Email just received from a PR agency:
"Dear Richard,
Below, please find a press release from Hyster Company presenting the Hyster® Fortis® line of lift trucks. The Hyster Fortis product line represents a transformation in the way lift trucks are designed, built and acquired. Incorporating proven design processes and systems, each Fortis lift truck is offered with multiple powertrain configurations to meet specific application requirements and business objectives and to optimize productivity, dependability and cost of operations.
We thought Read/WriteWeb readers would find this news of interest."
Thanks Hyster!! For the edification of Read/WriteWeb readers, here is an image of the afore-mentioned lift truck:
Yesterday we published a 2007 review of the Web Office market. In that post I concluded that Google Apps was the leader in this space - but this point was disputed in the comments by CentralDesktop's Isaac Garcia, who wrote that "real traction in the business world is yet to be seen or proven for Google [Apps]." This may well be true, but today Compete provided some very useful stats around Google Docs.
The following image shows a rise in usage from June '07 till October. Overall Google D&S had an 84% year-over-year increase.
Ah ads, nobody likes ads. Especially ads that postpone your enjoyment of some media -- that's why 70% of people using TiVo to timeshift television are also skipping the commercials. But there is one time each year when commercials take center stage. That's right, the Super Bowl. Every time the world's most watched yearly one day sporting event rolls around, people seem to forget their hatred of television advertising -- sometimes the high priced TV spots are more talked about than even the game itself.
And there are plenty of places to watch Super Bowl ads. There's the aptly named SuperBowl-Ads.com. There are the specialized channels on iFilm, AOL Sports, YouTube, and CBS Sportsline. But what about all the ads that get made the rest of the year? They're funny too, right?
Never fear, there is a growing breed of sites dedicated solely to TV ads as content. Below are 7 places you can go to get your commercial watching fix.
I'm all for anything that gets people to read more. Though I count myself a connoisseur of good film and television, I'm always reading a book (right now it's "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" by Susanna Clarke). I admit, though, I don't quite grasp the concept of BookSwim, which is essentially a Netflix-like rental by mail program for books. Oh, I get how it works: you sign up, choose the books you want, they get mailed, you send them back when you're done and get the next book on your list. But I'm having trouble grasping what makes the service useful to the average reader. It may be, however, that the service isn't useful to the average reader.
New Jersey-based, BookSwim, which sent out its first book last March ("The Richest Man in Babylon" by George S. Clason), has plans starting at $14.99/month, which allow you to take out two books at once. Assuming your library is often out of the books you're into, you'd need to read about three books (trade paperbacks cost about $6-7 each) per month, or at least one higher priced new release hardcover book to justify that cost. How many people actually do that each month? My guess is, sadly, not many -- either for lack of time or lack of interest.
Here's a sticky situation. The US House of Representatives voted yesterday to approve the `Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online (SAFE) Act of 2007.' The resolution requires "electronic communication and remote computing service providers" to report and forward any obscene images related to children to the government. In addition to providers of public wifi, that could include social networks and email providers. The Resolution will now face a vote by the Senate.
News.com's DC beat blogger Dean McCullagh summarizes the content at issue thusly:
"It includes obvious child pornography, meaning photographs and videos of children being molested. But it also includes photographs of fully clothed minors in overly 'lascivious' poses, and certain obscene visual depictions including a 'drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting.'" I'll leave commentary about American Apparel ads to other people. I can't help but think there could be some teenagers snared by this for posting sexy pictures of themselves and friends to MySpace and Facebook if the resolution becomes law.
Point being, obscenity is a subjective matter, age is difficult to prove and this is a mess waiting to happen. Sexual exploitation of children is one of the most clearly wrong things that happens in this world, and drawing cartoons of children in sexualized situations is a possible red flag of actual behavior - but I'm not sure this is an appropriate way to deal with the situation.
Open source software development tools provider SourceForge.net, today officially launched their SourceForce.net Marketplace, an eBay-like online market for buying and selling open source services and support. The Marketplace has been in closed beta for the better part of the past year, but today launched to the entire SF.net community.
The Marketplace looks and functions essentially like eBay, where people can offer services and support for open source software projects listed at SF.net (think installation, customization, training, etc.). Listings are free, and SF.net takes a cut of sales, usually about 10%.
Advertising in the blogosphere, and indeed the web at large, is driven by page views. And Google, which also relies on page views and unique visitors to make money, is one of the best traffic generators.
However, getting traffic from Google is not simple. AdWords campaigns generate far more traffic than those placed with AdSense
because with search people express intent (and are more likely to click on contextually relevant ads). But tuning AdWords campaigns to generate a lot of traffic
is not easy since you are competing with other bidders and Google's algorithm.
Thus, many top tier blogs have begun to rely on a different source of traffic - the web's number one social news site Digg. Getting to the front page of Digg leads to a such traffic surge that it has been known to cripple web servers. Thousands of Digg users instantly flock to the source site as soon as a story hits Digg's front page, causing traffic to spike on web sites well higher than usual levels.
But Digg has a much more important role than that of traffic generator. It has become an experiment in human-based, self-organizing systems and the point of origin from which important news gets spread through the web. In this post we look at what Digg is today, beyond its bare front page, and look into what Digg's future holds.
Over the next few weeks we'll be reviewing a number of Web product categories on Read/WriteWeb, summarizing what's happened in 2007 - and what to look forward to in 2008. We're starting with the Web Office, a market that underwent a lot of changes this year. Our definition of Web Office is: A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features.
Probably the biggest change was that Google Apps ramped up this year, starting with the release of Google Apps Premier in February. And 2007 continued the trend of acquisitions in this market, which started in 2006 with the likes of Writely and JotSpot. In 2007 Yahoo acquired Zimbra and Google acquired a number of small startups - including GrandCentral (online telephony service) and Zenter (presentations software).
The biggest disappointment of the year in Web Office? The lack of a compelling web-based offering from Microsoft. Perhaps not surprising, given Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop with Microsoft Office. But disappointing nonetheless.
So let's explore Web Office in 2007 in depth....
2007 was a very busy year for Google in Web Office. They made a number of important acquisitions, and just as importantly developed their product range and continued integration of those into Google Apps.
In February, Google released a premier edition of its Google Apps package (previously known as Google Apps For Your Domain). They also unified the product range more, including a re-designed online control panel.
The open identity system OpenID 2.0 was launched today at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, after what Marshall Kirkpatrick recently described as "a long, long time of political infighting over either semi-relevant minutea or deal-breaking technical details." The new version improves security and usability -- and will hopefully be the catalyst for more Internet companies to adopt it.
According to the announcement, more than 8,000 Web sites currently accept OpenID and this figure is growing by five percent per week - although Marshall mentioned in his post that this figure is down from 7% in February. But support for OpenID is gradually growing; just last week Google Blogger unveiled support in the next version of Blogger. A number of Internet companies, such as digg, have promised to implement OpenID once 2.0 arrived.
Marshall wrote an in-depth critique of OpenID 2.0 a week ago, which I encourage you to read to fully understand the significance of this announcement. OpenID is the way of the future for identity on the Web, so expect more adoption - and deeper support from existing adoptees such as AOL, Google and Microsoft - in 2008 and beyond.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog this morning apologizing for missteps with the roll-out of their much maligned Beacon advertising system. "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it," he wrote.
Zuckerberg goes on to apologize specifically for "taking too long" to make the system opt-in rather than opt-out (where the site assumed no answer to the Beacon prompt was a 'yes' and went ahead and shared information). Last week Facebook made Beacon opt-in site-by-site, and today they added a privacy control that allows users to shut off the program completely (pictured after the bump).
