Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » post

Hitwise: Facebook.com Now Accounts For 1 In Every 5 Pageviews On The Web (In The U.S.)

Budowniczy425 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:32:40 +0000

In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg , Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion. The company’s filing revealed some significant (or perhaps mind-melting) stats, including the fact that Facebook is seeing 845 million users every month, half of whom are daily users, and half of whom are mobile users. Zuck still owns 28 percent of the company , among other things; really that was just the beginning. In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s filing for themselves succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website . Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — coming in less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more. Today, Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Hitwise shared some further stats , which provide a great follow-up to yesterday’s IPO madness. Yes, a $75 to $100 billion valuation is enough to marinate on, but just how much traffic — and what kind is — Facebook.com generating? While this data is from January, many readers may already be familiar with a lot of this, but it’s just further evidence of how colossal Facebook’s share of the market has become — both at home and abroad. For starters, Hitwise found that Facebook.com is now seeing one out of every eleven visits in the U.S., and one out of five pageviews online in the U.S. takes place on Facebook.com. Yep, 20 percent of pageviews in the U.S. happen on the Facebooks. [Insert Myspace dig here.] Furthermore, in terms of engagement, the average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes, and breakdown of male to female in Facebook’s visitors, shows that the social network is more popular among women, as 57 percent of its traffic for the last 3 months, ending January 28th, came from the ladies. Meanwhile, the ages of Facebook.com visitors shows that the breakdown of its its visit share by age compares favorably to the online population, as you can see in the graph to the right. As Erick said yesterday, Facebook managed to report $1 billion in profits for 2011, which is a fairly exact number, considering all of the variables at play. It could be that Zuckerberg managed accounting to come out at this round, even number, a sign to investors that the company has everything completely under control. Investors love predictability. And on that note, beyond the average of 20 minutes users are spending on the site, 96 percent of of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012. Hitwise’s numbers also show that, in terms of reaching affluent users, Facebook’s size allowed the site to win 499,949,430 visits from the most affluent income group, ahead of YouTube at 223,732,591 visits and Twitter at 15,166,795 visits. Facebook makes billionaires and caters to them. Further adding to its accolades, when it comes to search, “Facebook” happens be the most searched term in the U.S., with Facebook-related terms accounting for 14 percent of the top search clicks. is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks. Internationally, Facebook.com remains in the top market in every country aside from China, due to the influence of China’s Facebook and Twitter competitors, Sina Weibo, Baidu, and Renren, which are the largest generators of traffic. The social network’s largest web footprint is in Canada, where it captures 12 percent of all visits in the market. With all the excitement around Facebook yesterday, it really comes as no surprise that Facebook.com is, according to Hitwise, “the largest website in the U.S. and a top performer in numerous international markets.” The loyalty, engagement, and sheer number of monthly users proves that this company is, simply put, a freak of Internet nature. The social network has spread across the Web with its sharing functionalities, Facebook Connect, and is bringing social to just about every industry imaginable. Zuck’s proposed goal of making its social graph portable and fundamental to the fabric of the Web has certainly been realized, as it played an integral role in the rise of Zynga, social gaming, is making eCommerce social, music, and on and on. For more on the Hitwise data, check out the post here . And here’s more of TechCrunch’s coverage of Facebook IPO Day: Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO Yes, We Actually Changed Our Logo To Zuck (A Facebook IPO Round Up) Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Zuck Owns 28 Percent Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

Here is the original:
Hitwise: Facebook.com Now Accounts For 1 In Every 5 Pageviews On The Web (In The U.S.)

Wahooly Launches Its Crowdfunding Experiment With First 3 Startups Ready For “Social Capital”

user — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:00:06 +0000

There’s an interesting experiment afoot in the startup community, which poses the following questions to entrepreneurs: Would you be willing to trade equity in your startup in return for social media buzz, and customer feedback? How much, if any, would you fork over? Minneapolis-based startup called Wahooly is both asking those questions — and proffering a few answers. Soft-launching in late September, Wahooly set out to create a platform on which socially-connected and early adopter-types, who are not accredited investors, can grab a small stake in up-and-coming startups by sharing their influence in exchange for a piece of the action. The goal: To help address one of the biggest obstacles encountered by early-stage companies — traction. Partnering with Klout and Cmp.ly, Wahooly has ammassed over 28,000 users, which Founder Dana Severson (a former business writer/blogger) says are all online infleuncers within the 90th percentile, according to Klout. Wahooly provides startups that need social media boosts and helping feedback with access to these “influencers,” allowing them to create testing groups of 5,000 to 8,000 people. Once formed, these groups take a share of between 4 to 6 percent in the startup. As to how it works, at a more granular level: Severson says that once users (a collection of bloggers, developers, and “web-lebrities”) join a startup, their share of the equity pool fluctuates based on a number of criteria, including feedback, which is tracked/rewarded in a point system. Users gain points based on three variables: The value of feedback (voted by the community), user activity (how often and to what extent they are using the service), and by influence (how many conversions their activity creates). Obviously, it’s in the interest of the user to focus on increasing the value of their startups, and the campaign continues until Wahooly exits, at which point users are paid based on their point total. In terms of what Wahooly provides to its startups, the founder says that the platform’s value proposition lies in delivering acceleration via advocates. “It’s a quality not quantity equation,” Severson says, “We’ve built our system to get what start-ups need most out of influencers, which is what most companies struggle with. We’re really focused on the power of combined influence, which is how trends begin.” While many startups are able to attract a decent amount of tweets, posts, mentions, and so on, the tipping point truly comes when this activity occurs concurrently and repetitively. But finding sustainability in brand advocacy is a difficult challenge, as user attention is fleeting, and most are wary of phoniness when it comes to repeat advocacy. That’s why Severson, who has also spent tim in advertising, wants to deliver a level of activity that will consist of 1,000 mentions over a single day — rather than over the course of a year — and then repeating that. A tricky feat, no doubt. Due to its unusual business model, Wahooly has been met with skepticism from some media, as the company plans to have quity stakeholders who take no action have their stake diluted (like a stock splitting), could potentially run afoul of the FTC and other regulators. Severson explains that part of the reason for this skepticism was due to the fact that the team hasn’t been willing to discuss how Wahooly is structured, holding off for competitive reasons. At this point, however, the founder is willing to share a bit more. Wahooly will always be the single shareholder in its startups, paying users based on its point system, with points being calculated against the net result of Wahooly’s success with its investments. It’s the same result for everyone, he says, while staying within the guidelines and allowing for the structure to be applied to international markets. In terms of the FTC’s potential interest, Wahooly’s users will be required to provide full disclosure. In other words, the affiliation/disclosure will appear on pages in which Wahooly users share. Because its users are influencers, the founder explains, they want to maintain their credibility and online reputations, and thus Wahooly wants to make it simple for the proper disclosures to be made. As to Wahooly’s progress: The company plans to introduce 200 startups to its users this year, and they’ve received over 300 applications thus far, and will be continuing to accept applicants going forward. Right now, Severson says, the focus is on consumer-based web applications. Today, Wahooly is officially introducing its first three companies: TweetTV.com, Cull.TV and ValuValu.com. The first, tweetTV is an Austin-based startup, building a web-based social TV Guide and Twitter-powered social TV platform that helps its users discover what to watch on TV and facilitates real tweet-based conversations around TV programs as they air. The second, Cull TV is attempting to reboot music television by leveraging leading recommendation and web data mining technology to helps anyone discover relevant, emerging talent through music videos. Currently experiencing a renaissance, music videos are the most popular way to distribute and consume music online, so Cull TV wants to give users a new and better way to discover artists. The third is Seattle-based startup Valu Valu , which calls itself “the hedge fund for everybody,” and aims to beat the stock market by combining momentum strategies with social sentiment analysis, sending “precise and easy trading instructions to its subscribers.” I’ve also just learned that a fourth startup, RAVN, which we wrote about in October, will be launching on Wahooly later this week. Check out the post for more here . Wahooly, which is walking the line between an accelerator and a crowdfunding platform, is definitely offering an unusual model, and could very well be a successful tool for startups looking to push past the early-adopter phase. But it could also be another sign that we’re on the doorstep/in the midst of another bubble. Whether or not Wahooly is successful depends on how influential its community truly is and whether they can really help startups get off the ground. Startups have to attract enough users or they will be overlooked, another challenge. It’s still early in the process to waylay judgement, but, as it scales, we’ll be able to get a better sense of how much real value Wahooly is adding to the ecosystem. It’s very likely that Wahooly will get early adopters feeling very tingly, but will the value be there? If it can deliver real acceleration in the market, Wahooly will no doubt race past the tipping point. The company is currently in the midst of raising its series A. For more on the model, check out Wahooly at home here .

