Posts tagged wants
7 Ways to Find What Your Target Audience Wants and Create Epic Content by @jaysondemers
May 21st
Great content sells. It converts. It helps with SEO. And sometimes, it works like magic: it goes viral, creates traffic inflow, and helps you achieve your goals. But what exactly is great content? How do you produce something so great it’ll go viral and help you achieve your goals? The Internet is inundated with a [...]
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The post 7 Ways to Find What Your Target Audience Wants and Create Epic Content by @jaysondemers appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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Congress Wants To Take A Tax Bite Out Of Apple
May 21st
Tim Cook is going to have an interesting day today. The CEO of Apple will be testifying before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which would love to know how Apple has managed to avoid paying billions of taxes. Given the loopholes in U.S. corporate tax laws, Cook might save himself a lot of stress and just hold up a mirror in response to the senators’ questions.
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Now Google Wants To Kill The Mobile Web (Good Riddance)
May 15th
Mobile versions of websites are so 2009.
You know those clunky, stripped-down versions of sites with addresses that tack an “m.” onto the beginning, and serve up a dumbed-down, limited version of their content? If Google has its way, those sites are headed for the dustbin of history.
At I/O, Google’s developer conference held this week in San Francisco, executives Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson showed off examples of websites that traveled smoothly from desktops to tablets to smartphones. A website for the upcoming second installment of the Hobbit movie franchise let you soar above Middle Earth on many devices. And a racing game had cars leaping from smartphone to tablet to laptop.
The vehicle of this, of course, is Google’s Chrome Web browser, which is now available across all those platforms (including, as of last year’s edition of the I/O conference, Apple’s iPhone and iPad).
The point of the demonstrations: You should be able to build your website once and have it adapt to different computing environments, a notion called “responsive design.” Rather than force the creator of a website to design for specific screen sizes and interfaces – like keyboards versus touch screens, say – or force users to go through contortions to use websites optimized for the limitations of the wrong device, websites should just sense what computing device is being used and reconfigure themselves accordingly.
Just a few years ago, that sounded like a pipe dream – hence, the proliferation of mobile-optimized websites standing alongside full desktop versions.
At ReadWrite, we haven’t just been writing about responsive design. Since last October, when we launched a major redesign of our site, we’ve been living it. So we’re naturally biased in favor of this concept.
It will take time and effort to rearchitect websites for this reality. And there will always be those holdouts- particularly within large, slow-moving businesses – who insist on designing for older versions of Web browsers or mobile devices. Legacy technologies which haven’t made the cross-platform leap, like Adobe’s fading Flash, need to be winnowed out. But those problem areas will increasingly be the exception, not rule.
Let’s just have one Web. That seems easier.
Photo by Nick Statt for ReadWrite
View full post on ReadWrite
Now Google Wants To Kill The Mobile Web (Good Riddance)
May 15th
Mobile versions of websites are so 2009.
You know those clunky, stripped-down versions of sites with addresses that tack an “m.” onto the beginning, and serve up a dumbed-down, limited version of their content? If Google has its way, those sites are headed for the dustbin of history.
At I/O, Google’s developer conference held this week in San Francisco, executives Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson showed off examples of websites that traveled smoothly from desktops to tablets to smartphones. A website for the upcoming second installment of the Hobbit movie franchise let you soar above Middle Earth on many devices. And a racing game had cars leaping from smartphone to tablet to laptop.
The vehicle of this, of course, is Google’s Chrome Web browser, which is now available across all those platforms (including, as of last year’s edition of the I/O conference, Apple’s iPhone and iPad).
The point of the demonstrations: You should be able to build your website once and have it adapt to different computing environments, a notion called “responsive design.” Rather than force the creator of a website to design for specific screen sizes and interfaces – like keyboards versus touch screens, say – or force users to go through contortions to use websites optimized for the limitations of the wrong device, websites should just sense what computing device is being used and reconfigure themselves accordingly.
Just a few years ago, that sounded like a pipe dream – hence, the proliferation of mobile-optimized websites standing alongside full desktop versions.
At ReadWrite, we haven’t just been writing about responsive design. Since last October, when we launched a major redesign of our site, we’ve been living it. So we’re naturally biased in favor of this concept.
It will take time and effort to rearchitect websites for this reality. And there will always be those holdouts- particularly within large, slow-moving businesses – who insist on designing for older versions of Web browsers or mobile devices. Legacy technologies which haven’t made the cross-platform leap, like Adobe’s fading Flash, need to be winnowed out. But those problem areas will increasingly be the exception, not rule.
