Web Traffic At Once

Amidst all of those tasty Apple Tablet and Microsoft Courier rumors, some very real products are preparing to enter the eReader/web-browser space.

Last week we got more information on the forthcoming Barnes & Noble eReader, and today Engadget points us towards another eReader/browser hybrid from a company called Spring Design — and this one runs on Google’s Android.

The Spring Design device is called “Alex” and like the Barnes & Noble eReader, it features a dual-screen. The top portion of the screen is a 6″ E-Ink EPD display and the lower display is a 3.5″ color LCD. This seems to be the popular work around for taking advantage of the readability and energy saving features of E-Ink, while also offering support for color graphics and multimedia.

Spring Design has patented what it calls its Duet Navigator dual-screen technology, which allows hyper-linked content and images to show-up in the lower screen, while text shows up on the EPD. Spring Design says users can toggle where data shows up in order to save battery life.

The device has both Wi-Fi and support for mobile networks like 3G, EVDO and GSM (which makes it sound like it could be customize for multiple carriers) and has an SD slot for more storage options and for viewing other media. There’s also a headphone jack, which emphasizes the multimedia nature of this type of device.

There’s no word on price or partnerships — but Spring Design says they are working with a number of content providers and plan to release it by the end of the year.

What do you think of these web browser/eReader hybrid devices? Is this something you could s

Tags: alex, android, ereader, spring design alex

Tweet This Post 

The desktop version of Waveboard for Mac, although in a very early stage, is already available for download. Official info on the app is very scarce, but some users have tried it out and called it “simple and practical”.

The same developer is currently waiting for Apple’s approval of a Google Wave client for the iPhone under the same name. You can already run Wave on your iPhone by simply accessing wave.google.com/wave from your iPhone, with mixed results (works a bit better on Nokia N900), but we expect the app to make the entire experience far smoother.

All you Mac users out there, please let us know how you like the application in the comments.

Tags: Google Wave, mac, Waveboard

Tweet This Post 

In my previous posts in the Trusted Expert series (Starts Here), I’ve mentioned the importance of press releases and how they can help you become a Trusted Expert.  Well, today I’m going to talk about them some more.  That’s how important press releases are to you and your business.  If you haven’t been taking advantage of them yet,  you need to start. Now.

Press releases have a two-fold purpose: they give you the opportunity to reach your buyers directly with news about you and your business, and they are fantastic for improving your standing wit h the search engines.

The first thing you need to do is add a press release/latest news page to your website.  This will be where you put all the press releases after you send them out.  Not only does it give your customers a chance to find all the latest information about your company, but it also indexes like mad and the search engines love it.  Just make sure that you keep updating it regularly – it won’t look good if the ‘latest news’ on your website is more than six months old.

A lot of people don’t send out press releases because they don’t think they have anything to write about.  Here are some easy ideas that anyone can use to base their press releases on:

• You’ve added a new product to your site
• You’re speaking at an industry related conference
• You’re sponsoring something or donating something
• You’ve written some Trusted Expert content
• You’ve found a new use for your product
• You’re targeting a new segment.

Once you know what to write about, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to write your press release.  When press releases were only written for the traditional press, all you had to worry about was making it interesting enough to be featured.  Now you still have to try to please the news outlets, but you also need to make sure that your press release resonates with your buyer personas.  One of the best ways to do this by including a special offer that appeals specifically to your personas and will compel them to take action, whether that’s going to your site, signing up for a newsletter, or buying a product.

So, to recap, here’s what you need to do to get started using press releases to make you a Trusted Expert:

• Add a press release/latest news page to your website.
• Come up with a list of reasons to write a press release.
• Figure out what offer you’re going to use to compel your buyers to take action.

In the next post in the series, we’ll go over the more technical details of an online press release, like keyword targeting and density, optimizing the press release for search, and the social media release.

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Tweet This Post 

Recently, Microsoft and T-Mobile had a very embarrassing episode: after a server failure, Sidekick data was lost for a portion of users, and originally Microsoft had said that the data was lost forever.

Shortly after that, Microsoft announced that they were able to recover “most, if not all” of the lost customer data. Now, if you’re one of the users who’ve been affected by this incident, you’ll be happy to know that your data will be restored soon.

From Microsoft’s official announcement on the matter:

“We continue to make steady progress, and we hope to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter.”

Sounds encouraging; if you’re one of the affected Sidekick users, please let us know how the data restoration process is going.