Bebo Apologizes For Downtime: “We’re Not Going Anywhere”

kram412 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:46:56 +0000

When social network Bebo went down on Monday, what seemed like a flood of distraught users concluded that the site must be shutting down, and they took to Twitter to commemorate it. Instead, the downtime turned out to be the result of technical problems. The site was down for about 20 hours, and now the company is about to post an apology, advertised site-wide through the banner ad above. We’ve obtained a copy — CEO Adam Levin explains that the team was working on some new features and accidentally crashed the site. He also assures users, “We’re not going anywhere.” Here’s the full post: Dear Bebo’ers, As you probably noticed we were out of commission for a while starting on Tuesday. We have been fortunate that in the nearly seven years that Bebo has been in operation, these glitches have been few and far between. Still, we work hard every day to keep the site constantly working and we heard from many of you — loud and clear — how much your lives were affected by the outage. We are both profoundly sorry and profoundly moved by the outpouring of comments on blogs, Twitter and elsewhere. Once we had everything back up in perfect order, we realized we needed to explain what happened so Nigel from Marketing went back into storage and pulled out the Big Book of Website Excuses (2012 Edition). Among the options considered: 1. “Occupy” protesters took over Bebo. 2. Another internet company was protesting against SOPA/PIPA. 3. Time to get a new server… That Amiga 500 has gone as far as it can go. 4. Huge spike in traffic exceeded our server capacity and brought the site down. 5. Time off for the staff to watch a Harry Potter Marathon on Blu-Ray. 6. Just a publicity stunt to get more attention. 7. Government-mandated program to get users to spend more time outdoors. 8. Too many cute cat photos causes our servers to run out of disk space. 9. New policy: turn the site off one day per week to reduce greenhouse emissions. 10. It was all just a dream. But in the end, we thought it best to just be honest and tell you the truth: we were working on some new features (pretty cool ones, I might add) and in the process we crashed the site. Embarrassing, but true. And we worked as hard as possible to restore everything as fast as we could. Unfortunately, on a site as complex as Bebo, with as many users, these things take time. We’re not going anywhere. (And even if we were, we wouldn’t just disappear into the night without even saying thanks, right?) The fact is: Bebo has a fantastic future ahead and we’ve been working on some new things that we’re truly excited about. We can’t wait to share them with you, but of course we’ll be a bit more careful as we roll these things out. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out these comments. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are frankly kind of mean. But that’s Bebo users in a nutshell, isn’t it? Lots of luv! Adam (CEO)

Here is the original:
Bebo Apologizes For Downtime: “We’re Not Going Anywhere”

Nintendo Partners With free-hotspot.com For Free 3DS WiFi Access Across Europe

bestcbstore — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:38:04 +0000

The Nintendo 3DS just got a bit more connected. The gaming company has teamed with free-hotspot.com to provide 5,000 access points to 3DS owners throughout 22 European companies. 3DSs can now hop online while abroad at various locations including McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Subway, Ibis Hotels and Etap Hotels. US gamers have enjoyed free hotspot access for sometime now. Nintendo partnered with AT&T to allow access at their hotspots and then late last year , Nintendo struck with Boingo in late 2011 that opened access at various airports. “Our extensive network of Wi-Fi hotspots across Europe will provide Nintendo 3DS users with a high-speed, reliable service to help them make the most of their time while away from home. We are delighted to work with Nintendo and to announce this important partnership.” stated Joseph Brunoli, Managing Director of Anacapa Holdings, Ltd., operators of the free-hotspot.com network. The 3DS lacks a 3G radio but features many connected functions that are left meaningless without Internet access. The same thing can be said for the 3DS screen and lack of good games, too.

Go here to read the rest:
Nintendo Partners With free-hotspot.com For Free 3DS WiFi Access Across Europe

