Blews

Over the coming months iPads will flood the Belgian market, and to anticipate the questions I'll be getting on "which apps to download", here is my favourites list:
- Amazon Kindle - ebook reading
- Air Video - stream video from a mac on your network
- Epicurious - interactive e-cookbook
- Evernote - turns your iPad into a notepad that syncs with iPhone and laptop
- Adobe Ideas - a cool sketch pad for the iPad
- Wired - the only real iPad magazine that get the concept
- Comics - in case you like comics
- Air Sharing - gives access to all your documents over the network (e.g. laptop) or in the cloud (e.g. Gmail)
- Gowalla - even more location based fun
- Goskywatch - who needs a telescope anyway
- Fish Pond - harmless entertainment
- Cool Hunting - man, I'm so trendy
- Pulse News - the coolest RSS reader around
- Soundhound - music maestro
- Aurora feint 3 - addictive game
- Alice Lite - the future of books

Booyah is the not-so-little location based engine that could. The company behind MyTown has raised $20 million in new funding from a group of investors led by Accel (current investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and DAG Ventures, also participated in this round). Accel’s Jim Breyer, a board member of Wal-Mart, Dell and Facebook, will join Booyah’s board. (According to a source close to the deal, the valuation was sizable but definitely under $120 million.)

For months, the location based market has been dominated by Foursquare drama, as Dennis Crowley’s “well-oiled machine” (his words), attracts buyers, adds users and snaps up high-profile partnerships, like its recent deal with NBC. In terms of hype, Booyah has taken a backseat to Foursquare’s billion-dollar-shine but Booyah is chugging along quite nicely.

The company has now raised $29.5 million since 2008 and MyTown has more than 2.1 million users, according to CEO Keith Lee. While Foursquare has yet to reach that milestone, Booyah is preparing for serious acceleration. Lee says Booyah will hit 6 million users by the end of this summer across MyTown and its future products(!).

It’s not exactly fair to compare Foursquare and Booyah, Foursquare focuses on social utility, Booyah focuses on gaming, but both are trying to unlock the power of the check-in and create a massive user base. Booyah, via MyTown, is trying to merge a virtual gaming world with the real world. Users can check-in to real world locations to unlock virtual rewards, they can also “purchase” their favorite properties, collect rent from others and update their properties. Like Foursquare, you can see where your friends are checking-in and pick up local deals.

Lee says MyTown and its unnamed, new products (he was tight-lipped on details but expect major announcements in the next few weeks) will build on that base with a host of new features that will increase the value of the check-in experience. Lee talked in abstracts, but he is interested in adding layers of information on top of the basic GPS check-in: “it’s about validating the activity you do in the real world— a check-in only takes you 70% there.” Booyah is interested in unlocking the information surrounding a check-in through QR codes, bar code scanning, the Facebook Open Graph, etc. For example, instead of just checking into your gym, imagine if you could easily transmit information about your workout, or if you’re at a store, automatically telling your friends what items you like. It’s not clear how these new tools will be implemented but they obviously represent a huge opportunity for Booyah and others, if properly executed. If MyTown, or one of Booyah’s mystery projects, became a popular retail/shopping tool, Booyah would amass valuable consumer data and possibly new monetization opportunities.

On the subject of monetization, Lee would not disclose whether Booyah was in the black, but revenues are indeed rising. Earlier this month, MyTown was averaging 6.7 million virtual item impressions per day, now it’s averaging 8.3 million a day (or 250 million a month). Why does that matter? The popularity of paid virtual goods, which account for 1/3 of MyTown’s revenues, is fueling growth— although the MyTown iPhone app is free it’s a frequent member of Apple’s Top 50 grossing list thanks to the large volume of virtual purchases. Booyah is also making money from paid partnerships with large clients like H&M and the Travel Channel.  Lee says he’s quickly shoveling money back into the company, to expand their product, prepare for the move into foreign markets and to grow the staff. He says a major portion of the new funds will be used to hire the right talent— expect Booyah to nearly double its staff from 24 to 40 by the end of this year.

CrunchBase InformationBooyahKeith LeeAccel PartnersInformation provided by CrunchBase

There’s the unmistakable smell of revolution in the air this week. And if I were Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales I’d be keeping an eye out for angry French peasants dragging guillotines.

For Jobs, the rebellion  is opening up across several flanks: from once-loyal partners like Adobe bitter over Apple’s decision not to support Flash to once-loyal journalists penning op-eds about heavy-handed treatment of the fourth estate and blanket censorship of adult content on the iPad. For Zuckerberg, as I wrote last week, it’s the continuing user-generated outcry over privacy. For Wales it’s an alleged mutiny by wiki editors over his decision to unilaterally delete hardcore pornography from Wikipedia.

In each case the specifics are different but the thrust is the same: having built hugely successful and popular companies in their own image, some of technology’s leading visionaries are coming under attack from the people who were once their biggest allies.

