Philipp Heintze

Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook spoke yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium in Las Vegas and had some interesting things to say about the iPhone. In what's already becoming one of those soundbites heard 'round the world, Cook made a comment about Apple's choice to use exclusive deals with cell phone providers:

In the US, our fundamental choice was "Do we want to develop two phones, a CDMA phone and a GSM phone?" And we didn't. We wanted to do the simplest approach in the beginning, because that's the fastest way to learn...and AT&T is the largest carrier and the business relationship we could work with AT&T allowed Apple to be Apple and AT&T to be AT&T...We feel very good about that. We went into Europe and we picked the top carrier in each of those three countries...Now, are we married to this model? Will we do that everywhere? We're not married to any business model. What we're married to is shipping the best phone in the world [...] You might find [a country] where being exclusive might not be in our best interests...we're going to intelligently think about each one and decide what's best for the company to do.

Of course, Cook was clear that he's not saying that Apple will choose to go the non-exclusive route, but that it may be an option, given the circumstances. Given that no matter how much they make off carrier deals, Apple is above all in the business of selling iPhones, it's not surprising that they're leaving the option open.

Cook also briefly discussed third-party applications, though he declined to give specifics, saying that he wanted to leave some surprise for next week's SDK event. He also touched on iPhone inventory levels—specifically the so-called "missing million" iPhones that form the discrepancy between sold and activated iPhones. And, unsurprisingly, the COO also reiterated Apple's goal of selling 10 million units in 2008. Here's a transcript of the relevant portion:

We have a situation where we purposely rolled out iPhone in four markets...we did this at this chosen speed so we would learn and could apply those learnings to future rollouts. We are right on track where we want to be. The 4 million units we've sold over the first 200 days gives us confidence we can achieve 10 million units in 2008....We believe we're right on track for that.

So, where are the iPhones?...The demand for the iPhone is so intense in the market where we aren't officially selling that people are exporting it out of the US in many different ways and then running it on local carriers in countries where we're not officially selling it. It shows a lot of worldwide demand. [...]

There will always be some level of hacking. There will always be a case where someone wants to run on a different carrier. In the US, what we see, very few people have bought a phone to unlock it and use it on a carrier on AT&T. What's happening is people in all of these countries around the world are finding ways to get the phone in their country. Of all the problems that I might face, this is one that I face looking at with a little bit of a smile, because it means there's great demand for the phone. To have people stepping over each other to get the phone isn't a bad thing, I say.There's a full stream of the discussion at Apple, should you be interested in the entire 45-minute session, in which he also talks about Apple's stance on innovation, the Mac, Apple TV, and more.

[via BusinessWeek]

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A

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Facebook Music Rocks! Move over MySpace. Facebook is jamming to the core of your audience and DNA. Facebook Pages for musicians have existed since pages went live. But what is new is the main music page that shows a lot of the features that are available on facebook pages for music artists.

What I find interesting is that facebook is making a solid play at the core of MySpace; which is music. While it is still a bit utilitarian looking by myspace standards; I like it. I can listen to songs from the artisits, a discography catalog of all of their album/CD releases, watch videos, see photos, upload fan photos, become a fan, etc. This is cool stuff.

Only a matter of time before ticketmaster or ticketsnow becomes the gateway to purchase tickets to shows right through facebook. I can envision picking out my seats live and buying them instantly.

Image how bands and music promoters could run contests on these pages and encourage participation with rewards like VIP passes, etc. I can also see a day (tomorrow or very soon) where apps could actually become part of the consumption/participation model in conjunction with these pages.

I can also envision ways that these pages could have apps embedded and they could find interesting ways to reward & communicate with fans with video blasts, messages, etc. I could also imagine fans being able to have pre-release videos sent right to their cell phones/email.

Check out Facebook Music Pages and you can see an index of the major artists that have pages as well as the functionality that is available.

Here are a few of my favorite facebook music pages:
Bare Naked Ladies
Matchbox Twenty
Shiny Toy Guns

Note to whoever runs the Britney Spears music page: your videos do not work.

Josh sent in an excellent list of his top ten recommended Windows programs… all of which are absolutely free! Here they are, for your use if you wish.