Apple Is Totally Serious About That Stuff They Put At The End Of Their Emails

blogger — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:03:32 +0000

Welcome, kids, to TIL – Today I Learned. Today’s TIL is “Don’t post your correspondence with AppleCare representatives or Apple will totally tell the government on you.” David Boles had a nice Apple monitor that died on him. He had a little trouble transferring AppleCare coverage to his new monitor after it pooped out and so he posted some advice on his blog. Nothing major, just “don’t forget to connect your AppleCare accounts.” Very innocuous. But then, from out of the inky shadows, comes Apple like the Spanish Inquisition, informing him he’s breaking the law worse than Josey Wales: Hello, I am one of the policy representatives here at Apple. It came to our concern that our policy was broken. It is illegal to transmit information from voicemails, e-mails, transactions, etc, into public or private blogs and forums, vlogs, as well as documentation onto the internet, except for the proper authorities. We have been informed that a conversation with a member of our Agreement Administration team has been posted on a blogging website. We do view all e-mails that are sent to our departments for security reasons. “This transmission may be privileged and may contain confidential information intended only for the person(s) named above. Any other distribution, retransmission, copying, or disclosure is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please delete this message from your system.” This is a very strict policy that we enforce, and that the government is under watch of. We do ask that you take down the posting of the conversation that you had which was posted on “http://goinside.com/2012/01/26/warning-check-your-applecare-support-profile/” . If no compliance is made, further action will have to be forced upon. You will have 24 hours to take the post down. Thank you. Apple Policy Restrictions I suspect that this email didn’t come from a native English-speaker (“If no compliance is made, further action will have to be forced upon”) and it’s laughable that anyone would hold that “This transmission” garbage up as proof that you can’t post an email. Heck, I just reposted it so now Apple will have to sic the government on me, too. Anyway, it’s a fun situation that I’m sure will be cleared up by nobody caring about it in a few days.

Continued here:
Apple Is Totally Serious About That Stuff They Put At The End Of Their Emails

DreamHost’s Unhappy January Continues: First, A Database Breach, Now An Outage

user — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:25:46 +0000

DreamHost has been having a rough couple weeks. The low-cost hosting provider and domain name registrar found some unauthorized activity in its databases back on January 20th, which they later admitted were a series of attacks that may have led to the theft of some of their customers’ FTP passwords. The company required mandatory password resets for all their Shell/FTP accounts — you can read our coverage here . DreamHost’s bad dream continued today, as they’ve been reporting outage problems, as Web, SSH, and FTP services were down for many of the company’s virtual private servers, shared, and dedicated machines. The outage was first reported at 4am PST on Sunday, and has continued throughout the course of the day, with the company offering updates on its blog . In the company’s initial blog post, the team said that “the apache (web), SSH, and FTP services on a subset of our VPS and dedicated servers are currently down. FTP services on some shared servers are also experiencing downtime. Our system administration and data center operation teams are currently on the case and we are attempting to restore services as soon as possible.” Furthermore, the post said that the outage only affected web VPS/dedicated and shared web server FTP services, while other services or servers, i.e. mail were unaffected. They also, unfortunately, did not specify which “subset” was affected in particular. Yeesh. And, judging from the parade of comments and subsequent updates, users were apparently experiencing problems with MySQL and webmail services as well. The majority of the large problems seem to have been addressed as of DreamHost’s last posting at 6:30 pm on Sunday, although there’s been no final word. DreamHost plays host to thousands of small websites and personal blogs across the Web, and for many of them, it was a surprise to find their sites offline for most of the day. By now, most of the sites are back up, but from what these site owners have learned from DreamHost, the VPS server was damaged by new software they were installing this morning, leading to a sizable outage with ripple effects across their services. Even though the outage lasted nearly 24 hours for some, many could not even access files to move to another host. Unsurprisingly, the outage caused a flurry of DreamHost users to flock to Twitter to express their chagrin, with some saying that it might cause others to consider moving to other services. Veteran tech journalist Dan Frommer and his SplatF were among them: Props to @swein for his reaction. Clearly, other hosting providers may be seeing some new clients in the near future. Though as of now, it remains unclear whether the software installation this morning had anything to do with the database breach on January 20th. As far as I can tell, they were unrelated. More here from DreamHost . Will update should we hear any updates.

View original post here:
DreamHost’s Unhappy January Continues: First, A Database Breach, Now An Outage