It’s worth pointing out that, for all their ferocity, the attacks are having little noticeable effect on the performance of the companies concerned: all three continue to go from strength to strength. But clearly for the founders themselves there’s a real  impact. Last Tuesday, it was reported (although later denied) that Wales  has voluntarily surrendered almost all of his editing privileges over Wikipedia, reducing his status to that of a junior editor. For his part, the normally unflappable Jobs has taken to protracted and snippy late night exchanges with a Valleywag writer who asked “If Dylan was [sic] 20 today, how would he feel about your company?” Zuckerberg’s suffering, meanwhile, is positively Alighierian: with leaked email exchanges and a Hollywood movie conspiring to destroy any last vestiges of privacy that the 26-year-old enjoys. I suspect all three have stopped reading their Google News alerts.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of schadenfreude as much as the next failure, but as I listen to the growing chorus of disapproval at some of technology’s most iconic founders I can’t help but feel uneasy.

No matter what Danah – sorry – danah Boyd – sorry – boyd – might say, Facebook isn’t a public utility, and nor should it be treated as such. (The test by the way for if X is a utility: if the sentence ‘Millions of children in Africa have no access to x’ doesn’t sound like a headline from the Onion. Try it with electricity, water and Facebook. See?) No matter what some bloggers might think about the First Amendment implications of banning porn, Steve Jobs is not an arm of the US government. Likewise Jimmy Wales’ democratic powers are safely confined to the space between the words Aardvark and Zyxt – is it really a pseudo-constitutional scandal for him to delete a bit of porn?

The problem here is one of perspective. We hardcore internet users might do well to realise that, just because we spend our days trawling TechCrunch and TechMeme and Hacker News doesn’t mean that the wider world shares our belief that privacy settings for photos we’ve chosen to post online, Flash on the iPad or our God-given right to see erections on Wikipedia are the most important issues in the world today. And why should they? By and large, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Wales are going about their lawful business, providing fun digital toys that we could easily survive without, but choose not to.

The second problem is one of entitlement. Just because the founders of web and technology companies are inherently  more accessible to us than other CEOs (see Jobs replying to emails or Jimmy Wales’ and Mark Zuckerberg’s frequent conference appearances) doesn’t mean that they are any more answerable to us. The respective visions of Jobs, Zuck and Wales have created companies that we gladly use every day in our millions. What right do we have to tell them that their vision is suddenly wrong, just because it happens to clash with our own?

As Mike Arrington wrote on Wednesday in relation to Digg, it’s simply not the obligation of an entrepreneur to make decisions based on what the crowd demands. In fact it’s ludicrous to think that a business which has attracted millions of fans thanks to a founder’s singular vision should suddenly start taking their orders from those fans. The whole point of a visionary is that they can see things that others can’t; if thousands of users think they know what path a visionary should take then that path is inherently the wrong one.

I may disagree with Steve Jobs’ approach to pornography on the iPad (I do), or with Zuckerberg’s high-handed approach to privacy (I do) or with Jimmy Wales’ spontaneous clean-up operation to avoid bad press (I don’t, actually) but provided they remain within the law, I will shrug my shoulders to the death in defence of their right to do what they think best.

If they continue to make the right calls, their companies will continue to grow, and if they make the wrong ones, then they will fail. Until there’s any meaningful sign of the latter happening to Apple, Wikipedia or Facebook we – the journalists, the bloggers, the Twitterers and the shrill activists – should probably put away our guillotines and consider that maybe, just maybe, when it comes to their businesses, these visionaries know what they’re doing.

This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, the former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, which was recently acquired by mobile app directory Appolicious. He is currently an advisor to Appolicious.

One of the most commonly asked questions we get from both developers and industry outsiders is: how much money can I make developing apps? It’s a hard question to answer.

So we decided to conduct a survey. We asked for sale sdata from 124 developers that market applications ranging in price from 99 cents to $79.99. This survey was conducted on apps that ran the gamut of popularity, from wildly successful to barely breaking three figures. Developers were anywhere from funded companies with multiple titles under their belt, to first time, single-person authors. Both regular app developers, as well as game developers were included. This mining of data was intended to cover the entire iPhone app industry as a whole, without allowing outliers to skew the data too much in one direction.

There are many different metrics that must be taken into account – just because product X sold well does not mean product Y will. As a longtime publisher of app reviews, I’ve always been a bit apprehensive about sharing cold, hard statistics because of this issue. Taken as a precise gauge for future iPhone apps, statistics can be completely misleading. Therefore, I strongly encourage you to interpret this information only as an overview of the industry, which, like any others, has its blockbusters, stragglers and everything in between.

The following financial information is pulled from 96 developers who provided in-depth sales data and pricing metrics.