• Audacity is a free program that allows you to edit your music and sound files. It is open source and it is very to use. For someone looking to start podcasts, this program is for you. You will get used to the features it has in a matter of minutes. This is perfect for starting off in editing music and sound files.
• Winamp is a great music player for those looking for a alternative to the common “iTunes” software. It comes with many features and plug ins as well. You can play all your music files and save play lists as well. It also plays many music files that other music software cannot normally play.
• Trillian is an all-in-one messenger that uses very little resources. It includes, MSN, AIM, ICQ, JABBER(G-Mail Chat), YAHOO, and even IRC. This is for you if you are a person that always has at least 4 messengers running at a time. There is a Pro edition to this, which is sightly better, but the basic one is just as good because it is free.
• CPU-Z is a small program that displays your current computer specs. For example, it can show you your Motherboard name and even how much RAM you have. This is good to know when you are looking for those drivers and you forgot the name of your motherboard.
• WinRAR is a great program that allows you to compress your files to a smaller file size. I suggest using this as a default compression program. There are others such as Win7, but this does the same job.
• UltraVNC is a client to server based program that allows you to access another computer. Just start the server on the computer you want to gain access to, and then use the viewer on another computer to view that computer. I suggest getting UltraVNC and not RealVNC. It seems to be faster and overall more robust.
• TrueCrypt This software allows you to encrypt any drive you want to and as you move files to that drive, the files encrypt automatically. I suggest using this if you need to keep important information away from people that want to know things.
• Skype is a voice over IP program that allows you to communicate for free for pc to pc calls. The only downside to this of course is that you need credit in order to call to land line phones. However, the price is cheap to do so.
• HiJack This will search your registry for errors and possibly anything that could be wrong with it. Not only that, it logs all of the information it changed or found.

EDITOR’S NOTE: be VERY careful when using HiJackThis. It can be a very powerful tool, and do serious damage to your computer if you don’t know what you’re doing. NEVER fix “everything” that HiJackThis finds… most of it is harmless, and even essential system files.

• SuperAntiSpyware scans your computer for known Spyware, Adware, Malware, Trojans, Dialers, Worms, KeyLoggers, HiJackers and many other types of threats, and allows you to remove or quarantine them. It offers daily (manual) definition updates, as well as home page hijack protection and customizable scan options. Furthermore, the program includes a Repair feature that allows you to restore various settings which are often changed by malware programs, but usually not corrected by simply removing the parasite. The free version lacks real-time blocking and protection as well as several other advanced options.

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Google acquired hosted wiki service Jotspot in October 2006. The service immediately stopped taking new users, although existing users were supported. Now, nearly sixteen months later, Jotspot has been relaunched under the Google Apps team, as Google Sites.

Google Sites looks absolutely nothing like Jotspot, other than the fact that both are hosted wikis. All of the structured data templates launched by Jotspot in July 2006 have been stripped out. Users now have a choice between just five basic templates - a standard wiki, a dashboard where google gadgets can be embedded, a blog-like template for announcements, a file cabinet for file uploads, and a page for lists of items. Instead of creating structured templates, users will now simply embed spreadsheets, presentations and word documents from Google Docs, as well as Google Calendars, YouTube Videos and Picasa Albums.

Like Google Docs, Google Sites wikis can be made private, shared with others, or made public. Users can select from a variety of templates, but cannot yet customize the look and feel of the site. Somewhere down the road, Google says, they’ll release an API for the new service as well. Editing is done with a rich text editor that allows for basic formatting.

Google Sites is a free product, with limitations on support and storage (10 GB). Users can upgrade their Google Apps account to a standard edition, also free, and map their own domains to the site. A premier edition is also available for $50/user/year that includes a service level agreement, support and more admin capabilities.

All wiki pages have RSS feeds associated with them to allow users to track any changes.

Existing Jotspot users will continue to be supported on the old platform for the near future, and they will also be given instructions for porting their Jotspot wikis to Google sites.

In an interview today, Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a “Microsoft Sharepoint killer” because it’s allowing businesses to collaborate without all that expensive Microsoft software. It may not be a Sharepoint killer yet, but Google Apps constitutes 2-3% of Google’s total revenues. Some point soon, its going to start hurting Microsoft.

Sample screenshots:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Ihr wisst ja, die Wikipedia auf dem iPhone finden wir klasse. Seit unserer letzten News ist das freie Projekt von Tom Haukap bereits auf Versions-Nummer 0.51 gesprungen, kümmert sich im aktuellen Release aber hauptsächlich um Fehlerbereinigungen.