Sony Rolls Out A Trio Of New Cyber-Shot Point And Shoots

vertical8 — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:00:01 +0000

In the market for a new point and shoot? Didn’t think so. Why don’t you take a gander at the new Sony shooters anyway? You’ve basically got two models worth looking at. First is the rather expensive TX200V: It’s expensive for a reason, though. They’ve made it look as much like an iPhone as possible, flat glass on both sides. Unlike the iPhone, however, this thing is waterproof down to 5m. It’s got a 5x non-protruding zoom, for which they provide no F numbers, so it can’t be very fast — though the camera’s back-illuminated 18-megapixel sensor makes up for that a bit. It’ll shoot 1080/60p of a sort. On the back is a 3.3″ OLED touchscreen of the “Xtra Fine™” variety, which I presume is a higher resolution than the previous 3.3″ OLED they put on a camera. Should be nice, high contrast, and decent resolution. There are no buttons on the thing except power, shutter, and a zoom rocker. Looks like a fun little camera, though for my money I’d want something with a brighter, bigger lens. This thing will set you back Next you have the WX70 and the WX50: They share the same internals, but are different on the outside. The WX50 has normal controls: switches and dials and all that, and a 2.7″ normal LCD. The WX70 is like the TX200V, all touchscreen on the back, and with just power, zoom, and shutter controls on the top. The screen is 640×480 and 3″, which should be nice and sharp. The lens for both is a 5x zoom, F/2.6-6.3. Nothing special, but F/2.6 isn’t bad for a compact wide-angle. Inside they both have the same 16-megapixel back-illuminated sensor, which will shoot 1080/60i, though if it has a progressive mode (the press release doesn’t say) I’d recommend that. Anyone shooting interlaced in 2012 should have their camera confiscated. I wish somebody would tell Sony that. The WX50 will cost around $200, and the WX70 will be $30 more. If the touchscreen works well (can’t tell until there’s a hands-on), the extra $30 will be well-spent. So which is the best? Obviously the expensive, waterproof one, though for $500 you can get a better camera these days as far as lens and sensor are concerned. And you can get waterproof ones for under $150. Hell, I got a waterproof smartphone for $80 on Craigslist. So although it’s nice, it doesn’t strike me as a bargain. Meanwhile, the WX70 is pretty fancy for $230, and with the BSI sensor and F/2.6 you should be able to get most shots without bumping the ISO too high. I’d go with that over the more traditional WX50 and the nice but expensive TX200V. And there you have it!

See more here:
Sony Rolls Out A Trio Of New Cyber-Shot Point And Shoots

Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor By William Gibson

user — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:40:28 +0000

William Gibson is the defining author of our digital age. More than any social media pundit or Popcorn futurist, he has defined the dystopia we can expect once we escape the dystopia we’re in now. His fiction – a trilogy of trilogies that works backwards from the distant future to a world that is ours – is constantly approaching the present while exploring what it means to exist in a culture mediated by electronics. Although his early work owes more to Burroughs and Verne than anyone cares to admit, he was wildly prescient in his prediction that soon we would see the entire world – an entire world – through the lens of gadgetry. While the web isn’t cyberspace yet and the East Coast isn’t the Sprawl, we’re headed in that direction. And that’s just his fiction. Gibson’s non-fiction writing is a peanut in the bland Cracker Jack of the dead tree publications where they first appeared. He’s often graced the otherwise leaden pages of Wired with his unique style and many of the pieces in this book appeared elsewhere, whether in magazines or at public talks. His non-fiction is rare enough that we definitely want more, but do we want a whole book’s worth? If you are a Gibson fan, then yes, this is definitely worth a read. There are a few great pieces in here, like his meditation on watches and eBay in “My Obsession” as well as an excellent look at the growth of a fiction writer in his essay “Since 1948,” a piece that shows us all stages of his growth – from child of a nervous mother to draft dodger to writer to genius. That both of these pieces are available online is a lucky coincidence, not a reason to avoid this book. The rest of the non-fiction here will be a little less familiar and is, at times, uneven. Gibson’s writing style is as conversational and puffy here as it is flinty and clear-eyed in his fiction. A story by William Gibson about visiting Tokyo involves no super-charged street samurai. Instead it involves mediations on gomi, toys, and colonialism. We assume Gibson to be more plugged in than most of us but instead he seems to have a lot of good, cool friends who show him around. That’s one of the benefits of replacing Tom Swift as the go-to boyhood sci-fi of the tinkerer. The other stories – the talks, the mediations on futurism and on the dystopian – are beautiful in their own way, well written and often full of telling detail. He notices the “demented, heartbreakingly lyrical, 3D collage of cargo containers, dumpsters, an Airstream trailer, a cabin cruiser, a school bus” on the set of Johnny Mnemonic . To the average sci-fi nut, a wall of junk as a set piece would be as commonplace as a laser gun or a Tribble – it’s the visual landscape we expect in what the set director will imagine as the “hinterlands” and nearly every movie has a compacted wall of junk that stands in for the place where the wild future people live. To Gibson, however, it’s seen with new eyes. Not naive eyes, really. Just new ones. If you’re new to Gibson, don’t start here. Get the Sprawl trilogy first, then the Bridge trilogy, then, if you’re not done, the Present trilogy, a group of three books that are connected by the Dotcom boom and have a certain airport lounge, endless travel, Razorfish feel that the average start-up drone will love. Those books hae have no overarching geographical locus to hang on just as the late 1990s and the early aughts left us listless and disconnected, pining for a day when everyone – students, surf bums, and even a woman allergic to branding, could find a place in an economy that whirred like a shining VCR read/write head. Each trilogy moves closer to “speculative fiction of the very recent past.” While you’re in there, hit The Difference Engine as a palate cleanser. Then you can begin to distrust this particular flavor. I’m probably preaching to the choir, though. Gibson is a gem, our own Jules Verne who planted so many seeds in popular culture that it is difficult to look out across our roiling intellectual landscape and not see his ideas. He knew that the ability to render fluid 3D was coming, that Japan would rise as a major techno-center, that man-machine relations would become seamless. One could argue that cyberspace now exists in the wildly detailed games we play and that we’re a few steps away from really jacking in, as his characters did. He foresaw urbanity as cancer – in the Sprawl – and as Alternative Flea Market/Edgy Disneyland on the Bridge. He saw the world as a grey waiting room populated by the rich and their helpers in his post 9/11 novels, and saw fashion as an expression of commerce. He does the same here, although on a much smaller scale. He’s talking about real life so there are fewer mirrorshades. Instead we visit with him as he lands in Singapore and makes a movie and walks by a window full of ephemera in lower New York where a jumble of missile identification models was dusted one September morning with “blasted dreams” as it sits in a closed antiques shop. He’s seen a lot, and wants to tell us about it. My one peeve? Gibson adds these little asides at the end of each piece, explaining just how he failed and how this story “needed a haircut” or how he went off on an odd tangent. It’s like a magician doing a serviceable rendition of the disappearing elephant, and then explaining afterwards that his curtain work was a little sloppy and if you looked under the stage you could see the elephant. In the end, this collection of essays is a minor addition to the Gibson canon. It’s a worthy one, though, and well worth a read. And while you wait for it to download onto your Fire or your iPad or your Sandbenders, give thanks to the seer of our age who didn’t expect things to turn out that rosy yet still understood the good in both us and, more important, our variegated and ever more cunning tools. Product Page