The average total number of units sold was 101,024 copies within an average period of 261 days. The average number of units sold per day was 387. The average price was $5.49, although the data skews due to the $49.99 outlier. In most cases, the price point was $0.99. The average number of updates released was 3.89, with the average total development cost amounting to $6,453. Several developers omitted development costs and most did not include their personal time in these figures. It is safe to assume the cost would be at least five or ten times more when using a contracted team. But on average here, iPhone developers are seeing a return of more than 15 times their initial, albeit small, development costs.

Market success still top-heavy

However, when the top 10% of the most successful apps are removed from the data set, the numbers skew much lower, giving a far better impression of what the iPhone industry looks like for most developers. In this scenario, the average sales were 11,625 total units, averaging 44 copies/day. Approximately 23% of apps sold less than 1000 units from launch (ranging from 12 to 370 days in the App Store). Further, 56% of apps sold less than or equal to 10,000 units, while 90% sold less than 100,000 units, with the remaining 10% achieving sales of 127,000 – 3,000,000 units.

While industry wisdom states that application updates always boost downloads and sales, Apple has changed how updated apps are given exposure and this now doesn’t quite hold true. Some developers reported that updating the app gave only a small—and brief—spike in downloads. What did seem to have a larger impact on sales was a drop in price, although this also tended to taper off quickly.

Being featured by Apple is the greatest contributor to spiking sales. The level of Apple
promotion, as expected, reflected what sort of increase the developer would see. Areas such as “New and Noteworthy” produced slightly less gains than “Staff Favorites” or “What’s Hot.” Generally speaking, it is safe to assume a 2-20X sales spike following being featured, with the effect lasting roughly a week or so before returning to average numbers. The key here is to use this dramatic spike to propel the app onto a top list—be it the universal top 100 or in a top list for a specific section or country. Once there, the app has a much better chance of moving up and reaching a higher plateau of sales.

From a marketing perspective, the same tactic could be applied. While not all apps have the likelihood of being featured, focusing promotional efforts within a tight timeframe can be the key. Instead of spreading out marketing and advertising over the life of a product, focusing efforts into a narrow window (preferably, in terms of days) can be much more effective in getting the app onto a top list.

Now, let’s take a look at specific applications. I encourage examining the apps themselves to understand what exactly went into them. The production values, complexity, niche, and pricing determine why they produced either excellent or paltry sales results. The following list reflects 50 applications from the data set that covers the range of sales:

App Name Total Sales Days in Market App Price Xpong 20 210 0.99 ShingleNav 28 156 4.99 Fumbers 62 40 1.99 Greenthumb! 87 231 1.99 FastTrac 199 60 4.99 splojit 217 238 0.99 Size Convert 354 210 0.99 Handbook of High-Risk Obstetrics 436 210 49.99 Traveler’s Quest 532 97 2.99 Cougar Call 800 229 0.99 Seasonalysis 1000 200 49.99 The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle 1179 223 13.99 Star Ride 1200 270 2.99 Star Fusion 1323 217 0.99 Germs 1465 102 0.99 iWasted 1500 201 0.99 Silly Songz 2000 365 0.99 School timetable 3648 395 0.99 Pi Cubed 3775 316 9.99 CardSnap 4690 342 14.99 Adaptunes 4754 272 0.99 Theme Park Madness 4788 367 2.99 Birthday Reminder 10000 250 1.99 Craigly 10000 400 0.99 EleMints 10224 505 4.99 Gridlocked: Traffic Control 12500 270 0.99 MeetMe. 15000 180 0.99 MicroCars 16613 230 1.99 Green Screen Studio 17025 210 2.99 NineGaps 18120 278 0.99 Distant Suns 20000 450 6.99 Numerology 34905 518 4.99 iEscaper! -Escape From the Ninja’s Lair- 35000 215 2.99 TapﾠFormsﾠDatabase 35100 517 8.99 A Doodle Flight 38000 225 0.99 Mini Touch Golf 40000 596 0.99 Art Envi 40000 580 0.99 Mover+ 46000 195 2.99 Orbital 50000 180 1.99 Scanner Pro 52514 143 6.99 Movie Challenge 53402 475 1.99 Formula Racing 127483 127 0.99 Stitch’em Words 200749 353 1.99 Air Hockey 300000 578 0.99 Finger Physics 418000 155 0.99 Fling! 500000 205 0.99 Moto X Mayhem 800000 218 0.99 PocketGuitar 1300000 530 0.99 Flight Control 2000000 361 0.99 Bejeweled 2 3000000 600 2.99

Common marketing techniques include Facebook, forum posts, Twitter, own website, press releases, LinkedIn, app Review sites, blogs, friends, contests, YouTube, advertising (Print, PPC, and banners), flyers, newsletters, Flash Demos, physical networking and podcasts. While each of these methods helped developers in some ways, the real marketing power to make or break an app product rested in the hands of Apple and their selection choices. Apps with successful products in other industries (tie-ins) gained a significant boost from that relationship. The same held true for developers with a known presence already on the web.

