AOL will launch a new look and logo along with its official spinout from Time Warner on December 10, as it tries and become a content centric company. Wolff Olins, a global brand and innovation consultancy worked on this new look & logo which seeks to replace the older, more iconic AOL branding. The minute I saw the logo (and its various interpretations), my first reaction about the logo was simple: lame. It is ambiguous at best, and as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie, Wall-E.

Why such a visceral reaction? Perhaps because I grew up with the old AOL (all caps) and am mad at change — a malady normally associated with aging. Jokes aside, the new logo fails to capture what is going to be a smaller, nimbler AOL, one that is represented by a collection of smaller, iconic brands such as Engadget and Joystiq. AOL should ask for its money back!

Two winters ago, we unveiled a new design for GigaOM — today, we are launching another one. Whereas before, our focus was on design, this time around we’re aiming to bring you a unique user experience.

The biggest change at our company in the intervening two years, of course, has been in the growth of our network, which now totals seven blogs: In addition to this site, we also have TheAppleBlog, jkOnTheRun, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech, OStatic and WebWorkerDaily. In short, we generate a lot of content that adheres to the basic ethos of GigaOM.

Our product guru, Jaime Chen

While I remain a big believer is specialist niches, I feel it’s also important to surface more of the quality work being produced across these properties, such as the Car 2.0 coverage by Josie Garthwaite on Earth2Tech or Simon Mackie’s web working tips. So about six months ago, I asked our product guru, Jaime Chen, to come up with a game plan that would allow us to conduct a complete overhaul. Her mission was to:

• Better showcase new content and related articles so that we can overcome the limitations of the blog format without really moving away from it.
• Give readers an easy way to go to other GigaOM Network properties so that they can discover the work of our entire team of writers.
• Focus on super simple content consumption and discovery.
• Enable us to be more social.
• When it comes to actual blogging, take us back to our roots.

Jaime, instead of taking my word for it, went out and talked to a whole lot of our users — nearly 1,000 of you shared your feedback and insights with us. And you were not shy about your dislikes. As it turned out, most of what you wanted was already on my wish list. So we got ahold of our old friend Ryan Freitas and the ace design team of Shane Pearlman and Peter Chester to turn what we learned into a unique experience. They quietly toiled away for months and now, here you have it: The first step in the network-wide overhaul.

What we’ve tried to do is strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine. We have done this by adding a Featured Posts block at the top of the home page, while toward the bottom we’ve added topic pages and special reports. The rest maintains the typical blog format, but with a focus on extreme discoverability — the most-requested feature amongst our readers.

To that end, many of you asked for a list of three bullet points that summarize the highlights of longer posts. You got it. A list of related posts was another common request, so we’ve implemented that as well. And for those of you that wanted the GigaOM Team to point to great blog posts we might have read across the web and found useful, we’re rolling out that feature later this week. It’s pretty simple — we don’t have a monopoly on ideas, and since our business is based on your attention, it’s our job to make sure that your attention is being put to good use. And that means helping you save time and finding you stuff that you might find useful.

A note about typography: I wanted us to make reading an easy experience, so I opted for white spaces, bigger fonts and some elements that you would typically see in a traditional print publication. I’ve been reading the test site on an older, smaller screen (1024 x 768 ThinkPad) and my eyes don’t hurt — yet. In addition, some of the typographic stylings come to our blog courtesy of font technologies from San Francisco-based startup Typekit. We’re using the Clifford font, which is being served using the TypeKit technology (Disclosure: Typekit and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, are backed by True Ventures, investors in GigaOM and where I am a venture partner).

In the end, I want us to be closer to my grand vision of what I see as the future of blogging — more visual, multimodal, interactive, real time and social. We’re not there just yet, but we will be in a few months. Today you can share our stories on Twitter and Facebook; you can also connect via Facebook Connect and leave comments on the site. It might come as a surprise, but this entire operation (including a fairly advanced publishing system) was built on top of WordPress.com, the on-demand blogging service based on the open-source software, WordPress. Without going into the dirty details, WordPress Jedi Mark Jaquith, our in-house coding champ Chancey Mathews and our dev team of Kelsey Damas, Nick Ohrn, Dan Cameron and Matt Wiebe and designers Reid Peifer and Brandon Jones – many of them spread across different time zones and geographies — helped us put together the whole back end for the new site (and our blog network).

Now all this design and user experience is only as good as what we are supposed to do: create content you actually want to read. On that front, too, we have some good news. Liz Gannes, who till recently was the editor of NewTeeVee, has joined the GigaOM team as senior writer, where she will closely follow consumer web technologies and startups. She will be editor-at-large for NewTeeVee, where she will be contributing her insights into the world of online video as well. Liz is going to be joining me and Stacey Higginbotham, who has also been made a senior writer for GigaOM.

Given her work ethic and deep insights, Stacey’s promotion is well deserved. She will continue to track broadband (including policy), the FCC and cloud computing. So there you have it: the GigaOM troika. We are going to be focusing on all the things we love, with a renewed emphasis on innovation. Thankfully we have our editor in chief, Sebastian Rupley, giving us his perspective on technology all the time — his experience brings a much-needed realism to the go-go nature of Silicon Valley.

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Windows Mobile vs. Android: WinMo Is Better Than You Think jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; The Party Line — Phone Buzz of the Day jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; New iPhone Ads From Apple Jab at Verizon TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington "; How to Backup Any Smartphone — Gizmodo jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: Blog Design, GigaOM Redesign

"You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kromer of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible.

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Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to "encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page."

Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it."

With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data.

These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks.

Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see.

"Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies

Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location.

There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered.

These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind.

Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include...

Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today?

News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool

Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on.

Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed-in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm.

Cop Watcher

Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed.

Inventory Forecast

If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it.

