Google has announced that Google Offers, its daily deals product, will open in Austin, Boston, D.C., Denver and Seattle today. The service launched - bearing Google's ubiquitous beta label - in Portland, OR on June 1 and expanded to the Bay Area and New York City in July.
Google continues to roll out Offers to compete with Groupon, which famously rejected a $6 billion offer from Google last year. This week, Groupon appears to be delaying its IPO amid market uncertainties.
Jill Fehrenbacher, founder of leading green design blog Inhabitat, announced this morning that her nearly seven-year-old site has been acquired by media network Internet Brands.
Fehrenbacher says she started the site when a student, as a way to engage in public conversation about specific topics of interest to her. That sounds like the kind of founding story that many of the first wave of commercially viable blogs of the era can tell. The site speaks to a lucrative young readership with disposable income and now gets 15 million unique visitors each month, up from 11 million at the beginning of this year. Fehrenbacher told the story of Inhabitat's birth in depth in a long post this Spring. No acquisition price was named but given the site's growth, audience and angel fundraising, it was presumably a life-changing event for Fehrenbacher. She'll stay on as the site's manager and Editor in Chief.
This week we're looking at how social media is being deployed in museums. The idea with our Social Media Case Studies series is to analyze how social media is actually being used by organizations, which we hope will provide inspiration or assistance to others. We started with Brooklyn Museum yesterday. Despite being impressed by the presence of Brooklyn Museum on many social media platforms, I concluded that the museum is spreading itself too thin. I think it would be better off focusing on deeper engagement on fewer channels. Some of the feedback suggested that I was overly critical. That wasn't the intention, however I do think constructive criticism motivates us all to find more creative ways to use social media.
Today we're going to review a service that creatively uses video. Called ArtBabble, it's an art video service run by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). Want to know some best practices for integrating video into your social media plans? Look no further...
Last Friday, Amazon took on the U.S. Post Office and opened a real world locker box service as a delivery portal for the stuff people buy on Amazon.com.
The lockers, which come in several sizes, are located on a wall in a 7-11 convenience store in Seattle surrounding an ATM-like device that allows a customer to key in a PIN and pick up their Amazon package.
Of people who own smartphones in the United States, 55% use the device for some kind of location-specific task, according to a study published today by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. In total, 23% of all American adults use location services on their phones or via social media sites on the desktop.
Does this mean that Americans are suddenly check-in-happy Foursquare fanatics? Not quite. The survey's definition of "location services" is pretty broad. The majority of respondents who said they participated in such an activity were referring to things like mapping out directions or receiving location-based recommendations on their phones.
These days, the tablet computer seems to be central to much of Amazon's product strategy. The company is working on a substantial redesign of its website, which aims to simplify the browsing experience for users on iPads and other tablets.
The new design cleans up the site's UI significantly, hiding the store department buttons on the left in favor of a tidy drop-down menu and doing away with many of the graphics and other UI elements that have become so familiar to Amazon shoppers. The result is a simpler layout with a bigger search box and much more whitespace.
As museums look for ways to attract more visitors, social media has become a key tool in drawing people along and engaging them. Some museums are trying to be more creative with social media, but step one is to make use of the main tools. Brooklyn Museum is certainly doing that. It has a main web site, a blog, a Facebook Page, a Twitter presence, a Flickr account, a Tumblr, a Foursquare, and more.
Unfortunately, a closer inspection reveals that many of those social media accounts are infrequently updated. Perhaps Brooklyn Museum would be better off focusing on one or two of the tools and using those selected tools creatively. There may be lessons here for other organizations attempting to cover all social media bases.
The press is one of the many casualties of Mexico's ongoing violence, in particular, the local media. Newspapers and TV stations are caught in a battle between censorship, control and threats from the drug cartels and the local governments. In some cities, people often witness shootings, grenade attacks and other violent events, but when they try to find out what happened, their local news has nothing to offer. Some newspapers have officially announced a policy of self-censorship when it comes to reporting drug war-related news.
The result for a lot of Mexicans is that local media is no longer a source of news. Some citizens claim that their local news sources are paid off by the local government in an effort to minimize the violence; others argue that it is the cartels who have bribed them; while others, especially the journalists, say they are being threatened to keep quiet. What is certain is that journalists are being murdered and their murders often go unpunished.
Cellular data usage has become subject of contention among consumers, carriers and federal regulators. Consumers want more data with less restrictions at manageable prices. The carriers want the opposite. The federal government is left to balance consumers' rights with spectrum allocation, bandwidth requirements, net neutrality and mergers that may disrupt the ecosystem.
There are a lot of balls in the air. It is likely that there will not be any type of compromise between the interests of these groups any time soon. Carriers are starting to set bandwidth limits into their data plans and throttling users who exceed those limits. The data plan needs to evolve.
Baidu, the Chinese search giant, became the latest company to jump into the mobile operating system game this morning when it previewed Baidu Yi. The Android-based OS will offer much of the core functionality of Google's mobile OS, but replaces Google's apps with Baidu's own equivalents.
The previously-rumored OS was officially announced this morning at the company's Baidu World event in Beijing and is expected to be available on handsets soon. Some of the OS's default apps include maps, a book-reading app and a mobile version of Ting, the company's social music service.
