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Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Can You Taste It?

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
This kind of data mining might make Facebook a lot of money. LinkedIn is doing it, Facebook is not doing it.

Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds
Visitors to the new Lay’s Facebook app are asked to suggest new flavors and click an “I’d Eat That” button to register their preferences. So far, the results show that a beer-battered onion-ring flavor is popular in California and Ohio, while a churros flavor is a hit in New York. ..... sets up Facebook chats between engineers and customers to help refine products. “It’s amazing that we can get that kind of real feedback, as opposed to speculating” .... Wal-Mart acquired the social media company Kosmix last year for an estimated $300 million, chiefly because of Kosmix’s ability to extract trends from social media conversations. .... “There’s mountains and mountains of data being created in social media” ..... @WalmartLabs found that cake pops — small bites of cake on lollipop sticks — were becoming popular. “Starbucks had just started getting them in their cafes, and people were talking a lot about it” ..... @WalmartLabs found that enthusiasm for “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises” was surging before the movies were released, and suggested that stores increase their orders of related merchandise. And after Walmart started carrying a spicy chip called Takis, @WalmartLabs found that most of the positive chatter about it was coming from California and the Southwest. .... Frito-Lay has already run the contest overseas, resulting in chip flavors like hot and spicy crab in Thailand and pickled cucumber in Serbia. ..... “Data can’t tell you where the world is headed” ..... using data from social media said the ability to see what consumers do, want and are talking about on such a big scale, without consumers necessarily knowing the companies are listening in, was unprecedented. “This is like the biggest focus group someone could ever imagine”
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Google Chrome 21: Can You Smell It?

google chrome
google chrome (Photo credit: toprankonlinemarketing)
21 releases already? That is fast paced innovation. Chrome has been the best browser for a while now. It's just that Internet Explorer has legacy users.

Google Chrome 21 stable release adds Retina MacBook Pro support, webcam use without plugins
Chrome 21 is now crisp and clear for those who took the plunge on Apple's new laptop but would rather not cling to Safari for the web. No matter what hardware you're using, Google has rolled in its promised WebRTC support to let webcams and microphones have their way without Flash or other plugins. Other notable tweaks like wider support for Cloud Print
New senses for the web
What if web apps could see? What if they could hear? ..... The getUserMedia API is the first step in WebRTC, a new real-time communications standard which aims to allow high-quality video and audio communication on the web

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Patent Potholes

English: Portrait of Judge Elbert Tuttle, take...
English: Portrait of Judge Elbert Tuttle, taken by United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, from here. It is a work of the federal judiciary, so it is in the public domain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Software is like music. Notes can not be patented.

Top patent court struggles to decide when software is patentable
the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that upheld a patent on the idea of using a computer to perform a particular kind of financial transaction. Now, just a couple of weeks later, the same court has reached the opposite conclusion about a patent on using a computer to manage a particular type of life insurance policy. ..... The courts have long ruled that "abstract ideas" and "mental processes" are not eligible for patent protection. And that has implications for the patentability of software. .... Every computer application, no matter how sophisticated, consists of nothing more than "the performance of repetitive calculations." .... At root, the judges of the Federal Circuit appear confused about how computers work
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Real Time



"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

We can’t entrust Twitter with the future of the real-time web
Twitter is an important development. The ability of individual users to pool their efforts to essentially document, minute by minute, every day on an Internet-connected planet Earth, is an amazing gift...... a snapshot of humanity on a speed and scale that we’ve never known in the past. .... It is either a broadcast network for brands, which happens to host conversations of individuals, or it’s a platform for discussion in which brands can take part, just like the rest of us
Trees were still falling fine before Twitter came along.

I am not at all opposed to Twitter monetizing. Twitter should make money so it can keep the service free and improve on it.

There was not only one email service. There was not only one Instant Messenger. But there is only one Twitter. I find that amazing. How do you explain that?


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August NY Tech MeetUp

Check out the 7 startups demoing at August’s New York Tech Meetup




Simple Banking

Much of banking is just moving around data. And that should be kept out of sight.

First Look: Simple Reimagines Banking
one fundamental axiom of modern life: banking sucks..... Banking sucks a lot. What’s worse, when it sucks, not only does it drive you insane, it costs you money. Lots of money. ..... they would use the large charges to make the balance fall to zero as quickly as possible, then hammer the account with the small charges to rack up overdraft fees ...... the bank’s abusive fees and seeming inability to block fraudulent charges from hitting my account — even after being notified multiple times — he was apologetic but unable to offer much help. ..... Simple, and the company’s stated goal of removing abusive fees ..... The bank’s phone support was a nightmare ..... “Simple replaces your bank, but we are not a bank.” ..... The company’s drive for simplicity permeates everything from the packaging that the card is shipped in, to the massive “Call Customer Service” button in the app, all the way to its promise to never punish its customers with hidden fees; yes, the overdraft fees that decimated my PNC account a few years back are gone. Kaput. ..... “Our stated mission is that we don’t profit from fees
There's moving around money. That's data. Then there are abusive fees. That is behavioral. And then there is customer service. Three different things, all related.

The no abusive fees part should fall in the public policy domain, one would think.

And great technology should free up resources to provide amazing customer service.


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