Für eure Fragen haben wir der Wiki2Touch hier ein (bzw. das offizielle Wiki2Touch) Forum eingerichtet. Wer mehr Infos zur Wiki2Touch haben will, findet eigentlich alles in unserem Archiv, nur so viel: Mit Wiki2Touch könnt ihr euch die komplette deutsche Wikipedia auf das iPhone kopieren. Neben der Installation der W2T-Applikation muss dafür ein Wikipedia-Dump heruntergeladen, mit dem Indexer bearbeitet und auf das iPhone geschoben werden.
Um euch die Arbeit/Wartezeit mit dem Indexer abzunehmen haben wir die aktuelle Kopie der deutschen Wikipedia bereits für die W2T-Applikaton vorbereitet. Im Anschluss gibt es die Download-Links für das komplette 1GB-Archiv.
Zudem bedanken wir uns bei syaS. Dieser hat heute hier einen weiteren Wikipedia-Dump aus dem iFUN-Forum veröffentlicht und schreibt:

“So, neuste Version (0.50a mit WikiArchiv vom 21.02.2008) idiotensicher als Download Upload von “extracuriosity” im iFun Forum:
Hier gibt es den fertigen indexierten dump (21.2.08) zusammen mit dem app. alles ist schon in die richtigen verzeichnisse kopiert und muss nur noch in der selben ordnerstruktur auf den iPod Touch bzw. das iPhone kopiert werden. den status aller dateien bitte von hand auf 755 setzen. kinderleicht.“

(more&#8230

Apps, Download, Tipp, Wikipedia

It's no secret we're Google Reader users here at Webware. We've got a Newbie's Guide for it, and wholly recommend it to folks who want a simple feed-reading experience. That said the product is not without its faults. Earlier today we got a pitch from a cool new service called Favorit that's definitely gunning to take some market share away from Google and other Web based RSS readers. The good news is that it's got a lot of things going for it that others do not.

First things first, Favorit does all the usual things you'd expect--pulling in RSS feeds, providing a directory of new feeds, and giving you tools to share stories you like with others. But that's not what makes it different. Favorit is linked up with Disqus, a universal community discussion service we covered when it launched back in October. This means you can comment on any story on a Disqus-enabled blog right in the reader, and have it show up alongside the rest of the comments on the original story page. Compared with Google Reader, which only shows you how many comments a story has, you can actually read through comments like their own little feed--right in the reader.

That's not the coolest part, though. Favorit is set up like ReadBurner and Streamy to figure out what stories are hot, then promote them to a various hot topic pages. Each story features buttons to vote the content up or down, and even bothers to keeps track of how a story's been voted on. The system employs a small chart that evaluates those votes combined with user attention (time spent reading it) over the past 36 hours. If there were more users taking advantage of the service, it would be a fun way to track the timeline of how the popular stories get hot, similar to that cool DiggCharts visualization we checked out back in May (on a side note, DiggCharts is DOA).

Besides the comments and popular stories, Favorit has taken a nice open approach to sharing stories with others. Like Google Reader you get your own RSS feed of shared stories. You can also add other users' shared story boxes (called "slices") where you can add stories you think they'd like or set it up to automatically grab stories using Boolean values--it's like setting up a smart playlist in iTunes. Additionally Favorit incorporates several popular social publishing mediums, letting you post stories straight to Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal.

While I found Favorit to be a little less user friendly than Google Reader when it comes to adding feeds, the reading system is off to a good start. Browsing stories is very user friendly, and Google Reader users will feel right at home with similar keyboard shortcuts and tools to discover new feeds. Where the system currently falls apart is the OPML importing, and subscribing to feeds--the latter of which is nowhere to be seen. You can find feeds by searching for them and browsing the directory, but there's not a clear and easy subscribe button anywhere--something I hope will be amended.

The service is in private beta for the time being, although the creators were kind enough to provide us 200 invites for Webware readers. To manage this we've set up a form after the break and will be giving the first 200 to sign-up access.

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This week Facebook opened up its News Feed to third party services, allowing users to add content from outside sites to their Facebook feed. Third parties could already allow their users to do this by creating Facebook Apps. However now users will be able directly import these content streams by inputing their login credentials to Facebook. It's a good first step, but not enough.

We've discussed before the increasing importance that social networks are placing on feeds. In a previous post, we gave Facebook credit for introducing the paradigm with their News Feed.