Tags: microsoft, sidekick, T-Mobile

Tweet This Post 

On Thursday  WolframAlpha launched its developer API, which should allow large and small developers (as well as businesses and educational institutions) to harness the power of the computational knowledge engine to enhance their own applications or products. Today, the WolframAlpha iPhone app (iTunes link) — which was built using the new API — was released to the App Store.

The application is pretty advanced, as its $49.99 price-tag suggests. Before your jaw drops over the price, keep in mind that this is much more than just a mobile version of the website. It’s a high end graphing calculator (that supports discrete number theory, Calculus derivative and plotting of functions), an almanac, a currency/unit converter and a pretty sophisticated stock analysis tool. And that’s just the beginning.

High Powered Proof of Concept

The buzz over Wolfram Alpha has always centered around its potential. After all, combining statistical, factual and scientific information with human-language requests is an impressive feat. However, actually showcasing the use cases for that potential has been difficult.

With the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app, the company has not only showed off what is capable with the API, but it has delivered a very good example of what is possible with the ever-increasing data engine that backs Wolfram Alpha’s core.

For instance, check out this query from the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app. Here, I typed in “MSFT vs. apple vs. IBM” and what I get back is a very high-level comparison of the companies’ financial data. Stock price, overall market cap, P/E ratios and graphs showing off revenue and stock performance are displayed quickly and in a very, very readable way.

All of this data was available in a few seconds, which is much faster than the time it would take to create these charts in a spreadsheet or to try to track down pre-made comparison data.

Examples

Music, Film and Book Data

Entering in  song titles can bring up who wrote the song, its history on the music charts, associated acts and other information. Presently, the song database seems pretty limited to older songs (I had very little luck with newer material), but the information is interesting and accurate. Check out “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles:

Films and books work the same way. Entering in film title will bring up the release date, estimated gross (not-adjusted for inflation), cast and crew information and more. If there are multiple queries that answer a certain question (for instance, “Fight Club” is both a book and a film), you can choose what information you want to see.

Historical Date Information

Entering in specific date can bring up a wealth of information. For instance, I entered in my birthday, November 12, 1982, and this is what I got back:

I can even get the sunrise and sunset data from my current location (which also happens to be the location where I was born), which is interesting information.

Mortgage Calculations

The Wolfram Alpha iPhone app has one of the best mortgage calculators I’ve ever used. You can enter in the amount of your loan, your interest rate and the time on your loan and get a breakdown of your monthly payment, total amount of interest paid and total paid for the house. You can also choose an adjustable-rate mortgage and control the loan or sale amount and other options like taxes, balloon payment info and an interest-only period.

Then, Wolfram Alpha runs a mortgage simulation showing what different low, medium or high interest rate scenarios (for an adjustable-rate mortgage), for instance.

These aren’t difficult calculations, but seeing everything visualized in charts and tables makes the information much more digestible. Plus, entering in a query like “$200k mortgage at 5% for 40 yrs” is much easier than having to do all the calculations by hand.

Who Needs a Graphing Calculator When You Have an iPhone?

The mathematical functions of the Wolfram Alpha app are in a league of their own. When the Wolfram team told me that the app could replace a graphing calculator, I was a bit skeptical, because I have experience using high-end $150+ calculators in high school and college, and I wasn’t sure that the data output would be as robust.

I was wrong. For students who already have an iPhone or iPod touch who need a graphing calculator for a high school or college math class — this $50 iPhone app might just save you money and give you more options (but make sure you can use it in class and that you have an Internet or data connection available to you).

Check out some of these examples:

Scratching the Surface

These examples only scratch the surface of what the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app can do. The application can display demographic and census information, population data, do unit conversions, solve Physics and Chemistry equations and provide information on chemical compounds, and even show domain information.

The fact that all of this is powered by Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge engine is pretty amazing. We knew this thing had potential, but wow!

Who This App is Aimed At

At $50, this app is not for everyone. From my uses, students in advanced math classes (I would have killed for this in high-school and I had a TI-89, which was the super-calculator of its time), people who do lots of data analysis, financial analysts (really analysts of almost any kind) are the most likely to find this application useful. The mathematical and scientific information is really outstanding and it’s pretty mind-blowing the sorts of data you can extrapolate and the sorts of information that you can get back.

Ultimately, this app showcases the very real potential Wolfram Alpha has. Whether that potential will ever be useful in an everyday way to consumers, I’m not sure — but to me, it seems clear that the underlying technology could make a great asset to a variety of products and services.

Tags: iphone, mathematics, wolfram alpha, wolfram-alpha iphone

Tweet This Post 

Does your email address reveal something about your credit score? According to Credit Karma, an online credit checking service, it might.

