Posts tagged Last
“Dream High 2″ Releases Last Official Poster of its Six Leads – Soompi
Jan 15th
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"Dream High 2" Releases Last Official Poster of its Six Leads
Soompi This last poster also features the six leads of the drama – Park Seo Joon, JB, T-ara's Park Ji Yeon, Kang So Ra, 2AM's Jung Jin Woon , and SISTAR's Hyorin – displaying their character's personalities through their expressions. Park Seo Joon, JB, … |
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Hulu Grew Revenue 60% Last Year, Still Blocks Google TV & Boxee
Jan 12th
Hulu didn’t end up getting sold in 2011, but it nonetheless turned out to be a pretty big year for the premium video streaming service. Overall, the business grew by 60% over the previous year and raked in $420 million in revenue.
That money came from a combination of ad sales and paid subscriptions to the service’s Hulu Plus offering. They now have 1.5 million paying subscribers. It’s a far cry from Netflix’s more than 23 million paying members, but then again Hulu Plus only went live in 2010. According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, this is the fastest any paid video streaming service has reached 1.5 million users.
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For both free and premium users, Hulu increased its selection of content substantially last year, most recently adding television shows from The CW and Univision. That focus on expanding its library of content will continue well into 2012, with a planned $500 million investment in acquiring the rights to television shows and movies.
Hulu’s growth is also fueled in part by its continued expansion into other markets around the globe as well as the effort the company puts into making its service available on a wide range of devices. Most gaming consoles, smartphones and tablets now have an app for Hulu Plus, even if many of them can’t access the advertising-supported Hulu website. This year, Hulu launched dedicated apps for the Kindle Fire, XBox 360 and Nook e-reader, among others.
Despite the long list of supported devices, Hulu’s cross-device compatibility could be even better. The service has irked users of Boxee and Google TV-powered units by blocking access to those devices. Even though Hulu Plus is available in the Android Market, that app can’t run on Google TV and when you try to navigate to Hulu.com from the platform’s Web browser, the site is blocked on Hulu’s end. The same is true of the Boxee Box. A long-awaited Hulu Plus app for the Apple TV is allegedly ready and working, but has been held up due to political reasons.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Hulu Grew Revenue 40% Last Year, Still Blocks Google TV & Boxee
Jan 12th
Hulu didn’t end up getting sold in 2011, but it nonetheless turned out to be a pretty big year for the premium video streaming service. Overall, the business grew by 40% over the previous year and raked in $420 million in revenue.
That money came from a combination of ad sales and paid subscriptions to the service’s Hulu Plus offering. They now have 1.5 million paying subscribers. It’s a far cry from Netflix’s more than 23 million paying members, but then again Hulu Plus only went live in 2010. According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, this is the fastest any paid video streaming service has reached 1.5 million users.
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For both free and premium users, Hulu increased its selection of content substantially last year, most recently adding television shows from The CW and Univision. That focus on expanding its library of content will continue well into 2012, with a planned $500 million investment in acquiring the rights to television shows and movies.
Hulu’s growth is also fueled in part by its continued expansion into other markets around the globe as well as the effort the company puts into making its service available on a wide range of devices. Most gaming consoles, smartphones and tablets now have an app for Hulu Plus, even if many of them can’t access the advertising-supported Hulu website. This year, Hulu launched dedicated apps for the Kindle Fire, XBox 360 and Nook e-reader, among others.
Despite the long list of supported devices, Hulu’s cross-device compatibility could be even better. The service has irked users of Boxee and Google TV-powered units by blocking access to those devices. Even though Hulu Plus is available in the Android Market, that app can’t run on Google TV and when you try to navigate to Hulu.com from the platform’s Web browser, the site is blocked on Hulu’s end. The same is true of the Boxee Box. A long-awaited Hulu Plus app for the Apple TV is allegedly ready and working, but has been held up due to political reasons.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Microsoft’s Last CES Keynote: The Undiscovered Country
Jan 9th
If you happened to see the movie Star Trek VI (the last one with the original TV cast) when it premiered in theaters in 1991, perhaps there may have been a moment (or a dozen) when something occurred to you: You didn’t have to dislike or even fail to appreciate these actors on-screen to realize, yep, there’s a reason why this is – and should be – their last performance in this venue.
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Although the fellow who runs CES, the CEA’s Gary Shapiro, introduced Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Monday evening by saying that Microsoft would be taking a “pause” from CES keynotes after this year, if you sat through the entire hour and eighteen minutes, you probably felt it even if you’re a Microsoft fan. It really is time. One moment longer would be one too long.
