Q 8 Blog Reviews

SXSW 2010 for Web Celeb Stalkers

cgseo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:56:18 +0000

A ReadWriteWeb Guide OMG! Kevin Rose just touched my shirt! Don’t lie – we know you get butterflies at the thought of bumping into iJustine or Robert Scoble at a tech conference. We’ve pulled together a nice little cheat sheet just for you, friends. Whether you want a simple handshake, and autograph on your iPhone or a chance to pitch your idea for the Next Big Web App, here’s ten places, panels and parties where you can track down the Internet famous at SXSW 2010. Don’t forget to leave your tips in the comments! Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon! Justine Ezarik, a.k.a. iJustine Longtime lifestreaming queen iJustine is famously an Apple fangirl, but it’s Intel that’s giving you the key to tracking her down at SXSW. She’s and Intel Insider, and she might be stopping by some of the Intel Insider events , like Frank Gruber’s Johnny Cash party or Chris Heuer’s Social Media Clubhouse . We don’t have hard and fast details on Ezarik’s whereabouts, but wherever she is, she’ll probably be tweeting, so keep an eye on her Twitter accounts . Christopher Poole Pool may not be a household name in and of himself, but there’s nary an Internet user who hasn’t been in some way effected by the fun and foul play on 4chan. “4chan – often referred to as a ‘meme factory’ – has been responsible for the creation of countless Internet memes but is perhaps best known for its exploits. In this conversation, we’ll explore the game mechanics of online communities. What fosters creativity in an online community? What design elements can we incorporate to increase interaction? How is the game played?” Baratunde Thurston In “How to Be Black,” The Onion web editor and star of Popular Science’s Future Of series Baratunde Thurston will “touch on the black online experience (if there is such a thing) included memes, statistics on usage patterns, popular destinations and issues of representation. For example, are black people as represented among the creators, developers and builders of our future or are we more consumer oriented than average?” Violet Blue Our favorite sex blogger will be kicking off SXSW with a presentation on “How to Not Be a Douchebag at SXSW Aimed at both first-time and long-time attendees to SXSW Interactive, this biting and humorous, yet useful panel takes a look at the common actions and behaviors to avoid if you don’t want to be described as ‘doing it wrong.’” Kevin Rose This year, the Digg founder returns to host Diggnation Live at Stubb’s. The Bigg Digg Shindigg was certainly one of the largest events at SXSW 2009, with fans crowding around the large outdoor stage to take pictures and watch Rose shoot the Diggnation episode. But don’t expect to meet the man himself unless you’ve got VIP status for the party. Chris Messina In his talk, “ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?,” Messina will explore the nuances of the real-time web. “From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the ’stream’ has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.” Leah Culver This young developer and successful entrepreneur will be hosting the Web Framework Battle Royale. “Which web framework will rule them all? As an audience member you pick the winner! We will present an introduction to a variety of web frameworks including Rails, Django, Catalyst and Sinatra. You can vote for the best web framework in categories such as URL handling, database integration, forms, HTML templating, documentation, testing and deployment.” Gary Vaynerchuk The WineLibraryTV founder is a true Web guru and an inspiration to entrepreneurs and content creators around the globe. He’ll be giving one of his signature, unforgettable presentations again this year as part of the Interactive Speakers Series. Three years after his web app hit it big at SXSW 2007, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams takes the main stage to be interviewed by Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque in front of a live audience . All we have to say is that you’d better get there early if you don’t want to get stuck watching a simulcast in an adjacent room! Molly Wood A last-minute stand-in for Natali Del Conte, Wood has a fanbase of her own. “CNET’s Buzz Out Loud will broadcast live from SXSW. While discussing the day’s tech news, hosts Tom Merritt, Jason Howell, Molly Wood and others will chat with the audience and invite special guests to talk about what’s happening at the show and beyond.” Bonus Round! If you stalk him on Twitter, Foursquare, Plancast and Gowalla, you might get to bump into Robert Scoble , as well. Or, you can catch him at the Rackspace party Monday evening. And of course, while we don’t consider ourselves celebrities, the RWW crew will be present and accounted for at the PBS/NPR/RWW party Sunday night ! Those are our SXSW Interaction recommendations for web celeb stalkers of all stripes. If you’ve got suggestions or feedback, let us know in the comments! See you in Austin, folks! Discuss

