Posts tagged Closer
Obama & Romney Inching Closer to One Touch Donations with Square
Jan 31st
“We’re always looking to get as close to one touch donations as we can,” Romney Campaign’s Digital Director Zac Moffat told the LATimes.
Politico reports that both the Romney and Obama campaigns have started using Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “magical” dongle, Square. Of course, you can’t pay by saying your name as you now can at select merchants – but Square still makes campaign donations much faster and easier. Staff, field organizers and campaign volunteers hook up Square to their mobile phones and accept campaign donations on the spot.
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The Obama campaign personnel will be able to use either iPhones or Androids; Politico reports that staff at all levels will have access to Square card readers. The Romney campaign isn’t moving as quickly, rolling out Square in Florida only – just in time for tonight’s primary. The campaign as plans to start using Square nationally at some point in the future.
Barack Obama has been leading the way on social media, giving the most interactive State of the Union address ever on Jan 24. It featured a Twitter hashtag and a streaming of the entire speech on WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU. The White House also hosted a Google+ Hangout on Jan 30, which our own Jon Mitchell attended and blogged about. Sure, it might have been fun to hangout with the prize, but unless you were one of the five Americans who actually hung out with him live, Mitchell reports that the experience felt just like television. Barack first launched as a Google+ brand – not a profile- late last year. Not long ago, Barack joined Instagram.
Yes, it’s pretty awesome that the Obama campaign is using Square, the oh-so-popular mobile photo app Instagram, and the Google+ hangout feature. But we are at a point now where social media tools and mobile payments are hardly a novelty – instead, they are accepted and necessary modes of communication. Will Square help raise more funds for Obama and Romney? Or is it just another payment option for the few?
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With Endeca Buyout, Oracle Edges Closer to Embracing Unstructured Data
Oct 18th
Up until the point where data starts making sense, by definition, it doesn’t make much sense. Information requires analysis. And despite its name and its mission, the Web presents more unstructured, unrelated data than any information source ever created.
So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the biggest trend in data management today surrounds analysis of data outside of databases. We heard this two weeks ago from Oracle at its OpenWorld conference, and we’re hearing it again today with Oracle’s acquisition of an analysis tool provider named Endeca.
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The key to the acquisition is a hybrid search/analytical engine called MDEX, which underlies a series of Endeca products ranging from general purpose to vertical and task-specific. For example, Endeca produces a data analysis engine for criminal intelligence services.
“The MDEX Engine shares many of the characteristics of a state-of-the-art database, yet is written for the unique constraints of unstructured, structured and semi-structured data,” reads an Endeca white paper on its core technology (PDF available here). “The MDEX Engine is written around a vertical record store to operate at high speeds and at scale. This structure is then stored in columnar form and achieves high compression, and is highly memory efficient for optimizing the delivery of results.”
Comparison of common database management schemes to Endeca’s MDEX engine. [Courtesy Endeca]
If this kind of acquisition sounds, well, strangely familiar… Last August, HP under then-CEO Léo Apotheker was willing to shutter its webOS devices project and redirect its attention toward acquiring Autonomy, a producer of an analytical search engine.
What’s different in Oracle’s case is that MDEX operates a “vertical” data store, “vertical” in the sense of how fields are organized. Rather than Oracle’s classic tables, MDEX stores long trains of data in key/value pairs — which puts MDEX in some respects on a par with scalable databases like Hadoop. With one buyout, Oracle may put itself at or near par with HP on one level, and Microsoft on another — Microsoft having just announced its partnership with Hadoop parent Hortonworks. (Microsoft acquired FAST Technology, an enterprise search tools provider, back in 2008, although so far the most prominent product of that matchup remains a search add-on for SharePoint.)
“The Endeca Latitude MDEX Engine enables users to explore data and content in an unconstrained and impromptu manner and to rapidly address new questions that inevitably follow every new insight,” the newly acquired company states. And Oracle’s position is as follows: “The combination of Oracle Business Intelligence and Endeca Latitude is expected to provide a comprehensive business intelligence foundation and analytic applications, bringing together information from structured and unstructured data sources.”
Ovum technology analyst Mike Davis believes that the exploding quantity of unstructured data, coupled with the rising tide of independently developed analytical and management tools for that data, caught major manufacturers such as Oracle and Microsoft sleeping, or at least snoozing while officially working on their own catch-up products. “We believe it is about time that Oracle ‘bit the bullet’ and gained itself some high-end capabilities, and a referenceable customer base for enterprise search, rather than continuing to develop [its own] Secure Enterprise Search,” Davis said in a statement for RWW this afternoon. “Endeca was the last of the ‘big’ independent enterprise search engines, Autonomy and FAST having already been swallowed by HP and Microsoft, respectively. We believe this continues to illustrate that even the biggest software companies often fail to get their innovation fast enough internally.”
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Yahoo Sale Getting Closer?
