GRTHkkUuGOc" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Samuel Jackson" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/samuelJacksonPulp.jpg" width="150" height="129" /As the cloud is getting more players and interfaces, best and worst practices are emerging. As the market grows and more companies try to plug in, the cloud may benefit from guiding principles. /p pSimilar to new technology movements in the past, a natural process is underway to define "what is good", which, for some in the industry, equates to "what is open". Like religion itself, open can be defined in ways that are uplifting, or on the other side of the coin, restricting. Also, we learn again, nothing is free./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18620amp;cb=18620' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18620amp;n=18620' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Cloud APIs Must Walk on Water/h2 pIf you've been part of a software development project, you know that sometimes it's hard to get the team to all agree on best practices for interface design, database optimization, or even what technology to use. In this analysis, we take a look at some of the movements in cloud computing that start to lay a framework of good as it relates to this technology./p pIn this context, API designers for cloud applications need to think ahead and avoid common pitfalls. For several reasons, more than ever before. First, because many people will be accessing your one piece of code. Second, is that in this world of open APIs, it's easy to compare your code against another. /p pWe notice that data management practices are at the core, and details matter when provisioning in platforms. At the same time that groups are forming to align practices and forms of virtualization and cloud standards, a voice whispers that perhaps this is a free-market problem. People who benefit at solving it, will; others will ignore it or compete directly. We enjoyed this a href="http://www.joyent.com/joyeurblog/2009/10/15/on-cloud-standards-transparency-and-data-mobility/"post from Joyent/a on where standards matter in a practical sense. /p pIn essence, the question raised: If a vendor makes it easy and bakes in the ability to "just do it", do you know or care about the standards? This seems to mirror an iPhone development paradigm, which is to expect work from the vendor SDK or libraries. The SDK wraps standards implementations, which is done in the way best understood by that vendor./p h2Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done To You/h2 pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/commandment.jpg" alt="commandments parchment" width="250" height="305" class="alignright" /We know the cloud is big - perhaps it will inevitably be bigger than the Internet itself as it usurps our conception of location, space and time. /p pWhere power forms, rules, groups, and organizations do as well. In information technology there is always tension between open standards and defacto standards. The former are crafted through agreements, the latter through leadership and market dominance. /p pWe asked in a prior series "a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/02/cloud-computing-leader.php"Will a single company become the dominant provider in the cloud?/a" Today we look at the more practical side of "who is winning now" - who is setting the rules and who is in the trenches./p pQuite a number of the responses to our earlier posts emphasized that "the cloud should be free", meaning that it should have governing principles to avoid one vendor from owning the landscape./p pHere are a few groups that have emerged to provide some context in how this may come together, both philosophically and practically. In both, the devil is in the details. A good a href="http://www.ogf.org/News/news.php?id=133"summary of some of the current combining/a of forces is by the a href="http://www.ogf.org/"Open Grid Forum/a. (In our opinion, grids have given way to clouds as the dominant concept in this technology makeover)./p ul liA resource directory of initiatives is located at the a href="http://cloud-standards.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page"Cloud Standards Wiki/a, which in itself was formed by a handful of organizations and movements working to align around setting rules and patterns for cloud computing. lia href="http://opencloudconsortium.org/"The Open Cloud Consortium/a is organized around developing practices around sharing resources and has recently focused on a developing a test bed./li liThe a href="http://www.dmtf.org/home"DMTF/a is working at the core definition of virtualization. It recently focused on the 1.1 version of the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification that focuses on packaging virtualization instances and creating a portable mechanic distribution by defining envelope and collection parameters around the virtual machine and its services. The organization, which contains members of IBM, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, XENSource, Sun, and NEC, has submitted 1.1 for consideration as an ANSI and ISO standard./li liThe efforts by the federal government in its a href="http://www.data.gov/"data.gov/a initiative shows that there's a market that's starting to see the value of a href="http://www.data.gov/catalog/raw"raw government data formats/a. Soon, we would expect this to be powered by a mesh of computer resources that allow all sorts of jobs - integrated jobs - to work with these data sets. It would comprise an active government cloud. /ul h2Do Not Covet Thy Neighbors Network Resource/h2 pWhen looking for things to avoid, we found a lot of philosophical questions around data ownership, logging and portability. These discussions