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SXSW 2010 for Web Celeb Stalkers

Google Launches Apps Marketplace for the Enterprise

cgseo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:00:38 +0000

Google launched an application marketplace today comprised of services from third-party providers that integrate with the Google Apps ecosystem. The news has been anticipated for some time. In particular, it shows how much Google is embracing open-standards and leveraging its search and Google Apps platform to attract third-party developers. Sponsor Google made the announcement at its Google Campfire One event tonight. The emphasis Google is putting on the enterprise is apparent in how much attention the company put into the event. Over and over we heard that Google passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend. It is that mark that Google is using as its hook for attracting developers to its platform. Developers will be charged $100 to join the program. With that entrance fee, they may add as many apps as they wish to the Google Apps Marketplace. The marketplace supports OpenID to provide a single sign-on for developers. Authorization is integrated into the platform. The customers get access through OAuth, the open standard for authorizing users. A “manifest page” is the foundation for the service. The developers provides information when adding the application to the marketplace that identifies it. Developers then provide additional information about the product. The system is a controlled. Application developers submit the app for approval, which might take a few days. Intuit provided an example of how the system works by showing how payroll could be managed. The customer accesses the account. With Google Apps integration, the customer accesses an account where they have the employee information. It’s that collected contact network that is then integrated with the payroll application. Atlassian showed how Studio, its project management application, would integrate with GMail and Google Apps. Again, if the company is standardized on Google Apps, the information is available through the network. Manymoon is another project mangement application that was demonstrated. It uses Google Apps to develop features such as a calendar, showing how a startup can leverage Google Apps to add features to its service. Other companies that were a part of the initial launch include Socialwok and Appirio . At its core, the marketplace is built upon Google’s search capabilities. Google Apps can be extended with applications. In turn, developers have access to the built-in capabilities of Google Apps. Perhaps the greatest value to customers will be if they are centralized on Google Apps. If so, they can get some pretty powerful capabilities of the marketplace. Discuss

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Google Launches Apps Marketplace for the Enterprise

There is No Perfect VP of Sales and Marketing

cgseo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Sales and marketing are not the same thing. It’s true they both deal with relationship management and it’s true that neither of these job descriptions require hardcore engineering, but just because they’re both in the realm of words over code does not mean that they are the same. At the risk of muddling your mind with HR jargon, the core competencies of a marketer are very different from those of a sales person. Surprisingly, many startup CEOs insist on hiring for a VP of Sales and Marketing position. Sponsor If you’re the VP of sales and marketing for your company, this article is not about how you aren’t doing your job properly. In fact, it’s about how you’re doing the job of two separate people and shouldn’t be. Interwest investor Bruce Cleveland recently wrote an article entitled, In Search of the Mythical VP Sales and Marketing where he defines the separate domains of sales and marketing. Says Cleveland, “Sales and Marketing are vastly different functions that require substantially different personalities, skills, and decades of experience to master…A CEO who doesn’t understand this basic fact, or doesn’t believe it, is not a CEO I want to invest in.” Explains Cleveland, a sales person understands the inner workings of B2B deal probabilities and the short term requirements to increase deal flow. Meanwhile, marketing people look at the landscape from a longterm perspective and lay the groundwork for sales through analyst, media and web leads generation. Essentially, sales people are great oral one-on-one communicators and marketers are great written mass communicators. He writes, ” I have found that the CEO who makes this serious mistake hasn’t worked with someone who is an excellent Marketer and therefore discounts the role it plays.” With expertise in the Software as a Service space, it’s interesting that Cleveland believes the marketing role is the one that gets tacked on at the last minute. While sales offers obvious measurement through direct revenue generation, marketing tends to have a less clear set of metrics. Cleveland explains that “today’s head of Marketing must be an excellent demand creator (the “owner” of future revenue) through sales-ready leads.” Essentially he believes that the marketer’s job is to increase perceived value and generate demand on a massive scale in order to grease the wheels of the sales team. Discuss

Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:05:18 +0000

Seth Goldstein comes up with a lot of ideas. Some of them work and some of them don’t. He was one of the original backers of Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Etherpad (bought by Google) and Bit.ly (huge via Twitter). He was also President of the short-lived Attention Trust and built a browser plug-in that allowed people to track, manage and sell on the Chicago Board of Trade futures in their browsing history and other online attention data. That didn’t work out so well, though it was a very interesting idea. Two years ago he raised $10m, built an advertising network called SocialMedia.com and then sold it off a big chunk of it in November . Goldstein’s latest idea may be one of his most interesting yet. He’s co-founded a company called Stickybits . It’s a service that uses vinyl barcode stickers and a mobile scanning app to layer social media content on top of physical objects. Sponsor You scan a Stickybits barcode that you place or find on some thing or some place (perhaps on someone) and you can see all the multimedia that’s been associated with that barcode before and add your own. Erick Schonfeld covered Stickybits this morning on TechCrunch and called it a way to unlock “the secret lives of objects.” Commenters on that post brought up far more questions than Stickybits has answered so far. Someone is going to nail this, though. I’ve long fantasized about being able to use my mobile phone while around town to find out the news, demographic and property ownership history of various locations. Stickybits isn’t doing anything that ambitious yet; it’s mostly just tweets, photos and audio messages. It’s hard to know if a temporary sticker from one particular company will be the way forward into a world of places and objects with social histories made easy to unlock. Stickybits is selling packs of 20 attractive vinyl stickers for $10, a steep price if you ask me, but perhaps calculated to maximize the significance of each one and minimize the annoyance of property owners about to get annotated. How that price point and the need to download a free mobile app will impact the spread of the program remains to be seen. Whether the messages attached to the stickers end up looking more like Foursquare, Gowalla, Wikipedia or ChatRoulette is another one of the many questions that come to mind. In a location-aware world, the primary role of the barcode stickers may simply be in letting people know that there is data associated with a particular location, something that other services that let you “tag your world” have struggled with. There will likely be other user experience subtleties, sublime and profane, that users start to notice after a few Stickybits scanning experiences. Expect to find these things stuck around various places in Austin this weekend. Perhaps on cats, dogs, planes, trains, automobiles and street light poles all around the country soon. Will it work? We’d love to hear your thoughts in comments below. Discuss

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Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?