For most of the keynote, Ballmer was seated across a patio table from American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, both trying nervously to generate banter like two cars trying to jump start each other in an Alaska snowstorm. It was clear that Seacrest hadn’t read much about the material before showing up on stage, as he was constantly searching for the location of his cues. TV people expect their cues to come from teleprompters, at eye level; public speakers look down toward monitors showing PowerPoint slides.
“We have a chance in the next year to really raise our game, our product line, to the next level, across phones, PCs, tablets, TV, the Xbox,” opened Ballmer. “And really the heart and soul of that will be our kinda featured attraction tonight, our new Metro user interface.”
Not since 1995 has the layout of an operating system been considered the keynote attraction at an electronics conference. Metro is the overall style of layout being applied to new apps for Windows Phone, Windows 8, and now Xbox 360. “I think people will be kind of impressed at how it lights everything up.”
Seacrest thought that was a cue for something. It wasn’t, so he searched for some sense of direction. Finding none at eye-level, he quickly ad-libbed: “When you said, ‘Metro,’ you looked at me in a strange way… Is it the jacket, the sweater, or the combination?” Ballmer got the joke, and then feigned laughter, which is about the second most painful thing you can witness Ballmer ever doing.
Even for a company that may yet have some irons in the fire, it was hard to watch this company stretch things out for time. There were truly painful moments, reminiscent of sitting through an infomercial for Time-Life Music, with some ’50s legend of the stage now running on fumes, filling an hour reminding you about how excited he was and how great the past used to be.
It’s no secret that stage show producers plant folks in the audience to help applaud at the right moments and generate enthusiasm (I’ve sat next to a few). This year, when the applause came from about eight people in response to the arrival on-stage of the Windows Phone part of the presentation, the groans from the rest of the crowd drowned them out.
Then Seacrest, who truly is a stranger to quiet crowds, tried to jump in and save the day, as though this were a Vegas lounge act and it was bombing. Holding out his hand in their direction as if to invite them to stand, he said, “The design team over here.”
“We definitely took a different approach than everybody else,” Ballmer then explained, “and I think we’ve got a unique and beneficial experience. All these phones these days, they all make calls, they connect to the Internet, they e-mail, social networks, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,” he added in what has come to be heralded as Ballmer’s typically dismissive attitude toward market categories where his company is not the leader.
“If you take a look at it, the other phones make the sea of icons, the sea of applications, the kind of view of the world. What we’ve really done with Windows Phone, I think, is have a better way by putting your people, the people who are important to you, whether it’s dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions in somebody’s case, I might think,” the CEO added, trying to hand off to Seacrest. There was a train of thought there that would have been oh, so welcome at CES 2009, when Microsoft had a prototype concept but opted instead to hold those cards close to its chest, and tout Windows Mobile instead.
When Ballmer moved to the topic of Windows 8, the old syndrome continued to rear its ugly head: starting a new train of thought, building a metaphor, and then found himself descending into a list of things popping into his head that, impulsively, he could not then ignore.
“Of course, things change – that’s the essence of this industry,” he replied to Seacrest at one point. “In some senses, maybe the only two things that are constant: Number one, things change. And number two, people don’t want to compromise on what they have today. They want the best of what they have and the best of what they want. Nobody wanted to give up anything they had on their desktop, for example, when the world moved to notebooks. It’s a wonderful thing. The Windows PCs evolved – it was a programming machine, it was a productivity machine, a music machine, a video machine, an Internet machine. But we don’t give up anything.”
This evening, we saw the first sign of later builds of Windows 8 running on “Intel-inspired” ultrabooks, than the Developer’s Preview that premiered last fall in Anaheim. The green background tone of the Metro-style Start menu has been muted to more of a teal, and multiple saved bookmarks in IE10 are now multi-colored. Besides these factors, there was not much noticeable difference.
Easily the most painful moment of the evening came, sadly, from a gospel choir that had been hired to improvise wonderful, joyful sounds based on tweets that were being streamed in over the speakers’ monitors below stage. It wasn’t painful for the music; the voices were actually good. Some of the tweets they were singing were selected refrains of excitement from viewers looking forward to the upcoming Xbox-related announcements.
And here they were: The arrival of the Metro-style interface for selecting programming choices (which some Xbox players are already doing). This was followed by a preview of a Metro-style programming guide for Verizon FiOS, which will soon also be tailored for Comcast subscribers (who know they’ll still have to subscribe to Comcast’s HD STBs whether they use Xboxes instead or not).
And a live demonstration of a little girl who was obviously a few years graduated from Sesame Street, using the Kinect tool to toss imaginary coconuts into Grover’s cardboard box.
