Fish pedicure
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
The Yvonne Hair and Nails salon in Alexandria, Virginia offers a service where garra rufa (aka Doctor fish) nibble the dead skin of clients' feet. Proprietor John Ho claims that 5,000 customers have had the treatment so far. It costs $35 for 15 minutes and $50 for a half hour. From the Associated Press (image from CNN video):
Ho was skeptical at first about the fish, which are called garra rufa but typically known as doctor fish. They were first used in Turkey and have become popular in some Asian countries...Fish pedicure (AP), Fish pedicure video (CNN)
In addition to offering pedicures, Ho hopes to establish a network of Doctor Fish Massage franchises and is evaluating a full-body fish treatment that, among other things, could treat psoriasis and other skin ailments.
Ho spent a year and about $40,000 getting the pedicures up and running...
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Octopus with 96 tentacles
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
This octopus has 88 extra tentacles. The rare specimen is on display at the Shima Marineland Squarium. From Pink Tentacle:
Extra-tentacled octopus (Pink Tentacle, thanks Nat!)The preserved octopus actually has the normal number of 8 appendages attached to its body, but each one branches out to form the multitude of extra tentacles. Apparently there is no theory that fully explains the surplus tentacles, but they are believed to be the result of abnormal regeneration that occurred after the octopus suffered some sort of injury.
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SlyDial: Get Straight to the Point
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
I love nifty voicemail services which make use of the Internet in some day. This one doesn’t really make use of the Internet so much other than for marketing purposes, but it’s still very cool. The name of the service is Slydial and it lets you get directly to someone’s mobile voicemail, skipping the call they might or might not pick up. In short: a direct way to leave a message while saving time and avoiding an awkward phone call.
Here’s how it works: you dial 267-SLYDIAL from any U.S. landline or cell phone, and enter the phone number of the person you want to leave the voicemail to. You’re directed to their voicemail within a second, and you can go ahead and leave the message, which they get to whenever they want to.
The service is undoubtedly a niche, situation-oriented service, but I see a lot of people having a use for it. We often need to save some time in our fast-paced lives, and thinking of the thousands of businessmen this is targeted for, it could serve as the perfect solution.
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Stephenson’s Anathem was inspired by Clock of the Long Now
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Neal Stephenson's forthcoming novel Anathem was inspired by the amazing Clock of the Long Now, a project to make a clock that runs for 10,000 years. The Long Now foundation is helping to launch the book with a signing in September in San Francisco, and its esteemed board members have been weighing in on the book:
Link“‘I suffer from attention surplus disorder,’ jokes a character in Anathem. Attention surplus is exactly what Stephenson teaches his readers, in a book so tightly crafted it rewards instant rereading.” - Stewart Brand
“It is a great story, set in an alternative reality where people take long-term thinking seriously.” - Danny Hillis
“Long Now’s 10,000-year clock inspired Neal Stephenson’s new story, Anathem, and now Anathem is inspiring the Long Now. In ten centuries, no one will be sure which came first.” - Kevin Kelly
See also:
Ask Neal Stephenson questions about Anathem
Spooky, wonderful music CD in Neal Stephenson's new novel
Long Now clock souvenir
Unveiling of second Long Now clock in Bay Area: photos
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3 Ways to Make More Money Blogging
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks has been asking a number of interesting questions over the last six months or so, starting with the question of whether an RSS feed is worth a buck. Today, in a continuance of this professional blogger introspective, he asks what you’re doing to put food on his table. The whole question is neatly explained and contained in this video embedded below.
Here’s the version for those unable to view the video: “Bloggers are supported by ads. Few of you click on those, and you seem almost proud of this fact. As much as 52% of you use ad blocking software. How do you expect us to eat? ”
There’s a bit more to it than that, but it’s the gist of the issue, and it’s one that I identify with. I’m a content producer, and I’m a supporting a wife and two kids on the fruits of advertising. I’d love for you to click on as many ads as possible, so that our CTRs will go up, the advertisers love us, and they keep throwing money our direction.