While Facebook certainly led the adoption of this 'feed paradigm' in social networks, in the area of integrating external web services, Facebook clearly has lagged. Startups like Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and Iminta are integrating content streams from other services and Facebook may well be doing this to compete with those offerings.

I think FriendFeed has a slightly unique approach (see the differentiators section of our coverage on FriendFeed & my interview with two of the founders on Read/WriteTalk.) Regardless, the point is that Facebook is clearly playing catch up in this area. Also, it's worth noting that earlier this week FriendFeed announced that they had closed a $5 million series A round and have officially launched the service (it was previously in closed beta).

Not Enough ... Enable Sharing

Unfortunately, I don't believe that what Facebook is planning will be enough. Until Facebook allows users to take their Mini Feed and News Feed with them to other services, the sharing is all one way (to Facebook) and not compelling relative to these other services. Users should be able to share their Mini Feed and News Feed data back out of Facebook.

Conceptually: Attention Should be Portable

We've covered the attention economy regularly at ReadWriteWeb and encouraged these Attention Silos to open up. Interestingly, in the post on Attention Silos, Alex Iskold commented:

"Modern services like del.icio.us and Flickr recognize the importance and the benefits of being good citizens and letting other services access their information, but among older web players opening up this way is a taboo."

I find it amazing to say, but Facebook is still behaving like the 'older web players' in this area. This is especially remarkable, because Facebook has joined Data Portability Working Group. A group whose purpose is to:

"...put existing data portability technologies, techniques, policies and initiatives in context in order to facilitate translation, education, advocacy and ultimately implementation. Portability is defined as both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used."

Ultimately, these feeds are a reflection of my attention and my network's attention and conceptually I should be able to share this with any other services I choose.

Pragmatically: User Benefits

A few times I've heard Dave McClure point out that 'open isn't better nor is closed better ... better is better.' I completely agree with this. Therefore, while I think there is a solid conceptual argument for Facebook to allow users to share their News and Mini Feed, ultimately the best reasons are that both users and Facebook would benefit. Specifically, I see three benefits:

• Display Facebook activities across the web
• Accelerate learning on other web services
• Stay up to date in my feed reader / start page

Display Facebook Activities Across the Web

If Facebook was the only place on the web to interact with content, this wouldn't be meaningful. However, obviously many of us maintain other digital identities on the web such as blogs, Tumblr pages, and even other social network profiles. On these other sites, it would be great to create dynamic Facebook badges, similar to what I can do with my Twitter Badges.

Facebook would also benefit from this by increased exposure and reminders to visit the site. While they certainly aren't struggling from a lack of awareness (they're even featured in the latest iPhone ad), I'm pretty confident that these dynamic widgets would not only be valuable to users but increase engagement with Facebook.

Accelerate Learning in Other Web Services

As data flows more and more freely across the web, it's interesting to see how other web services are able to leverage interactions. The most common example, is discovering friends on one service and adding them to another service. Facebook even does this by allowing you to discover friends based on people you email with. While finding friends is a great, simple use case, the News Feed and Mini Feed are a reflection of the activities and interests of my friends and me personally. I imagine a whole ecosystem of entirely new and creative services built off interpreting these attention streams, such as product recommendations based on your behavior in Facebook.

Stay Up to Date in My Feed Reader / Start Page

I'm sure this one would be more controversial inside Facebook, but one of the reasons I log into Facebook is to check my News Feed. I would love to be able to subscribe to the News Feed in my Feed Reader so I didn't have to login exclusively for this purpose.

While this would certainly decrease the number of times I visit Facebook just to check that feed. I actually think it would increase my engagement with Facebook, because the number of meaningful visits I make to the site would increase. My reasoning is that the significant visits are when I see a friend's action that I'm interested in learning more about. I'd still see these activities and be driven to Facebook to do this investigation.

There is no doubt this would be valuable to me as a user, I actually think it also would be valuable to Facebook as well, since engagement is ultimately what matters as long as their advertising is primarily based on cost-per-action metrics.

One Challenge: Filtering

Creating filters that appropriately share the correct information is obviously going to be an important issue to work through. This is especially true with the News Feed (more than Mini Feed), because it includes other people's behavior.

The Problem with Current News Feed Filters

I highlight this because I don't find the current News Feed preferences very empowering for filtering. Only some percentage of my actions actually show up in my friend's feed and more importantly only some percentage of my friend's actions show up in my feed. The current empowerment is limited to tweaking parameters by which certain actions are chosen and others are not (see the screen shot below).

