Editechial

Online social networking is huge and growing strongly, but what happens when all those virtual friends hit the road? Increasingly, they will be able to keep in touch via mobile versions of their favorite social networks, running on their cellular phones. ABI Research forecasts that in 2013, more than 140 million subscribers will share “anytime, anywhere” experiences this way, and they will generate subscription revenues in excess of $410 million.  Social networks like Facebook and Myspace have been steadily increasing their number of mobile subscribers through popular applications on smartphones such as the iPhone and Blackberry wireless devices.

“Subscriber numbers for mobile social networking will climb at a relatively modest rate for the next three or four years, but will then start to accelerate sharply,” says research director Michael Wolf. “That uptick is based on assumed acceptance levels in the giant emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Those countries are wildcards, very difficult to estimate, so we are quite conservative in our forecasts.”

Some mobile versions of social networks will follow the same model common to today’s Internet-based groups such as MySpace and Facebook: free browser-based access. Such models pose a problem for mobile operators by limiting their slice of the revenue to a charge for data traffic. “The ideal scenario for the mobile operator includes a recurring revenue stream: a subscriber paying $1.99 or $2.99 a month to have this application on their handset,” says Wolf.

Beyond the relatively modest subscription revenues that mobile social networking will generate, there will also be significant opportunities in mobile advertising as well as in mobile content sales. A recent end-user survey conducted by ABI Research showed that mobile users of social networks are likely to consume two or three times as much digital mobile content (pictures, music, videos and games) than their “asocial” peers. That would suggest a golden marketing and advertising opportunity yet, says Wolf, that isn’t happening: “They are not offering the right kinds of products for these users. The advertising isn’t that sophisticated yet.” His conclusion? “Social networking applications have to be uniquely mobile and not reliant entirely on advertising-based revenues, at least not initially.”

SayType has just launched and provides any telephone, landline, or mobile user with a simple, accurate, and hands-free solution for sending text and e-mail messages. The process is as easy as leaving a voicemail, up to two minutes long, that SayType will completely type out and send to any requested destination. SayType processes English and Spanish voice messages into text without human transcribers, voice training, or additional hardware and software. Visit www.saytype.com and send your first 21 talk-to-text messages free of charge.

Voice messages are converted into text and sent in less than 90 seconds

“SayType is safely providing drivers the hands-free ability to send accurate text and e-mail messages all typed out without pushing a button or spelling a word,” says John Kent, SayType inventor.

• SayType works with any voice from any phone
• Talk-to-text message
• Talk-to-e-mail
• Talk-to-translation

SayType has eliminated the “did you say” error and the voice training that is most frustrating and typical of other voice recognition technologies.

Specific contacts can receive translated messages with one simple click inside your address book. Language translations are available in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

Using say type hands-free text is much safer and faster than touch-typing, especially when walking and driving. SayType callers have the ability to text or e-mail important memos, papers, projects, translate languages, or spell an unknown word instantly just by speaking.

Everyone in the Web 2.0 world hears news coming from companies like Youtube and Hulu on a seemingly daily basis.  However what most tech blogs fail to cover is the (for lack of a better term) unsexy part of the online media business.  These companies are uploading, managing and distributing millions of files on a global basis and are the invisible hand of online video.

Sparked by the ongoing explosion of audio, video, photos, and text being generated or converted in digital formats, the global market for digital asset management (DAM) solutions – software intended to capture, organize, store and distribute an organization’s digital content – is expected to pass the $1 billion mark in 2013.

I’ve had the chance to spend some time with a company that is one of these platforms, Vidshadow.  Vidshadow’s CTO, Atul Patel had this to say about the ’shadow’ of the digital media industry,

“There has always been an interesting gap between the consumer facing startups and the business services that sit behind them.  For instance, with airline search, Kayak and Orbitz utilize ITA Software for their data.  In a similar fashion, in digital media, the services companies focused on the backbone of the industry itself, such as digital asset management, encoding, content delivery, are apt to generate more revenue in the long-haul.  This is the same reason why most startups want to become ‘platforms’ — it gives them an edge to be more the backbone with more predictable revenues, than merely the dotcom consumer site trying to monetize with advertising.  In the digital space, this is what makes the likes of Ascent Media and Akamai far different than Veoh and Joost.”

According to ABI Research industry analyst Zippy Aima, there are a number of forces acting to drive this market to great heights, but DAM also has some significant challenges to overcome.