View post:
Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor By William Gibson

Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book

bestcbstore — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:00:32 +0000

I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book, and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and ”I Was Blind But Now I See” I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books with traditional publishers, combined. If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself. The rest of this article is really three discussions: Why self-publish rather than use a traditional publisher, why entrepreneurs should self-publish, and finally, HOW does one go about self-publishing. WHY: A) Advances are going to zero. Book publishers are getting more and more squeezed by declining booksellers so they, in turn, have to squeeze the writers. Because of so much free content on the Internet, the value per unit of content is going to zero unless you are already an established name-brand author. B) Lag time. When you self-publish, you can have your book up and running on Amazon, paperback and kindle, within days. When you publish with a traditional publisher its a grueling process: book proposal, agents, lawyers, meetings, edits, packaging, catalogs, etc that ensures that your book doesn’t actually get published until a year later. Literally, as I write this a friend of mine just IMed me the details of his book deal he just got with a mainstream publisher. Publication date: 2014. C) Marketing. Publishers claim they do a lot of marketing for you. That’s laughable. I’ll give you a very specific story. When I published with Penguin they then met with a friend of mine whose book they wanted to publish. They didn’t realize she was my friend. She asked them, “what marketing did you do for James Altucher’s book”. They said, “well, we got him a review in The Financial Times and we got a segment about his book on CNBC and an excerpt in thestreet.com” Here’s what’s so funny. I had a weekly column in The Financial Times. I WROTE my own review. As a joke. For CNBC, I had a weekly segment on CNBC. So naturally I spoke about my book during my regular segment. And for thestreet.com excerpt, I had just sold my last company to thestreet.com. So instead of doing my usual article for them I did an excerpt. In other words, the publisher did NOTHING, but took credit for EVERYTHING . Ultimately, authors (unless you are Stephen King, etc) have to do their own marketing for books. The first question publishers ask, even, before they look at your proposal is, “How big is your platform?” They want to know how you can market the book and if they can make money on just your own marketing efforts. D) Better royalties . i.e. when I self-publish I make about a 70% royalty instead of a 15% royalty with a traditional publisher. I also own 100% of the foreign rights instead of 50%. I hired someone to sell the foreign rights and they get 20% (and no upfront fee). E) More control over content and design. Look at this cover for “SuperCash” designed by a traditional publisher for me (this was my third book). It’s hideous. Now look at the cover for my last book (self-published), “I Was Blind But Now I See”. You may or may not like it but it’s exactly what I wanted. Publishers even include in the contract that they have final say over the cover and this is one detail they will not negotiate. You also don’t have any teenage interns sending you editorial comments back that you completely disagree with. YOU control your own content. Now, WHY SHOULD ENTREPRENEURS SELF-PUBLISH A) You have content. I have enough material in my blog right now (including my “Drafts” folder which has 75 unpublished posts in it) to publish five more books over the next year. And I’m sure that number will increase over the next year as I write more posts. You’re an entrepreneur because you feel you have a product or an idea or a vision that stands out among your competitors (if you don’t stand out, pack it in and come up with a new idea). You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an “About” button. Give away part (or all) of your ideas in a book. You’re a brand new social media agency? How should social media work? Write it down. You’re a new CRM software package? How should CRM be better? Tell me. How should online dating services work? Tell some stories. Heck, make them as sexy as possible. Don’t have time to write it. Then tell it to a ghostwriter you outsource to for almost no money. You don’t need 60,000 words. Do it in 20,000 words. Throw some pictures in. Just do it. Then when you meet someone and they ask for your business card, how cool will it be when you can say, “here, take my book instead.” B) You have more to say. More and more companies have blogs. Many of the posts on the blog are “evergreen”. i.e. they last forever and are not time specific. If you just take the posts (mentioned in the point above) and publish them people will say, “he’s just publishing a collection of posts”. A couple of comments on that. 1. So what? It’s ok if you are curating what you feel your best posts are. And for a small price people can get that curation and read it in a different format.There’s value there. 