Network as a Service: Open Source Enables Efficient Cloud Hosting

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:30:00 +0000

To keep up with the growth of cloud computing and virtualization, networks keep evolving. But unlike Twitter’s Trending Topics, IT budgets don’t scale up. In fact one of the major initiatives in many IT shops is creatively reduce their own expense. To get to a scalable cloud infrastructure where costs are contained, it sounds like the network industry is going to see a time where a “Linux” arrives on the scene. An open source alternative to building networks may disrupt the networking landscape and give network admins an open source network operating system. Sponsor Virtualization: It’s in the Network Too Distributing workload across machines, storage, and environments has required networks to be smarter than ever. Now, the network needs to be intelligent enough to not only route traffic both a bridge and a toll-gate, but to also provision and de-provision all aspects of the environment at a moments notice. Providers like Rackspace are in the business of using the network to optimize the performance of the entire data center. To be effective in keeping up with dynamic system provisioning, technical teams need access to all tiers of the computing environment to reduce operations overhead. In their innovation for efficiency, hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace start to create new patterns – including ones in the core of the network – to get their job done. Network operating systems that are open, like Extreme XOS enable large scale hosting providers to look deeper into networking gear and start to tune it themselves. And enterprises may follow this trend. Servers Don’t Sleep at Night, but Applications and Admins Do For a long time, networks have been used to detect the peers and devices. Many of us use the nearly ubiquitous DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), which is the the thing that automatically assigns IP addresses to a PC when plugging into the network. In an analogy, there is a need for a “super DHCP” is needed that can keep up with the highly virtualized cloud infrastructure per virtual instance. To do this, engineers look deeper to find efficiencies in how the network talks to the hardware and software for the virtual machines. A good example of benefit for this is where a resource has peak loads during the day. Due to natural usage, the applications compute power is not utilized during the night. Using monitoring and provisioning tools, the network can de-provision the extra hardware and offer it to another service. This “freeing up” allocation saves power and money. This is a simple example of where virtual data center solutions are being innovated in the industry to figure out how to further timeshare the computing resources. The network has the ability to help manage the scale down to the moment is enabled by it’s reach to everything over IP (Internet Protocol). The Open Network Wins, Developers Rule Extreme Networks is betting IT leaders that have become very familiar with Linux and open source Hypervisors like XEN want to tweak the network. For the data center manager that wants to go into the core network engines innovate, there comes a need for APIs, SDKS, and open access libraries. Extreme’s openness is in the form of web services, many offered that are offered as XML or CLI scripting that allow integrate tools into the core of the network via XML, and configure edge ports for security and VOIP access as dynamic provisioning. The company offers a code workbench of its own to download widgets to plug into the network. Designed for the open source developer, it shares the familiar pattern that presides in open source community for application frameworks and operating systems code sharing. Shown in the diagram, Extreme’s network offers real-time provisioning of code widgets in the network. Play Nice: the Networks Worse Enemy May be Success Will the network evolve to see an open source player that drives change in pricing and value? In the rush to enable new efficiencies we wonder if this is an Apple A-HA moment in the making. The question seems to be can the giants in the space balance the fine line of better end-to-end experience of managing the environment and whether vendors do it best. If we follow the Apple example of industry success, and end-to-end play for the network may be in the cards. Last month, Juniper announced it has created a new business group and commitment to an Junos ecosystem. Juniper has made a big move towards open source innovation in it’s recent re-branding and at least to one analyst, John Furrier from Silicon Angle, seems to be suggesting that Juniper Judo’sing Cisco, like Google did with Open and Microsoft . That probably doesn’t feel the least bit nice to the market leader, especially when Cisco is priming it’s engines for changing the Internet forever. Cisco Open IOS in 2007 a model towards compartmentalizing and opening IOS, as part of it’s overall movement into a more software based organization.With the complex series of network enhancements and feature sets, it will be interesting to see how Cisco views “open” vs. “customizable” and where the control lives for network management and up-time. When visiting the Cisco IOS website today, we see the standard license and no clear mention of open source licensing. Cisco strikes the balance between open and controlled in it’s a approach to defining what an open network is and where networks will be encapsulated as services. We wonder if Cisco deliver the capabilities to pull more traffic into it’s end-to-end range, while open networking APIs rise as part of the network service stack. With this market, it’s likely both. At very least, open networking has a role in determining the fate of the network and where territories are being defined. The Cloud is a Network of Services The cloud is defining a world where service orientation rules – both the software and physical layers. And, it is breaking the rules of workload distribution, where network topologies are changing. The requirements of connecting the layer 2 and layer 3 networks, as well as IT leaders that are building solutions for mass scaling (enterprises or service providers) are evolving and being driven by an ability to be efficient at the workload level. Extreme Networks Technical Brief, Dynamic Network Virtualization Overview , explains the value of plug and play network components in today’s topology. “By leveraging Extreme Networks® ExtremeXOS®, a modular, edge-to-core operating system, and our extensibility frame-work including Universal Port Scripting and an XML interface, Extreme Networks is able to tightly integrate the switching network with the virtualization environment to create a virtualization-aware network fabric that automates the network-level virtualization required in next generation data center and cloud computing environments. This unique functionality enables Extreme Networks to provide seamless support of virtualization capabilities across the various hypervisor platforms, including Citrix ZEN, Microsoft and VMware. The highly integrated solution allows the Extreme Networks solutions to trigger responses to virtualization moves as they happen in the network by virtue of a tightly integrated XML-based network management framework.” Extreme, and now Juniper, are moving in the direction of offering IT administrators control points in networks and protocols to optimize it opens the market. It looks promising to give administrators vendor leverage in buying services without vendor lock, or waiting for feature releases from the vendor. And, it mirrors the open-source movement in bringing communities together to solve problems and build compatible services. Open APIs may define the cloud’s network of the future for large hosting providers. We wonder if for the enterprise. Photo credit: opensourceway Discuss