Not all of these are bad things – certainly I would have seriously considered this Kinect app for my daughter had it been made available a decade earlier. It’s just that the first rule of public speaking is “Know Your Audience,” and this amalgam of software-related events, most of which we’ve already seen, speaks to a vastly different audience than the one assembled here in Las Vegas. The audience is doing the types of things that Ballmer describes as “blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.” There was a disconnect this year, a clear sign that Microsoft has moved one way and CES another. Rather than prolong the agony, perhaps it’s best to just say it’s time, and move on.
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Last Call To Speak At SMX West
Jan 6th
We’re finalizing the speaker lineup for SMX West, and there are still a few openings. We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you can speak knowledgeably on the following topics: Best Practices With adCenter For Bing & Yahoo Beyond The Google AdWords Tool Duplication,…
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Shattering Records, We Downloaded Over 1 Billion Mobile Apps Last Week
Jan 2nd
During the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, users downloaded more than 1 billion apps for the first time ever in a week-long period. Across iOS and Android, over 1.2 billion apps were downloaded, according to a new report by Flurry Analytics. That was a 60% increase over early December.
The holiday season typically sees a surge in mobile application downloads, especially once Christmas Day arrives and countless consumers all over the world unwrap their new Android devices, iPhones, iPads and iPods. In a true testament to the continued proliferation of these devices, this year’s holiday spike in app downloads was a one for the record books, according to Flurry’s data.
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The vast majority of downloads were seen in the United States and several other Western countries made the top ten. In second place was China, which saw 99 million downloads. That sounds like a lot, but it’s relatively small compared to China’s overall installed base, as the report pointed out. It’s the second biggest app market in the world, but only saw about one fifth of downloads the week after Christmas, which of course is not as widely celebrated in China.
Apple hasn’t released numbers, but there’s little doubt that items like iPads, iPhones and the iPod Touch did quite well this holiday season, and for those who already own such devices an iTunes Store gift card made for a no-brainer of a present. Amazon’s own Kindle Fire, which has access to a limited version of the Android Marketplace, was that company’s top-selling and most frequently gifted item this holiday season as well.
The 1 billion weekly downloads threshold may be a new one, but it’s one that Flurry expects to see continue well into 2012. There’s very little reason to doubt that prediction, as smartphones and tablets continue to pick up steam in the marketplace and new devices from Apple, Amazon and Android handset manufacturers are expected to drop throughout the year, in many cases at lower price points.
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Random Hacks of Kindness Has Global Meetup Last Weekend
Dec 7th
We last wrote about the Random Hacks of Kindness operation a year ago. Twice a year, a group of programmers gather together for an intense weekend in 28 different cities around the world to benefit some good causes and write some code. Last weekend was the fifth such occurrence, with about a thousand different participants and with more than 90 projects being worked on. That is a lot of hacking going on, almost too much to review in a single article.
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And it wasn’t just coders eating a lot of pizza either: the meetups included designers, project managers, PR and marketing professionals and others less tech-savvy. The causes included Doctors Without Borders, the World Bank, Oxfam and even some hyperlocal challenges too.
For example, one hack (which was the winning San Francisco entry) called Drop2Drink included assembling a geo-coded map of the 60-some odd fire hydrants that are used for delivering emergency drinking water in San Francisco in case of an earthquake. The hydrants had small markings on them but no one, until now, had taken the time to do a census and make their locations available online in any meaningful manner. Here is the team hard at work.
This past weekend the organizers tried to encapsulate some institutional memory and use the efforts of prior hacks to help build on new projects. For example, this Philadelphia project drew on what was done a year ago in Bogota, Colombia for locating the nearest homeless shelter based on your current location. And two teams in Portland and Boston were linked together on similar solutions for disaster awareness and helped to reduce duplicated efforts and increase capability for users and help first responders better coordinate their own disaster management efforts.
There are plenty of other examples from cities all over the world that are worth perusing on their website. The next RHOK event is scheduled for June 2012.
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At Long Last, Flipboard Launches an iPhone App
Dec 6th
For iPad owners, the personalized, socially-curated digital magazine Flipboard is one of the absolute must-install apps for the device. For many, social news-reading apps like this have begun to replace printed magazines and newspapers all together. Pretty much since it first debuted on Apple’s tablet in July 2010, users have been clamoring for an iPhone version of Flipboard. Today, that wait ends.
Flipboard’s latest update, available now in the App Store, brings the same social media-fueled reading experience to the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch.
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More Than a Resize: Flipboard Gets Rebuilt For a Mobile Context
The team at Flipboard has done a remarkable job of whittling down what previously occupied a 10-inch screen so that it will properly fit on a smartphone. Not only did they size things down without losing any features, but they redesigned the experience to be more useful in a mobile context, Flipboard cofounder Evan Doll told us.
Rather than flipping horizontally as the app’s virtual pages do on the iPad, the iPhone version flips vertically. It also includes a new feature called Cover Stories, which offers a way for readers to quickly consume a handful of stories that are likely to be most relevant to them. The app selects these stories based on one’s reading preferences and social connections.
