Update: Michael Arrington will be blogging at http://uncrunched.com.

There is a lot of speculation about the upcoming blog of Mike Arrington. We should  see him blog again within a week. So what will be the name of his blog? After being call the unpaid blogger  by Arianna Huffington, Mike has been seen sporting a t-shirt which says “Unpaid Blogger”.

After seeing him sport this t-shirt, I thought that unpaidblogger.com should be nice domain name too. So, we looked it up to find that it has been recently bought (9th September to be precise)

I am just speculating that Mike has bought this domain name for blogging and it might or might not be true. All I want though, is to read Mike’s thoughts again. I wish him all the very best.  He remains my favorite technology blogger, by far. Keep  refreshing the url and you might find a blog soon. I saw a nice error page once but forgot to take the screenshot.

Get in touch with the writer at mitra[dot]arkid[at]gmail[dot]com

]]> http://microreviews.org/has-mike-arrington-bought-unpaidblogger-com-speculation-and-proof/feed/ 1 http://microreviews.org/the-facebook-age/ http://microreviews.org/the-facebook-age/#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:36:25 +0000 admin http://microreviews.org/?p=5227 Continue reading →]]> I just got the new facebook and wanted to share some of the screenshots:

First up the timeline view of my profile:

Facebook timeline

Next up: the activity log:

Arkid Mitra - Activity Log

dNext up : The washington post social reader:

Washington post - news reader

We will write more about these massive changes as we use Facebook over the next couple of days. Get in touch with the writer at mitra[dot]arkid[at]gmail[dot]com

YouTube takes 3 billion video views a day. Thats every person on earth watching half a youtube video every day. After IPTV, Now companies have started with products like google TV and Apple TV cashing on internet’s on demand media content & ability to surf websites. (Indian Counterparts can be taken as Samsung SMART, Panasonic Viera which have Internet connectivity build into them, I wonder no one in India has come up with a service like this for Old TV Sets). YouTube’s video content can be very raw and homemade to very professional and Well! Copyrighted.
But Never the less because of backing up with big websites and YouTube’s partners program Or simply the Joy of  Sharing, the content keeps getting better, diverse and More.

top youtube channels

I am a youtube junkie ever since I had decent Internet. I remember in college I used to open 20 something video windows to buffer then go to lunch to come back and watch…Right from learning swimming from Robert Binas lessons to Jill and Kevins wedding dance.

Below is list of Some youtube channels worth checking out:

Send in your entries latest by Monday, 05 September, 2011 to contact@adityaprakash.me

Choose from any of following categories:
1. Latest gadgets (sample post)
2. Indian tech start-ups (sample post)
3. Tech opinion (sample post)
4. Web 2.0 (sample post)

We respect honesty. So, please do not send in any earlier published or copied content. Do mail us in case of any queries.

• LinkedIn has a very well defined and easy targeting mechanism
• The engaged userbase is educated and one to run after
• The news feed system is much more engaging than it was a year back
• The LinkedIn-Twitter news integration is working well
• The clickthrough rate of items shared on LinkedIn is very high

Even after all these advantages and huge userbase, LinkedIn isn’t as engaging as other social networks. People share less on LinkedIn. People spend less time on LinkedIn. Even the most dedicated professional, which I talk with tells me that he spends less than 10 minutes a month on LinkedIn. Ridiculous for such a social network with such a big userbase. So, what is the problem with LinkedIn?

• LinkedIn is not your online entertainment OS like Facebook is
• LinkedIn is not your blog pimping, news publishing, celebrity abusing/praising network like Twitter
• LinkedIn is professional and people don’t mess around with what they share on LinkedIn. They are more likely to share their job promotions on it
• LinkedIn groups don’t seem to be a part of LinkedIn at all. They seem disjoint from LinkedIn

The biggest problem and oppurtunity for LinkedIn lies in its search. The people search, that is. A lot of people looking for a job would update their LinkedIn and a lot of people offering jobs would do a simple LinkedIn search. For example, let us say I am looking for a “Java Professional” on LinkedIn. I would go and search for the keyword “Java” on LinkedIn. LinkedIn would return a lot of Java professional’s on the basis of keywords/skills on the profile of the user. However, there is no guarantee that the person who appears on the top of the search results is very good at “Java”. It is just that his profile is very well LEO-ed(LinkedIn Engine Optimized). Here in lies the oppurtunity for LinkedIn. LinkedIn needs to become better by digging out the person with authority on Java(probably even looking for a job) on the top. So, how does LinkedIn accomplish this? 