Beyond manually adjusting these preferences, Facebook also empowers their users to 'thumbs up' certain activities from their friends to indicate an interest in receiving more similar items (see the screen shot below).

I'd specifically like the ability to do at least three things:

1. see all my friend's actions that could have shown up in my feed
2. apply my own filters to the feed
3. understand why one specific item was delivered to my feed

I appreciate that the interactions are a tough to get right, however, Facebook has a lot of smart engineers and designers and I'm confident they can tackle this. Plus, I'm sure I speak for entrepreneurs everywhere when I say that any number of startups and would be happy to help.

Conclusion

Even acknowledging that the appropriate method of filtering is a difficult problem to tackle, I think Facebook has to move to completely open up the Mini Feed and News Feed for sharing across the web. This is a topic I'm sure that will come up in my upcoming panel at Graphing Social Patterns - Social Networks and the NEED for FEEDS. However, I thought it would be appropriate to attack this lack of functionality Facebook style. Therefore, I've created a group in Facebook to request it. Please consider joining the group and I look forward to your feedback in the comments below.

Full disclosure: Sean Ammirati is the co-founder of mSpoke, which makes a product called FeedHub that filters aggregated sets of content feeds. Therefore, this is an area he has a vested interest in.

From SEO Black Hat:

Google reduced the clickable area on Adsense text ads ... Before, a user could click anywhere on the ad and be brought to the destination. After the changes, users have to click on something that looks like a hyperlink.

"The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with Googles changes, Image ads on the other hand stayed the same."
- January 4th, 2008 Marcus of Plentyoffish.com

4 months later, that little back and forth in the Google Rec Room shaved about $85 Billion (with a B) in market capitalization.

But it wasn't as stupid an idea as it might seem. You see, Adsense works in a Quasi-market place environment. The market will bid up the cost per click once the adjustment for accidental clicks is readjusted. Right now, marketers should be getting a better value per click as a higher percentage of the clicks are "real" or intentional. That will lead to higher bids per click and ultimately should be close to a break even for GOOGs bottom line.

Is the Sky Really Falling?

The problem is that in the interim, GOOG gives almost not Guidance to the stock market. Mutual Fund types are really too thick to grasp exactly what's going on, so they think that this "slowing" in the growth has to do with the potential recession effecting GOOG.

Meanwhile, the real story is that Online Advertising Spending will continue to grow at about 30% per year for at least the next 3 years and GOOG is poised to take a disproportionate amount of that growth even if nothing else they do is even marginally successful.

There have been rumors circulating for over a year now that Facebook will launch a music feature. Today, Facebook announced that they will be entering the film and music business, competing directly with MySpace’s movies and MySpace’s music features. Both of these new features will be showcased at the SXSW conference next week in Austin Texas. They have also provided a new feature that enables musicians to sell their music on the site.

This new service is direct competition to MySpace and is similar to the service that I had previously announced that they would be revealing. There is no word on whether or not there will be a directory of music and film pages but my guess is that we will see the directory launched in the coming months. Facebook is rapidly launching one service after another that competes directly with MySpace while at the same time maintaining design integrity within the profiles as I announced yesterday.

Eric Eldon suggests that this film feature is an extension for Facebook beyond the alternative news platform that they’ve already generated. This is a launch into new forms of media and I would guess that we will begin seeing widespread adoption. I can see film pages and music pages becoming an integral component of profiles. I would also guess that we will see this addition within the new profile features being rolled out over the coming weeks.

Facebook has partnered with MusicToday, LLC to enable artists to sell there music, something that MySpace has been frequently criticized for. This is big news for Facebook and it will be interesting to see if these pages gain widespread adoption. To see samples of these pages check out the Facebook Film page and the Facebook Music Page.

Update
Facebook’s PR has contacted me and has said that many of these assertions are false. Ultimately Facebook made sample film and band pages. I think that their decision to publish the film and music pages and state that they would be presenting the services at South by Southwest implied that they were announcing the service. Also, they wanted me to clarify that there is no formal partnership with MusicToday, LLC and instead they were simply promoting the application created by them.

A Facebook spokeswoman stated “the pages you see are an education/marketing effort to offer resources to filmakers and musicians and not a new Facebook product.” I guess the rumors snowballed into a large story. I think Facebook’s music pages have been somewhat misleading as well.