Other than that, the functionality of Flipboard for iPhone is pretty consistent with what users have come to expect on the iPad, just in a more compact package. There are a number of pre-curated content sections that can be added or users can plug in just about any publication with an RSS feed. Like its tablet-based predecessor, the new app hooks right into Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Google Reader and other social media services to provide a truly personalized reading experience.
By expanding to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Flipboard stands to expand its user base, potentially by a significant amount. As popular as the iPad is, they haven’t sold nearly as much as the iPhone, which has been on the market since 2007. As of early 2011, Apple was said to have sold over 100 million iPhones, a number that is sure to be much higher since the launch of the sales record-breaking iPhone 4S in October.
Flipboard had about 2.5 million users as of this summer, according to the Wall Street Journal. However much that number has grown since then, it’s likely to start skyrocketing before the end of the year.
When’s it Coming to Android?
Behind “Where’s the iPhone app?” the second most frequently asked question about Flipboard has to be “When is it coming to Android?” Doll declined to give us a specific timeline, but assured us that it’s a high priority for the growing startup.
Now that Flipboard has been adapted for smaller screens, we can’t imagine an Android version can be that far away. In terms of design, they’ve already got it nailed. They just need to have developers build it out for the Android platform, iron out a technical detail or two and work the launch around whatever other product development they’ve got going on.
Since its launch, Flipboard has given rise to quite a few competing apps, most of which are built for the iPad. Google is rumored to be building its own answer to Flipboard in the form of a project code-named Propeller, an Android app that was expected to go live in November.
The new Flipboard for iPhone is available for the iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S, as well as newer iPod Touches. It will work on devices running iOS 4 and iOS 5.
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Last Call – SMX Social Media Marketing Starts Monday in Scottsdale, AZ
Dec 1st
Time is running out! Search Marketing Expo – SMX Social Media Marketing begins next Monday in Scottsdale, AZ. Register now to reserve your place! Your investment in coming to SMX Social Media Marketing will pay off many times. We guarantee it. Register for your All Access pass and pay only…
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3 Lessons Learned from the SOPA Debate Last Week
Nov 30th
Last Wednesday, ReadWriteWeb published a legal analysis of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate Counterpart, the PROTECT-IP bill. Our story prompted a spirited, logical, and largely rational debate between e-novel author Rowena Cherry, who supports the legislation, and TechDirt founder Michael Masnick, who opposes it.
I’ve been on record as saying that we as a society have forgotten how to debate. These two have not. While they may not always have been as strictly civil with one another as Lincoln and Douglas, they both demonstrated some lessons that both opponents and supporters of the bill may perhaps put to good use:
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1. It’s better to oppose a concept by taking it apart than by building it up into something big, bureaucratic, and conspiratorial. There is opposition on both sides of the SOPA issue: One side is opposed to piracy, the other to government regulation of Internet domains. Thus far, the efforts to demonize piracy in the public mind by ballooning it into a global conspiracy to destroy the entertainment industry, has had the opposite of the intended effect. And on the other side, the effort to demonize legislators and the supporters of the bill(s) as global conspirators to suppress the free speech of private citizens, has only empowered legislators to blindly press ahead rather than consider the merits of the actual language they’re proposing. Just because bigness is, by virtue, unpopular does not mean a cause can or should be rendered unpopular by casting its supporters as bigger than they truly are.
2. Causes change, and viewpoints must change with them. Last year’s version of Senate anti-piracy legislation (which went under the acronym COICA) included a provision where authorities would accumulate blacklists of suspected bad actors, and give service providers rewards for thwarting access to blacklisted addresses on their own. That provision was largely unpopular, for obvious reasons; and in the current PROTECT-IP legislation, the language has been stricken. Nevertheless, popular opposition continues to rant against the non-existent blacklist provision, and has even tried to suggest that by omitting the language, Congress is injecting blacklists into the system through some sort of stealth. Not keeping up with the changes in stance of one’s opponent makes one’s own opposition look foolish and feeble, and gives those whom you’re debating with opportunities for advantage.
3. It serves one’s own cause to respect his or her opponent’s viewpoint as earnest rather than subsidized. Going back to #1, part of how the more automated opposition to a cause works is by painting him as a “paid shill” for one of the more demonized, “big” parties – e.g., the entertainment industry, lobbyists, Microsoft, Google, the “pirate mafia.” You can win a chess game once you respect the fact that your opponent is playing chess with you, rather than some other duplicitous game under the table. When a debater trusts her or his own chances at success on a level playing field, he demonstrates his own self-confidence, as well as the belief that his cause is just and his arguments are sound.
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