The iPhone app market is something that is still in its infancy when one considers what it will look like only a few years from now. Although we are at more than 200,000 apps released, one million doesn’t seem so far fetched given the rate of growth thus far. These sales analytics should offer a starting point for understanding the general landscape, but are not necessarily indicative of one’s own app success. We’ve seen apps made in a weekend earn millions and apps taking months or more earning next to nothing. Developers can either find a niche and get extremely lucky, or produce a fantastic product with high production values. In the end, the latter is the safer route to success. Time to get crackin’…

CrunchBase InformationAppVeeAppoliciousInformation provided by CrunchBase

It’s becoming a common thing. Sometimes the best quotes about something, be it an event, or a deal, or a product, come by way of Twitter. For a few years now, writers have been quoting tweets in posts, and sometimes even taking screenshots of the tweets just for added effect. Starting tomorrow, there will be an easier way to do that.

As Twitter notes on its Media blog, a new feature will launch tomorrow that will allow you to easily embed tweets into a blog post (or presumably, anywhere else). “But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have a simple alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow,” the post notes.

We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see these in action, but I imagine that it will indeed by much better than the screenshot approach. It would be great, for example, if all the links/names in these tweets were clickable so readers could trace information back to its source. A great example of that would be if a tweet is actually a reply to someone, and you could click on a “in reply to” link just as you can on Twitter.com to get some context.

I’m also going to assume these embeddable tweets won’t work for protected accounts.

Update: And judging from this post, this is how the embeddable tweets will look:

CrunchBase InformationTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase

Face.com, the service that uses facial recognition to auto-tag your Facebook photos, is expanding across the web today with the launch of an API.

Developers can now tap into Face.com’s technology to add facial recognition to all kinds of web apps for free via the open API.

The company claims that its technology can  identify faces even in poor lighting or poor focus; or when subjects are wearing glasses, facial hair, and supposedly even Halloween costumes.

By way of demonstration, Face.com has provided three sites using the API for developers to try. CelebrityFindr uses facial recognition to find celebrity photos on Twitter. It seems quite effective, if skewed towards American celebrities. The facial recognition certainly seems to act as  good filter for removing tweets that mention celebrities but don’t actually feature them in linked photos.

The Tagger Widget can be embedded in any webpage to auto-tag photographs, while Poster Yourself adds Facebook photos to celebrity images. While there are already a few ‘face in hole’ sites out there, this demo does a great job at choosing photos that best fit the poster. For example, here I am as Darth Vader.

Face.com could be onto something with this API. We couldn’t find any other currently available free, open facial recognition APIs out there. The company’s technology was recently used in an impressive social Augmented Reality app so we look forward to seeing what other developers do with it.

Did we mention that 2010 would be a big year for HTML5? Apple and Google are pushing it big time, and now so is Microsoft. When Internet Explorer 9 comes out, it will support HTML5 and help make it more common across the Web.

“The future of the web is HTML5,” writes Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager for IE at Microsoft in a blog post talking about Web video. Microsoft still supports Flash as well, but HTML5 and Flash are at loggerheads. By throwing its weight behind HTML5, Microsoft giving Website designers one more reason to abandon Flash.

The post specifically talks about Microsoft’s plans to support only the H.264 codec for HTML5 video. Again, Flash players now support H.264 also. But the more H.264 video is out there, the less need there will be for Flash players because those videos can play directly in an HTML5 browser, such as IE9, Safari, or Chrome.

And, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs discussed in his we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-Flash rant yesterday, H.264 is much more mobile-friendly:

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

Hachamovitch is more diplomatic. He also notes that “Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance.” Nevertheless, he adds that too many consumers rely on Flash, so Microsoft will continue to work with Adobe to make it better.

And if it doesn’t get better, . . . well, by that time HTML5 will be more widely distributed on sites across the Web. Microsoft and Apple and Google will make sure of that.

CrunchBase InformationWindows Internet ExplorerAdobe FlashInformation provided by CrunchBase

If you run a website that accepts Salesforce leads directly, chances are it’s running on WordPress. Chances are also that you’re getting emailed each of those leads, which you then have to copy-and-paste back into Salesforce, to put them into your system. Not anymore.

Salesforce has just launched a WordPress-to-Lead plug-in that allows you to place a sign-up form on any WordPress post or page, which then automatically puts that data into your Salesforce account. No more email required. It’s the first “Consumerprise” play that Salesforce has attempted.

Like all WordPress plug-ins, it requires a little bit of work to install WordPress-to-Lead, but it’s relatively simple. You download the plug-in here, upload the files to your server through FTP, then go into your WordPress set up to activate it. You then need to enter your Salesforce.com Organization ID, and then you’re all set. You can use the [salesforce] WordPress shortcode to display the form anywhere on your site. And yes, the form is customizable with different fields.