Politics & Marketing

People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable.

How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on.

Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time.

Flu Trends+

Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area?

Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset.

What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data?

Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com.

We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN's ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media - and in particular bloggers. That's a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it's still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

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://URLFAN is, as we write this, "currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds."

The list below is ://URLFAN's all-time top 10. The number in brackets to the right of each item is last year's top 10 ranking (Nov '08).

#1. en.wikipedia.org (1)
#2. youtube.com (3)
#3. flickr.com (2)
#4. twitter.com (9)
#5. google.com (4)
#6. myspace.com (6)
#7. facebook.com (-)
#8. imdb.com (5)
#9. nytimes.com (7)
#10. apple.com (8)

There is one new entrant, Facebook at #7. washingtonpost.com moved out of the top 10, dropping from #10 last year to #12 this year.

Twitter is the biggest mover, up 5 places to #4.

Wikipedia is still the most cited website on the Web, for social media users and bloggers. YouTube and Flickr, two oft-used media sharing services, occupy the next two spots.

Last year we noted that there were 10 independent blogs in the top 100, including ReadWriteWeb. There are the same number this year, with a couple of new entrants. Here is the blog list circa November '09, again with last year's rank bracketed:

#23 techcrunch.com (#25)
#26 huffingtonpost.com (#32)
#33 engadget.com (#28)
#37 boingboing.net (#29)
#39 gizmodo (-)
#41 mashable.com (#91)
#53 arstechnica.com (#50)
#60 lifehacker.com (#63)
#78 readwriteweb.com (#97)
#93 smashing magazine (-)

Finally, what's new at ://URLFEED this year? You guessed it, a Real-Time Web feature! The site has introduced a Real-time Buzz Radar, which tracks buzzwords in the blogosphere. 'Chrome OS' is number 5 on the list currently, on the back of Google's Chrome OS event last week.

://URLFAN isn't a perfect measure of influence - you could easily argue that Google's PageRank is far better. However we continue to like the concept and we believe it's an accurate and up-to-date reflection of influential websites on the Web.

The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discrete button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes.

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Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website.

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, "Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook... This is just one more chapter in a much larger story - but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!"

But now, Mozilla's UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla's Weave to make your online identity something that's stored in your back pocket more than it's stored in your cookies or a third party's server.

Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we've seen yet:

Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for "sign in" on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site... Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.

Finally! They said it!

And now, we give you screenshots:

So, what's the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome's identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don't want their personal traffic tracked?

That's what's striking about the report from the 2.0 Adoption Council. The group did a web survey of its 100 members with 77 responding. That may seem like a small number to use for any quantifiable conclusion about the state of Enterprise 2.0. But the people who responded lead or help lead Enterprise 2.0 efforts at some of the largest organizations in the world. Thirty-four percent of the respondents work for companies with more than 10,000 employees. Twenty-five percent work for organizations that have more than 100,000 employees.

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These people have solid footing into how social enterprise technologies are being adopted.

Let's get to to the results:

Manufacturing Has Surprising High Adoption

It's not surprising to see high tech companies as leading the way in uses of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. But it's interesting that manufacturing businesses are proving to be adopters. These are companies with roots deep in the industrial age that are showing that they see it as important to bring social computing into the work of its employees.

No Surprise About Early Adoption

It should be no surprise that Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early adopter phase.

Budgets Are Healthy

Budgets are less than $500,000 in most organizations but 52 percent of the respondents have budgets between $500,000 and $5 milliion.

Projects Are Well Under Way

Enterprise 2.0 is not just a concept any more but a reality in the enterprise with 34 percent saying they have multiple projects underway. We are curious about five percent having Enterprise 2.0 technologies fully ingrained into their work places. These must be more service oriented companies that do not rely on deeply entrenched technologies like ERP software.

Who's Driving The Efforts

We often use terms like "groundswell," to describe the phenomena around social applications in the consumer world. In the enterprise, it's a different story. Adoption is often user driven but management is dictating a lot of the efforts.

ROI is Hard To Define

The one weakness that Enterprise 2.0 faces is the abstractness of its return on investment. It's important to note, though, that 55 percent of the respondents are very satisfied with their Enterprise 2.0 efforts. Another 26 percent of respondents are somewhat satisfied.

Conclusion

The 2.0 Adoption Council survey results unquestionably show that Enterprise 2.0 is well becoming a core part of organizations. The challenges will come as more scrutiny is placed on how the organization benefits from Enterprise 2.0. What really is the ROI? We expect this question will answer itself as more advanced analytics provide more detailed views about how the efforts are faring.

A Final Note

In addition to its survey research, The Council has also released its first "how-to" report, "A Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise," which gives additional insight into how to successfully implement Enterprise 2.0 technologies within organizations.

The rise of video streaming is dramatically affecting the Internet, according to a two-year study of Internet traffic trends that Arbor Networks recently presented to the North American Network Operators Group. Two years ago, Internet traffic was distributed evenly among a dozen Tier-1 network providers, but today the majority of traffic flows through direct peering agreements among large content providers, content delivery networks and ISPs. Consequently, Tier-1 networks have shifted their business models from simple packet delivery to richer cloud computing and content hosting services, and new players Google and Comcast have joined the top 10 list of Internet traffic producers — and the more traffic they put on the Internet, the more control it gives them over your online experience.

Traffic is growing much faster than the 50 percent year-to-year rate found by studies such as the Minnesota Internet Traffic Study; yet the “exaflood” of video traffic hasn’t drowned the Internet because network operators have found more efficient paths. The dramatic shift in traffic patterns has to do with the rise of what Arbor calls “the Hyper Giants,” 30 large companies that contribute 30 percent of Internet traffic. Thanks to YouTube, Google alone is responsible for 7 percent of all the traffic on today’s Internet, which puts it in the privileged position of prioritizing its VoIP and video calling services over YouTube without FCC permission.