are alive and well and seem to be being absorbed into vendor solutions and consortiums like the ones mentioned earlier./p pFor a more practical view, we turned to a friend of ReadWriteWeb, a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/thorsten/"Thorsten von Eicken/a, and have summarized his thoughts from a recent post, "a href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/"Top Cloud API Sins/a. strongBold/strong items are our (loose) mapping to biblical terms.br / ulbr / listrongDo not covet your neighbors resources./strong: Listing of resources without the details, e.g., a list-servers call that doesn't return all the details for each server. This makes it very expensive to poll for server state changes a href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/".../a/libr / listrongDo not make cast idols/strong: Not returning a resource id on creation. Some APIs don't give you a server i.d. when you request a servera href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/".../a/a/libr / listrongLabor six days, rest on the seventh/strong: Providing a task queue. Several APIs I've seen have a task queue that is supposed to provide updates on tasks that are in progress E.g., you launch a server and you get a handle onto a task descriptor. For us that's just overheada href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/".../a/libr / listrongThough shall not bear false witness/strong: Not returning deleted resources in a "list resource" call. In particular, terminated servers must be returned in a list servers call for a certain duration, probably at least for an hour. Ouch!a href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/".../a/libr / listrongShall not covet his neighbor (or force me to repaginate)/strong: Pagination that goes page-wise instead of using a marker, e.g. where you get page one or the first 100 resources and then issue a query for "page 2″ or "from 100 on". Explain to me how a client can get a consistent resource listing when resources can be added and removed concurrentlya href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/".../a/libr / liRandy Bias added to Torsten's post: strongTreat others as you want to be treated /strongYour UI MUST use your API so you understand how to be a consumer of your own APIa href="http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/02/13/top-cloud-api-sins/".../a/libr / /ul/p pWe plan on keeping up with this list and seeing how it intersects with implementations and standards that evolve./p h2Nirvana: Smells Like Services Orientation/h2 pTorsten goes on to describe a picture of the future. "Now here's what I'd really like to see. This is what we're working on for internal purposes and it's not easy, which is an event based interface instead of a request-reply based interface... " /p pimg alt="nirvana " src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/nirvana.jpg" width="280" height="193" class="alignleft" /Smart services in the cloud, rather than resources alone. This starts to get us closer and closer to an object-orientated network. Maybe that's what the cloud will be for platforms, infrastructure and software. The industry has been quick to identify the layers. But perhaps the point is piecing them together in a smart transactional framework./p pA way to engineer highly reliable systems around these architecture challenges may sound familiar to those who monitor existing data centers today./p pTorsten continues, "We run a good number of machines that do nothing but chew up 100% cpu polling EC2 to detect changes. Fortunately cpu cycles are cheap :-)". /p pThis is practical intervention between vision and get it done. /p pWe find it refreshing to hear this type of dialog in the industry and see a fresh opportunity for defining efficient patterns for this next generation of the cloud infrastructure. /p pPerhaps a new concept is forming: "Divine Computing". /p pWhat buying decisions will be based on the openness of cloud resources and common APIs?/p pPhoto credit: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsarkasim/"tsarkasim/a, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments"Amsterdam Esogna/a/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/03/cloud-virtualization-api-nirvana.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e5ESi1bEwXQfp9eLQcXlNZofBKU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e5ESi1bEwXQfp9eLQcXlNZofBKU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e5ESi1bEwXQfp9eLQcXlNZofBKU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e5ESi1bEwXQfp9eLQcXlNZofBKU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=QzzKl0hbTNY:NI2M4kDw6cM:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/QzzKl0hbTNY" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="google marketplace and zoho" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/assets_c/2010/03/apps_marketplace_logo-thumb-150x19-15112.gif" width="150" height="19"/Since the announcement went live yesterday about the a href="http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/home"Google Marketplace/a, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service./p pWe'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at a href="http://zoho.com"Zoho/a, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company a href="https://raju.