This seems like such an logical addition for Salesforce that it’s somewhat surprising they didn’t have something like this earlier (though there have been other work-arounds). Especially in today’s world where we’re all bombarded by email, and some are easily overlooked — or you have to hire someone to be in charge of moving these leads from your mail over to Salesforce. This is much, much simpler.

The video below has more:

CrunchBase InformationSalesforceWordPressInformation provided by CrunchBase

Docstoc, an online document sharing site that caters primarily to small businesses and professionals, has just added a big dose of new content to its premium Docstore. Through a partnership with digital media distributor Overdrive.com, the site has added a collection of 100,000 books from a smattering of well known publishers as well as 150,000 new ‘professional’ documents, which include research reports, legal forms, and other content you’re probably not going to find sitting at your local bookstore.

Among the publishers that are included as part of the Overdrive.com partnership are McGraw-Hill, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Included in the collection are book series like the ‘For Dummies’ books, Frommer’s travel books, and Microsoft guides.

Docstoc’s Docstore launched in August 2009, but was initially only available to select publishing partners. Earlier this year the site added a marketplace for “Professional” documents (like the reports and forms mentioned above) which anyone can sell their content through.  The site competes directly with Scribd, which has also inked deals to feature content from many mainstream publishers.

CEO Jason Nazar says that he believes Docstoc is seeing stronger conversion rates on its premium content than its competitors, which he attributes to the site’s focus on professional content and extensive A/B testing. He notes that Docstoc is now able to buy traffic profitably.
CrunchBase InformationDocstocInformation provided by CrunchBase

App store analytics startup Distimo has taken a deep look at Apple’s App Store today. The number of iPad apps are growing rapidly since the release of the device nearly a month ago, with the App Store now counting 4,870 iPad apps. That’s a 32.7% increase in apps over the past two weeks. To break down the stat further, there are now 3,437 iPad-specific apps, with 1,433 universal apps that work on both the iPad and iPhone. You can download the report here.

Unsurprisingly, the largest application category on the iPad is Games with 1,577 titles (32%), followed by Entertainment and Books with 455 and 396 titles, respectively. From the launch of the iPad, gaming apps dominated the iPad App Store.

In terms of pricing, the iPad is still seeing the majority of its nearly 5000 apps as paid offerings. Of the 186,414 applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone, 73% are paid, while 80% of the 4,870 applications in the Apple App Store for iPad are paid. An application in the Apple App Store for iPhone costs $3.82 on average, as opposed to $4.67 in the Apple App Store for iPad.

In fact, on the Apple App Store for iPad, Medical and Finance applications are the most expensive at $42.11 and $18.48 on average, respectively. This is significantly more than the average price for applications in these categories on the Apple App Store for iPhone ($10.74 and $5.74).

Steve Jobs wrote in a post yesterday that there are now 200,000 apps in the app store, but Distimo evaluated these numbers as of April 26, which could account for the discrepancy in the number of total apps. Of course, we expect the app store to continue to grow steadily as developers flock to the platform. In fact, there are still any major apps missing from the iPad, such as those for Facebook and Foursquare.

CrunchBase InformationiPadApp StoreDistimoInformation provided by CrunchBase

After about a decade of discussion and failed initiatives the "online identity" issue was finally solved when Microsoft bought Twitter. Since then 80% of the internet population uses their Twitter-name to log on to their e-mail, the online version of Microsoft Office and all other websites based on Microsoft technology. "@myname" has become the new universal way to identify people, and now we can use online banking applications with it, consult healthcare data and get access the popular events such as the MTV awards.

Shortly thereafter Microsoft rolled out the first real behaviour-based promotion campaign for Axe, the popular deodorant by Unilever. A sharp target group was defined: single heterosexual males aged between 16 and 32 with an average household income of +- 32% around the median of the their country. Those who live within a 50 kilometer radius of a shop that carries Axe in their assortment were by means of Twitter involved in the biggest sampling action ever. The campaign was a huge success, 100 million consumers were thrilled and had themselves spoiled by Axe.

Shortly after the campaign went live, President Obama expressed his concern about the privacy aspects of these new marketing techniques. To avoid that Microsoft would abuse their newly acquired power, they were forced to sell 25% of their shares at a reduced price to the United Nations, which means they acquire total control over the company.

In the meantime a once leading worldwide media group has sold the majority of their shares to Microsoft in an ultimate attempt to avoid bankruptcy. All publications were migrated to a new digital media-store that is only accessible through Windows-based tablet computers and e-readers.

Facebook continued their succes and were the only real online power standing up to the Microsoft-Twitter tandem. But success took its toll. The company was forced to open up their databases to the European Union after a terrorist attack whereby European President Herman Van Rompuy only just escaped from death. The "European Defence Agency" invested in startup company Attentio and uses their technology to permanently monitor potentially dangerous activities on Facebook.