The onslaught of video is also changing the nature of peering agreements. Traditionally, peering and so-called transit were very distinct from a revenue perspective: Peering agreements were “settlement free” arrangements in which packets changed hands between networks of roughly equal size and scope, but money didn’t. Fee-based network interconnects were confined to “transit agreements” in which a large network operator connected a small player to the entire Internet for a fee; peering is also strictly a “one network to one other network” arrangement. The new wrinkle is “paid peering” agreements in which a large operator permits direct connection for a small fee. Paid peering replaces transit fees that run $2-9 per Mbps with direct connection at $1-3, and enhances service, according to an article on Bill Norton’s “Ask Dr. Peering” web site which explains the value of Comcast’s paid peering and its potential collision with net neutrality regulations:

Paid peering provides better performance than transit, since the traffic takes a less circuitous route. Paid peering allows Google competitors to more easily compete with Google on performance and price without having to reach Google scale.

But paid peering may be forbidden by Question 106 of the FCC’s proposed Open Internet rules because it’s essentially two-tiered network access, Norton points out.

Paid peering illustrates how hard it is to write an anti-discrimination rule for the Internet that doesn’t have harmful side effects for all but the largest content networks. Paid peering is a better level of access to an ISP’s customers for a fee, but the fee is less than the price of generic access to the ISP via a transit network. The practice of paid peering also reduces the load on the Internet core, so what’s not to like? Paid peering agreements should be offered for sale on a non-discriminatory basis, but they certainly shouldn’t be banned.

Video is rising on the Internet, with more of it coming from legal sources such as content delivery networks and less from piracy-oriented systems like eDonkey and BitTorrent. Regulators need to look before they leap into wholesale bans on practices like paid peering that enable the Internet to carry increasing volumes of traffic. The FCC’s last net neutrality order (issued against Comcast in 2008) was an unintentional gift to purveyors of pirated content because it banned P2P throttling; going forward, the FCC should be at least as kind to network operators coping with the rise of video traffic by creative means.

Richard Bennett is a research fellow with the ITIF with 30 years of network architecture experience.

With the spin-out from eBay complete, its legal troubles with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis settled, Skype is looking to the future where it wants to become a ubiquitous real-time communications platform. And that means thinking about the next generation Skype architecture and also hiring a lot of smart people, said CEO Josh Silverman in a conversation earlier today.

“We are looking to hire engineers,” he said. “Especially those who want to live in Estonia.” In addition, the company is planning to ramp up its Stockholm (Sweden) office. “We are going to be ramping our presence in the Bay Area as well,” Silverman said. Skype currently has 700 employees and wants to hire engineers and product managers who have help Skype expand as it seeks to transform itself from just a voice-based service to a multi-feature real-time communications platform.

“While Europe is going to remain our base, California is going to be a big presence for us,” Silverman said. Skype recently added SIP Guru Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist and he is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company had built-up a substantial team in the Bay Area over past few months as it was trying to built a route-around the JoltID’s technology. With that need gone, the company now has enough engineering talent to start transforming itself into a platform.

“We want Skype to be embedded in more and more devices and we want to offer our APIs for developers to embed into their applications,” Silverman said. That is going to be a tough sell considering the company’s history of throwing its developers under the bus, the most recent example being the Skype Extras disaster. Silverman was candid enough to admit that the Skype Extras program wasn’t working. “APIs were hard and the extras-software uptake was low and it is important for us to have a great platform that is built for success,” he said. “So starting off a bad platform wasn’t a good idea.”

When I pressed Silverman on the embedded ambitions, he outlined a future where Skype would be embedded in connected game consoles, televisions and video phones. Skype could be embedded into different software offerings as well. The company wants to be a big player in the enterprise as well, but knows that it can’t do it all by itself. “We need to open up our platform in order to expand it,” he said, “Our aspiration is ubiquity.”

Silverman declined to offer any specific dates (and details) on when Skype will make launch a platform for others to leverage. One thing is for sure, Skype can pose a serious challenge to some of the upstarts such as Ribbit, TringMe and Twilio who are all trying to make it easy for application developers to embed voice-related functionality into their offerings. Skype’s ubiquity – over 500 million subscribers – makes it a fearsome agent of change in the Internet-based communications arena. (Related Post: How Skype can quickly and easily become a social network (and clean Facebook’s clock.))

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Silverman about the next generation of Skype architecture and he said the company was working on it. “It will work with SIP, it will have P2P but we won’t come to it with a religion,” he said. And that includes offering Skype via a browser and making it even more savvy about video conferencing.

Photo of Josh Silverman courtesy of Phil Wolf via Flickr. Skype desktop photo courtesy of IPVEO.

Updated with new information from Dropbox: You don’t go into file backup and syncing for the fame and glory, but that’s what it seems to be yielding for 2-year-old Dropbox. Simply put, people — including my GigaOM coworkers and I — love Dropbox because it works. “We do have a rabid following,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston admitted in a conversation today.

Over the summer Dropbox raised a $7.25 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, adding to $1.5 million in seed money it brought in from Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator in 2007. Accel’s Sameer Gandhi, who had previously led Sequoia’s investment has since become a partner at Accel, led the round. We found out about the Series A via an SEC filing; Houston confirmed the funding had closed but said that the filing was not the final amount. Houston said the company had not yet disclosed its A round because up until last month it was in the process of obtaining the URL dropbox.com from a domain squatter.

He later contacted us (after this article was posted) to share more details. Dropbox had raised $1.2 million in debt in 2007 from Sequoia Capital and that along with interest (on that amount) converted to equity as part of the Series A investment, which included a fresh slug of $6 million. That brings company’s total investment raised to date to $7.25 million. Houston claimed that the round was closed in October 2008, though the documents were filed with the SEC in July 2009. The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Accel Partners.