Let’s just have one Web. That seems easier.
Photo by Nick Statt for ReadWrite
View full post on ReadWrite
Craigslist Wants To Reform The Same Law It Uses To Sue Others
May 14th
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is consistently inconsistent. Even as he personally lobbies to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), Craiglist has been using that same law to sue competitors. Peace, love and litigation over at Craigslist?
Craigslist Hates (And Loves?) CFAA
In an effort to stop competitors like Padmapper from building complementary or rival services using Craigslist ads, Craigslist has sued under copyright law and CFAA to block them. This wouldn’t be so surprising – competitors try to bludgeon each other with IP law all the time – but for Newmark’s own animus toward the law his company is invoking:
Reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to reflect the realities of computing and networks in 2013. petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/refor…
— craignewmark (@craignewmark) January 16, 2013
A court recently threw out Craigslist’s copyright claims, but the same court allowed Craigslist to proceed with its CFAA claims. Craigslist should end its CFAA claims. CFAA is an overly broad law that is creating all sorts of unintended consequences, one reason that Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman argues that CFAA is a “failed experiment.”
It’s a bad law, and that’s what makes Newmark’s implicit support of it so galling.
Hypocrisy By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sour
Newmark is a socially engaged liberal, regularly tweeting on voting, marriage, veteran affairs and other issues. He has also fought against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and other questionable technology laws. By many accounts, he’s a good person who means well.
But suing competitors under the same law you’re trying to kill? That’s called hypocrisy, and it doesn’t fit Newmark’s character.
Sure, such hypocrisy is par for the course in technology. After all, Microsoft, IBM and Apple complain about the patent regime even as they sue others for patent infringement. Why should Newmark and Craigslist be any different?
The obvious answer is because Newmark has always held Craigslist to a different standard. This is why Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick hits home when he says:
“If Craig Newmark and Craigslist move forward with this lawsuit, which has the possibility of creating very dangerous precedents concerning both copyright law and the CFAA, it will do tremendous harm to Craigslist’s reputation and standing in the wider internet community… Destroying [Newmark's] reputation and acting out just because a couple of sites tried to make Craigslist more useful? It just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Craigslist has little to gain and much to lose from proceeding under its CFAA claims. For a company that uses a .org domain to “symbolize[] the relatively non-commercial nature, public service mission, and non-corporate culture of craigslist,” perhaps an even better way to underscore Craigslist’s mission is to kill its CFAA lawsuit. That would be in keeping with who Craig Newmark is and what he stands for.
Image courtesy of Sierra Communications.
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Yahoo Wants Out of Microsoft Search Deal
May 8th
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been trying to pull out of the agreement for almost a year. Mayer has already met with her previous employer Google and agreed to enter an alternative search partnership if the Microsoft agreement can be concluded.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
CrowdMed Wants To Crowdsource Your Medical Care To Strangers
May 8th
Would you trust the “wisdom of the crowd” over your own doctor? CrowdMed thinks you might. The San Francisco start-up has an audacious plan to use crowdsourcing techniques to tap the “collective wisdom” of strangers to help diagnose patients – particularly those who’ve bounced from doctor to doctor for years trying to understand uncommon symptoms.
While many may worry that healthcare is too important to trust to strangers, I think this is awesome.
After all, crowdsourcing is already used to help find missing persons, track down terrorists, answer life’s vexing questions, pick stocks – and to select our President. SETI uses crowdsourcing to search for extraterrestrial life. Why not employ crowdsourcing to help our multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry?
CrowdMed recently received $1.1 million in seed financing from some of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, including NEA, Greylock Partners, Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz.
Ask Your Doctor? No. Ask the Crowd.
CrowdMed works like this: Patients pay a $199 fee to list their case on CrowdMed. They fill out a “patient questionnaire” that details their symptoms, case history and personal information. Though CrowdMed founder Jared Heyman declined to say exactly how many patients have enrolled so far, he claimed that there has been “pretty strong demand.” Without the fee, Heyman explained, the site would be overwhelmed with patients who might not get diagnosed.
Once a case is posted, the crowd, what CrowdMed somewhat coyly terms “MDs” – for “medical detectives” – can review the patient’s information and offer up what they believe is the correct – or most likely – diagnosis.