• By making group discussions a basis of people rank
• Create a point system like Stackoverflow
• Get a relevance algorithm like Quora
• Import Quora and Stackoverflow points

Talking in simpler terms, LinkedIn needs better Q&A integration. They can target Q&A on the basis of user skills. They can target Q&A campaigns for companies and professional’s will answer. Professional’s can earn points by answering questions and become better LEO-ed.  Professionals, serious professionals will be better engaged and they will have something to take back when they log on to LinkedIn. Surely, a business oppurtunity.

Get in touch with the writer at mitra[dot]arkid[at]gmail[dot]com

People Rank: Every person is not equal in knowledge or in influence in a particular field. Michael Arrington might be the biggest influencer in technology, but not in sports. Which are the companies working on People rank? A lot of them for sure. Google and Facebook are two which are surely working on something very closely related to people rank. Quora, Stackoverflow will soon have their own versions of people rank ready. The best implementation of people rank that i have seen till now is Klout. Klout clearly identifies your overall influence as well as the fields that you influence. Although far from perfect, Klout seems to have figured out the right way. Once the people rank is figured out, search will surely have a new dimension. I mean, the author along with his identity should be able to influence the rankings. It just makes better sense.

Klout works well for twitter influence. However, Klout’s influence calculation otherwise is pretty irrelevant as of now. To have a unified online influence calculation system is going to be very difficult but a task worth taking up. The influnce of offline media on this ranking system will make relevance clculation even more difficult. Some of the segmentations which would make such a people rank wonderful should be:

• Geographical Segmentation – Simply put, A Sachin Tendulkar is much more relevant to Indians or to the cricket playing nations than to the non cricket playing nations.
• Gender Segementation – Difficult to segement, but extremely important. People who influence females may not influence males at all.
• Age-Group Segementation – There are these youth icons and then there are these icons who influence other age groups.
• Sphere of Influence Segmentation – Technology, Sports, Movies- What is your sphere of influence?
• Real time media vs Old Age Media Segmentation – There are people who are more ifluential when they blog than when they microblog.
• Time wise Influence (Who is relevant when?) – Some people are relevant during the elections but become irrelevant durring the techcrunch disrupt.

There can be a lot more segmentaions possible. Search can be changed upside down once a unified people rank is available. Google is starting to become irrelevant. Facebook like’s hardly reveal the truth. Twitter influence is not the end of the world too. LinkedIn is way too professional to reveal a person’s real identity or influence. Stackoverflow is just for programmers. Quora is for techcrunch readers

I will continue writing a few more posts in this series about finding relevance. Contact me at mitra[dot]arkid[at]gmail[dot]com.

The buzz on these mediums was so high  that people wanted to measure the impact of these mediums as a marketing tool. With the exponential growing power of this media, the next logical step was to see it as reflection for all that a brand did on its other marketing mediums. The question was how? It was time for the good old Analytic tools to evolve and a new round of innovation to measure this medium.

There had been the concept of clicks, goals and conversions right from the beginning. It was time to see a major change in the clickstream. It was not only the Google Ads which gave the hits and in turn the conversions but also the tweets and the Facebook updates doing the job for you. But, we all wanted more and yes, we got it.

We wanted to know which particular user from among the millions was proving influential and a URL shortening service, Bit.ly came out with a dashboard which measured exactly the same. Bit.ly came out with a service where we could measure exactly whose update/tweet was clicked how many times and now we found a way to find the influencer. This influencer was not always a celebrity. It was sometimes another guy who tweeted a lot of random stuff which people enjoyed. The story of quantifying the medium goes on.

Here, we realised that we had found a completely new way to measure all our campaigns on all platforms. Everytime, a music video, an advertisement or new paper ad flashed, we saw the shadows and more precisely the reflections on the social web. Brands as well as celebrities wanted to trend on twitter, as that meant instant publicity for their new ads which released on the TV as well as Youtube. The number of views on Youtube  was a good enough indicator of your campaign was doing.