Now that privacy online seems to have totally disappeared, the geek-community is looking for ways to stay in contact online but out of sight of Big Brother. Read more about the result of this quest in upcoming articles ...

Recently I did something to MackCollier.com that I thought I'd never do. For a couple of weeks, I switched the feed for MackCollier.com from a full to a partial feed for subscribers. I *hate* reading blogs that publish partial feeds, because it forces me to click over to the blog to read the entire post.

So why would I do this to one of my own sites? Because I didn't *know* what would happen. I didn't know how readers would react. I didn't know if there would be fewer comments, or more. For the record, neither traffic nor comments seemed to be affected, so I switched the feed back to full.

That's the thing about social media, it's still new. For all the '10 Steps to Building a Better Blog/Facebook Fan Page/Twitter Presence' posts, we don't KNOW what all the rules are. And the people that use social media the most efficiently, are often the people that have broken the most stuff. They are the ones that tinker, that experiment. They constantly change their blog's layout, or the content on their Facebook page. One of the reasons why I love Twitter is because the way I use Twitter is constantly evolving. I am always tweaking and changing the way I use the tool to connect with other people.

Want to be a social media expert? Break stuff. Color outside the lines. Write longer posts than you usually do, write shorter ones. Ignore all the rules.

When you think you've mastered one tool, that's probably the best time to mix things up. I remember Kathy Sierra once wrote that experts are often the people that always think 'there must be a better way' to do something, no matter how 'good' they got at it.

Image via Wikipedia Social media is much more than a way to stay connected and to have fun: it’s a way to market yourself, your business, and your products and services. By establishing a presence on...Pam Dyer17959305948508351143

Advertising in a connected and open world does not have to be boring, clearly ...

Realtime search has come a long way from just a year ago when the only option really was Twitter’s own search engine. Now Google, Bing, and a gaggle of realtime search startups all have products up and running (even Facebook is expanding its own realtime search to include everybody’s public stream). Today, one of those realtime search startups, CrowdEye, released a bunch of new features that point the way to a better realtime search experience. In particular, it lets you filter your search by location and sentiment (expect Google and Bing to copy some of these soon).

CrowdEye is part of an early group of startups who recently got access to Twitter’s full firehose of Tweets. Today, it turned on that firehose and is indexing a full 14 days of everything on Twitter. CrowdEye returns both links and Tweets as results, and lets you sort by relevance or time. It uses its own CrowdRank algorithm to come up with the most relevant Tweets.

But the best new features are the ones that let you sort by location and sentiment. The location filter shows only Tweets that come from a particular city or spot on a map (you can literally just place a marker on a drop-down Google Map to choose the location). The sentiment filter is more rudimentary. It only allows you to boost positive or negative results, but it doesn’t show you the overall sentiment for a keyword.

CEO Ken Moss says he hasn’t built that yet, but it shouldn’t be too hard and could show how sentiment changes over time. Brands would love that, as well as the ability to get an overall sentiment score by location. With CrowdEye’s new features, you can already filter by location and sentiment and read through the stream of results. For instance, here are negative Tweets about Pizza Hut in Chicago (“Why does pizza hut smell like this? How can people really ignore this odor? Why? Why? Why?”), and here are positive Tweets (“Just used the Pizza Hut app for the first time. Overall, great UX and pretty good pizza to back it up. Will definitely use it again.”). Oh yeah, brands are going to be all over realtime location search.

My one compliant: There are no links back to each individual Tweet, only back to the Twitter account it came from.

CrunchBase InformationCrowdeyeTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase

Amazon.com just reported strong earnings for the first quarter of 2010, with net sales increasing by 46% to $7.13 billion in the first quarter, compared with $4.89 billion in first quarter 2009. Amazon says the Kindle remains its bestselling product with the number of books in available for the device reaching 500,000 titles.

Operating income increased 62% to $394 million in the first quarter, compared with $244 million in first quarter 2009. Net income increased 68% to $299 million in the first quarter, or $0.66 per diluted share, compared with net income of $177 million, or $0.41 per diluted share, in first quarter 2009.

Amazon is clearly emphasizing Kindle sales and its status as their premier product in response to the potential competitiveness from Apple’s tablet device, the iPad. Amazon subsequently released its own iPad app for the Kindle, to compete with iBooks. For the quarter, Amazon reported that worldwide electronics and other general merchandise sales grew 72% to $3.51 billion. The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 500,000 books, which Amazon says includes 100 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers, more than 9,000 blogs, and more than 175 top U.S. and International newspapers and magazines.

Amazon also highlighted the success and international expansion of Amazon Prime, the subscription product that gives customers free two day shipping on everything they buy from Amazon. Amazon was recently reported to be launching a promotion to give all Amazon Prime customers a free Kindle.

In terms of of total sales, International sales, which include revenue from the company’s U.K., German, Japanese, French and Chinese sites, were $3.35 billion, up 45% from first quarter 2009. U.S. and Canada sales came in at $3.78 billion for the quarter, up 47% from first quarter 2009.