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Network as a Service: Open Source Enables Efficient Cloud Hosting

Report: Location Sharing Is Coming to Facebook

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:24:53 +0000

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API. Sponsor How Will Facebook’s Users React? It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.” From Facebook’s Privacy Policy : Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate. When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it. Will Facebook’s Users Care? It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far. Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.? According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users. It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however. Discuss

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Report: Location Sharing Is Coming to Facebook

International Blackberry Outage Goes Into Day 2

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:23:50 +0000

The Blackberry outage that RIM does not want to talk about continues to affect people on both sides of the Atlantic with outages reported in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Some people have been without service for more than 24 hours. The outage is a peculiar one, Data Outage News reports: “Again, this is affecting devices on all North American carriers, BIS and BES, and it appears to be only devices on WiFi, wherein data works “sometimes” when connected via WiFi; no data when WiFi is disconnected.” Sponsor RIM has not yet made a statement about the outage and we have to believe that this is not a smart way to handle an issue that has customers wondering if it their phone that id causing the problem. T-Mobile has been keeping its Twitter account updated for customers affected by the outage. We posted yesterday about the news. It was difficult to get a read on the extent of the outage but by this morning commenters were reporting a number of problems. On Monday, Simon Benson in the United Kingdom said: Seems to be affecting the UK as well! We’ve been out since around noon GMT on Sunday! Bit difficult remote working without access to email… Some are considering dropping the Blackberry. Danielle Ricks posted: “I’ve had MAJOR problems with my T-Mobile Blackberry 8900 for the past 12 hours!!! What is most disturbing is the fact that the T-Mobile techs didn’t even know there was a problem. I spent a half hour doing trouble shooting with them… after doing my OWN trouble shooting… just to FINALLY find this post telling me we ONCE AGAIN have a nationwide Blackberry outage. I’m on my way to SXSW and I HAVE to get my emails. I LOVE T-Mobile customer service but if the Smartphone doesn’t work it won’t do me a whole lot of good. I’ve been a loyal Blackberry customer but this is my third RIM outage and I’m done! Thank you ReadWriteWeb for being on top of things *calling AT&T to inquire about an iPhone*” The outage can’t be helping RIM right now. How many outages can users face when there are an increasing number of alternatives to their service? We’ll update the blog when we have an update about the service being restored. Discuss

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International Blackberry Outage Goes Into Day 2