According to Heyman, “close to 3,000 people have signed up as medical detectives.” He said CrowdMed’s “MDs” include doctors, residents and “regular people that like solving medical mysteries.” Why sign up to be a medical detective? First, there’s the chance to help patients. Second, CrowdMed awards its detectives “points” for the diagnoses they correctly predict.
CrowdMed utilizes a so-called prediction market methodology to help glean the correct diagnosis. For example, when a detective selects a case to review, they use up some of their points. They use up still more when they suggest a diagnosis or vote up (or down) other suggested diagnoses. Essentially, it “costs” to play. The more accurate their predictions, however, the more points they are ultimately awarded.
Points do not have any cash value, however. For now, they can be exchanged only for donations to Watsi, an organization that helps fund medical treatments in the developing world. Heyman did not say how much CrowdMed is donating.
While it’s true that CrowdMed’s detectives may not always correctly diagnose a particular patient, if they can narrow the likelihood of someone’s illness to, say, two or three likely options – those that garner the most points, for example – that could speed up decision making and help point to which tests should be perfomed.
In Crowd We Trust?
The obvious question: Can a crowd of strangers with unknown amounts of medical expertise be trusted to safely and correctly diagnose baffling medical problems? CrowdMed claims that after “four years of development” it possess a patented “unique technology” specifically designed to optimize group intelligence for medical diagnostic purposes. From its site:
Groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member, no matter how brilliant. With hundreds of minds working in parallel, groups can process information much faster than individuals.
Heyman told me that his sister suffered for three years from a rare disease. Once it was finally correctly diagnosed, doctors were able to significantly ease her symptoms. CrowdMed used her case to help validate its model – Heyman says it accurately diagnosed her within days.
What Do Real MDs Think?
The first rule of medicine is primum non nocere, Latin for “first, do no harm.” It does not necessarily apply to the crowd. Not surprisingly, the CrowdMed approach bothers many real doctors.
Dr. Hubert Chen, the Associate Medical Director for biotech pioneer Genentech, said, “I want to be enthusiastic, but I have concerns about it.” Dr. Chen’s primary concern was the potential for numerous “false positives” that CrowdMed’s “detectives” might generate: ”I’ve seen many patients misled by the Web. Doctors often have to un-educate them.”
Dr. Aaron Roland, wo runs a family practice in northern California and is an associate clinical professor at UC San Francisco, had different concerns. “I wouldn’t pay $200,” Rolan said. He also wondered whether CrowdMed could attract the scale it needs. “Crowdsourcing is good when there’s a lot of people in the crowd,” he said, “but until you get that crowd, I’m suspicious.”
Industry Connections
To help attract the required crowd, Heyman recruited Clare Martorana, the long-time editor of WebMD, to help support CrowdMed’s outreach efforts.
Not surprisingly, Martorana was very positive about the concept. There are many “experts,” she said, not necessarily doctors, who may have suffered from a particular disease, or have a family member who has suffered, and whom can now contribute to the site.
She hopes to “reach out” to staffers – not just doctors – at medical research, counseling and support organizations that concentrate on specific issues – think, autism, for example, or Parkinson’s dioease – and encourage them to participate in CrowdMed.
Martorana also suggested crowdsourcing diagnoses could be a boon for health insurance companies: “If you are insured and going to multiple specialists, but not getting relief, that costs a lot of money – you, your employer, your insurer all must bear those costs. At some point, there probably will be a pretty significant revenue stream for CrowdMed coming from insurance companies. Right now, their cost numbers are staggering.”
Staggering Potential
The relatively paltry $1.1 million CrowdMed has raised so far suggest that investors remain unsure of the idea’s potential risks and rewards. But connecting patients with chronic medical symptoms to experts, regardless of their titles, clearly holds massive disruptive potential. CrowdMed’s ambitious, even inspiring idea is to use connectivity, collaboration and collective intelligence to help people avoid needless suffering. Despite the risks, it seems like it’s a worth a try to me.
See also
- Social Revolution: Crowdsourcing For Change
- The Problem With Crowdsourcing Crime Reporting In The Mexican Drug War
- The Key To Crowdsourcing: Smarter Crowds
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. Images of Jared Heyman and Carly Heyman courtesy of CrowdMed. Image of Clare Martorana via LinkedIn.