Problem is, just by begging and pleading, I’m unlikely to change your behavior in for a sustainable period of time. You may click a few ads around this article if you really feel sorry for me, and you may remember to do it again tomorrow, but long term, you’ll probably go back to your habits of not clicking on ads.
Frankly, it’s ok. It’s human nature. Bossman Pete will probably kick my ass for saying this, but we have learned, as humans who stay on the ‘Net all day, how to tune out ads. You probably don’t even see them when you’re looking at this site (and no, I’m not talking to the folks with AdBlocker, I’m talking to regular folks who have the ability to focus on what they want to pay attention to).
This is a failure not on the consumer’s part, but on the part of those making the advertisments. Sure, we can all assume for a minute Allen’s attitude, which to me is a bit akin to the attitude assumed by most public broadcasting. It works for a certain segment of the audience: “It’s your responsibility to make sure this programming stays on the air.” But there’s a reason why Charlie Rose is on PBS and not CBS during primetime - most folks find him boring. Those that don’t find him boring will seek him out on PBS, and ostensibly donate to the cause. The rest watch Survivor or American Idol or whatever else is on network TV these days (I guess it’s obvious I’m watching Charlie Rose).
There are innovative and interesting ways to increase the value for advertisers on blog content, but it requires that bloggers and their advertising agencies start to think outside the box a bit. I’ve a number of ideas of what this means…
Behavioral Marketing
One of my biggest let downs in recent memory was that Facebook, the supposed darling social network of the Web 2.0, had a groundbreaking advertising and monetization solution, and the best they could come up with was Project Bacn. This is a company that collects a literal wealth of information about their users, all of it supplied voluntarily, and they do absolutely nothing interesting with.
I had hopes that they were going to announce an advertising network that others who had content that was in no way associated with Facebook could join. The most successful form of advertising on the Internet currently is Google’s search ads. This is because they know my intent - they know what I’m looking for, and can present relevent ads alongside my results. In theory, Facebook know my favorite movies, my favorite activities, and in many cases, my favorite websites.
Concurrently, one of the worst performing types of ads are those displayed on social networks. The reason is simple - the content is too enjoyable. Advanced mainstream social networks are the ultimate in a customized web experience. Why would I click off to the ads?
Open that targetting data to content websites, and you have yourself a ballgame. Tailor the ads down to a micro-targeting level, based on what they’ve said their interests are, and you’ll increase CTRs. Simple as that. The first major social network to start offering this to bloggers will be the next major player in Internet advertising.
Using Your Brand with Video
I’ve long said that the smartest thing that blogs with a brand can do is get into video. The response rates on video advertisements, when done properly, are amazing. Furthermore, a video ad associated with a recognizable brand fetches a much higher asking price than any typical display advertisement.
Add to that the ability to latch in captive subscribers via podcast subscription feeds and being able to deploy to a large variety of platforms and other media types, and you are seeing return on investment.
The downside to video is that for well produced stuff, it can be both time-consuming and expensive. As newer technologies become available, this cost is going down, and frankly the bar for excellence in broadcasting has been brought way down in recent years, so that often a few minutes of commentary on a webcam can be just as compelling and acceptable to general audiences as slick Hollywood effects.
As Stephen has been noting recently, it’s also very important to make sure that your video adds to the equation, a struggle for any content producer. It shouldn’t simply be a re-hash of what you’ve got in your text format. Following a few simple guidelines for production, though, will give you another monetization angle - one that’s lucrative for the producer, and beneficial for the advertiser.
Sponsorships Instead of Advertising
Between Steven and I, I feel like we’re beating a dead horse here, but even when clicks aren’t made on sponsorship deals, the advertiser still gets value. Take, for instance, Stickam - a sponsor for our SummerMash tour. Certainly part of the reason Stickam is advertising has to be for the purposes of driving traffic back to their site. That’s why we link their logo in our SummerMash posts back to the site.
More importantly, though, they want to associate their brand with Mashable. They have the desire to not only be seen by their users and their users viewers as a company that can get things done with live video, but by associating with Mashable in a publicly viewable way, every attendee to our events sees their logo, their work, and the fact that they’re doing well enough as a company to give us sponsorship dollars.