Oct 5th
Yahoo advisors are readying financial information for potential buyers, Reuters is reporting. Seems over the past few weeks a number of companies have shown interest in buying some or all of Yahoo, according to the news service.
“Over the l…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Yobongo Adds Photos, Bringing Chat Closer to the Real World
Aug 15th
Since its launch at South By Southwest Interactive this year, Yobongo has been a quiet startup. It hasn’t made best-thing-since-sliced-bread pronouncements or it’s-the-x-of-y elevator pitches; it has just quietly kept working on its simple promise to, in the words of co-founder David Kasper, “help people communicate with new people around them.” It’s a promise that sounds overly simple until you see what Yobongo does. And today, the location-aware chat service for the iPhone has announced an update worth a thousand words.
Yobongo users can now add photos to the conversation. The app creates mobile chat rooms based on location, allowing users to chat with real people nearby, even people whom they’ve never met before. With Yobongo 1.4, they can now snap (or upload) a picture of where they are, and it will be instantly uploaded into the chat room. With messaging and photo sharing services rolling out from every major player, these features seem to strike at the heart of the iPhone’s functionality. But Yobongo stands out from this crowd, because its purpose is to help people meet and discover each other. “We started Yobongo to help people make new connections and communicate more efficiently,” says CEO Caleb Elston. “Now we are going to help people communicate even more emotion.”
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When you shoot a photo in Yobongo, you get the native camera view, and you use pan and zoom to frame a square shot. You can also upload an existing photo from your library. Yobongo doesn’t store the location data for your photo, it just uploads the image into the chat room and saves the full-size version to your phone. Photos are displayed collapsed in the chat, and they expand with a tap. If somebody gets creepy, users can flag photos. Once an image reaches a certain number of flags, the preview is blurred. Yobongo stores the photos so that users can browse the conversation and see them, even if they weren’t online in the moment.
To identify participants, Yobongo displays avatars, real names, short bios, and a small profile space asking what a user is currently pondering. The smoothly designed user experience feels almost native on the phone. Using Yobongo already felt personal, and the addition of photo sharing will bring everyone in the chat closer together, whether they’re comfortable with that or not. Yobongo makes it okay to talk to strangers, because, if it works as intended, they won’t be strangers for long.
The Town Hall
One reason Yobongo has been so quiet, though, is that the service is only available in a few key areas. Yobongo is currently only open in San Francisco, New York City, and Austin, since its SXSWi debut. If you run the app from anywhere else, it displays a screen that lets you vote on Facebook and Twitter for your community to be next. On July 27, Yobongo held a “town hall,” allowing eager iPhone users outside of its three pilot cities to try the free service for the first time.
Participants in the town hall were eager to learn when and where Yobongo will launch next. Co-founder and CEO Caleb Elston said they had “no timeline to announce now,” but that the team is “committed to getting the Yobongo experience to more people.”
Elston said they held the town hall in order to “get feedback from users about the Yobongo experience, answer any questions they may have, and give people a sneak peek of how the app works currently.”
He found that interest was “an order of magnitude bigger than we anticipated,” which actually caused capacity issues that delayed the event for a few minutes.
It was an interesting choice to call the event a “town hall,” since it was actually a special exception to the service’s local limits, and participants were from all over the United States. Members of the Yobongo team asked how users liked “chatting with people from all over.” The consensus was that the experience was personal enough that it felt almost local.
Even though the participants were divided up into multiple chat rooms, which Yobongo does automatically to keep the chats from getting flooded, the team, including both co-founders, floated between rooms and was responsive to questions and comments from everyone. I asked Elston if he saw any overarching themes between rooms, since I was only able to participate in one. He said, “People were talking about Yobongo, their day, the tech news of the day, recent movies they saw, their desire for coffee,” in other words, a perfectly normal day on Yobongo.
Making Connections
Yobongo wants to serve a local purpose, which is why it has targeted big, dense cities with high iPhone penetration first. Many town hall participants were from rural areas and wanted to know how the service’s definition of “people nearby” would affect them.
Elston said the team was using the town hall to explore those kinds of questions themselves.
“As we think about expanding to more places,” he said, “we want to ensure there are people to connect and communicate with, and so the strictness of ‘nearby’ is important to understand and test.”
Other participants asked about possible business models, and the team, while not offering specifics, was open to the conversation. Town hall participant Michael Stancil asked, “If I’m a local pizza shop, could I sponsor a channel within a 5 mile or so radius of my shop?”
Kasper replied, “That’s definitely a possibility.”
Talking to Strangers
Yobongo’s insistence on talking to strangers does not appeal to everyone, but I found the experience quite natural and enjoyable. One of Yobongo’s most distinguishing offerings is its potential to turn nearby strangers into real-life friends. I asked town hall participants about their views on using Yobongo to meet people in person, and the responses were unanimous. Brent Byington said it was “exactly the point! Love it!”