The e-commerce giant also recently announced that the Kindle would be available for sale at Target stores, which is the first availability of the device in a brick and mortar store. In the earnings call, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak said the vision for the Kindle was to have every book ever published available in all languages and that’s still the aim for the future.

CrunchBase InformationAmazonInformation provided by CrunchBase

One of the many announcements at Facebook's f8 conference today included an expansion of the Facebook Credits program, the social network's official virtual currency. Expansion of the Credits program could have a huge impact on how and how much revenue Facebook applications will generate.

Already in beta testing with over 100 applications, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Credits would soon role out to the whole network. Credits allows users to purchase virtual currency through Facebook that can be used to purchase virtual goods across multiple applications.

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Credits are meant to simplify online transactions by allowing users to use just one source of currency, rather than having to enter separate bank or credit card information for every purchase. According to Deb Liu, product marketing manager for Credits, users can currently purchase credits for use in Facebook applications with credit cards, special offers, mobile phones and Paypal, and Facebook plans to add "100 or 200" local payment options worldwide.

Liu also introduced the App2user Credits program, promotions that will allow users to earn Facebook credit without paying with their credit cards. The App2user program is designed to enable merchants ways to convert reward points into Facebook Credits. Facebook may seed new and inactive users with credits in order to incentivize their use, and they hope that this will "grease the system," introducing more users with more Credits into the system.

While some developers have grumbled at the 30% cut that Facebook takes from Credits, they soon may have little choice. However, the move to a single virtual currency for the entire Facebook network will mean more revenue overall as users find transactions easier to make.

When Facebook released their revenue figures in February, the Credits program accounted less than 2% of revenue - only $10 million out of $700 million. The consolidation of virtual transactions on Facebook into one currency means that these figures are likely to change substantially. Liu said today that there were around 800 million unique social gaming experiences on Facebook each month. Clearly there is potential for phenomenal growth in virtual currency - for developers and for Facebook - lies with users who are willing to pay for virtual goods to help them in their social gaming.

But according to Zuckerberg, Facebook is not doing this to generate revenue, but "for the developers."

Discuss

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Some small businesses start without a business plan, finding success in a breakthrough product or service early on and building upon that success organically. However, it’s inevitable that the venture will need to have a structured business plan put in place at some point if the business is expected to scale, expand and ultimately thrive. This well understood concept is the basis for what I’m informally labeling “social business planning”, yet from my experiences working across multiple organizations, the current focus remains on social media programs (the external) without putting in the appropriate social business infrastructure (the internal). Sound like theory? It’s not. Many of you reading this are probably initiating your own versions of social business planning and if you aren’t you will be.

Parallel Path Planning & Implementation

 
There are several considerations to factor in while aligning your social media programs with your social business infrastructure. The first is that in today’s agile world it’s realistic that neither comes first. When I visited Dell several years ago, it was clear that the company had leapfrogged others in the social space because they were not afraid to take risks and implemented “pilot programs”. Pilot programs are small, manageable initiatives where progress can be made rapidly and leveraged as proof points while gathering data. Today, you can be assured that Dell is looking to scale and integrate social into their entire business model and this will likely be an ongoing process which requires a good deal of incremental change. But this is inevitably the next step. So in a digestible format, how does social business planning break down? I have a few thoughts:

Employee Engagement:
The program side of social media often includes initiatives where brands and companies perform outreach toward customers or engaging them in the hopes that they will advocate on behalf of the company or brand. Employee engagement is a similar model but focused on employees and it acts as an umbrella over much of the social business infrastructure. When Nokia implemented an internal forum where employees could freely complain about the company anonymously, they in essence created a form of employee engagement where they are able to gain valuable insights. Companies such as McDonalds are known for engaging employees prior to launching major branding initiatives. Specific to social media, engaging employees in semi-public environments such as Facebook is where the lines between social media and business blur. Helping employees engage each other on secure internal networks can help ensure that they socialize internally since it’s likely they already do this externally.

Training
 
I often hear from companies that they have the most personal and effective sales and customer service reps. This is followed by the fact that few of them feel comfortable leveraging social networks for the company, or that the organization has not taken steps to formalize this as a function. Before any formalization can occur, it’s worth considering that your representatives may need training just as they did in traditional channels. Providing customer service in social spaces often means that you are engaging in public and not everyone is naturally comfortable with this. Some companies have found success through their business culture—Best Buy being one of the few to succeed in modestly scaling customer service via social systems. If your organization doesn’t naturally lean toward engaging in public spaces, you’ll need to identify the people in and outside of your organization who are and have them systematically train others. I’d recommend training start with small connected groups and gradually expand through the organization. Edelman’s belt system is a good example of a training program which can work at scale, moving your employees from rudimentary to more advanced levels of social media proficiency.

