By Guest Blogger Mark O'Neill
One of the most commonly requested features by Skype forum users is the ability
to use the telephony tool from a USB flash drive. As yet, Skype has
not got around to making an official portable version and even the John Haller
PortableApps
website, which has made portable versions of everything from
Mozilla
Firefox to
Sudoku,
doesn't seem to be in any hurry to make a portable version of Skype either.
The reluctance is inexplicable, because a portable version of Skype could take off in a big way due to the enormous popularity of USB flash drives. For a start, businesspeople on trips could plug their portable Skype into computers which don't already have the Skype application downloaded, in order to make contact with the office or clients. Tourists could also plug their USB drives into internet cafe computers and run portable Skype to call home or keep in touch with friends all over the world. Being portable, any identifying information that Skype produces would be written onto the USB stick and not on the host computer, which is ideal for people who are not inclined to log into their Skype accounts on a computer they don't know or trust, for fear of leaving behind sensitive information.
However, it IS technically possible to make an unofficial portable version of Skype yourself and here's how you do it.
File this one under "D" for "Duh." A new report by the Burton Group says that Google Apps Premier Edition isn't quite ready for enterprise applications. The report, according to Infoworld, says using Google Apps could be a "career-limiting move for enterprise architects."
At $50 user the Google product may be an attractive, inexpensive option for companies, says Burton. "However, the seductive price can spell trouble for enterprise architects and their companies if they don't do their homework: the solution's rudimentary feature set means that enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly."
Alex Iskold's latest post coins a new term: The Digestion Phase. Alex says that the latest wave of technology, which started in early 2003, has peaked:
"We have entered a digestion phase. It is not a burst, nor a recession. Rather, a digestion phase is a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together. It is the outcome of this phase that will decide if we continue to slide or if we rebound and start climbing back up. The deciding factor will be the true value of the technologies that we created."
(emphasis mine)
This kind of thinking excites me - it's focused on the technology of the Web, moreso than A&M, VC money, and other peripheral things (important as they are). As Alex writes later in the piece, the digestion phase means thinking about the real value of technologies; and building on them.
This is Online Video Week at Read/WriteWeb and the folks at Yahoo pinged us about a new inline video player on Yahoo.com. It's just been rolled out along with a new 'video' module, allowing people to watch videos without leaving the page. Users can also see related videos, and email or IM interesting videos to their network of friends.
Yahoo! claims it is the first portal to enable such "an immersive video experience" directly on its home page. The following two screenshots indicate how it works. The first is the homepage with new video module, and the second is what happens if you click 'play video' on the Daily Show image:
Should Do This, a new site from Robot Co-op, came out of closed beta today and will officially launch tomorrow. Should Do This is a service that aggregates user submitted suggestions on any topic. The site has a similar look and feel to Robot Co-op's other products, such as 43 Things.
According to CEO Josh Petersen, Should Do This was created out of necessity for the company. "Should Do This grew directly out of running and operating our other web sites," he said. The small company knew it was useful to gather user feedback, but needed to figure out a way to distill suggestions from their more than 1 million users down to only the best and most popular. "We initially ran a public feedback site that worked well for gathering and prioritizing this feedback," said Petersen. "Over time we developed the Should Do This concept and thought the application would be applicable as a suggestion box for just about any company, non-profit, city, person or thing - not just 43 Things."
Google made two big video-related announcements in the past 24 hours: that they are going to begin including videos in Google News content, and perhaps more importantly, that they are finally rolling out their overlay ads on YouTube. This month we profiled two companies trying to break into the video ad space, Adotube and LiveRail. Of the two, Adotube's overlay ads are the most similar to Google's new YouTube advertising, though both companies utilize a similar "click-to-play" strategy instead of an automatic pre-, post-, or mid-roll approach.
YouTube is Google's second most popular product after search. When Google introduced contextual text ads to monetize search results in 2000, just a few years later (in 2003) they took the next step by bringing those text ads to the long tail of the web and gave publishers of all sizes the ability to monetize their content. The service, called AdSense, has been a huge moneymaker for Google and helped solidify them as the leader in text advertising. So that got me thinking: can AdSense for video be very far away?
If you had any doubt that video is hot right now, chew on this: the top 10 videos on YouTube have been viewed a collective 307.7 million times. In February, Emre Sokullu identified over 60 major players in the video space in our Online Video Industry Index. Meanwhile the video category at SimpleSpark lists 499 video-related web apps, many of which are long-tail gallery hosting sites like YouTube.
With so many video sites out there, how can anyone possibly keep track of all the great videos coming out? You definitely don't want to miss this leg humping dog or these guys jumping over office cubicles, right? The answer is video aggregation sites that attempt to figure out the best videos each day from across the online videosphere, so that you can be sure you never miss another Poopy Pavarotti video. Er, right. We've highlighted some of the best video aggregation sites below in no particular order.
Earlier this week a Sydney Morning Herald article claimed that Facebook "may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year." The quote is from an analytics firm called SurfControl, in a report which calculated "that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia." Update: CNET reports on a poll where 43 percent of workers said that their employer blocks Facebook access completely.
I appeared on a breakfast business news TV show this morning, here in New Zealand, to discuss the SurfControl report. This post was written the night before, to get my thoughts together before going on the telly. Although in the end I only got to speak twice - and I barely touched on the main benefits of social networks in the workplace.
Everything is cyclical. From stock markets to our daily lives we see cycles; on the macro scale of
economics and on a micro level of entomology there are cycles. Technology is no exception:
it follows the ups and downs, taking the big companies, startups and venture capitalists on
an emotional roller coaster ride.
Everyone knows that there are cycles. What we do not know is how long any particular cycle will last. We know of the patterns, but we don't know the details. Only a handful of people will ever predict exactly when the tide will turn (sometimes using science, but mostly using luck). The rest of us, realize it later, some time after it happened.
It is clear by now that the latest wave of technology, which started in early 2003, has peaked. We have entered a digestion phase. It is not a burst, nor a recession. Rather, a digestion phase is a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together. It is the outcome of this phase that will decide if we continue to slide or if we rebound and start climbing back up. The deciding factor will be the true value of the technologies that we created.
Conduit Labs, a stealth startup that is building a mix between social networks and "immersive online gaming", today announced a $5.5 million Series A investment from Charles River Ventures (CRV) and Prism VentureWorks. Unfortunately we weren't able to get any screenshots of the product, but the promise of a totally new form of social network product intrigued us.
According to Nabeel Hyatt, Founder and CEO, the rise of social networks and virtual worlds has also left "a huge gap in the current experience". Conduit Labs believes that gaming is the way forward. The company is employing people from both the Web and Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Gaming worlds. The team already includes some of the developers behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band (two successful social gaming products) plus Asheron's Call and Lord of the Rings Online (large scale MMOs). In an introductory blog post, Nabeel implies that what they're building is similar to Club Penguin, a virtual world for kids sold to Disney recently for $700M.