The nature of this new social medium was however very different. It was two way communication and the people had a say. A positive or a negative impact of the new multi-million dollar campaign which the brand had recently taken up was easily found in the form of tweets and updates of the higly opinionated user. The Social Web had become the Publishing Service 2.0 for everyone and the brands had to listen and absorb it all, be it good or bad. The former audience was now your marketer and critic and the brand had to pay respect. This massive audience, however, didn’t mean that it was difficult to segment. There is  the  option to segment this impact of your campaign by age-group, sex, city and much more. You can find out exactly which section of the society had disliked which portion of your campaign and then mending your way was up to you. All this was flamed even more with the evolution of smartphone market in the form of IPhones and Androids. You were found tweeting in the loo.

It was not the ease of measurement that led to the social web becoming such a beautiful ROI calculation tool but the large size of the audience which excited the developers like never before to deep dive into the peta-bytes of data and make sense out of it. There is still a lot of scope out there, with the evolution of sentiment analysis and semantic web tools but the medium already is much more a measure of the Brands’ ROI than any other traditional mediums.  With the instant ROI revelation of the social media, the other traditional mediums have started feeling the heat. Newspapers have gone social. Televisions might have a huge evolution this fall with the entry of Google TV and in turn Apple TV. Televisions will stream YouTube and Hulu and you would have all the smartphone applications running on your TV and the viewership will again be as simple to calculate as impressions. Brands have realised the importance of this media and are looking at the Silicon valley to come out with good social media monitoring tools as the present ones are still in an evolving state.

Game 2.0 is simply an integration of simple games made on some server side scripts, action scripts like JS or ajax, Flash and implemented on Web 2.0 (aka social networking).

For the newbies, let me tell you that social games are web based games which you can play with friends, mostly on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc. In this post I will give a brief about the biggest players in development of social games, and compare them in terms of market share, funding, revenue and business model.

We are already familiar with the popularity of the first generation social networking startups like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut etc. Now a new generation of application developers have taken center stage, who are based mostly on these gen1 social networking sites, and are making big money. The top 3 in my list are:

1. Company: Zynga (www.zynga.com)
   Funding: $219M
   Major Apps: Farmville- 61M Players, Mafia Wars- 25.8M , Yoville- 19.8M, Texas Hold Em’ Poker- 18.3M
   Revenue: Estimated $200M
   Zynga is a srong candidate for 2010 IPO.
2. Company: Playfish (www.playfish.com)
   Acquired: by Electronic Arts (EA Sports) for $400M
   Major Apps: Pet Society- 20.5M, Restaurant City-17.3M, Country Story- 8M
   Revenue: Estimated $135M
3. Company: Playdom (www.playdom.com)
   Funding: $47M
   Major Apps: Mobsters -14M, Bumper Stickers-11.7M, Own Your Friends-10.1M, Sorority Life-7.1M, Mobsters 2-3.5M, Poker Palace- 1.5M
   Revenue: Estimated $60M

Let me just remind you that these companies are startups and have existed for not more than three years. So, how are they making this much of BIG money? All of them have two revenue models, and these two models are like the necessary practices for companies in this domain.

• The first model is very simple and straight forward. It begins when you start playing any of these games. Initially everything is free in the game. But as you move ahead in the game you will need a lot of virtual stuff – like seeds for your farm or guns for your gang – which you would have to buy from an online store using a credit card, PayPal etc. The idea is very simple here – get addicted to the free version, then start spending real money for virtual stuff. Playdom has gone a step ahead and even opened offlinestores for virtual goods.
• The second model is the traditional online revenue model using ad clicks, lead generation and toolbar installation, but in an entirely new fashion. If you do not have a credit card or a PayPal account, then you sign up on some other website to get virtual money, which you can use to buy some virtual stuff. The cache here is that when you sign up for that website you are actually generating leads for them. When you signed up on the other website, the gaming company gets real money for the lead generation. You can call this SGL (Social Game Lead), and this lead to companies is a guaranteed lead, as the user needs the virtual stuff, which means he is willing to pay if you can sell him the virtual stuff, i.e. if you can do some SGM (Social Game Marketing).
• Toolbar installation revenue model is more interesting. When you install a toolbar, it will make Ask.com (say) the default search engine on your browser. Ask.com makes money from search ads and pays money to gaming company or the toolbar developer for every installation of the toolbar. Ask.com pays about $1-$2 for every installation. Just imagine how the money is flowing back to the game developer. Ask –> Toolbar developer –>Zynga –> Facebook (for ads) –> Zynga. This is an endless circle. Hats off to this revenue model.