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-launches-Business-Apps-on-Google-Apps-Marketplace.html"joined Google Apps Marketplace/a in its launch./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18654amp;cb=18654' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18654amp;n=18654' border='0' alt='' //a/p pBuy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs. /p pVegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster./p h2Extending The Relationship/h2 pFor many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend./p pVegesna:/p blockquote"First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. "/blockquote h2Google Dominates The Landscape/h2 pTo play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure./p pVegesna:/p blockquote"Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this a href="http://blogs.zoho.com/general/ibm-microsoft-google-eras-of-computing"here/a and a href="http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-we-cooperate-with-google"here/a."/blockquote h2A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM/h2 pYesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM? /p pVegesna:/p blockquote"Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)." /blockquote pFor more about the Zoho integration:/p pobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mK_D-Z4wy88color1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mK_D-Z4wy88color1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=en_USfeature=player_embeddedfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/03/the-day-after-why-zoho-is.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3B1F_teMI-trr9KJXIGqr475Jv8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3B1F_teMI-trr9KJXIGqr475Jv8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3B1F_teMI-trr9KJXIGqr475Jv8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/3B1F_teMI-trr9KJXIGqr475Jv8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ROEDzCo59ZI:mGPQiX9is28:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/ROEDzCo59ZI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="google_reader_logo_mar09.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_reader_logo_mar09.png" width="148" height="37" /Google just a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/03/and-now-for-something-completely.html"launched /aa new a href="http://www.googlelabs.com/show_details?app_key=agtnbGFiczIwLXd3d3IVCxIMTGFic0FwcE1vZGVsGPG3vgEM"Google Labs product/a for Google Reader: a href="http://www.google.com/reader/play/"Google Reader Play/a. Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's a href="http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/"Fast Flip/a. It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18652amp;cb=18652' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18652amp;n=18652' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Big on Recommendations/h2 pimg alt="google_reader_play_small.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_reader_play_small.jpg" width="320" height="223" class="alignright" /As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader./p pPlay will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds./p h2Get Started/h2 pTo use Google Reader Play, just head over a href="http://www.google.com/reader/play"here/a or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second./p pimg alt="google_reader_play_large_2.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/google_reader_play_large_2.jpg" width="610" height="485" //p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_reader_comes_out_to_play.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2OqFfeOJidaGySvGLLXVjmIGzMc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2OqFfeOJidaGySvGLLXVjmIGzMc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2OqFfeOJidaGySvGLLXVjmIGzMc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2OqFfeOJidaGySvGLLXVjmIGzMc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=t72_zLqeQL4:4mMQJFIdBIU:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/t72_zLqeQL4" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="Lottay Logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/images/lottay_logo_mar10.jpg" width="147" height="85"/We've all heard of the big company that started as two guys in their garage, but these days, with startup organizations and incubators, more and more success stories seem to feature companies that built their success from group collaboration. One excellent example of how startups can take advantage of collaboration is to work in a coworking environment with other companies and entrepreneurs. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18643amp;cb=18643' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18643amp;n=18643' border='0' alt='' //a/p pTuesday I had the opportunity to chat with Harry Lin, CEO of a href="http://lottay.com/"Lottay/a, an online gifting service that has spent a large portion of its short history coworking with outside developers and entrepreneurs. Starting in October of last year, the company spent six weeks working in the offices of San Francisco-based Ruby on Rails development house a href="http://pivotallabs.com/"Pivotal Labs/a. In December they moved into a space at the a href="http://www.v2tc.com/"Ventura Ventures Technology Center/a where they work alongside other consumer Internet startups, sharing ideas and resources./p pimg alt="Harry_Lin" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/images/harryline_new_mar10.jpg" width="220" height="265" class="alignright"/"The thing about a startup is that you're always under resourced; you never have enough people," Lin told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. "So the more you can make out of less, the better off your are, the faster you can go, and a startup is all about speed."/p pLin, formerly the Vice President of a href="http://abc.com/"ABC.com/a and General Manager of a href="http://www.evite.com/"Evite/a, was brought on board at Lottay after the company received Series A funding in the summer of 2009. Below are some highlights from my discussion with Lin on the benefits of coworking environments for startups. /p pemstrongHow did Lottay benefit from the Pivotal Labs experience?