Posts from November 2005

Yesterday I attended the San Francisco auto show to geek out over the latest cars. A few companies stood out in their marketing efforts to connect their brands with passive customers. Chrysler had special photo zones around popular cars such as the Dodge Viper, a Chrysler 300 Dubs Edition with gull-wing doors, and the Chrysler Phaeton concept car. The company setup special floor mats as photo zones and attendees lined up to have their picture taken. Chrysler representatives handed special cards to everyone they photographed with a URL and access code to retrieve their digital photograph the next day. Subaru...

Read more...

MetroFi announced today the deployment of wireless mesh networks at San Francisco's Civic Center, Ferry Building and Portsmouth Square. I visited all three locations this evening and SF TechConnect, San Francisco's wireless access grid, is definitely alive and broadcasting. Using the network supposedly currently requires visiting a splash screen and accepting a terms of service document, but I could not establish a connection to any of the nodes. (pictured above are the three network locations plotted on a Google Map. Please open this post in a web browser if you do not see a map) Macworld reports the system...

Read more...

Brightcove just closed a $16.2 million Series B funding round led by AOL. Other investors include IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. Barry Diller of IAC will join Brightcove's board. Series A was led by Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners. Brightcove was founded by Jeremy Allaire, formerly chief technical officer at Macromedia where he helped develop the Flash format. Brightcove makes heavy use of Flash throughout its site to deliver video direct to customers over the web for free, subscription, and individual purchases. Brightcove also signed a deal with AOL allowing publishers...

Read more...

I created a Simple Sharing Extensions exporter for NetNewsWire followed links as a proof of concept. The OPML SSE exporter is written in AppleScript. It iterates through each subscription feed and its items, outputting every feed and the descriptive data about the items you have opened in a browser. If you are a Mac user with NetNewsWire installed you can download the AppleScript or view some of the outputted OPML. Example output <outline type="feed" text="Greg Reinacker" htmlUrl="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog" description="Greg Reinacker: Greg Reinacker's Weblog" xmlUrl="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/rss.aspx"> <outline type="item" text="NewsGator acquires NetNewsWire" htmlUrl="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=783" created="Tue, 4 Oct 2005 01:27:16 GMT" /> <sx:sync id="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=783" version="1"> <sx:history...

Read more...

Om Malik and I sat down tonight to talk about mobile technologies, the latest developments in networks, and mobile phone hardware. We discussed the recent changes at Cingular, the benefits of each major mobile carrier, wireless data networks, MVNOs, and the phones we recommend for the holiday season as well as early 2006 corporate budgets. Om and Niall PodSessions are now available as a weekly feature on their own domain: ONPodSessions.com....

Read more...

Google's shopping comparison service Froogle will now contain inventory information from local brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot, Bombay and CompUSA. Google will also populate the database with local merchant information from Google Base in addition to Google's existing merchant feeds. Users searching for a product will be shown a map with local an overlay of local stores carrying the item. Google is in a unique position to offer the service because unlike traditional shopping comparison engines that make most of their money when a user leaves the site, local search does not provide easy lead and...

Read more...

Ray Ozzie announced Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML this morning. Ray explains on his weblog the need to synchronize data such as contacts, calendaring, and read status on a wide range of devices across multiple profiles such as personal, family, and professional. The new namespace is the first extension of OPML I know of. Ray mentions there "nothing to announce right now in terms of which [Microsoft] products will support the spec, when, and for what purpose, but people are experimenting with it and are intrigued." The acronym "SSE" makes me think of Intel's Streaming SIMD Extensions processor...

Read more...

FeedBurner just published a report on the current state of RSS and Atom syndication formats across a variety of publisher types with varying goals. The graphic above helps illustrate the difference between feed search and blog search. While the two used to be almost one and the same, blog search focuses on just blogs and podcasts and not commercial publishers, web services, watchlists, and other peer-produced content. I think the report was a bit light on monetizing subscribers, so I hope FeedBurner addresses advertising in syndication feeds as its next market report topic. Tags: atom, rss...

Read more...

Google Base launched last Tuesday as a new repository of information for distribution across Google's network of sites including Google search, Froogle, and Google Local. You can add your existing content to the Google Base for broad distribution with only a few easy steps. I'll show you how. You need a Google account associated with Google Base to submit items. Sign-in to Google Base to get started. Complete your extended profile. Market yourself with your full name or the name of your site, a description up to 400 characters in length, your URL, location and contact information. Create a...

Read more...

Napster UK has a sexy new commercial online to promote its music subscription service (NSFW). The commercial shows a 30 second peep show that abruptly ends as the stripper is about to remove her bra. The ad ends with "Leave you wanting more?" and links to a free trial subscription. Clever. A link to a free download for the commercial's musical track would have been a perfect ending. Tags: advertising, napster, commercials...

Read more...