PocketSensei has released SilverScreen 3.0, an upgrade to the popular application launcher. The new version features a pop-up tools set, customized icons, background images and sounds effects. [PalmInfocenter]
Apple changing its basic strategy?
With Apple’s entry into the digital music business with the iTunes Music Store, which will be made available to Windows users later this year, “a fundamental shift in Apple’s strategy may be afoot,” David Zeiler writes in a SunSpot.net column. [MacCentral]
Web marketing sells like teen spirit
Smart marketers will use the Web if they want to harness some of that teen spirit, according to a new study on media consumption among young people. [CNET News.com]
MSN Outlook Connector
This morning, during Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ keynote at the company’s annual financial analysts’ meeting, a product manager demonsrated the Outlook Connector for MSN. The new product, which is testing and will release with the next version of MSN later this year, adds MSN e-mail, calendaring and contact management to Outlook. The connector takes advantage of new features in Office Outlook 2003 that allow the keeping of multiple calendar and contact databases. Microsoft is trying to solve the problem of someone that keeps work e-mail, calendars and contacts in Outlook but the same type of information and e-mail in MSN for personal use. The connector also makes it possible for the sharing of calendars and other information with family members and others.
This is a big deal. If you use a portable device or more than one computer it is not easy to mange across them with any of the services and your work info. I hope AOL is paying attention to this…
A Wrapup of Short Link Generators
If “Tinyurl” is becoming a verb with you, you’ll want to check out Notlong’s wrapup of short link generators.
The short link generators, about ten of them, are arranged in a table. The table contains a variety of information including default links, expiration, whether or not statistics and custom links are available, whether or not an API is available, and what languages are being checked. Not all short link generators are included here, but there are several. [ResearchBuzz]
MIT Launches Site to Gather, Display Information on Government
GIA is inspired by the federal government’s Terrorist Information Awareness program (TIA), an effort to monitor Americans’ lives in detail, from credit card purchases to pets’ veterinary records. But unlike TIA, GIA is maintained by a diverse population of citizens rather than by the government. [URLwire]
24-July-2003 — July Bandwidth Report
July Bandwidth Report — “As of June 2003, most users in the US connect to the Internet using dial-up modems… [WebWord]
Cable has 67% to 105% more users than DSL in the US, according to two recent surveys. Overall, broadband grew by .83% in June, with 36.7% of wired US users enjoying a high-speed connection.
Rich Media and Larger Ad Units Maintain Growth Levels
DoubleClick Inc. on Wednesday announced results of its Q2 2003 Ad Serving Trend Report, which reveals that rich media usage continues to grow quarter by quarter, while larger ads have surpassed the smaller options in popularity. The report also suggests that marketers, having mastered direct response on the Web, are now perfecting the art of online branding and creating more memorable ads that leave lasting impressions. This is evidenced by declining click-through rates — the lowest in six quarters — and higher view-through rates (assessed when a user takes some action on an ad within 30 days of viewing, but not clicking on it). MediaDailyNews 07-24-03
Read an Ad, Get Free Wi-Fi
At least one U.S. airline plans to offer free Wi-Fi Internet service, and phone calls for as little as 50 cents a minute. Business travelers, in particular, want both services. But they have reservations about a plan to subsidize the costs of the services with intrusive advertising. By Elisa Batista. [Wired News]
In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus
Enabling wireless technology in university auditoriums has led to a back channel of communication for students to reveal their thoughts. [New York Times: Technology]
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and blogger who has experienced this back-channeling at several international technology meetings, likens the chatter to what happens in the corridor just after people leave a conference session.
“We’re just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,” said Mr. Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his Weblog, or blog, during conferences, enabling people to follow the speaker and Mr. Doctorow’s take on the speaker at the same time.
Times They Are Surreal in Bob Dylan Tale
As a movie, “Masked & Anonymous” is an unholy, incoherent mess. As a Bob Dylan artifact, it is endlessly, perhaps morbidly, fascinating. [New York Times: Arts]
The intent seems to have been to capture the feeling of one of Mr. Dylan’s surreal, shaggy-dog ballads on celluloid (not to be confused with cellulose): not an especially good idea, perhaps, but certainly an interesting one. Filmed in picturesque, run-down corners of Los Angeles, the movie fuses Coen Brothers Americana with Gabriel García Márquez magic realism. (It also, speaking of the Coens, reunites John Goodman and Jeff Bridges, who speak lines that might have been dreamed up by their characters in “The Big Lebowski.”)