Dropbox now has 3 million registered users, up from 2 million in September and 1 million in April. Nearly 1.5 million of them were active in the last month, including 300,000 using the company’s new iPhone app, according to Houston. And many of those folks identify themselves as Dropbox lovers, with more than 35,000 signing up to be Twitter followers and 23,000 as Facebook fans. A 2-week-old feature that allows the community to vote on new features has garnered nearly 10,000 votes for the top choice: selectively syncing certain files or folders rather than a whole account.

Alongside other lightweight web apps like Gmail infiltrating the enterprise, Dropbox customers (an undisclosed portion pay $10-$20 per month for additional storage) are now using the simple tool to do their jobs. In some ways, the migration is flowing in the opposite direction — a traditionally enterprise concept is now available to everybody. And Dropbox, as could be expected, says it will offer tools for corporate collaboration in a more formal fashion early next year.

San Francisco-based Dropbox has just 20 employees. The service currently stores nearly 1.3 million gigabytes of data.

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This Week in Mobile Tech Manor #67: MW2 FTFail! jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; 10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Apple Opens Doors to iTunes LP for Indie Labels and Artists TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington "; My Early Black Friday Deal Arrived — Panasonic HDC-SD10 jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel ";

Posted by Liz Gannes on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  22 Comments
Tags: Accel Partners, dropbox, Online Storage Startups, Sequoia Capital

As PC makers such as Lenovo — which said today that it will spend $200 million to buy back its mobile unit — move into the mobile phone market, they are most likely to rely on Google’s Android (both Dell and Acer are using it) to deliver their iPhone-inspired smartphones. So while fellow-computer maker Apple may be the inspiration (and a key enabler by getting the carriers to open up their networks and their application stores), it’s Android that will democratize the hardware for mobile phones by offering a widely adopted, open operating system that divorces the phone from its software.

The OS is certainly becoming popular. Requests for web-based ads from Android-based smartphones are on the rise, according to the most recent stats from AdMob, a mobile ad network in the process of being acquired by Google. When it comes to data requests from smartphones, which make up 44.4 percent of worldwide mobile web requests, Apple holds the crown, but Android has only being available on handsets since September 2008.

Widespread adoption of Android could lead it to become what Windows was for the PC world, an operating system that can be licensed on any underlying hardware and ensure that a variety of applications run on the machines. There will be room for other players in this multibillion-dollar device market, of course, but for the most part, the computer makers have already settled on Android. (Acer has Windows Mobile phones, too). Ironically, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile was aiming to be the OS for the computer guys.

If Android phones proliferate while delivering a consistent user experience and numerous compelling applications (the consistent user experience bit needs work), consumers who want to use the web on their phones can choose their devices based not on what kinds of apps are available on the handsets, but the quality of the network, pricing for access and other carrier-specific factors that consumers deem important.

Eventually, if handset exclusivity becomes a non-issue and networks open up, then the handsets and the network will be divorced as well, leading to a world where consumers will benefit from competition amongst device makers, software firms and even the carriers. In this future, pricing innovation (and maybe even actual competition) by carriers will matter, given that those factors are the primary concerns for wireless customers when choosing a network. Prepaid carriers will have an advantage, although I imagine the larger carriers will have to fight to keep consumers happy — leading to lower prices or more services.

Developers for the hottest apps will also win, as OS makers try to attract and sign exclusivity agreements with them much like Sony and Microsoft fight for the hottest console games. On the hardware side, expect few traditional handset makers to survive, especially after the computer makers learn from their mistakes and get their later-generation phones out. Maybe some handset OEMs will be bought, but without a proprietary OS and the exclusive access to carriers that are in the process of being swept away, they have less value.

To survive, handset OEMs will need to either build out compelling services such as Motorola’s Blur or Nokia’s Comes With Music efforts, or pander to a large, specific community of users with features that really matter to its members, as Research in Motion is trying to do with the business market. Even the efforts to build differentiating services or focus on a community may not help handset makers, but doing nothing isn’t an option.

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Upgrade BlackBerry WSJ Mobile App or Lose Use jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; Handbrake Gets 64-bit Snow Leopard Love TheAppleBlog – by Liam Cassidy "; Ensure Devices Don’t Walk Away with Nio Bluetooth Monitor System jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; Dumb Idea: Waking Up at 4 AM to Shop for Deals NewTeeVee – by Ryan Lawler ";

Posted by Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  2 Comments
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Layoffs are cropping up all over the tech industry, with workers at companies ranging from AOL to Adobe to Microsoft getting pink slips. But while most people know to turn to the big online job boards and social networks ranging from LinkedIn to Facebook to help land a new gig, there are a lot of off-the-beaten-track online paths that can be taken as well. Below are 12 proven tech job search resources that you may not be using yet. Good luck!

TwitterJobSearch searches Twitter for posts on who is hiring. The posted jobs range from full-time to part-time work-at-home to one-off hired gun positions. Many of the positions listed are tech jobs, and the number of posts is at critical mass, with Twitter being the social phenomenon that it is. More than 410,000 new jobs were posted to TwitterJobSearch in the last 30 days. Use this syntax to, say, find web development jobs in San Francisco: “web developer San Francisco.”

oDesk is one of the largest online staffing marketplaces for people with tech skills. Developers, designers and many other tech types can post their resumes, examples of projects they’ve completed, and more, and get bids and offers from employers around the world for full- and part-time jobs. Find out more in WebWorkerDaily’s interview with oDesk CEO Gary Swart.

Do you have IT skills? ComputerJobs.com has listings from all over the U.S. if you do.