/strong/embr / We camped out at the Pivotal Labs office for the entire six weeks. We were in San Francisco and sitting in their office everyday with the two developers that were on our contract. The reason this worked better is that it was very intense and very concentrated; you had no other distractions. The other reason it was fantastic is that its a room full of 25 top notch Ruby on Rails developers. We were only paying for two of them in our engagement, but there were the other 23 sitting in that room working on various things. /p pimg alt="Pivotal Labs Logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/images/pivotal_labs_mar10.jpg" width="229" height="86" class="alignright"/We would come up with a problem or a hurdle we couldn't get over and we would just shout out, "Hey has anyone ever done emthis/em with a library?" and some guy would jump up and say, "Yeah, I've done that!" Voila! Problem solved. And that would happen all the time. So we were getting the benefit of this very open, huge brain trust that Pivotal had even though, technically speaking, we were just paying for the two guys. The third other thing I'd say was great about the environment is that they had other clients in there. So we got to meet, talk to, and get to know some other Internet companies, and that was really cool."/p pemstrongWhat is the experience like now in Ventura?/strong/embr / img alt="VVTC Logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/images/vvtc_logo_mar10.jpg" width="191" height="153" class="alignright" /There are 12 of us in this incubator here in the city of Ventura; it's a very deliberate ecosystem the city is trying to push, and we're part of that ecosystem. We all speak the same language, the same jargon, the same shorthand. If one of us comes up with a brilliant idea or an interesting strategic question, we'll grab each other, white board it, sit in a room, chat in the hall way - the kind of random things that happen when you're all physically located in the same place. The other thing that we benefit from is that because this is run by the city, we get a lot of support in the form of a fantastic rate on rent, free wifi, marketing and public relations, and they've helped us find recruits when we have openings to hire people. The city is more than just a landlord, they're trying to jump-start this ecosystem./p pemstrongSo you would suggest that early stage startups try to find coworking space?/strong/embr / If possible, I would not do the "in your basement" or "in your garage by yourself". Those are the legendary stories we like to hear about, but I think the majority of successful startups has had some kind of coworking environment. I worked for nine years in the Bay area and I know that while there are official incubators, there are also these offices where nine out of the ten companies there are high-tech companies. Being with other people who are doing the same thing is hugely beneficial./p pIn the consumer Internet space, especially with how the Web has evolved over the last decade, everything is getting more social and more open, both in terms of the consumer behavior and in terms of the development and how things are produced. So it just stands to reason that in launching and trying to grow these types of businesses, you should be more social as well./p pIemstrongs there anything startups should avoid when in a coworking environment?/strong/embr / It is tempting to do a lot of partnerships with other startups because you're there, you know each other, you understand each other's pains and trials and tribulations. Resist the temptation unless is makes a lot of sense. Usually what a startup needs by way of partnership is a large established company./p pemstrongWhat is your advice to the young startups out there looking to launch or grow their business?/strong/embr / There will be 100 problems to solve every week. I can guarantee you that at least 75 of those problems have already been experienced and solved by someone else. That's the problem with being in a garage or a bedroom by yourself; you'll probably end up trying to solve those 75 problems yourself. When you're colocated and coworking with other entrepreneurs, you can share. "Oh, you've got that problem? I've got that problem, and here's the solution." You can benefit from their learnings and not have to reinvent the wheel, which saves you a lot of time./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/03/entrepreneurs-view-on-benefits-of-coworking.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OIzzt8mdCUPR0vimLETzpiv9_rk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OIzzt8mdCUPR0vimLETzpiv9_rk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OIzzt8mdCUPR0vimLETzpiv9_rk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/OIzzt8mdCUPR0vimLETzpiv9_rk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=l4F_4rh_FD0:cgUl7bVPKc8:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/l4F_4rh_FD0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="gowalla logo" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/gowalla_logo_mar09.jpg" width="150" height="43" /As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both a href="http://www.gowalla.com"Gowalla/a and a href="http://www.foursquare.com"Foursquare/a release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year's SXSW./p pBoth apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling "fresh" and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18650amp;cb=18650' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18650amp;n=18650' border='0' alt='' //a/p pFoursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it's list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It's boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a "Places" view that supports categories, a history view of places you've been and a "pull-to-refresh" feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away./p pFirst of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends' photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location. /p pNext, it's bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don't need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it. /p pIn addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With "spot details", including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing - real world connection information. /p pAnd one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, "Hot Spots", tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven't had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting./p pThe updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think - who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we're calling it for Gowalla./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gowalla_foursquare_release_simultaneous_updates_th.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G-AYM2zNEKNJc57h-GA1VbCJ6pk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G-AYM2zNEKNJc57h-GA1VbCJ6pk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G-AYM2zNEKNJc57h-GA1VbCJ6pk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/G-AYM2zNEKNJc57h-GA1VbCJ6pk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tpoQELcxaKI:ce0uRs1yCM4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/tpoQELcxaKI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="sony_reader_store_logo_mar09.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/sony_reader_store_logo_mar09.jpg" width="141" height="41"/Sony just a href="http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/e_book/release/56795.html"announced/a that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony's e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18651amp;cb=18651' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18651amp;n=18651' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2eInk vs. LCDs/h2 pFor users who don't own an e-reader yet but are looking into getting one, the question right now is to either wait for the iPad and go with a regular LCD screen for reading books, or to choose a more traditional (and cheaper) e-reader like the Kindle or Sony Reader that feature electronic ink. While some users don't mind the blacklit LCD screens of their phones to read, others can't fathom reading any long-form content on these screens./p h2Fighting Off the iPad/h2 pFor Sony, Amazon, Bamp;N and others who are currently betting on electronic ink for their devices, one of the best ways to distinguish themselves from Apple is to offer more content over their free wireless connections and to play up the advantages of eInk. In this context, adding a newspaper like the New York Times (which is also a favorite of Steve Jobs and features heavily in Apple's a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/gallery/#hardware06"iPad ads/a and other a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/"promotional material/a) makes a lot of sense. For the newspapers, getting on more devices and selling more subscriptions is simply good business. Sony charges up to $14.99 per month for these subscriptions. pGiven that all of these papers could sell their own apps and subscriptions on the iPad as well - and that some of them will be available for free - the availability of newspapers may not be a deciding factor for a lot of potential iPad and e-reader buyers. Hopefully, however, we will also see a lot of innovative newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. Chances are that these new apps will make today's traditional e-readers seem rather quaint in comparison. The availability of these apps could easily sway a lot of potential e-reader buyers to get an iPad instead./p pWhat is your experience? Do you think e-books and newspapers just look better on eInk? Or are you waiting for the innovative newspaper apps on the iPad that will include video and other interactive content?/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sony_brings_more_newspaper_and_magazine_content_to.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/akYu29IgioTlunVqUMkZl8H1CIM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/akYu29IgioTlunVqUMkZl8H1CIM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/akYu29IgioTlunVqUMkZl8H1CIM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/akYu29IgioTlunVqUMkZl8H1CIM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=HYlzCT8f1VI:p_pm4Vep10Q:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/HYlzCT8f1VI" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="top-HarmonySP-Products.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2010/03/top-HarmonySP-Products-thumb-130x98-15040.png" width="130" height="98"/Microsoft Outlook has historically been at the heart of document-based environments that for many years have ruled the enterprise./p pBut the walls that have guarded this document-based world are crumbling fast. Outlook is now more than a message center. It is becoming a collaborative space where the lines between Google Docs and other social applications start to blur./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18634amp;cb=18634' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18634amp;n=18634' border='0' alt='' //a/p pThree extensions exemplify this trend. These services are quite similar. a href="http://xobni.com"Xobni/a has the longest track record. it started as a consumer-based service, gaining a following for its search capabilities in Outlook. Search is Outlook's inherent weakness. Neither a href="http://docverse.com"DocVerse/a nor a href="http://harmony.mainsoft.com/content/harmony-for-google-docs/product-features"Harmony/a have deep search capabilities like Xobni. That may only be a temporary issue for DocVerse. Last week, Google announced that it had acquired DocVerse. We expect that will in some way translate into better search in the weeks and months ahead for the DoVerse service./p h2Harmony/h2 pHarmony is the newest of the group. The a href="http://mainsoft.com"Mainsoft/a service is a mash up between Google Docs and Outlook. It also puts SharePoint directly into Outlook. Like most Outlook extensions, Harmony pulls Google Docs or Sharepoint into an Outlook sidebar. /p pimg alt="HarmonyForGoogleApps.