2. Don’t just take a collection of your posts. A blog post is typically 500-2000 words. Usually closer to 500. Do a bit more research for each post. Do intros and outros for each post. Make the chapters 3000-4000 words. Make a bigger arc to the book by using original material to explain WHY this book, with these chapters, presented in this manner is a different read than the blog. Have a chapter specifically explaining how the book is different from the blog. With my last book, “I Was Blind But Now I See” I had original material in each chapter and several chapters that were completely original. Instead of it being a collection of posts, the overall book was about how we have been brainwashed in society, and how uncovering the brainwashing and using the techniques I describe can bring happiness. This was covered in a much more detailed fashion than the blog ever could even though the material was inspired by several of my posts. C) Amazon is an extra platform for you to market your blog. Or vice versa. You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will – never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer/speaker/enterpreneur when you go out there now to sell your book, syndicate your blog elsewhere or to get speaking engagements, etc. And when you do a speaking engagement, you can now hand something out – your book! So Amazon and publishing become a powerful marketing platform for your overall writing/speaking/consulting career. D) Nobody cares. Some people want the credibility of saying “Penguin published me”. I can tell you from experience – nobody ever asked me who was my publisher when Penguin was my publisher. And, by the way, Penguin was the worst publisher I ever had. E) How will I get in bookstores? I don’t know. How will you? Traditional publishers can’t get you there either. Often bookstores will look at what’s hot on Amazon and then order the books wholesale from the publishers. In many cases, tradtional publishers will take their most-known writers (so if you are in that category, congrats!) and pay to have them featured at a bookstore. As for my experience, my traditional publishers would get a few copies of my books in the bookstores of major cities (i.e. NYC and that’s it) but nothing more. OK, I’M CONVINCED. HOW DO I SELF-PUBLISH There’s lots of ways to do it but I’ll tell you my experience. A) First write the book. For my last two self-published books, as mentioned above, I took some blog posts, rewrote parts of them, added original material, added new chapters, and provided an overall arc as to what the BOOK was about as opposed to it just being a random collection of posts. But, that said, you probably already have the basic material already. B) Createspace.com. I used createspace because they are owned by Amazon and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. For my first book I did this by myself, for my second book, for a small fee, I hired Alexanderbecker.net to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF that I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on font (sans serif instead of serif) and was extremely helpful. C) Upload the PDF. Createspace approves it, picks an ISBN number, sends you a proof, and then you approve the proof. D) Within days its available on Amazon. It’s print-on-demand as a paperback. And by the way, your total costs at this point: $0. Or whatever you used to design your cover. E) Kindle. All of the above (from Createspace) was free. If I didn’t hire Alex to make the cover I could’ve used over 1mm of Createspace’s possible covers (I did that for my first book) and the entire publishing in paperback would be free. But with Kindle, Createspace charges $70 and they take care of everything until it’s uploaded to the Kindle store. Now you are available in paperback and kindle. F) Marketing. 1. Readers of my blog who asked for it got the first 20 copies or so for free from me. Many of them then posted good reviews on Amazon to get the ball rolling. 2. I’ve been handing out the books at speaking engagements. Altogether, I’ll do around 10 speaking engagements handing my latest book out. 3. I write a blog post about how the bo0k is different from the blog and why I chose to go this route. 4. Writing guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch helps and I’m very grateful. 5. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ are also very helpful. G) Promotions . You’re in charge of your own promotions (as opposed to a book publisher.). For instance, in a recent blog post I discussed the differences between my latest book and my blog and I also offered a promotion on how to get my next self-published book (“Bad Behavior”, expected in Q1 2012) for free. Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to stand out, promote their service, and get validation for their offerings. Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card. It shows that you have enough expertise to write the book. It also shows you value the relationship with the potential customer enough that you are willing to give him something of value. Something you created. And you can’t say the excuse “I don’t have time, I’m running a business.” Entrepreneurs make time. And they have the ideas so, again, at the very least you can use elance.com to hire a ghostwriter. Over the next year I have five different books planned. All on different topics. I’m super-excited about them because I’m allowed to push the barrier in every area I’m interested in and there’s nobody to stop me. There’s nobody I need validation from. I get to pick myself. You can do this also. And now, you should do it. There’s no more excuses in this environment. Good luck and feel free to write me with any questions. – Follow me on Twitter Also, see 33 Unusual Ways to Become a Great Writer