Elance is a very popular job bidding site for developers and programmers, and for people with other types of tech skills. Copywriters, illustrators and those with lots of other non-tech skills may also want to fill out a profile there. Check out more here.

Rent-a-Coder offers a very diverse collection of software development and programming jobs from employers all around the world. You can get very temporary jobs or full-time gigs.

Want a tech job search site with a name you can take very literally? Try FindaTechJob.com. It lists lots of positions for programmers and web developers, among others. You can also connect your programming skills up with businesses at ScriptLance.

For web projects in particular, put in bids showing off your skills out at Webmaster Projects.

Open Source Skills?
With record funding rolling in for commercial open-source companies and more foundations overseeing projects, there are more paying jobs in the open source software world than ever. Open source skills can also differentiate you from the tech worker pack, and many other tech workers don’t think of the world of open source as having commercial arms.

Several of the prominent open-source software foundations can help open sourcers find work. You might start by looking into the Apache Software Foundation , which oversees many open source projects, and the Drupal Foundation’s list of available jobs.

Don’t forget about the ongoing jobs available at prominent open source companies, as well as those that make extensive use of open source. Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can also find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo.

SmartData Enterprises specializes in placing outsourced open source workers on projects. You can work remotely on projects taking place all around the world, for pay.

For many useful tips on how to effectively use social networks to land a job, see WebWorkerDaily’s popular resource collection — and make sure to stay organized.

If you follow me on Twitter, then you’re already aware of my obsession with Foursquare, a New York-based service that taps into the narcissistic appeal of being able to post unusual locations such as our office cafeteria, Chatz Cafe, or best recommendations about a place and marries it to social networking. What’s more fun — it all seems like a game.

You can access Foursquare on its web site, on the iPhone, or via Android and BlackBerry devices. Every time you stop at a cafe, a bar or an eatery, you have the option to check in your location. Sure you can check-in your visit to a shopping mall or even a 7-Eleven, but the focus is primarily of going out. The service will serendipitously tell you if one of your friends in the same location . I started out as a skeptic of Foursquare but in just three months, have become an addict. And it’s the addictive nature of this little service that puts it on the fast track to the top.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley

Foursquare, which has received $1.35 million in funding from Union Square Ventures (and others), launched back in March in a handful of U.S. cities. Then earlier this month, it was turned on in 50 additional cities across the world. If the recent increase in the number of requests to connect that I’m now receiving on a daily basis is any indicator, then it won’t be long before Foursquare becomes a mainstream phenomenon.

A prominent story on CNN.com has only helped spread the word about the service co-founded by Dennis Crowley, founder of Dodgeball, a similar pre-smartphone-era offering that was acquired and subsequently shut down by Google. I emailed Crowley recently to ask about Foursquare’s traffic.

“We’ve been growing 50 percent-plus per month,” he said. When I last saw Crowley, back in October, he said the service was growing at roughly 40 percent a month in terms of new users, so this latest figure points to a growth spurt. For a while, there were persistent rumors that the service’s growth had flattened at around 60,000 users.

Crowley, who teamed up with Naveen Selvadurai and Harry Heymann for the startup, said that with Foursquare he’s building the product he wanted to build with Dodgeball, but couldn’t. (He had an acrimonious and very public split with Google.) Crowley believes that if you make software that allows people to discover new places and services, you can quickly build a database of “taste” and “cultural preferences.”

For instance, I have become a big fan of Sightglass, a hip new cafe in San Francisco. Showing up there every day and letting my friends know of my repeated visits indicates my “preference” for Sightglasses’ coffee. The more places I “check into,” the better chance I have to win awards or “badges” with cute names such as “bender” (going out more than four nights in a row), “crunked” (more than four stops in a night), and “overshare” (more than 10 check-ins in 12 hours.) Compared to its rivals — and there are many, including Gowalla (which for some odd reason is popular with a lot of Sand Hill Road VCs) — these little, seemingly silly things are what make Foursquare so much fun. Of course, it helps that most of my friends are big Foursquare users as well, making the other services that much less attractive to me.

In my opinion, structured datasets such as those being collected by Foursquare are going to become highly effective resources for cost-per-action advertising or even e-commerce revenue models. A smart hyper-local advertising platform, coupons or even sponsored badges are possible ways that Foursquare could make money. But Crowley isn’t thinking about revenues just yet; he’s busy getting Foursquare to grow exponentially.

“In the end, we want it to be the Netflix of places,” he said, referring to that company’s movie recommendation system. “We want to use (the) social graph and help with (the) discovery of places.” The company recently launched its API with the hope that it would spur a variety of apps based on Foursquare data — thus making it that much more distinguishable from its rivals.

Like Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare taps into our inner exhibitionist self — a malady of the post-Internet era. It allows everyone to be a Ruth Reichl, the legendary food critic — an arbiter of taste. With a narcissistic quotient that is higher than a genius’s IQ, it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered by everyone from dithering fashion editors to pro athletes and pop stars. And when that happens, yet another tech pop phenomenon will be born.

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eBay Introduces Bargain-Hunting Deals App for the iPhone TheAppleBlog – by Darrell Etherington "; Mobile Tech Minutes: Acer Aspire 8940G Gaming Notebook jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick "; How to Add More Icon Rows in Windows Mobile 6.5 jkOnTheRun – by Kevin C. Tofel "; Living by the Numbers: What Happens When You Quantify Everything? WebWorkerDaily – by Celine Roque ";

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Intel researchers in Pittsburgh told journalists today that brain implants are harnessing human brain waves to surf the Internet, manipulate documents, and much more. And just as we told you two years ago, the lucky recipients of these implants will be willing volunteers, not government-controlled guinea pigs. Some of us are now researching cheap flights to Pittsburgh.

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Just think of how far we've come since the early days of portable tech. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time," said Intel research VP Andrew Chien, "they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop."