That imbues a feeling of stability, hipness, and awareness amongst all who see the logo on the site, watch our podcasts, and go to the events. It’s obviously not a driver of traffic, and the benefits are fairly far removed from how many people click on the link from our website.
It’s another example of how we’re diversifying our income here at Mashable so as to not solely rely on display advertisements.
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
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Six Apart Acquires Apperceptive; Offers VIP Ad Programs for Influential Blogs
Obopay Lets You Send Cash with AIM
Blogger’s Dilemma: Huge Arenas Or Small Gigs?
The Daily Poll: Reactions to Facebook’s Advertising Announcements
What is Web 2.0? Devil’s Dictionary Defines It!
Best of Mashable: Blogging
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Brightkite’s API for Location-based Social Networks
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
The fledgling location-based social networking service Brightkite, itself in limited beta, have announced the first release of its beta API (our API profile). The service which lets you use mobile and web interfaces to specify your location to connect with friends is described by CNET’s Caroline McCarthy like “a more feature-intensive version of Dodgeball“.
Brightkite’s API offers both basic HTTP authentication and OAuth. Resources available through the API include users, their friends, places, checkins (i.e. when a user “checks in” at a particular place), notes and photos about a place, placemarks (a user’s saved favorite places, comments left on notes and photos, and user-to-user messages. It also makes available the service’s “streams,” or recent actions from friends or people nearby. Developers may choose to receive responses in XML or JSON format, and the API is fully RESTful—HTTP POST for object creation, GET for reading data, PUT for updates, and DELETE to delete an object.
In the announcement, Brightkite’s Brady Becker uses Socialthing! as an example of the API in action. Socialthing! uses the API to pull in a user’s Brightkite updates as well as his avatar and has filters for notes, photos, and checkins (our mashup profile):
Brightkite is organizing third-party developers using Google Groups and some appear to be hard at work building Brightkite mashups, as well as interfaces for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and other devices.
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New York Times, LinkedIn Enter Content Partnership
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
In a brilliant move that's sure to make both newspapers and social networks around the web jealous, the New York Times and LinkedIn, the leading US social network for professionals, are announcing a content partnership tonight that could substantially increase the value for users of both sites. The announcement will be made at the top of the hour, but the integration is live now.
LinkedIn users are now being shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals on the Business and Technology sections of NYTimes.com and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.
We're big on LinkedIn here at RWW and though a wide open developers platform has yet to emerge, moves like this are inspiring. The deal is an important step beyond the previous integration of sharing hooks on NYTimes.com from other services.
A number of other social networks and bookmarking services have "share this story" links on NYT stories, but it's unclear how much traction those links alone are getting. Last month we wrote about one of those services, social news site Mixx, that's still seeing fewer than 1 million unique visitors per month despite "share this on Mixx" buttons on a long list of the biggest news sites in the world, including NYTimes.com.
How much more compelling is this partnership? We think it's a lot more compelling; check out the screenshots below and imagine the feedback loop this could create between the NYT and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 25 million registered users and the NYT sees 17 million + unique visitors per month, but the partnership will need none the less to introduce more people to LinkedIn in order to really be a home run. See this NYT page for an "introduction to LinkedIn." That's pretty classy, though it's unclear yet when that link will be displayed and when it won't.
We'll see how the recommendation process works; we hope it doesn't rely exclusively only on explicitly shared links, but we'll see. This certainly gets the mental juices flowing about any number of other integration and recommendation possibilities.
One question we have is about money changing hands. There has been extensive discussion around the web of late about LinkedIn using partnerships as a revenue source and it wouldn't surprise us if the NYT is paying for this integration. LinkedIn may not be a huge social network, but its user demographics are some of the most financially desirable in the world.
We expect to see more partnerships like this emerge, perhaps from a chastised Facebook attempting to relaunch its Beacon program in a more acceptable fashion.
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Live Mesh Goes Mobile and P2P - Mac Version Coming Soon
July 22, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
There has been a lot of development around Microsoft's Live Mesh platform in the last few days. Just last week, Microsoft opened up Live Mesh to all users and quietly released a a mobile version. Today, Microsoft has also announced that is is rolling out a major update of the Live Mesh infrastructure tonight and that it will allow users to sync files directly between different devices without having to sync to the Live Desktop first. This will allow users to bypass the 5GB limit of Live Mesh's online storage.