Cisco in the Core: Preparing for the Next Generation Internet

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:52:58 +0000

Today, Cisco announced the CSR-3 product , a game-changing system to managing the network core. But for CEO John Chambers, the news is about market transition forces and being ready for the next generation of the Internet. The company invested $1.6 billion research and development in CRS-3 to be ready for the next phase of market growth that merges video, cloud, and mobile trajectories. When asked, he said when his team looks out 3-5 years that network growth may be 300 to 500%. Cisco is investing that another revolution is on the way for consumer access and enterprise productivity. Sponsor Getting a handle on scale Cisco’s fabric offers network speed never seen before. According it’s’ own estimates the CRS-3 could offer bandwidth for: Every man woman and child in China the ability to make a simultaneous video call. All movies ever made to be downloaded in 4 minutes (if you had enough disk to store them). 1 GB link to every household in San Francisco. Virtualization and Cloud: Moving from Plumber to Business Architecture The network has many touch points. Chambers said that this has been moving Cisco from being a technology partner to a trusted business partner for nearly all its enterprise and service provider accounts. He views this as a tipping point in how Cisco engages customers and innovates. To that end, the major market transformation underway in the cloud, and Cisco has positioned its network, including the CRS-3 to offer tight linkage between data center and virtualized services. Chambers mentioned “It’s all about the cloud, the CRS-3 family talks directly to the UCS in the data center.” To that end, it’s nice to consider the end-to-end network being prepared for the connections in the data center, especially for physically distributed environments that benefit from fast links between them. Chambers continued: “We kept our partners VMware and EMC in mind in this solution, to be ready to fulfill our vision in the data center”. Here it is a summary diagram on CRS-3 connects data centers. Service provider: Critical Network Backbone Keith Cambron, President and CEO, AT&T labs added. “AT&T was the first user of CRS-1 with it’s 40 GB interfaces and have been using them to manage their network growth. We are testing the 100GB interface in the labs and real production environments.” Chambers mentioned that Cisco’s goal is to have long-term partners and to never compete with pervice provider. With a company like AT&T, Cisco’s product goals are to help be ready for where things are headed, to be there when it’s needed. Cisco does not want to be the bottleneck for the Internet. He continued “Service providers are our partners, if our goal is to bring this technology to everyone in the world, we must work in a tight fashion and follow the market transitions with them” Q&A Some of the best parts of this dialog was the question and answer session, a few excerpts below show the depth of thinking Cisco is moving forward with the intelligent network. Q : How does this impact the mobile data flow? A : The team was asked about how this innovation impacts consumers and the mobile data flow. Chambers added, “As a consumer, I want any video any time. To share it on any device in the living room and to bring it with me when I’m on the go. The network has an important role in enabling that future” Cambron spoke from AT&T’s goals with this technology “It provides a single network design for around the globe. Particularly important for important customers who are using private networks and deploying mobile applications. A common network design that is highly video centric is central to our business” Q : Is Cisco an on open vs. closed company, will core innovations from CSR-3 be open source? A : Chambers responded “Interoperability is one thing we don’t debate in Cisco. We believe we need to bring together all of these protocols into one network. We will of course be an open architecture.” Q : What do you think about Google’s service provide announcement? A : Chambers responded “Google is a great company. We love anyone who adds loads to networks. We think the question here is how do we find the “and” here and find ways to build load and also built great networks with the right partners.” Q : Why is Cisco building in silicon? A : Chambers was excited to talk about how important silicon was to the company in the products. “Cisco’s investments in ASICS has been a key part of many of the core products. The reason that Cisco does our own, is that silicon ties all of the key components together. Cisco had to change the way its working style to have a collaborative team to build this next generation of silicon.” Cisco is in a unique position to see the future of bandwidth better than anyone. We wonder if Cisco will be rewarded for avoiding future network bottlenecks and propel the network forward with CRS-3? Discuss

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Cisco in the Core: Preparing for the Next Generation Internet