Indeed, mobility, transparency, and accessibility are all the terms of the hour; and their advocates are popular laureates. The forefront of the user interface has revolved around concepts such as intuition, organics, and biology.

Gesture technology is removing one barrier that lies between human-to-machine communication; think about that the next time you twirl your iPhone around like an Etch-A-Sketch. Isn't removing the need for physical contact the next rational step? Chien tells us that, although there are many challenges yet to solve, the day of brain-controlled computing isn't so far off.

Dean Pomerleau works for Intel on matters of cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, man-machine interfaces, brain processing of semantic information, and various brain-scanning technologies, such as fMRI, MEG, EEG and ECoG. He and his cohorts are solving the mechanisms of brain waves.

While there's no doubt the use cases are fascinating, Pomerleau also brushes off user concerns about implants, saying, "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

This is the precise line of thinking that Kirkpatrick debates so heatedly - perhaps as much now as he did in his editorial almost two years ago.

Have concerns around user privacy abated since then? Hardly, with Facebook and location-based-tech developers struggling to maintain balance for their users and constant struggles and inquisitions over corporate storage of user data. Has the issue of information overload lessened? If it had, would so many startups be staking their claim on the issue of firehose filtration? And is mobile tech obsolete enough to require even more portable access to the apps we love and - dare I say it? - need?

Are end users ready for brain implants? You tell us.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted.

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This is the third in a ReadWriteWeb series looking back at some of the key trends of the past 10 years. We previously covered the online music industry and the democratization of news media.

Recommendations Technology Advances

Over the past decade the online retail industry has seen great strides in the use of recommendations technology. Amazon has consistently led the field in this, with its sophisticated blend of personalized, social and item recommendations.

Many of the retail recommendations in use today rely on implicit user data. These systems typically track user data, which is then analyzed with a set of usually proprietary algorithms. The end result: recommendations for users. Earlier this year we looked into Baynote's recommendation system:

"Baynote observes real-time user behavior on a site and looks for implicit, emergent patterns. It uses collective intelligence and an affinity engine to analyze the data. Common behaviors which it tracks include page refers, queries, mouse movement, time spent on a page, peer behavior."

Other similar recommendation technologies we've profiled include MyBuys, ATG and richrelevance.

Social Media Takes Retail to Blogs, Social Networks

As with nearly every other industry, shopping sites have increasingly used social media to promote their wares.

According to Shop.org's recent eHoliday Study, 47.1% of retailers surveyed will be increasing their use of social media this holiday season. Specifically, more than half of retailers have "added or improved their Facebook page (60.3%) and Twitter pages (58.7%)" this year. Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) have "added or enhanced blogs and RSS feeds" over the same time period.

One result of this has been a big increase in implicit social recommendations data across social networks and blogs.

Another trend with ecommerce sites is distributed sales. Anyone can embed an Amazon store into their blog or social network these days. As Kurt Collins of social commerce vendor Cartfly told us in December, this won't replace "end destination e-commerce" - but it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network.

Mobile Commerce Arrives, Albeit Slowly...

The growth of mobile phones has been a big trend this decade. However, as Sarah Perez wrote in September, mobile commerce in the U.S. market has struggled for momentum.

According to data from eMarketer, more than 70 million U.S. mobile phone users will access the internet from their devices this year. Despite this, the m-commerce market remains immature. In an April 2009 survey by RIS News, privacy and security concerns are still at the forefront of both shoppers' and retailers' minds.

There is some promise that mobile commerce will finally gain traction in the coming decade. Mobile payments firm Billing Revolution found that on-the-go consumers are happy to purchase small ticket items like pizza and movie tickets, for example.

One market that has shown strong signs of mobile commerce growth is Japan, according to Morgan Stanley.

See also our analysis of mobile payments.

Conclusion

New recommendations technologies make it easier every year for consumers to find what they want, social media has driven a lot of retail activity to small websites and social networks, and mobile commerce has slowly but surely gained a foothold in e-commerce.

These are just some of the trends in e-commerce over the past 10 years. While Amazon.com and eBay continue to be the giants of online retail, the Social Web and advances in web technology have both had a big impact this decade.

See also:

• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music
• Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

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TypePad Micro: In addition to being able to blog via email, iPhone app, "Blog It" bookmarklet and the general WYSIWYG dashboard, this tool also allows users to cross post to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. My only complaint with TypePad is that there are only 2 design themes to choose from. For someone like me with very little design sense, it's a long process to find something right. As well, if you'd like to add another blog or add new design themes you are required to pay for a monthly subscription service.

Tumblr: This service offers users publishing via iPhone app, desktop widget, the Tumblr bookmarklet, text message, email, AIM and even via audio call-in. Tumblr's theme gallery offers hundreds of options for design. Users can also add their posts to Facebook and Twitter via the free customization. Tumblr allows users to create more than one blog and add more than one contributor for free; however, all edits show up in the same dashboard in chronological order. This means you may have to dig to revise an older post.

Posterous: Posterous is the original email publishing microblog. Users can email posts, publish them via the web editor or upload them from the PicPosterous iPhone app. The service allows users to set up auto posting to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress and Xanga. You can also choose to post to just one service in addition to your Posterous account by emailing flickr@posterous.com to specify Flickr or twitter@posterous.com to post to Twitter. Of the three services, Posterous offers an advantage in its ease-of-use and while it's lacked design abilities in the past, the company recently launched themes and theme import from Tumblr.

Other notable light blogging services include Soup.io, Vox and Noovo. If we've missed your favorite service let us know in the comments below.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings. Those comments have confused and scared many folks as to how speed might impact their businesses.