See the rest here:
Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book

LivingSocial Now At 5,000 Employees, Half The Size Of Groupon

bestcbstore — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:29:47 +0000

A few days ago, at the DLD conference, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason revealed that his three-year-old daily deal company now has 10,000 employees , with about 70 percent overseas. What about LivingSocial, the No. 2 daily deal company? Tim O’Shaughnessy told me yesterday the company is now at 5,000 employees worldwide, with “just under half” in the U.S. While he won’t reveal LivingSocial’s revenues (the company is still private, and just raised another $176 million in December), he says: “We’ve grown very significantly in the last 12 months. We entered 2011 with 3 countries,, now we are at more than 20, with 60 million members worldwide, and just around 5,000 employees worldwide. We have been able to aggressively grow the business.” But what about all of the Groupon and LivingSocial clones dropping like flies? Is the daily deal business winners-take-all, with Groupon and LivingSocial emerging victorious, or is the whole industry in trouble? One recent study , estimates that 798 daily deal clones hit the deadpool in the last 6 months alone. ”A lot of people started to scale and started to realize they didn’t have all the pieces needed to make it work,” says O’Shaughnessy. The bigger question is whether the whole industry’s moment in the sun has passed. After all, the daily deal business was born in the worst recession since the Great Depression when deals were especially appealing. Now there is deal fatigue, and the economy isn’t in as dire straights. O’Shaughnessy doesn’t see it that way. “The business is not predicated on being in a recessionary cycle,” he argues, pointing to its success in countries like Brazil whose economies are doing well. Okay, but what about the fact that traffic to LivingSocial has dropped significantly since last summer? In the daily deals business, historically, at least, there was a strong correlation between traffic and transactions. According to comScore, visitors to LivingSocial’s site peaked last June at 11.2 million worldwide. In December it was down to 4.4 million. Groupon also took a hit, peaking at 14.4 million worldwide unique visitors in June, but it’s been growing steadily since September and was back up to 12.5 million uniques in December. (See chart above). There is another factor to consider here, however. “Everybody knows,” says O’Shaughnessy, “a lot of marketing has gone into this space. Guess what? When you click on an ad and you are taken to a page, that is traffic. Once you get enough users, if you stop doing some of that marketing, you will have a significant drop in traffic.” The daily deal companies were paying through the nose for traffic. It certainly showed up in Groupon’s numbers. And LivingSocial was doing the same thing. We’ll find out when Groupon announces its first earnings quarter, how much it is continuing to spend on marketing, but LivingSocial has pared back and is now focussed on harvesting the 60 million users it already has a relationship with. Also, these numbers don’t measure mobile, which is “an incredibly meaningful percentage of interaction,” notes O’Shaughnessy. The one thing I took away from my conversation with him is that you can’t be too simplistic in your analysis of these businesses. Not every customer is the same either. the 60 millionth customer does not behave the same way as the 1 millionth, and mobile app users are much more engaged. It is important to look at cohorts of customers (people who joined a year ago versus 6 months ago), and see if older customers are becoming more loyal. Most importantly, he sees the daily deal business as we know it today merely as an entry point for local commerce. It is version 1.0, and he is already building version 2.0, which could make LivingSocial end up looking significantly different from Groupon down the road. I will delve deeper into where LivingSocial might be headed in another post.

Excerpt from:
LivingSocial Now At 5,000 Employees, Half The Size Of Groupon