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2010/03/HarmonyForGoogleApps-thumb-600x479-15038.jpg" width="600"//p pThe service is intended to ease attachment overload by creating a central place where people can access Google Docs. It's a drag and drop environment that allows people to drag email attachments into the Harmony sidebar. /p pA document may also be dragged into an email where it appears as a link for the recipient. The recipient may access the document by signing into their Google Docs or Google Apps account./p pThe service is now available as a free download. It is compatible with Sharepoint 2007 and Sharepoint 2010. It will be available later this year as an extension for Microsoft Office./p h2DocVerse/h2 pDocVerse plays a similar role to Harmony. The service synchronizes in the Outlook Sidebar. The widget associates a link to the document that is getting the edit. Every modification is synced. When multiple people work on a document, the updates are made through the plug-in and versions are stored online./p pobject width="400" height="225"param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7332001amp;server=vimeo.comamp;show_title=1amp;show_byline=1amp;show_portrait=0amp;color=amp;fullscreen=1" /embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7332001amp;server=vimeo.comamp;show_title=1amp;show_byline=1amp;show_portrait=0amp;color=amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"/embed/object/p h2Xobni/h2 pimg alt="" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2010/03/xobni.profile-thumb-240x401-15096.jpg" width="240" height="401" class="alignright"/Xobni provides what Outlook really needs. Great search. It will search Outlook and external social networks and third party applications to get a fuller profile of the contact. In November, the company released a href="http://www.xobni.com/enterprise"Xobni Enterprise/a. The service gives I.T. administrators the ability to deploy and manage the plugin across the enterprise. it also offers integration across services such as Salesforce CRM and Sharepoint./p h2Outlook Has Come A Long Way/h2 pThe old days are over for Outlook. It's now entering an era where the degree of collaboration will center around a hyperlinked environment more so than document-based systems. The enterprise is becoming more web-oriented and Outlook is no exception to the change./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/03/three-extensions-that-make-out.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_1SkOf1SUWLCzEJ0Qcq3UkKw_d8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_1SkOf1SUWLCzEJ0Qcq3UkKw_d8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_1SkOf1SUWLCzEJ0Qcq3UkKw_d8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/_1SkOf1SUWLCzEJ0Qcq3UkKw_d8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=gTKLu7lOaks:1eheLVE2ePE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/gTKLu7lOaks" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/brizzly_logo_150.jpg" width="150" height="61" hspace="5px" vspace="5px" /For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We've moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than a href="http://www.twitter.com"Twitter.com/a? /p pFor that, there's a href="http://www.brizzly.com"Brizzly/a, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18648amp;cb=18648' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18648amp;n=18648' border='0' alt='' //a/p pThe web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you're clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that - embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter./p pToday, the company is releasing a full-featured a href="http://brizzly.com/iphone/"iPhone app/a that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn't offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it's limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that's as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs - all the standard stuff you would expect./p pAs we mentioned the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brizzly_adds_facebook.php"last time/a we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called "News". /p pBrizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a "permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about," it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be "integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide" the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brizzly_releases_iphone_app.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tf4cSoC8LD6kBDeuFHNTRuH4eVA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tf4cSoC8LD6kBDeuFHNTRuH4eVA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tf4cSoC8LD6kBDeuFHNTRuH4eVA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/tf4cSoC8LD6kBDeuFHNTRuH4eVA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=fmLB8ZIChq0:rZJVXX-RARk:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/fmLB8ZIChq0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/UrbanAirshipLogo.jpg"a href="http://urbanairship.com"Urban Airship/a, a Portland, Oregon based iPhone "push notifications as a service" company, a href="http://blog.urbanairship.com/2010/03/10/urban-airship-expands-popular-mobile-push-messaging-services-to-android-and-blackberry-platforms/"announced this morning/a that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. "We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future," the company said, "and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them."