To be sure, Cutts’ comments don’t offer any details, and it is not even clear if Google will go down that route. (Matt, can you offer clarifications please?) Still, some are worried that Google is going to turn PageRank into a country club for the rich, and penalize smaller sites because they don’t have high-end hosting facilities. Of course, there is the uneven distribution of backbone connectivity. Many parts of the world are not as well-connected as, say, Asia or the United States, so does that mean this new approach to PageRank could penalize sites hosted in places that don’t have abundant connectivity?

Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer of AlertSite, a web site traffic monitoring service, thinks such a move could have a serious impact on many web sites. “The potential changes at Google mean there will be a REAL business impact for poor web site performance, and conversely, in Google’s words, a bonus for good performance,” he writes on the company blog. “Online organizations will need to look closely at themselves and the other parties that participate in the Web application delivery supply chain to understand and manage this new development in 2010.”

On a personal level, I believe that a faster web is good for everyone. At some point in our web journeys we have all cursed slow-loading sites, a problem that is only going to increase as the web becomes more intricately intertwined, in the process becoming a patchwork quilt of diverse services. Performance hiccups at one service can send out ripples of disruption.

Increasingly popular widgets can slow down the performance of even the best web offerings, thus lowering the overall experience. The increased interdependency of various services can often cause disruption. Hours after the news of Michael Jackson’s death spread on the web, many news sites became inaccessible and suffered slowdowns. Those sites didn’t crash but instead were hampered because they were pulling data from ad servers that weren’t prepared for the onslaught of traffic. On our own sites, we have seen things break down when one of our partners suffers an outage or has performance problems.

As a consumer of information, I would say Google giving preference to faster sites doesn’t seem like a bad idea. As a publisher, the high cost of speeding up my web offerings might hurt in the short term, but ultimately it means a better experience for my readers — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Photo of Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2009 courtesy of PlanetC1 via Flickr

As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls "negative cashback." How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.

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The problem may lie with Bing's ability to accurately track website changes or with Bing's relationships with retailers or with the basic values of the retailers themselves, but one way or another, the system seems to be gamed.

Essentially, certain products from certain websites appear through a Cashback-enabled browser to be a certain price. Yet, if the same user visits the same site at the same time from a non-Cashback browser or machine (or if he deletes his cookies), the price is sometimes drastically different in a way that benefits the end user not a bit.

As one user very succinctly put it, "If I go directly to butterflyphoto.com, I pay $699 with 0% cashback. If I use Bing Cashback, I pay $758 with 2% cashback, or $742.84. Using Bing cashback has actually cost me $43.84, giving an effective cashback rate of -6.27%."

We did the same search, and we saw the same results. Here's our Bing Cashback screenshot from an Internet Explorer window:

And here's the same product on the same website in a Chrome tab:

As a side note, the blogger that alerted us to this issue had previously received a nastygram from Microsoft about his post on Bing Cashback technical issues.

So, what do we make of this issue? Is it a potentially scammy technical glitch? More importantly, how soon can it be fixed so innocent online shoppers aren't quietly swindled out of cash throughout the holiday season? Let us know what you think should be done in the comments - particularly if you've noticed this bug yourself.

LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users - not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have.

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The Good News

1. It's easy to get started. After two years of waiting, unreplied emails and heartbreak - developers should now be able to get an API key within minutes and start building on the LinkedIn platform. That's great news and not something that could have been taken for granted.
2. The API allows search. That's great because with a little disambiguation done on the client side you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you're connected to on other networks. Unfortunately, no one is doing exactly that yet - but isn't that the biggest value proposition here? I see a person on Twitter, on Facebook, on some other social network and I want to see what they do for a living. Let the app collect and expose that data from LinkedIn!

   Disambiguation of people with the same name and privacy limitations regarding who gets to see who's information are both complicating factors. The coolest use of the search API we've seen so far is Salim Ismail and Rohit Khare's Knx.to. That service is limited to your own connections so far, but it's definitely a keeper.



3. The API uses OAuth. That means that 3rd parties can offer fast, secure, standardized authentication into your LinkedIn user account. That's great.
4. Activity updates are now parsable by type. The API allows developers to pull in just one type of the many updates a person gets on LinkedIn. Will someone please build an app that just shows me when my contacts change jobs and leaves out all the status messages, friend connections and other cruft? That kind of granular control has a lot of potential and is reminiscent of the vision behind the proposed user activity data protocol Activity Streams.

And Now For the Bad News...

1. The first use-cases make it look like LinkedIn is trying to be Twitter. Tweetdeck and Posterous are the most high-profile early adopters of the new API; Tweetdeck will give you a LinkedIn column (too bad LinkedIn contacts can't be integrated into other columns) and Posterous will let you publish links to updates on that platform over to your LinkedIn contacts' streams. Jobdash looks like Tweetdeck just for LinkedIn and job-hunting, but it doesn't yet offer features like limited display of notifications by type - it's just a big stream of updates.

   LinkedIn is not Twitter! LinkedIn's Adam Nash told us this morning that he loves the Twitter and Twitter-like integrations but "integrating messaging isn't the goal, there's a wide range of business applications that will benefit from it. Twitter is hot so people are jumping to that but there are far more compelling business cases."

   Two years after the business-oriented platform was announced tiny Tweetdeck was just so hot it out-maneuvered all the business applications that could have been built to showcase? I don't buy it. Just like the formal partnership between Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this month, I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served.
   

   

2. Terms and Conditions are unclear, restrictive and changing. The API terms say that you can't build applications that compete with LinkedIn. API management service Mashery CEO Oren Michels (disclosure: RWW sponsor) had this in response to say: "It appears that you can't create a new experience around LinkedIn, an iPhone app for example. You might create some interesting bolt-ons to other services that might drive users to linkedin.com - but that's a very 5 years-ago approach to an API."

