Hello Fringsters Goodbye Skype
I hope fring and skype work this out. It is not good for the users when companies such as Skype don't play well with others. Think "What Would Google Do?" Google wants users to come to their service through any means. Regardless of how we use Skype, Skype is still benefiting from the use.
Agile Development Lessons from Zynga Farmville
He and Amitt also talked about the ability of tying each experience to a point of monetization—at user account creation, users status page and status viewing; but also that the best way is to bring the promotion into the game. He talked specifically about a promotion they ran with FTD where in the game you could buy a virtual boquet; and integrating product placement into the story line yielded he said 3-5x conversion rates. He also was big on two tier currencies; which I understood as a base currency that users mostly earn through time and effort in the game; and a second more mega currency that maps to premium monetization of user actions; and links with more “subscriber” class buyers.
HootSuite
HootSuite describes itself as the professional Twitter client. With Hootsuite you can:
Techcrunch: Linus Torvalds: Google's Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don't Hate
I haven't seen the Google Nexus One yet, but I've listened to and read reviews. From what I've heard, if I were to give up my iPhone, this would be the phone I would choose. Jeff Jarvis on a recent This Week in Google, however, pointed out that the Google app for the iPhone provides a better user experience than does accessing Google on the Nexus One.
Citrix vs WMWare: Citrix Storagelink tips the scales
Those of you who regularly work with virtualization technologies know the many frustrations and concerns surrounding providing a proper storage infrastructure for virtualization. In particular, we often spend top dollar for high-end storage arrays from companies such as EMC in order to gain the support and high availability that these arrays offer. However, much of what makes these arrays high-end winds up being wasted in the implementation of these arrays for virtualization.
Predicting The Next Big Thing
Who wouldn't want to launch the next Twitter, Facebook or Google? Everyone in the tech business is asking the question, "What is the next big thing?" Clearly the most recent "big thing" has been the social networking boom. But what's next?
Kevin Rose Presents at the FOWA London 2009 Event - Taking Your Site from One to One Million Users
This presentation by Kevin Rose of Digg.com provides us with fantastic and timely information for how to grow a site and cultivate the community of followers you gain. I have outlined the highlights of his presentation here for easy reference. For further discussion, visit the Tech Cast Talk Discussion Forum Post for this topic.
Should Pandora use a subscription based business model?
On TWist Episode 16 Jason talked about an idea to have fans of an artist pay a subscription fee to receive news and bonus mp3s from the artist. I am a big fan of Pandora.com. Jason's idea inspired me to start thinking about the possibilities for Pandora and a subscription model. On Pandora, a user creates a custom "radio station" that the user seeds with artists and songs and then trains by giving selections a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In addition, users are offered the ability to bookmark a song or even purchase a song.
Leo Laporte Makes $1.5 Million Per Year From Podcasting
Looking at my list of the Best Tech Podcasts it is no secret that I love Leo Laporte's lineup of podcasts. Listen to this talk given by Leo Laporte at the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco on Friday.
What does it mean for Oracle to buy Sun and Virtual Iron? A play for the Cloud
Last summer I signed up for a developer account with 3Tera in their AppLogic Cloud environment to begin testing it as a a place to move our current managed hosting environment. During that same time, we met with Oracle to discuss licensing Oracle in the 3Tera AppLogic cloud. The guys we spoke with could only think in terms of physical cores for their licensing model. At the end of the conversation, after an hour of extreme frustration, I issued them a very strongly worded challenge to go back to Oracle and figure out a licensing model for virtualization and the cloud or Oracle is going to be left in the dust.