Posts from May 2006

Nike teamed up with Apple to offer new products and services combined with the iPod nano. The new partnership will include electronics, clothing, and online services for people who like to listen to music while working out. Apple claims 50% of iPod owners use their music players during a workout. The new campaign is called Nike+ and features community and social networking components. The first product is the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, a $29 accessory connecting your shoe and your iPod. Runners can place a small sensor under their shoe insole and connect a receiver to their iPod nano to...

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Hitwise just published rankings and market share for top portals in search, mail, news, finance, and maps. While Google dominates in search, Yahoo! is the clear aggregate leader across these top categories with an almost 10% lead over the search leader. SearchE-mailNewsFinanceMapsTotal Market7.39.33.40.60.521.04 Google47.42.51.90.37.53.80 Yahoo!16.042.46.334.920.55.62 MSN11.522.913.44.33.07 Other8.56 While Google Maps is an often-cited example of the Web 2.0 world Mapquest has 7x the market share according to these numbers....

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Google Reader Mobile is now available on your mobile phone. The pages are served using XHTML 1.0 for mobile, including access keys for each list item. The mobile reader is a good blend of what you would like to configure on your desktop but still access on a more limited input device such as a mobile phone. The mobile interface is purposefully barebones but utilizes features made possible by the full desktop experience such as browsing tagged posts....

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Yahoo! is opening a big San Francisco office later this year and Flickr just announced they will be one of the teams making the move to the city. I know at least half of the Flickr team lives in San Francisco so it's a healthy move for the group and will probably mean more time working on Flickr things! Flickr is the first Yahoo! team I've heard of moving into the San Francisco offices. It was previously rumored these would be ad sales offices but it's good to see some product folk moving in. Tags: flickr...

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Yahoo! presented its business strategy to analysts yesterday and gave the world a sneak peek at what's to come. A new advertising system is code complete and currently undergoing some testing and, if all goes well, will be rolled out later this year. Yahoo! plans to add advertising to it's new "coming soon" video site. The webcast was not working for me this morning; all my notes below are based on the slide deck. Yahoo! Video The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well. The top navigation bar references "My...

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Yahoo! released the latest version of its UI utilities this week, including the components used in the new Yahoo! homepage design. You can use the various utilities to build your own website, but Dustin Diaz decided to build a version of Tetris. The game combines Yahoo's Event Utility and DOM Collection utility to create some cross-browser brick busting action. One of the good things about releasing your code to the world is you never know just how people will use it. I doubt anyone at Yahoo! thought about gaming when they released the UI widgets but developers are resourceful!...

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Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month's SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark's last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six...

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Nokia announced an upgrade to the 770 Internet tablet operating system and bundled hardware this morning at the VON Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The new operating system, now named Internet Tablet OS 2006, features Google search and IM functionality built-in, including prominent display on the homepage and task bar. Nokia 770 owners can now chat with friends using text and voice from their Internet tablets. Nokia developed the IM and VoIP based on XMPP and Google's libjingle extensions. The voice and text screens are branded with the Google Talk logo, including the beta designation. The Gizmo Project will...

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Flickr's gone gamma with a new site design and functionality. The new site packs more links into less space using JavaScript menus. It looks like Organizr has been completely rewritten in JavaScript with no Flash required. The site also features a new search results page sorted by relevancy, recency, and interestingness. The search index contains photo titles, tags, and descriptions but not notes. You can search for groups of interest and people with a much cleaner result page. Tags: flickr...

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Tony Fadell helped develop handheld devices for General Magic and Philips. Tony had a vision of a portable MP3 player complemented by an online music store. His startup, Fuse, couldn't get VC financing to build the product. He shopped the idea around to big companies such as Real Networks and only one company decided to experiment with his idea, hiring Tony as a contractor to build a prototype in two months. The first review on Slashdot in October 2001 called the product "lame" and "not very exciting" for lacking wireless and a bigger hard drive. The product idea became the...

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