Process

 
The speed at which social technology moves translates to the need for new processes to be in place. Whether it’s Motrin Moms or Dominos, it’s been well documented how real time the internet as become. A crisis can go full blown in literally minutes and hours and doesn’t take weekends off. Organizations will have to take a second look at their existing process models and find ways to streamline as a result. This may mean opening up new channels of communication between departments so information can flow freely, or removing single approval bottlenecks and replacing them with multiple sources of authority (think nodes on the network as opposed to silos). Process will have to be intentionally re-designed not replaced with chaos.

Organization Models
 
Implementing a “social media center of excellence” or committee that works with core and extended teams cannot occur without there being some changes in the way your company organizes and staffs employees. Some companies such as Comcast have begun organizing around their service groups. Others have marketing playing a more prominent role. Each organization will likely organize and staff differently when it comes to integrating programs with infrastructure. Altimeter Group recently shared some of the models they are seeing emerge in this space.

Knowledge Sharing

My experience in the workforce has been that people don’t naturally share what they know and that even if they wanted to, IT departments have struggled with finding the silver bullet of technology that allows them to. In contrast, the external social networks allow us to share knowledge like crazy. In my estimation, platforms such as Slideshare, blogging and Wikis have actually changed how people view knowledge sharing. Instead of being rewarded for hoarding what you know, participants are rewarded with visibility and accolades. This is a complex problem for organizations and I’m not going to solve it in this post, but suffice it to say that your social media programs are less likely to be successful if you can’t even share internally.

Policies & Guidelines
Several years ago organizations instituted guidelines around blogging. Social media has evolved into much more than that since then. Real time communications and location based services signal what we are doing, when and with who. Policies need to be updated constantly and more importantly be relevant to companies who activate their workforce in social systems. Guidelines should provide employees with basic rules of conduct within the relevant social systems. At minimum, I’d recommend that your organization revisit both areas and ensure that they are still relevant and actionable.

Culture
 
More specifically your corporate culture and don’t be fooled your company likely has one—every social system does. Before Zappos, Southwest Airlines was engaging customers via Twitter. They were also one of the first to launch a highly engaging and informal blog. How? They have an entrepreneurial and scrappy corporate culture which stems directly from their founder. The culture of your organization is likely going to be tied to the success of your social business planning and any initiatives that involve engaging participants authentically. Cultures can be notoriously open or closed and everything in between. Consider though that even secretive corporate cultures such as Apple benefited by opening up (in an intentional way) their ecosystem such as the App Store. I’m not an expert in transforming corporate cultures, and common sense dicates that it’s amazingly complex. But, companies such as P&G have historically experienced transformation in areas such as innovation and design. It likely takes a long time, but it’s possible and in my opinion may be needed for the best business results when it comes to “social”.

Follow The Money

 
Which brings us to the conclusion. What are results? That’s fodder for further analysis. But consider the above chart from Forrester. It estimates that the highest increases in spending will be in the areas of social media and mobile technology. Why? Because attention has shifted from broadcast to networks and this trend isn’t going to reverse itself any time soon. If you accept this as a viable thesis, then making the case for investing in infrastructure or “social business planning” shouldn’t seem very far fetched. So what have I missed here? What would you include? How are you performing your own version of social business planning. I’d like to hear about it.

Google couldn't buy Yelp. So it's going to kill it by making its local business pages amazing. 

The company announced more tools today for local businesses to have a stronger presence on Google and Google Maps.

Google is changing the name of its "Local business center" to the less wordy, but equally uninspired, "Google Places." (Sounds familiar, no?)

In a blog post, John Hanke, VP Google Maps, says "One out of five searches on Google are related to location." He says he wants businesses getting found easily on Google.

Google's objective here is to pick up more ad revenue from all these businesses by giving them a place to send people who click on Google search ads.

Here's the new features it's adding:

• Service area: If travel to serve customers, you can now list the areas you cover.
• New advertising feature called "Tags." It costs $25 a month for a business to tag themselves. They get little yellow stickies that highlight their business on Google Maps with tags. 
• Free photos of your business. Google will travel to your business, take nice interior photos and upload them to your page.
• Customized QR codes. These aren't really popular here yet, but Google is trying to change that. QR codes are those things that look like TV static, but are barcodes. If you take a picture of a business's QR code with certain smartphones, you get a ton of information on the business. Google suggests putting the QR code on flyers and business cards for users.
• More favorite places. Google is mailing out a fresh batch of Favortie Places decals, which you may have seen in the windows of certain businesses. Similar to Yelp stickers, or even City Guide stickers if you've seen those.

See Also: How Google Is Going To Put The Squeeze On Salesforce.com

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• How Google Is Going To Put The Squeeze On Salesforce.com
• 10 Public Companies That Are Toast Without Google
• Google Brain Drain: Local Ads Exec Leaves For VC Firm

Jay Yarow08690948808370923779