An Accidental Marketer

Don’t count RIM out as a major player in the mobile market. BlackBerrys are the weapon of choice for young people because of their lower price point and the popular BBM messaging service (despite the fact it isn’t BB exclusive any more.)

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thatssodigital:

I was way off base when I said that if Facebook got in to the check-in game, watch out. would be very interesting to know what the usage stats were, and why they decided to kill it.

infoneer-pulse:

The disk drives powering Dropbox, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and Google Music likely issued a small sigh of relief Monday, after a federal court judge found that the MP3tunes cloud music service didn’t violate copyright laws when it used only a single copy of a MP3 on its servers, rather than storing 50 copies for 50 users.

For Amazon and Google’s nascent cloud music services, the decision clears the way for them to make it easier and faster for customers to use their music services; gives them legal cover to reduce the amount of disk space needed per user; makes it less likely that new customers of their music services will bust through their ISPs data caps when signing up; and clears the way for the companies to let users add songs found on webpages and through search to their lockers with a single-click — all without either being sued by record labels for doing so.

» via Wired

digital-diva:

In discussions about new media, you will often hear the division of media opportunities as Paid, Owned, and Earned media (P.O.E.M.)

Brian Solis believes that using Paid, Promoted, Owned, Shared, and Earned is a better way to categorise.

He has once again partnered with JESS3 to…

infoneer-pulse:

In a dramatic reshuffling, Hewlett-Packard Co. said Thursday that it will discontinue its tablet computer and smartphone products and may sell or spin off its PC division, bowing out of the consumer businesses.

It’s one of the most extreme makeovers in the company’s 72-year history and signals new CEO Leo Apotheker’s most transparent move to date to make HP look more like longtime rival IBM Corp., which now makes most of its money from software and services.

» via MSNBC

infoneer-pulse:

Apple has filed two patent applications that describe an approach as well as file formats and APIs to eliminate the printer driver as a requirement for users to access a printer and print documents.

Software drivers have been one of the big inconveniences in mainstream computing. USB and Windows 98 began to turn the driver installation process from a considerable source of user frustration into what many perceive to be merely an annoyance today, but the original idea of the printer driver is still a barrier that prevents us from accessing printers from new types of devices, such as smartphones.

» via ConceivablyTech

Apple to completely eliminate printer drivers?

infoneer-pulse:

One German physicist, Harald Haas, has come up with a solution he calls “data through illumination”—taking the fiber out of fiber optics by sending data through an LED lightbulb that varies in intensity faster than the human eye can follow. It’s the same idea behind infrared remote controls, but far more powerful.

Haas says his invention, which he calls D-Light, can produce data rates faster than 10 megabits per second, which is speedier than your average broadband connection. He envisions a future where data for laptops, smartphones, and tablets is transmitted through the light in a room. And security would be a snap—if you can’t see the light, you can’t access the data.

» via GOOD

infoneer-pulse:

The New York Times is beginning to roll out an experimental new approach to personalized news that the Poynter Institute compares to Pandora’s approach to suggesting music based on what users say they like. The paper is trying to provide a more social news experience that includes not only personalization but also a reader reputation system and new approach to commenting. So far, most of the new additions have been happening behind the scenes—rethinking how to do recommendations and tweaking algorithms. When the toolbar for TimesPeople, a simple social network launched in 2008, disappeared this week, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman suspected something biggest was in store and reached out to chief technology officer Marc Frons who explained some upcoming features.

» via The Atlantic

infoneer-pulse:

Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.

And that’s a problem for an encyclopedia that wants to grow. Some critics of Wikipedia believe that the whole Western tradition of footnotes and sourced articles needs to be rethought if Wikipedia is going to continue to gather converts beyond its current borders. And that, in turn, invites an entirely new debate about what constitutes knowledge in different parts of the world and how a Western institution like Wikipedia can capitalize on it.

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

infoneer-pulse:

To the rubbish pile that the Internet is creating, alongside the road maps, newspapers and music CDs, add one more artifact of consumer life, the paper receipt.

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

“As consumers, we’re changing the way we shop,” said Jennifer Miles, who oversees retail systems at VeriFone, which makes checkout technology. “Customers are starting to want electronic receipts.”

» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)

Bye bye paper receipts

infoneer-pulse:

The facsimile machine is a tired, clunky object used to send documents over a telephone line. The fax, at least as we know it, came into being in the mid-1970s (Almost Famous is set in 1973), when optical scanning, modulator and acoustic coupler technologies all came together. The process is fairly basic, and shouldn’t have lasted into the Internet Age almost unchanged. Somehow, though, the fax machine has managed to survive. Like Horseshoe crabs or those giant flies in the jungles of South America, these things are positively Prehistoric — and have proven nearly unkillable.

Today, you can find a fax machine in any dusty old office that still needs to transmit signed copies of paperwork — or in your nearest office supplies store. The chains have made an easy business out of charging too much to fax a couple of pages here or there; they know that the majority of their customers — even those who might purchase Post-It notes and staplers to take back to their dusty old offices — are without access to a fax machine but, every once in a great while, find that one would come in handy.

That could be changing. The end of the fax machine may finally be here. So, clear out that corner of the office and buy your employees a dart board to fill the space, because we’re about to take e-signatures to the tubes.

» via The Atlantic

Who knew? They still make fax machines. Amazing!