In the beginning of this post I had quoted a tagline - …why play akele (i.e. why play alone)? This tagline is being used by an upcoming Indian social gaming website -Ibibo.com. The tagline suggests how new players are trying to capture the potentially large Indian market. The reason I wrote ‘potentially’ large market was that though the Indian market is very large, but the revenue models might not work out here that easily. You will find less than 5% of the Indian gamers buying online stuff. So, your game might be a very big hit here, but you might not be making any money out of it.

If you were not able to make money out of this market, then this potentially big market could turn out into a potential risky market. Another reason why I say so is that these game developers are not paying any attention to localization, rather Indian-ization, of the games. The big developers have simply imported their international versions to India, and the local developers are merely copying the international games. They have not even cared to give Indian names. For instance, Ibibo has a game called Teen Patti, which is a card game. They have explained the rules using names like Aces and Jacks, which most of the Indian audience would not understand. Had they cared to mentioned that Ace means ‘Ekka’ and Jack means ‘Gulaam’ the public out here would have simply loved it.

Zynga and Playdom have opened up their Indian development centers in Bangalore, and they are planning to develop games purely for the Indian audience. I hope they keep their promise, and also hope that the Indian developers like Ibibo give some genuine thought rather than simply copying ideas. The competition is going to become more fierce as biggies like EA are soon going to join the race.

We still have a few unanswered questions to ponder over - will the potentially big Indian market grow into a real market for the developers, and what new things can be integrated with social networks to make more money out of this seemingly big market?

Your views and comments are welcome.

Reblogged from GeekonNet.com

• More than two-thirds of U.S. and Australian travelers, and 90% of British
Tourists, consider active protection of the environment and support of local
communities to be part of a hotel’s responsibility.
• In Germany, 65% (39 million) of travelers expect environmental quality; 42% (25 million) think that it is particularly important to find environmentally-friendly accommodation.
• Nearly half of those surveyed in Britain said they would be more likely to go with a “company that had a written code to guarantee good working conditions, protect the environment and support local charities in the tourist destination.
• A survey of U.S., British, and Australian travelers revealed that 70% would pay up to $150 more for a two-week stay in a hotel with a “responsible environmental attitude.
• In a U.K. survey, 87% of travelers said their holiday should not damage the environment; 39% said they were prepared to pay 5% extra for ethical guarantees.
• 53% of American travelers say their travel experience is enhanced when they learn as much as possible about local customs and culture.
• 95% of Swiss tourists consider respect for local culture to be highly important when choosing a holiday.

Eco Tourism is one industry surely set for a boom. We will sure keep a look at the industry and keep you all updated on how it does in India.

So, what is the future of Twitter and Facebook?

Stop making these comparisons, i would say. Twitter will always have its position as a marketing tool, as people are more addicted to Twitter than anything else. With a super cool API and the zillion of applications made with the help of Twitter, it remains the new age digital press.

Facebook is the new age social network, and with so many applications to play with. With a flurry of developers making so much money through facebook application development, Facebook  isn’t dying too. Facebook is a fun place, where people play  fun games and and join causes and try to create the so called online buzz on “Social Causes.”

What does Google Buzz do then?

• There are a number of these very close friends on my gmail contact list and I forgot to read their blog updates and lost track of what they are doing. Now with their blogs updated directly to the Buzz(through Google Reader), I started going through them again.
• Google Buzz is what i expected from Twitter a while back when they released their retweet feature. Commenting on twitter statuses was cool for me.
• It pushes your updates to people who matter the most, because in you Gmail contacts you add people who are really necessary for you to get stuff done.
• If Google is able to control spam, the click through rates may just be much higher than a twitter or a facebook.
• Buzz already has a list system, and a way to push updates only to a list . No one else provides that to me as yet. This feature can be immensely useful to me and many others.

Who looses out the most?

I see Google Buzz getting integrated to Google apps and then a lot of companies who were giving out this social intranet thing, notably Salesforce’s chatter are  completely destroyed.

What I expect from Buzz next?

• A clean way to search the public Buzz updates.
• A cleaner way to search people on Buzz inside Gmail interface only.
• A good API for us developers to play around with.
• Buzz for Google Apps gives immense power to start-ups. It almost solves all their intranet problems.

With mashable and techcrunch already up with their buzz it buttons, I need to start writing one quickly. My verdict, Buzz is not Google Wave or Google Knol, it just works.

Images are courtsey: buzz.google.com