/p pIf you've seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you've seen Urban Airship's service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18649amp;cb=18649' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18649amp;n=18649' border='0' alt='' //a/p pAirship developer Michael Richardson put the company's cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning:br / blockquoteWe want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS./blockquote/p pBringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry's own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn't ready yet. "We'll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection," the company says. That's easier said than done. Richardson: "We're taking it slow to make sure that we do it right."/p pThe downside to using a service like this of course is that it's a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that./p pstrongInto mobile? Check out the a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/summits/mobile/"ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010/a./strong/p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/urban_airship_lifts_off_beyond_iphone_looks_to_bla.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/elU1pZr8I-w3iKiw4SOvMxCsjT8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/elU1pZr8I-w3iKiw4SOvMxCsjT8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/elU1pZr8I-w3iKiw4SOvMxCsjT8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/elU1pZr8I-w3iKiw4SOvMxCsjT8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=FJi-l5NaGsA:dVdHyoRefaY:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/FJi-l5NaGsA" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/hulu_logo_and_vidoes.jpg"In a recent interview, a href="http://www.hulu.com"Hulu/a CEO a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/01/29/hulus-plans-for-the-ipad-the-mobile-internet/"Jason Kilar told/a technology reporter Om Malik that his company was "very bullish" on mobile, even going so far as to say "we will embrace every device." That's a funny statement, considering that the company has been touting that same sentiment a href="http://moconews.net/article/419-hulu-moving-onto-mobile1/"for years/a but has yet to launch emanything/em for mobile, be it an app or simply a mobile-ready streaming site. /p pNow, with the launch of the iPad just around the corner, the rumors of an iPhone/iPad Hulu app are rising up again. But there's a bigger mobile web than just the one accessible via Apple products, and that may be what Hulu has its eye on now. "We don't think about one device only," Kilar said. /p pHowever, going mobile is going to be a challenge for Hulu. And it's not as simple as re-encoding a few videos, no matter what you may have heard. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18646amp;cb=18646' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18646amp;n=18646' border='0' alt='' //a/p h2Problem A: Hulu's Business Model Needs Work/h2 pThe fact that Hulu exists at all is somewhat of an amazement. Through tenuous connections with major studios, the collaborative, experimental effort to bring streaming TV to web (and make it profitable) has managed to attract a number of users in the U.S. Although the audience size a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/business/media/15nielsen.html?_r=2amp;partner=rssamp;emc=rss"varies widely/a depending on who's counting, the company has managed to become a household name thanks to eye-catching commercials on NBC featuring actors from the network's top shows. /p pBut there's a problem facing Hulu: in-video advertising is, apparently, not as profitable as once hoped. In fact, it's just a href="http://www.beet.tv/2010/03/the-problem-with-online-video-advertising-is-its-too-expensive.html"too expensive/a, says Marc Ruxin, the Chief Innovation Officer for ad agency network McCann Worldgroup. Hulu has been aware of this problem, though, and has been a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hulu_to_add_subscription_services_pay-per-view.php"hinting towards the launch of a subscription service/a, with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch telling an investor conference last fall that the company, was looking at "adding subscription services and pay per view" options. Through the subscription model, Hulu could potentially generate enough revenue to keep the studios happy and maybe even encourage them to offer up more programming. /p pUnfortunately, the subscription model has yet to launch and the profits from video ads have been far too lean for some Hulu participants. Recently, for example, Viacom pulled two of the top shows - The Daily Show and the Colbert Report - from the site, claiming that they simply weren't earning enough money via the advertising model currently in place. a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchiveamp;sid=alPSzMvQQ5cs"Viacom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said/a that "on the current economic model for Hulu, there's just not much in it for us to continue at this time."