“Large quantities of digital media content require collaboration across all personnel and departments, from creation to delivery,” says Aima. “DAM systems’ ability to enable integration is driving demand.”

Until recently, the different operations concerned with rich media content were siloed and isolated. DAM solutions available today can integrate with existing third-party applications and systems, such as ERP and enterprise content management (ECM) applications.

Another factor motivating organizations to implement DAM is the bottom line: such solutions improve operational efficiency and demonstrate a clear ROI. Falling storage costs and ever-increasing bandwidth also mean that digital assets can be moved around with ease, and this capability too demands powerful management tools.

All that notwithstanding, there are still issues to be resolved. First among these is a lingering confusion about the very definition of digital asset management. “There is still a lack of clarity around defining the system,” cautions Aima. “DAM systems are often confused with ECMs. Currently, DAM is considered to be a subset of ECM.”

This has been a pretty exciting news for the tech industry, I’ve been using this new browser for the past two days and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that Google is just flat out good at what they do. Google launched Google Chrome, a new open source browser intended to create a better web experience for users around the world. Available in beta in more than 40 languages, Google Chrome is a new approach to the browser that’s based on the simplicity and power that users have come to expect from Google products.

In the early days of the Internet, web pages were frequently little more than text. But today the web has evolved into a powerful platform that enables users to collaborate with friends and colleagues through email and other web applications, edit documents, watch videos, listen to music, manage finances and much more. Google Chrome was built for today’s web and for the applications of tomorrow.

“We think of the browser as the window to the web – it’s a tool for users to interact with the web sites and applications they care about, and it’s important that we don’t get in the way of that experience,” said Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management, Google Inc. “Just like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome has a simple user interface with a sophisticated core to enable the modern web.”

Making the web experience better for users

Google Chrome was designed to make it easy for users to search and navigate the web for the content they’re looking for.

• A combined search and address bar quickly takes users where they want to go, often in just a few keystrokes.
• When users open a new tab in Google Chrome, they’ll see a page that includes snapshots of their most-visited sites, recent searches and bookmarks, making it even easier to navigate the web.

Google Chrome was engineered to deliver a seamless web experience for users. At its core is a multi-process platform that helps provide users with enhanced stability and security.

• Each browser tab operates as a separate process; by isolating tabs, should one tab crash or misbehave, others remain stable and responsive, and users can continue working without having to restart Google Chrome.
• Google also built a new JavaScript engine, V8, which not only speeds up today’s web applications, but enables a whole new class of web applications that couldn’t exist on today’s browsers.

Contributing to the innovation of browsers through openness

“While we see this as a fundamental shift in the way people think about browsers, we realize that we couldn’t have created Google Chrome on our own,” said Linus Upson, Director of Engineering, Google Inc. “Google Chrome was built upon other open source projects that are making significant contributions to browser technology and have helped to spur competition and innovation.”

To further advance the openness of the web, Google Chrome is being released as an open source project under the name Chromium. The intent is that Google will help make future browsers better by contributing the underlying technology in Google Chrome to the market, while continuing to develop additional features.

How to get Google Chrome

Google Chrome can be downloaded at www.google.com/chrome. It is being released in beta for Windows in over 100 countries in the following languages: Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin America), Turkish, English (US), English (UK), Arabic, Czech, Danish, Hebrew, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Indonesian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Estonian.

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux users will be available in the coming months. For more information on the open source project, Chromium, visit www.chromium.org.

Socialcast, a provider of on-demand corporate social networks, have officially launched Socialcast 3.0. This new micro-blogging-based version is the first corporate social network to feature a self-service model. As a result, small to medium-sized businesses can now sign up, customize and use Socialcast’s enterprise messaging platform immediately, to swiftly harness the collective knowledge of team members and foster internal collaboration.

Socialcast’s self-service model represents a new method of deployment for secure, private enterprise social networking sites, bypassing the traditional sales model that often requires weeks or months of set-up and approvals. This empowers small businesses to easily complement or replace a traditional intranet and utilize a full-featured network for their workgroup, department or entire organization. The service equips enterprises with the same resource it offers Fortune 500 companies, without the need for a knowledge manager or chief information officer. Customer service and support is also included and the software is fully scalable, allowing companies to easily add new users.