In considering where and when to launch next, Kasper said the key factors were population density, iPhone penetration, and the number of votes on Twitter and Facebook. Kasper said they’re thinking about revealing the vote standings soon.
Yobongo is free, it’s different, and it challenges our comfort zones. If you’re an iPhone user, download the app, and if you’re outside of the pilot areas, vote for the privilege of trying it (especially if you’re from Portland, Oregon). Other social apps are designed to keep bringing you back in. Why not try one designed to draw you out into the world?
Do you like the idea of chatting with new people nearby?
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A Closer Look at Cloud-based Testing with Soasta
Jul 19th
One of the themes many of us commentators harp on about is the fact that barriers to entry for application developers have never been lower – the availability of cloud hosting, agile development methodologies, even this crazy frothy investment cycle we’re in all combine to see lots of applications being created.
One of the flip sides of al this app development is the corresponding drag on testing – that horrible stage that no one really likes, but everyone needs to do. One player looking to aid in that stage of the process is Soasta (rhymes with toaster!)
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Soasta bills themselves as the “cloud testing pioneer”, providing Web testing services to test performance, scalability and reliability of both websites and Web applications by simulating traffic spikes for both testing and production applications. CloudTest has a number of different offerings including;
- CloudTest Mobile for mobile application performance testing
- CloudTest Enterprise integrated internal and external testing with clouds such as Amazon EC2, IBM, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.
- CloudTest Professional (Pro) more control and scale than the enterprise product
- CloudTest Standard an internal testing tool
- CloudTest On-Demand a full product+service offerings for organizations with no testing team themselves.
To this lineup Soasta is today launching a free product, CloudTest Lite, a downloadable app that gives organizations the ability to run limited testing (up to 100 virtual users, single server and behind-firewall testing only) including;
- Testing of web and mobile applications, including applications using HTML5 to REST Web services
- Test building with visual test creation tools
- Integration of application, system, and network monitoring data
- Analysis of results in real-time through a dashboard
- Upgrade path to a more scalable CloudTest edition
Interestingly this release comes only days after Atlassian announced its own new testing tool, as Klint Finley covered. The Atlassian Bonfire product is a browser plugin tool that is linked with Atlassian’s Jira bug tracking tool to give end to end testing/notification/tracking supports. As such bonfire seems much lighter weight than Soasta, focusing less on the testing and analysis of that testing and more on identifying bugs – Soasta on the other hand is a complete testing and performance tuning application. You can see some sample screen shots below:
In demos the CloudTest product had a simple and intuitive test builder functionality that makes it easier for a testing team to spend less time designing tests, and more time running them – and that’s never a bad thing. App testing has never been more important – with this new freemium offering, Soasta is hoping it will gain more customers for its suite of testing products.
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UltraViolet Moves One Step Closer To A Fall Launch
Jul 13th
A consortium of content providers, delivery services, software and hardware companies called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) is ready to launch a business-to-business content licensing program based on the UltraViolet format. Haven’t heard of UltraViolet? Pretty soon, you will not be able to escape it.
UltraViolet is the child of 70 (and growing) companies including movie studios, technology providers like AMD or Akamai, device manufacturers like Toshiba and entertainment retailers like Netflix and Blockbuster. The program is designed to permit cloud access to digital rights through a “locker” system. In other words, after you purchase music or video, you can access that content everywhere. It is the entertainment industry’s attempt to strike back at a decade of Internet piracy and will soon be a significant part of consumers’ lives.
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The business-to-business rollout of UltraViolet gives companies the chance to ensure that they meet technical specifications and are prepared to market content, services and products.
UltraViolet is an aggressive move initiated by the studios. As the primary content providers, the studios hold all the keys to legal viewing of their content. The purpose of UltraViolet is to allow all content providers to use one cloud and one set of Web standards for digital rights management (DRM).
“Consumers are looking for a better value proposition to own and collect digital movies and TV shows – a proposition that provides downloads, streaming and physical copy viewing options which are accessible on multiple platforms,” said Mark Teitell, the general manager of UltraViolet.
The format is based on the Common File Format that will play on computers, televisions, tablets and smartphones – basically, any device or platform that conforms to UltraViolet’s rules and standards. Netflix is a member of DECE and all the corporations that are part of Hulu (except Providence Venture Partners) are as well. DECE hopes to see a broad launch of UltraViolet by the fall.
Warner Bros. bought movie rating and information application Flixster earlier this year (which also owns movie critic website Rotten Tomatoes). The company hopes that application will be the delivery mechanism through which Warner Bros. brings UltraViolet content to consumers. It’s a interesting play by the studios as they try to put their foot down and control the flow of premium content across the Internet.
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A Step Closer to Social Media ROI with Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels
May 19th
Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels, currently in limited beta release, will allow marketers to take a big step in the direction of calculating the elusive social media ROI.
What is Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels?
This new fe…
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