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Even If Yahoo Wants To Leave Microsoft, Here’s Why It Can’t
May 7th
Despite effectively renewing its search deal with Microsoft recently, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo wants a way to break that deal. Why didn’t Yahoo take the opportunity it just had? I suspect that technically and financially, it couldn’t. Yahoo’s “Get Out…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Chorus.im Wants You To IM Anyone, On Any Device. Which Is Cool, If It Works
Apr 1st
Does the world need another messaging service? The team behind Chorus.im thinks so, and they’re banking on the browser as the future of anywhere, anytime costless communication. Chorus, an HTML5-based chat service that launches today, works on any device with a browser, and claims to let you reach anyone you could call or email, whether or not they’ve ever even heard of Chorus.
Why HTML5? “If all of us are trying to overthrow SMS, it should use the network that’s the most ubiquitous,” says Steve Tran, the company’s founder and CEO. An HTML5 framework lets the app work in any browser, mobile or otherwise. “We think messaging is likely to be a core application in the HTML5 frontier,” he adds, noting that it offered the least restrictions.
Founded roughly nine months ago and based in Mountain View, Calif., Chorus is basically a team of four, three of whom previously worked together on a voice application platform called BeVocal acquired by Nuance Communications back in 2007. The team has received angel funding, but runs as a self-described lean operation with no immediate plan for venture capital investment.
Biting The Dead Hand Of Carrier SMS
Chorus claims its app is the only HTML5, browser-centric messenger out there. But it will have to demonstrate some immediate advantages, because it’s joining an all-out firefight in the instant-messaging market.
A growing crowd of services — such as, for instance, WhatsApp and WeChat — aim to kill off carrier-bound SMS and its unreasonably high fees and lack of social media integration. Built-in smartphone features such as Apple’s iMessage have also been chipping away at the carriers’ grip on text communication.
And it’s not just in the U.S. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of Line, a messaging service popular in Japan that has joined the anti-SMS ranks, and also pointed out that “the rise of texting apps has taken away $23 billion in revenue from carriers as of the end of 2012….” Beyond Line, Samsung has ChatOn, Deutsche Telekom invested in Pinger, and Yahoo Japan purchased a 50% stake in the Japanese subsidiary of South Korea’s KakaoTalk.
The point is that the war is raging, and to catch on and stand out in the field of messaging services is becoming almost as hard establishing a new social network.
Almost Frictionless
Chorus calls itself “frictionless” because users can jump in and out of conversations while moving, say, from a laptop to a phone to a tablet — and with no registration required. Though a profile goes a long way toward making things easier. With Chorus, it’s required if you want to initiate conversations.
In other words, if somebody invites you to chat, you can accept and communicate, but you can’t start conversations yourself unless you register with a username, email and password. (Alternatively, you can sync an account from Google+ or Facebook.) The service has also launched iOS and Android apps for the sole purpose of enabling mobile push notifications, something smartphone browsers don’t allow at the moment.
But random signups aren’t how the Chorus team expects users to dive in. If you know someone’s email address or phone number, you can pull them directly into a chat — again, no registration required on their part. And from there the new user can decide whether registering seems worth the trouble.
Which means that Chorus effectively makes no distinction between its registered users and everyone else when it comes to chatting in the moment, a feature its team thinks will be key to its success.
“A lot of the over-the-top messaging apps, they’re effectively all walled gardens. They’re creating their own network,” Tran says. With Chorus, there’s no wall, and the garden is more like an open field. But naturally, that has its pros and cons.
Scaling The Walled Gardens
Services like Facebook Messenger or the popular mobile app WhatsApp are indeed walled gardens to varying degrees. But as Tran suggests, a service like Chorus will inevitably face the problem of pulling users away from ecosystems and buddy lists they’re familiar with. At the end of the day, messaging comes down to ease, and if there’s anything heavy mobile users are invested in, it’s in the tool they use to text.
Through straightforward integration, Chorus also lets you bring in contacts from your phone, Facebook and Google all into one address book. That’s not new to the world of messaging services, though Chorus claims it lets you do so easily and in a way that saves you the hassle of building up yet another useless profile and trying to organize a contact list.
“In our worldview, users already have a friends list — it’s called their address book. They shouldn’t have to create a new one and should have the flexibility to immediately send messages to whomever they want,” the company states in its official press release.
Which is, effectively, the main draw of Chorus: its ability to let you reach anyone without having to worry about whether they’re on a phone or a laptop, or iMessage or Google Talk or Facebook. In a space where there’s so many different ways to communicate that it makes your head spin, to have a stripped down service that does what you want it to do is an ideal solution. If it catches on.