The company has taken data from its users and split it up by email address, finding that Yahoo Mail users have the lowest credit scores of all. Bellsouth and Comcast users have the highest credit ratings, while GMail users rank third. MSN, Hotmail and AOL users take 4th, 5th and 6th position respectively.

Assuming the data is accurate (and the sample size is large enough – 20,000 credit scores), the more interesting question is why. Could it be because AOL, MSN and Yahoo email addresses are often linked to IM accounts, where the demographics skew younger? Do those who use their ISP-provided email address skew older? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

[via HN]

Tweet This Post 

The iPhone will soon see a fresh challenge with the imminent launch of the Motorola Droid, and Verizon is set to market the phone with a series of anti-iPhone attack ads titled “Droid Does“. The first ad rolled out tonight, directly picking on the iPhone’s most commonly-cited shortfalls: lack of flash, no replaceable battery, lack of a tactile keyboard and more. The counter on the DroidDoes site appears to count down to October 30th, according to BGR, meaning the iPhone could have some legitimate competition going into the holiday shopping season.

The Droid features a 5-megapixel camera (with a flash), runs Google Android 2.0, supports multi-tasking, includes both a tactile keyboard and touch screen and (we think) isn’t the ugliest phone in the world either. The marketing campaign, meanwhile, hits Apple at its core: the company’s minimalist philosophy does away with extra features in favor of simplicity.

Could the Droid be the become the poster-child of great Android phones and a true challenger to the iPhone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

[images courtesy BoyGeniusReport]

Tags: android, droid, droid does, motorola droid, verizon

Tweet This Post 

In February of this year, Adam Carolla, the former co-host of Loveline and The Man Show, was out of a job after his morning radio show, The Adam Carolla Show, was cancelled. Instead of wandering around waiting for his next gig though, Adam launched The Adam Carolla Podcast just three days after his cancellation.

The result? Over a million downloads in the first week, and it only grew from there. His show is now the most popular podcast on iTunes with millions of downloads every month.

His jump from the radio world to the social media world has been an interesting one, so were decided to sit down with Adam at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas to see just how he built the show, what he thinks of social media, and…what his dating turn-ons are.

We hope you enjoy the interview. You may want to skip to about 3 minutes in if you want to skip Adam’s impromptu dating video (though it is hilarious). We covered a lot of different bases with the comedian:

Tags: Adam Carolla, interview, podcasting

Tweet This Post 

Welcome to the Lunchtime Poll: Weekend Edition! If you’ve been following along with our weekly lunchtime polls, you’ll know what this is all about. If you’re new to the lunchtime poll, it’s all very simple: we ask you a question, and you answer it!

As it turns out, it seems like a lot of people enjoy being asked what they think (who knew?), so we’re keeping the tradition alive with the occasional special Weekend Edition.

Are you in? Let’s get on with this weekend’s question, prompted by a study we wrote about earlier this week showing how much time per month users spend online. The average monthly figure for September 2009 was 68 hours, which includes both work and home internet time. Are you above average? Below? Head on down to the comments and let us know:

How much time do you spend online per month?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ericsphotography

Tags: lunchtime poll, online, poll

Tweet This Post 

These here pastures are changing a wee bit as a result of focus and direction. One of the changes that I am implementing right away is the elimination of Full Page Ads or “Review Me Posts”.

What this comes down to is I want to focus on writing things that offer value, not advertisements and it is too hard to balance that when some one pays you cash to review their site. The fact is I do not have the time to write everyday as it is and it is not really fair to you the reader if you are not getting what you signed up here for.

Now since this is such a short post, here is a joke to hopefully put a little smile on your face:

A blonde, wanting to earn some money, decided to hire herself out as a handyman-type and started canvassing a wealthy neighborhood. She went to the front door of the first house and asked the owner if he had any jobs for her to do.

“Well, you can paint my porch. How much will you charge?”

The blonde said, “How about 50 dollars?” The man agreed and told her that the paint and ladders that she might need were in the garage. The man’s wife, inside the house, heard the conversation and said to her husband, “Does she realize that the porch goes all the way around the house?”

The man replied, “She should. She was standing on the porch.”

A short time later, the blonde came to the door to collect her money.

“You’re finished already?” he asked. “Yes,” the blonde answered, “and I had paint left over, so I gave it two coats. “Impressed, the man reached in his pocket for the $50. “And by the way,” the blonde added, “that’s not a Porch, it’s a Ferrari.”

Have a great weekend

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved

Tweet This Post