Springpad Takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:23:49 +0000

Springpad , a rival to Evernote’s popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it’s a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn’t want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant. Sponsor Evernote vs Springpad: the iPhone App While Evernote is, at this point, still the more robust product when it comes to supported platforms -the company offers Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry versions in addition to a platform-agnostic “web clipper” – Springpad is starting to catch up. Along with the numerous enhancements launching today, the company now offers their own “web clipper” browser bookmarklet (previously in beta) along with an iPhone application for mobile note-taking and reminders. Like Evernote’s iPhone app, Springpad’s app (iTunes link) lets you input text or snap a photo, but it also integrates a barcode scanner which takes advantage of the phone’s camera in order to record and save a specific product. In addition, the iPhone app lets you browse items by type in case there’s something you want to remember, but don’t have it right in front of you. This is ideal for adding things like restaurants or movies – the sort of things that come up in conversation (“You really should rent this movie – it’s great!”) but are later forgotten as we return to our busy lives. The Smart Web Clipper Knows What You’re Bookmarking Also new today is the web clipper. Now out of beta, this bookmarking tool lets you save anything you see on the Internet to your notes. This can be a product, a restaurant, a book, a movie, a recipe, a wine, a business or just a simple bookmark of a page which you can choose to annotate if desired. What’s different about this tool is the way it uses semantic technology to understand what it is that you’re saving and offer relevant links to other information when you view it again in Springpad. For example, after adding a recipe, you’ll be provided with “quick links” for actions like “add to shopping list,” “search for coupons,” “send to me” (an email option) and “print recipe.” You can also add your own notes or personal tags (e.g., “March dinner party”) if desired. The App Store: Do Something with your Notes Springpad users also have an included app store that helps you do things with the items you save. Although not listed among today’s updates, this is arguably one of the company’s standout features which should appeal both to new users or those switching from Evernote. Instead of just providing a searchable repository of notes and saved items, Springpad lets you add apps that help you actually do something with the items you collected. There’s a wine notebook for those who want to record wine reviews and selections, a weekly meal planner for recipe snippers, a movie tracker for film aficionados, a travel checklist for vacation planning and even a blog post planner for scribes like us. And there are dozens more, too. Additionally, later this year, Springpad will launch an API for developers who want to build their own apps for this directory. More of What’s New: Sharing Tools & a Smart Quick-Add Bar Other new features today include social sharing option which lets you post to Facebook and Twitter, a personalized email address for sending in thoughts, notes, itineraries and confirmation numbers, and a smart “quick-add bar.” This bar lets you type in anything into Springpad’s web interface to receive a list of suggestions from across a number of web services and the publicly shared notes from other Springpad users. If you find yourself always coming across suggestions from particular users, you may want to “friend” them on Springpad. The friending model used here is one that mimics Twitter’s involving one-way connections betweens followers and “followees.” This makes Springpad more social than Evernote without the pressures of having to accept or reject requests like on Facebook. As of now, Springpad has a lot to offer those interested in a web-based and mobile note-taking application. However, you may find Evernote to be a slightly more stable service. We ran into a couple of slowdowns when using Springpad’s website today. In addition, the suggestions displayed in the quick-add bar aren’t as speedy as your typical search engine’s autosuggest feature is. However, if you’re looking to do more with your notes than simply collect them, Springpad is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Evernote. It’s no longer a mere note-taking app – it’s more of a digital assistant…and who couldn’t use one of those? Discuss

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CheapTweet Wades Through the Sea of Tweet Deals

cgseo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Whether a website sells off your email address or forces you to install some pop-up plagued toolbar just to get 10% off your next online purchase, searching for online coupons can involve treading in dangerous waters. Enter CheapTweet , which uses both algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify its content, and suddenly looking for the best deals online isn’t quite so scary. The self-described “Twitter-based social deals search engine site” does precisely that – it finds tweets about deals and coupons through a custom search algorithm and then allows its users to upvote or downvote the deals on its site. Sponsor Tweeting deals, if your wondering, can be big business. In 2009, Dell made more than $6.5 million through Twitter deals and CheapTweet probably sent a few of those customers their direction. The ad aggregator is actually celebrating its 5 millionth indexed deal with a roll-out of a refurbished website, which includes upgrades to its search engine, the voting mechanism, a redesign and and new feature, the “DealStream”. CheapTweet allows its users to search for deals by category and keyword and will customize the stream of tweets according to their votes and Twitter conversations. They can also up and down vote tweets, like they’ve become accustomed to on sites like Reddit, Digg or Google Moderator. The “DealStream”, which contains a user’s customized results, can also be read as an RSS feed. As CEO Hayes Davis points out in a press release, CheapTweet is poised to help distinguish the good from the bad as more and more companies prepare to monetize through Twitter. “Online channels will only become more cluttered, as social networks start to monetize with ads,” said Davis. “CheapTweet’s service makes it easier for shoppers to sort through the clutter online and shop more effectively.” We’ve not only heard a number of rumors and anonymous tips on what the Twitter ad platform will look like, but other companies like 140 Proof have begun to enter the market, bringing tweet-like ads to third party clients. This doesn’t even account for the vast number of small businesses taking advantage of the service to pass out Web-only deals and coupons. With all of these ads, CheapTweet will help weed out the bad apples. Its users down vote nefarious tweets, the algorithm cuts out spam using a form of natural language processing and the multiple tweets about the same deal are combined to cut down on the noise. We think that a service like CheapTweet has found a perfect niche and its the ideal service to recommend to your less technically-savvy relatives, as well as those just looking for a deal. Like we said, searching for online deals can put you in some dangerous waters and this service helps clear out some of the flotsam and jetsam. Discuss

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CheapTweet Wades Through the Sea of Tweet Deals