View full post on ReadWrite
Chorus.im Wants You To IM Anyone, Any Time On Any Device. Cool, If It Works
Apr 1st
Does the world need another messaging service? The team behind Chorus.im thinks so, and they’re banking on the browser as the future of anywhere, anytime costless communication. Chorus, an HTML5-based chat service that launches today, works on any device with a browser, and claims to let you reach anyone you could call or email, whether or not they’ve ever even heard of Chorus.
Why HTML5? “If all of us are trying to overthrow SMS, it should use the network that’s the most ubiquitous,” says Steve Tran, the company’s founder and CEO. An HTML5 framework lets the app work in any browser, mobile or otherwise. “We think messaging is likely to be a core application in the HTML5 frontier,” he adds, noting that it offered the least restrictions.
Founded roughly nine months ago and based in Mountain View, Calif., Chorus is basically a team of four, three of whom previously worked together on a voice application platform called BeVocal acquired by Nuance Communications back in 2007. The team has received angel funding, but runs as a self-described lean operation with no immediate plan for venture capital investment.
Biting The Dead Hand Of Carrier SMS
Chorus claims its app is the only HTML5, browser-centric messenger out there. But it will have to demonstrate some immediate advantages, because it’s joining an all-out firefight in the instant-messaging market.
A growing crowd of services — such as, for instance, WhatsApp and WeChat — aim to kill off carrier-bound SMS and its unreasonably high fees and lack of social media integration. Built-in smartphone features such as Apple’s iMessage have also been chipping away at the carriers’ grip on text communication.
And it’s not just in the U.S. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported on the rise of Line, a messaging service popular in Japan that has joined the anti-SMS ranks, and also pointed out that “the rise of texting apps has taken away $23 billion in revenue from carriers as of the end of 2012….” Beyond Line, Samsung has ChatOn, Deutsche Telekom invested in Pinger, and Yahoo Japan purchased a 50% stake in the Japanese subsidiary of South Korea’s KakaoTalk.
The point is that the war is raging, and to catch on and stand out in the field of messaging services is becoming almost as hard establishing a new social network.
Almost Frictionless
Chorus calls itself “frictionless” because users can jump in and out of conversations while moving, say, from a laptop to a phone to a tablet — and with no registration required. Though a profile goes a long way toward making things easier. With Chorus, it’s required if you want to initiate conversations.
In other words, if somebody invites you to chat, you can accept and communicate, but you can’t start conversations yourself unless you register with a username, email and password. (Alternatively, you can sync an account from Google+ or Facebook.) The service has also launched iOS and Android apps for the sole purpose of enabling mobile push notifications, something smartphone browsers don’t allow at the moment.
But random signups aren’t how the Chorus team expects users to dive in. If you know someone’s email address or phone number, you can pull them directly into a chat — again, no registration required on their part. And from there the new user can decide whether registering seems worth the trouble.
Which means that Chorus effectively makes no distinction between its registered users and everyone else when it comes to chatting in the moment, a feature its team thinks will be key to its success.
“A lot of the over-the-top messaging apps, they’re effectively all walled gardens. They’re creating their own network,” Tran says. With Chorus, there’s no wall, and the garden is more like an open field. But naturally, that has its pros and cons.
Scaling The Walled Gardens
Services like Facebook Messenger or the popular mobile app WhatsApp are indeed walled gardens to varying degrees. But as Tran suggests, a service like Chorus will inevitably face the problem of pulling users away from ecosystems and buddy lists they’re familiar with. At the end of the day, messaging comes down to ease, and if there’s anything heavy mobile users are invested in, it’s in the tool they use to text.
Through straightforward integration, Chorus also lets you bring in contacts from your phone, Facebook and Google all into one address book. That’s not new to the world of messaging services, though Chorus claims it lets you do so easily and in a way that saves you the hassle of building up yet another useless profile and trying to organize a contact list.
“In our worldview, users already have a friends list — it’s called their address book. They shouldn’t have to create a new one and should have the flexibility to immediately send messages to whomever they want,” the company states in its official press release.
Which is, effectively, the main draw of Chorus: its ability to let you reach anyone without having to worry about whether they’re on a phone or a laptop, or iMessage or Google Talk or Facebook. In a space where there’s so many different ways to communicate that it makes your head spin, to have a stripped down service that does what you want it to do is an ideal solution. If it catches on.
View full post on ReadWrite
