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Google has purchased Agnilux, a chip startup run by Apple refugees. After P.A. Semi was bought by Apple in 2008 for $278 million, several of the prime movers of that company, including Amarjit Gill, Executive VP of Sales and Business Development, along with several Apple employees, jumped ship and started Agnilux. A former Tivo executive also joined the company. P.A. Semi produces the chips that run the iPhone and iPad. Speculation has surrounded the theoretical Apple intel that might come with the company, the entertainment media background of some of its executives and the extraordinary secrecy of Agnilux. Sponsor Despite investigation by the New York Times , very little information is available on the company. In February, NYT talked about the company's website. That website no longer exists. When it did it had little information. "Hop over to the Agnilux Web site and you're told very little about the company beyond the location of its offices and the derivation of the company's name. Agni is Sanskrit for fire and Lux is the Latin for light." An anonymous source told the Times he thought the company was producing a server. Prior to accepting the Google deal, Agnilux held conversations with Cisco, Microsoft and Texas Instruments. It's uncertain whether they spoke with VCs or other investors. Discuss
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Google Snaps Up Agnilux, Whatever That Is
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Today, digital textbooks for higher education and career education account for only 0.5% of all textbook sales in the United States. According to a new study by social learning platform Xplana , this could soon change. Xplana predicts that digital textbooks will account for almost 20% of all textbook sales within the next five years. This will make digital textbooks a $1 billion market. Sponsor According to Rob Reynolds, who is one of the co-authors of this report and also the director of product design and research for Xplana, this rapid growth will be driven by a number of factors, including the proliferation of tablets and e-readers like the iPad and Kindle, the availability and pricing of e-textbook content and an increasing interest in online learning. According to this study, sales of digital textbooks will increase 100% year-over-year in 2010 and the continue to grow rapidly for the years to come. Factors in Favor of Digital Textbooks Pricing, as the authors note, is a major factor that will make digital textbooks more interesting for students, who often spend hundreds of dollars per semester on textbooks. Flat World Knowledge , for example, offers its e-textbooks for free and only charges students for the print versions. Currently, teachers at over 400 colleges use Flat World Knowledge's textbooks for their courses. Other e-textbook companies like CourseSmart and MBS Direct also saw very strong growth in their sales last year. Other factors in favor of digital textbooks include the increasing availability (and affordability) of e-book readers and netbooks, as well as the move towards the ePub publishing standard for e-books. It is also important to note that textbooks publishers have long seen digital textbooks as way to shut down the market for used textbooks, which accounts for close to 35% of the textbook market today and which - of course - doesn't earn these publishers a single dollar. What Will these E-Textbooks Looks Like? Of course, it will be interesting to see what these textbooks will look like. Thanks to new initiatives from Wolfram Alpha and other data and service providers, interactive textbooks could soon replace static texts. The problem there, of course, is that these textbooks are more expensive to produce than today's textbooks. The lower cost of digital distribution and the publisher's ability to cut out the middlemen (distributors, campus bookstores etc.) will help to offset some or all of these additional costs. You can find the full report here Discuss
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1 Out of 5 Textbooks Digital by 2014
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Wolfram Alpha,
world-knowledge,
Xplana
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Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media - rather than be disrupted by it. We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us - and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform. Sponsor The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered. SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the "Facebook Imperitive", which we interpret as "be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither". Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine's "Wired: Tired" lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards. Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service. A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the "follower" mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done. Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally. From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum. Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here: "Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business" We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release. SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible. Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter . Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you'll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone's job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear. Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we're bringing our followers with us with every Tweet. IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements) Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited. Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter? Photo credits: Salesforce.com Discuss
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This Tweet is Priority 1: SalesForce.com's Chatter is Transactional Social Media
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Once upon a time, Wolfram Alpha tried to charge $50 for its iPhone app while, at the same time, offering a free iPhone-optimized mobile site. Then, the company shut down the mobile site of its "computational knowledge engine" altogether. Now, however, Wolfram is reversing this strategy and is not just bringing back a new and improved version of its mobile site , but the company also just announced that it will reduce the price of its iPhone app to $1.99 and will issue a refund to every customer who bought the app at the full price. Sponsor A New Policy for Wolfram Alpha According to Wolfram Alpha's newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This, obviously, is a complete reversal of Wolfram's earlier policy, but we are very happy to see this new direction the team is taking. Refunds for Those Who Bought $50 App While Wolfram always argued that the app was worth $50, not too many people thought so. The current version only has 24 reviews in the App Store. Wolfram will obviously take a loss on the refunds as Apple won't return the 30% cut it took from all the sales, but the Wolfram Alpha team clearly feels that this is the right thing to do. We can only guess how much money Wolfram made from the $50 app, but chances are that the company will sell more than enough $1.99 apps to make up for the price difference. If you bought the app at the full price (or $19.99 during the holiday sale), you can go to this site and ask for a refund. To get a refund, users will have to supply their phone's or iPod touch's UDID, a screenshot of their UDID on the iTunes summary and account details page, as well a copy of their receipt from Apple. You can find our full review of the iPhone app here . New Mobile Site The new mobile site feels faster than the original page, but at least in the version we tested just before the official launch, result pages seemed to be formatted for a screen somewhat larger than the iPhone. We assume, however, that this is just a glitch and that the company will fix this shortly. Unlike the native app, the mobile site obviously also doesn't offer the specially formatted virtual keyboards for entering formulas (something Wolfram used as the main reason to charge extra for the iPhone app). More To Come According to today's announcement, the company also plans to expand on this strategy of making the service more accessible in the next few months, though the announcement didn't offer any further details. According to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram|Alpha's architect, "the new iPhone and iPod touch app price, and the refund offer are just the beginnings of a wider strategic move toward ubiquity." Discuss
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Wolfram Alpha Admits Mistake: Mobile Site is Back; iPhone App Down from $50 to $1.99
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Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations . The company's VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a "set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion." Sponsor The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will be able to sell a grommet to an Albanian from outer space. "The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths." Ad Innovations is a specialist website Google has set up to "work closely with advertisers on what comes next." They intend to use the space to debut ad-tech ideas and solicit user feedback. Photo by Danny Sullivan. Discuss
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Google Introduces Search Funnel, Ad Innovations
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Danny Sullivan,
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Funnel,
Google,
google-com,
innovations,
products,
sales,
sales funnel,
search,
search-funnel,
search-funnels,
space,
Susan Wojcicki,
your-products