Going P2P
Allowing users to bypass the Live Mesh online storage by directly copying files from one machine to another is a major enhancement to Live Mesh. 5GB are not a very large amount of storage anymore, especially if you want to share videos or photos. Bypassing the Live Desktop of course means that those files are not available online from anywhere, but for a lot of usage scenarios (backup, syncing between desktop and laptop etc.), the online storage wasn't really necessary anyway. Still, it would be nice to see Microsoft up the 5GB limit, or allow users to purchase more space.
Strangely, users will have to turn of syncing to the Live Desktop on the Live Desktop itself. It is not possible to directly configure a folder to bypass the Live Desktop from the desktop, which might have some technical reasons, but mostly seems like an unnecessary hassle.
The new version of Live Mesh will also allow users to manage potential file conflicts on the Live Desktop, something that was sorely missing before.
Going Mobile
Microsoft also quietly released a mobile version of Live Mesh, which allows users to access their files from their mobile phones or any other Internet connected device through an optimized site. While it works best on Windows Mobile phones, we have tested it out on the iPhone as well, and found that it worked surprisingly well. The iPhone displays all photos and documents, though it doesn't play back mp3 files. The site feel a bit better integrated on a Windows Mobile device (you can upload files to Mesh from the phone, for example), but it works well on other mobile platforms as well.
This is not, however, the promised mobile client for Live Mesh - it is only a way to access your files more conveniently from a mobile device. The mobile client is still 'coming soon.'
Going Mac Soon?
As if all of these updates weren't enough, the enterprising folks over at the Live Side blog today found a Mac version of the Mesh client on Microsoft's servers (though Microsoft promptly took it down). While this wasn't an official release, it is clear that Microsoft is taking the Mac platform seriously in its Mesh strategy and chances are that we will see an official Mac client in the near future.
Lots of Developments
Microsoft is putting a lot of resources behind its Live Mesh platform. It's good to that the company is releasing so many updates and upgrades in such a short time. The syncing application is only the beginning of what Microsoft could do with Mesh and they surely have greater plans for it than just making it a glorified syncing app, of which Microsoft already has a few anyway.
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OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator gets reviewed, mice everywhere safe for now
July 21, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals
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Qik Opens Public Beta - Come Chat!
July 21, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
The live streaming video service Qik just opened up its previously closed beta to the public. Apparently, the public is so interested in the service that the site crashed completely just after the announcement was made (the site is back up now). Once it is back online, users will be able to stream live video from their supported mobile phones directly to the web without having to wait for an invitation from Qik.
New Features
Besides a few other relatively minor upgrades, Qik now supports more granular permissions and the grouping of videos. Qik has also released an update to its video player, which, next to some cosmetic updates, now includes the option to chat with other users from within the player.
Qik also announced some new distribution partners, including Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut. Also, as we reported last week, CoverItLive not allows for embedding Qik videos into its live blogging application.
Live streaming now also works on the Verizon and Spring networks, whereas it was previously restricted to the AT&T and T-Mobile GSM networks.
Competitors and the iPhone
Qik's main competitors are Kyte and Flixwagon. Both of these services, however, are currently only available for phones running Nokia's S60 operating system, while Qik also works on Windows Mobile phones.
None of these applications work on the iPhone, yet (thanks to the lack of a video camera) - though Qik has shown a demo of its product that works on a jailbroken 1st generation iPhone. Kyte also has an application for the iPhone, but it can only be used to share photos.
While most live video streaming services like Justin.tv or Stickam have focused mostly on streaming from webcams (and Kyte also allows for this), Qik is fully focused on mobile video. This is clearly a growing market, especially as more consumers start considering video on mobile phones as a basic utility. With its broad range of supported phones, Qik is well-positioned against its competition.
Qik already has a number of high-profile users, with Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose, and Jason Calacanis regularly using the service to stream interviews or other events live to their followers.
Now if only its users wouldn't flood Twitter regularly by announcing that they are "streaming live now, come chat!"