   "The signal from this is that they aren't encouraging developers to take the social graph and deep knowledge of peoples' professional lives and create new UIs for interacting with LinkedIn because they are explicitly concerned about competition," Michels said. "LinkedIn has amazing assets and a great business model - get out of the UI business!"

   Likewise several developers have expressed concern around the commercial limitations on the API. LinkedIn's Nash clarified with us that those terms simply prohibit charging people extra money for access to the free LinkedIn service and building an advertising network on top of LinkedIn profile data because of privacy concerns.

   Finally, the terms of the API aren't always clear. Michels points out that rate limits on accessing the API aren't made explicit - only that there will be rate limits and that a developer can email LinkedIn to request a personal expansion of their limit.

3. Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it's not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we're told.

Michels may have said it best: "There are some really smart people over there at LinkedIn. If this is what we waited 2 and a half years for, it's a bit disappointing."

It is a bit, but not entirely disappointing. We look forward to seeing how the platform evolves and what kinds of applications are built on top of it. The web has been waiting a long time for a LinkedIn platform - now let's see what happens.

Amazon.com was founded in 1995, but it famously didn't make its first annual profit until 2003. Those days of struggle for e-commerce vendors are long gone. In its State Of Retailing Online 2009 report, Forrester Research reported that the vast majority of Web retailers were not only profitable in 2008 - in a recession - but also that their overall level of profitability grew.

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The e-commerce market is expanding, due to a combination of factors. One is that consumers are no longer afraid to buy things online, as they once were. Also brick-and-mortar businesses are migrating more of their operations online. We also have technology advances to thank: better recommendations technology, social media, the emergence of mobile commerce.

E-commerce Continues to Grow, Despite Economy

E-commerce has ridden the ups and downs of the general economy over the past decade, but it has continued to grow throughout. In the State Of Retailing Online 2009 report, Forrester Research reported that retailers saw their Web divisions grow by 18% in 2008. Given that Forrester described 2008 as "one of the worst years ever" in retail, that's significant growth in online retail activity.

Holiday Season Predicted to Grow 8%

Online shopping has always been a seasonal market and there are promising signs for the upcoming holiday season. The latest comScore statistics show that toy web sites grew 9% in October, which comScore claimed was due to some parents getting in early for holiday gifts. The retail apparel segment also grew by 9% in October.

Overall, Forrester Research predicts that online holiday retail sales (over November and December) will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion.

Brick-and-Mortar Stores a Success on the Web

A noticeable trend over the past decade has been the slow but steady flight of 'brick-and-mortar' retail stores to the Web. In the early days of online retailing, Web operations were typically isolated from the main sales channels. But nowadays, Forrester notes that Web operations are a strategic part of the entire organization.

Two recent stories from industry website Internet Retailer show how traditional retailers are not only adapting online, but thriving. Best Buy's traffic has grown 18% over the past 12 months according to Nielsen Online. Meanwhile for the quarter ended October 31, 2009, Gap's Web sales increased 4.9% to $298 million. The web accounted for 8.3% of sales at Gap in Q3 09, compared to 8.0% in Q3 2008.

Forrester outlined a number of reasons why online channels are appealing during a "challenging" economy - including enabling consumers to find products online that they can't find elsewhere, offering comparisons on product features and pricing, avoding holiday crowds and more.

All of this data is very encouraging to online retailers. Even during a down economy, the Web has come through for most of them. Web entrepreneurs, if you're looking for opportunities then look no further than online retailing!

Photo credit: Sⓘndy

The Internet is abuzz over Google’s release of the open-source version of its Chrome OS, and for good reason. It’s free, which will save hardware manufacturers licensing fees, and it appears ideally suited for the netbooks that have become such a hot item for the mobile crowd (GigaOM Pro, sub. required). But Chrome is not without its detractors, and it’s worth remembering that Google isn’t King Midas — in fact, there’s a substantial list of Google products and services that have flopped, floundered or simply disappeared into the ether. Here are a few of the most memorable:

• Google Lively was a web-based virtual environment that allowed as many as 20 people to sit in a virtual room and chat with each other. The offering debuted in July 2008 only to have Google pull the plug a mere four months later.
• Google Print Ads was dropped earlier this year after the company’s vision of bringing web-like automation to the world of traditional media failed to materialize. The effort went belly-up just three weeks before the death of Google Audio Ads, which ended a three-year run in February after the company failed to gain traction in the radio ad game.
• Google Answers spent a year in beta before a full-blown launch in May 2003, but the effort to create a fee-based knowledge market never gained much traction outside a small base of users and the service was dropped in late 2006.
• The social networking site Orkut launched early in 2004 as an independent project of noted Google developer Orkut Büyükkökten and has caught fire in Brazil, a market that accounts for roughly 50 percent of its membership. The site reportedly claims roughly 100 million users, which is impressive, but Google can’t be happy that its effort is virtually unknown in Europe and North America while Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others have gained such impressive traction.
• Google Catalog Search debuted in 2001 as a way for consumers to go online to check out their favorite print catalogs that had been scanned and uploaded. Of course, retailers were already taking their inventories online themselves, and the effort was put to rest earlier this year.
• Google Health was released as a beta test in May 2008, but the service has yet to find much of an audience among insurers or the general public. Which may have something to do with the combination of the words “health” and “beta test.”
• The location-based service Dodgeball was shut down in 2009 after Google had acquired it four years earlier, and while Google continues to operate Jaiku – a social networking service it picked up in 2007 — the company has effectively abandoned the project. The technologies and expertise from both startups is being incorporated into other Google businesses and projects, however.

No company bats 1.000, of course, and a company as experimental and entrepreneurial as Google is bound to have its share of failures. As the blogosphere gushes over Chrome, though, Google’s stumbles help provide some perspective. Are there any other names that should be on this list?