“Socialcast operates as a ‘Twitter for the enterprise,’ enabling SMBs to capture the tacit knowledge of workers and leverage mindshare to bridge the gap between generations of co-workers,” said Tim Young, CEO of Socialcast. “The integration of the self-service model into our platform provides our SMB customers with sophisticated social networking tools. Our knowledge-sharing and collaboration portal is easily deployable, uniting the minds of a company’s entire workforce, while deeply engaging employees in their daily work.”

Workers can also leverage their organization’s social network via email or smartphone while away from the office. Whether at their desks or on-the-go, employees can send in questions, ideas and status updates, enabling uninterrupted collaboration and idea sharing. The software’s latest version includes a simplified user interface, improving the overall flow of communication through an enhanced activity stream that features customized settings based on user preference.

Other key features included in Socialcast 3.0 are in-line commenting and social searching, enabling users to comment on items directly within activity streams. This makes conversations easily accessible and connects users searching for similar content within the community.

This is a guest post from the Founder and CEO of Vidshadow, Jordan Hudgens.  I thought he had a unique perspective on how Web 2.0 got us where we are today.  This is taken from his personal blog in its entirety.

I was considering what the writing options were for this first real blog post, and I decided I wanted to discuss what is the root motivation behind all of these social media mediums such as: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. And since I am a fan of each of these services I believe I am well suited to self analyze why these companies are capturing our minds and dominating our daily lives.

This post is not going to discuss the technical specifications of any of these ‘Web 2.0’ services, there are literally thousands of blogs that have daily dialogue in regard to the social media world. However I have found very little discussion about ‘Why’ these online applications have captivated our collective psyches.

As our culture has become more and more introspective, simply put, I believe we have fallen in love with ourselves. I think that if we could run on a beach into our own arms we would do it! And with this new found love of self we have come to the, probably mistaken, notion that we are all geniuses. And we all feel that our ‘deep thoughts’ need to be shared with the world. It’s interesting to have observed the evolution of social media, see below for the time line:

1. Dating sites

We first began with ‘looking’ for other people to spend real world time with, these individuals should have common interests with us and the end goal was: physical, emotional, etc.

2. Myspace

We then moved to online social networking with Myspace (a former dating site). Myspace made it easy to make ‘online’ friends, 99.9% of whom you will never meet (hopefully).

3. Facebook

For as innovative as Mysapce was, it was mainly a static site that profiled the interests you typed into it on the day you signed up. Facebook introduced an entirely new world of connectivity when they launched the ‘News Feed’ service. The News Feed service allowed for people to track when you upload new photos, shared a link or video, and changed your ‘status’.

4. Twitter/Friendfeed

Taking Facebook’s News Feed process, services like Twitter made it quick and easy to share literally every part of your online self. They allow for you to share links, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, and status updates - many times on a dynamic basis. The majority of users on these services don’t even pay attention to the other members of the community, each of these social media mechanisms are completely ‘self-centric’.

So do you see the evolution? Starting with individuals searching for others online, we have migrated all the way to users being satisfied with being the talker in one sided conversations. Our inherent selfishness and narcissism, combined with technological advances, have led us down this path of egocentricity. So where are we going next? I don’t know, but I can promise you that there will be millions of opinions crossing the web, and all of them will be right (at least in one person’s mind).

We’re not working today, so here is a great Diggnation video, taken from the Nvidia conference this past week.  Enjoy!

I don’t usually write up software reviews on here, however one of my favorite software companies just released a new product for all you mac fans. Zengobi has released Curio 5, a major upgrade of their brainstorming and project management application for Mac OS X 10.5. Curio 5 features include the new Status shelf for tracking your to-do items across projects, iCal synchronization of events and to-do items, idea space templates, collapsible mind map and list hierarchies, an Inspector bar, figure styles, WebView figures, color-coded date adornments, beefed up Scrapbook shelf, improved search feature, and cross-project linking, multi-touch support. Curio is available in two editions: Standard (US$99) and Professional (US$149, US$69 academia).

Curio is the premier brainstorming and project management application designed to promote visual thinking. Using Curio’s innovative freeform interface and tools, you can intuitively gather, associate, and recall your ideas, while easily managing all the notes and documents associated with your project.