AOL Time Warner 2Q03 Notes
I still think the strategy of migrating the AOL base to a rich package of content, services, and software via 9.0 BYOA is the right strategy, but the subscriber drop-off is alarming. AOL management had to lower its outlook overall (total 03 revenues down mid-single digits) because of “limited visibility” into subscription trends.
Management is so focused on subscriptions that it risks losing sight of advertising. Yahoo had more marketing revenues ($220M to $180M) this quarter – for the first time ever. MSN doesn’t break out financial details, but is likely in the same range. Chairman Dick Parsons said, absent long-term contracts dying off, “AOL would have had a pretty good year” in advertising. I disagree.
House Votes, 400-21, to Block Media Rule by the F.C.C.
The House of Representatives votes to tighten regulations limiting TV stations, radio stations and newspapers, setting the stage for a possible showdown with the White House. [CNET News.com]
The House voted today to support the reversal of a rule that permits the nation’s biggest TV networks to grow larger. [New York Times: Business]
AT&T Wireless gears up for 3G launch
The company says it has ordered the gear needed to meet investor NTT DoCoMo’s deadline for it to launch a next-generation cell phone network in the United States. [CNET News.com]
The U.S. carrier is facing a closing date of Dec. 31, 2004, to launch a high-speed 3G commercial service in four U.S. cities. If it does not meet the deadline, it will have to return about $6.2 billion of part-owner and partner NTT DoCoMo’s investment in the company.
Standards bodies define 3G as delivering 384 kilobits per second of Internet access to cell phones, which is about 10 times faster than the current AT&T Wireless network.
Cell phone service providers worldwide are building such networks because they triple the capacity for cell phone calls, allowing carriers to keep pace with the growing number of minutes used for such calls. To earn back construction costs, carriers plan to offer new services like downloadable videos or Virtual Private Networks.
AT&T Wireless has so far chosen Seattle and San Francisco for its launch of what is expected to be the first commercial UMTS service in the United States, said AT&T Wireless spokesman Ritch Blasi. Two other likely candidates are San Diego and Dallas, where the carrier has an ongoing UMTS trial, he said.
C is for Cocoa
This new Cocoa programming series from O’Reilly starts off by teaching C: “You will learn all the C you need to know to learn Cocoa, and ignore the rest: these lessons will leave out the parts of C that, while useful, are not necessary to know in everyday Cocoa programming.” [Ranchero]
DMA Urges Schumer to Drop Do-Not-E-mail List Clause
The marketing association urges members to write the New York senator to remove the provision for a do-not-e-mail registry from his anti-spam bill. [internetnews.com: Top News]
If you use NetNewsWire and have a PDA…
James Strachan points to a script he tweaked (.dmg d/l) to allow AppleScript to extract NNW feeds for reading via PDA. [James Strachan’s Radio Weblog]
Billboard’s Download Chart
Wow, a chart that reflects the reality of what real people really want to hear? This could be something… [Blogcritics]
Billboard says that Apple, the most aggressive player in this market so far, is selling an average of 500,000 tracks a week. If that’s true, and it takes just 1,500 sales to be No. 1, then the variety of tracks that people are downloading must be extremely broad—particularly compared with, say, the variety of tracks that make up a typical Top 40 station’s play list
Search engine personalization: An exploratory study
Search engine personalization: An exploratory study [First Monday]
Have to read this one later when I have time…
How could I not link to this…
Backup Data on the Moon?
A California company intends to put servers and databases on the moon—seriously. [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]
TransOrbital has had companies that want to back up critical data somewhere other than on earth express interest, and is working on ways to make the idea attractive. “We’re trying to develop some wider bandwidth laser communications going beyond the communication protocols developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that exist for use in space,” Laurie says. “It is feasible to have electronic data on the moon, and to receive it from earth, although delays are implied.”