/p pAnd so the situation degrades./p pSo what is Hulu doing now? It's trying to attract more viewers to its site with the launch of "a href="http://ificandream.com/"If I Can Dream/a," an original series that premiered earlier this month. The fact that they're now making the foray into this sort of online programming is somewhat worrying. After all, if hit video webisodes alone made for a profitable service, then YouTube would have achieved profitability ages ago, instead of (maybe) a href="http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100114/is-youtube-finally-ready-to-turn-a-profit-this-year/"getting there this year/a, five years post-launch. Let's face it, original programming is a bonus for Hulu users, but it's not going to take the place of hot shows like the now-departed Comedy Central fare./p h2Problem B: Will Apple Allow a Hulu App on the iPhone/iPad?/h2 pAnother problem? Hulu has been planning to delay its iPhone app launch until a subscription model was in place, according to a href="http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100114/is-youtube-finally-ready-to-turn-a-profit-this-year/"earlier reports/a. But with the biggest names pulling out, subscriptions could be a harder sell. Still, even if Hulu was able to make subscriptions happen, there are no guarantees that Apple would ever allow them into the iTunes store, especially considering they're offering a competing product. em(See: /ema href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_voice_on_the_iphone_is_html5_good_enough.php"emGoogle Voice banishment from the iPhone/em/aem, for example). /em/p pMeanwhile, Hulu's online site doesn't work in the iPhone's web browser because it was built in Flash. If Apple rejects the Hulu app from iTunes, the company's other option is encoding all their site's content in H.264 and make that available via HTML5, the new web language that offers streaming video emsans/em plugin. Since this has already been done, a Hulu app could launch a player on the iPhone or iPad, if, of course, Apple allowed them to do so. If not, then a mobile site would have to be built in HTML5 - video controls, overall UI, advertisements and all. That's no simple process./p h2What's Hulu Doing Now? /h2 pSo is this the plan Hulu has decided on now? It's hard to know for sure. Like Apple, the company is incredibly secretive about their plans and product roadmap, often refusing to respond to calls and emails entirely, even to say "no comment." /p pAnd yet, the Hulu iPhone app exists. We've spoken to someone who's seen it...but that was ages ago. For all we know, iPhone/iPad app plans have since been scrapped to work on a new solution that works around any potential Apple restrictions. But sources inside Hulu have clammed up lately, meaning they're either building something top, top secret...or perhaps nothing at all. /p pWe hope it's the former, because frankly, an iPad without Hulu is a sad, sad affair. But will we ever see a real app? At this point, we're not holding our breath. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hulu_on_the_ipad_not_as_easy_as_it_sounds.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4SDljbIkhIhTN_2d1jOL_ychNIA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4SDljbIkhIhTN_2d1jOL_ychNIA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4SDljbIkhIhTN_2d1jOL_ychNIA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4SDljbIkhIhTN_2d1jOL_ychNIA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=ONoQOFWjO8Y:0SvWEU55EP4:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/ONoQOFWjO8Y" height="1" width="1"/

pimg alt="getsatisfaction_logo.png" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/getsatisfaction_logo.png" width="150" height="44"/a href="http://GetSatisfaction.com"Get Satisfaction/a, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/partners/facebook/"Facebook Social Engagement Hub/a, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/get_satisfaction_announces_api.php"synchronized/a, so that questions that get answered on a company's topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/ck.php?n=18647amp;cb=18647' target='_blank'img src='http://d.ads.readwriteweb.com/avw.php?zoneid=14amp;cb=18647amp;n=18647' border='0' alt='' //a/p pimg alt="getsatisfaction_on_facebook.jpg" src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/getsatisfaction_on_facebook.jpg" width="610" height="462" //p h2Liberating Content from Facebook/h2 pThe new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/extras/"additional/a $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction's co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service./p pAs Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations./p pOverall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts. /p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/get_satisfaction_tuns_facebook_fan_pages_in_customer_service_hubs.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ooBwr84o3QaOnLlSsC37YZnQobM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ooBwr84o3QaOnLlSsC37YZnQobM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ooBwr84o3QaOnLlSsC37YZnQobM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/ooBwr84o3QaOnLlSsC37YZnQobM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:FFnlKYwJmN0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=FFnlKYwJmN0" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:Ij26kaj3iuU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=Ij26kaj3iuU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:C2pbw5bZMiI"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=C2pbw5bZMiI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?i=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?a=tkm8wFvn5GE:jxIvS6-NpcE:OqabYuBsmOY"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/readwriteweb?d=OqabYuBsmOY" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/tkm8wFvn5GE" height="1" width="1"/