Pricing and Availability

Curio 5 is available immediately for download from www.zengobi.com/curio. Upgrade pricing for existing customers is available. Curio is available in Standard and Professional editions. Academic and volume discounts are available. Users can download and use either Curio edition as a full-featured trial for 15 days. A 60-day extended trial is also available upon request. Full system requirements and more information on Curio can be found at www.zengobi.com/curio.

If you read this blog often you know that I am not a fan of ad networks.  They cannibalize a site’s premium inventory and they devalue the site as a whole in regard to revenue (disclosure: Editechial is owned by an ad network).  However that hasn’t stopped companies like Adify from launching very successful services that empower anyone to start their own ad network.  And now 24/7 Real Media introduced a new application for its Open AdStream ad management platform to provide more control for vertical network owners across every site they operate. Open AdStream can be used for total network management, with the tools and features needed to enable strong network and revenue growth.

Open AdStream provides effective internal controls that enable the efficient management of affiliate sites, offering real-time updates on campaign status and greater control and transparency for both vertical network owners and publishers, for effective ad delivery. Network managers at companies such as Hola Networks, Godengo and United Online Media Group are now taking advantage of Open AdStream’s capabilities for this purpose.

“We use Open AdStream to consolidate our properties and our 50 million members into a single audience,” said Jeremy Helfand, Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer, United Online Media Group. “Its intuitive technology allows us to run individual site advertising programs while maintaining an effective system for cross-property buys. With Open AdStream, we can access scheduling, targeting, optimization, and reporting capabilities uniquely suited to our properties.”

Affiliate sites can also use Open AdStream to determine which advertisements are delivered to their Web pages, with robust information fields and controls to help categorize and measure they payout. They have the ability to accept and decline ads with ease, see any given report regardless of location, and gain access to specific subsets of information. Ultimately this efficiency enables the owner to focus resources and energy on running a successful network and gaining revenue.

Vertical networks can also utilize the recently introduced MultiSite feature, which provides access controls to streamline management for networks with decentralized trafficking.

“As the most comprehensive ad management system available today, using Open AdStream for vertical network management provides an enormous benefit to vertical network owners and Web site publishers looking for enhanced control and flexibility over their sites,” said Nicolle Pangis, Vice President, Product Management, Global Media and Technology for 24/7 Real Media, Inc. “Open AdStream gives network operators an all-in-one tool for managing revenue and combining feature sets to operate their business more effectively.”

PaySimple, a provider of SaaS (Software as a Service) for on-demand electronic payment solutions for small businesses, announced it has implemented technology by Varien, an industry-leading e-commerce provider. PaySimple has integrated its credit card processing services with the Magento open source shopping cart platform, which brings the power and security of an enterprise solution without the hassle and cost.

“We are continuously on the lookout for products and applications that will enhance our suite of solutions and bring value to our customers,” said Eric Remer, CEO of PaySimple, “With the addition of the Magento open source e-commerce platform, we have made it easy for PaySimple customers to use one of the best free products currently on the market, alongside all the PaySimple Solution 2.0 functionality, such as low-rate credit card processing, e-check processing, recurring billing, and secure data storage and reporting.”

PaySimple customers can download the free software and install it on their Web server along with a PaySimple module that will integrate the Magento platform with their PaySimple Solution. Information on how to integrate the Magento Shopping Cart with PaySimple Solution 2.0 can be found here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/277/paysimple.

Once installed, PaySimple merchants can provide a professional looking shopping cart system for their customers to make purchases from, without ever leaving the merchant’s website. And, being integrated with PaySimple, the merchants receive multiple fraud prevention functions such as AVS and CVV2 validation for credit card transactions, check verification for ACH transactions, and ensures they will be operating in a PCI compliant manner.

Key Benefits

• Scalability: Architecture accommodates the evolving needs of an e-commerce business; from a growing feature set to an expanding catalog, customer base, and order volume.
• Security: With an SSL protected installation of Magento working in conjunction with the PaySimple Solution 2.0, customers are ensured to be operating in a PCI compliant manner, allowing merchants to assure their end customers that credit card and bank account information is secure.
• Open Source: Magento’s free platform allows merchants total control and freedom over both their e-commerce business and e-commerce software.
• Flexibility: Magento delivers unprecedented flexibility and control over store operations, from catalog presentation to database configuration.
• Global: Multi-lingual support enables targeting global markets & customers in their native languages.
• Multiple Store Control: The multi-website and multi-store management through one administrative interface enables merchants to expand in whichever direction market opportunities point.