Entries Tagged 'Internet and web' ↓

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Net savvy: India surges by 27%, 28mn surf net

India way above Taiwan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore. Indian net user base increased by 27 pc this year nearing over 28 million users. Asia overall had a growth of 14% closing around 319 million users. In Asia Pacific the top 5 countries are China, Japan, India, South Korea and Australia. If you compare India and China numbers, even by the modest of the estimates there is a potential of Indian subscribers to grow 4x. In reality for next 5-10 years we should see y-o-y growth of around 20% atleast. This means a big business for ISPs & Telco’s in India. The current Internet pentration levels in India leave a lot of scope for the growth story to continue. Indian’s are not only getting on to commerce on the net but are also spending quite a lot of time now on social web. On a daily basis we are also adding lot of first timers on the net who will start off with their first mail on the web.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Cerius Shah writes about JuxtConsult’s report on India Internet Usage Trends.I was trying to know what it would mean from a product manager’s point of view. My observations are not limited to this report but how one should interpret such report and how to make sense for you own products. These reports are highly useful for any Internet company if you draw the right conclusions. In past 10 years I have understood that Reports & Survyes are like modern art paintings, for some it doesn’t make any sense for others it surely does.

Also, I am not critical of this report as others are. Why ? I have carried two/three surveys myself and I know it would take some super solid psychiatrist & mathematician to give you even the accuracy of 80%. But people who actually work on products know the 80-20 percent rule and would know what to understand from this. Also this report is based on what users claim and not what JuxtConsult claims.

Growth Indicator

If India Internet Urban Usage grew by 19% percent treat it as a figure like - GDP ; this doesn’t mean that your product’s growth rate has to be the same. It just means in a vast pool, some few more buckets were added. This data is more relevant for the established products categories like search engines & horizontal portals and they would see the year-on-year impact of this trend. A product in a growth stage has nothing to do with this. It’s just an indicator that market is performing well.

Daily Users

This is the bread and butter of any web site. This number you should never reveal to the outside world but keep it close to your heart and self-introspection. This is true both for open sites and for sites with authentication, and if you are not seeing growth in this you are in serious trouble. You would be surprised to know that majority of the Indian Net Users fall into once in a month & once in one/two weeks. So understand the classification of various types of users and how you can boost their usage and force them to come to your site.

Yeah! Social Media

81% of the users use social media platform. Now nobody seems to agree with my definition of social media so there you suffer. Please read this data as UGC data and I am sure even that would be wrong, why ? I would never treat chatting as social media, just remove those users from this and you would see a grand dip in this 81%. But that’s not the problem with JuxtConsult, it’s the problem with Internet Industry - we have removed the intelligence and representation from the word ’social’ & ‘media’. Anything and everything is social these days and anything and everything shouts to be media these days.

Top 5 activities

India is still at the very nascent stage of the growth (considering our overall population). If this is 10th year of your Internet usage, for majority of new Internet population they just figured out how to click compose and send. The Internet in India will be still be dominated by people who provide search & email and are better in doing that. I would not doubt the Top 5 activities cited in this report: Emailing (91%), Job Search (72%), Messaging (70%), Reading News (63%) and Sports (57%). But I may want to replace sports with Movies. But users tend to bring more of their serious or active side on the net.

Preferred Location

What does this mean for you as a product manager. This shapes your peak traffic during the day and gives you highs/low over the weekend. But again this is required to super fine tune the performance of your site and only meant for people with deep understanding of the product and their users. Most of the others should not feel too happy or sad to know what it means.

Net Access Points

Do not think at all from net access point of view when you are working on a product. Just ask yourself, is your service worth and/or really usable on mobile. There is no need to grab the share of the mobile usage if that share is going to be absolutely pathetic. Focus on maintaining the growth story of your core offering be it web or mobile. 0% web & 100% mobile or 100% web & 0% mobile both product scenarios are possible.

Top of the mind recall

Try to list down the reasons why these companies are there and now try to see if something is applicable to your products and market. Don’t take this too seriously though, some brands can feature here because they just had a big advertising campaign and therefore the recall might be high. And also, when you ask somebody a question he would dare not show his/her ignorance and would always come up with something from TV/Newpaper if nothing was available from his/her actual keyboard.

Popularity: 39% [?]

Why Google News has no noise:

Robert Scoble is happy with the Noise in Twitter and finds it better than Google News or Techmeme. This forces me to think.

• What is news, is it 140 character headline or the complete coverage.
• On one hand, we talk about degrading values of  media and journalism and on the other hand - anything and everything is now News
• Are we removing fact checking, reporting and analysis from News & making it a Arm Chair Journalism
• What qualifies News - would be harmful to our future, if we remove the validity of the source and authority from it.
• What impact will it have on a fresh talented journalist, who wants to report ‘real news’ - he will find himself totally defeated as nobody is interested in his analysis but just the buzz.

But whatever Scoble says - he is saying it from his own personal experience and the kind of ecosystem he is part of on Twitter. Top bloggers like him have covered and provided insights on many a things that traditional media would not be able to as these guys are the extreme examples of early adoptors and have a unique style and vision. Twitter suits perfectly in this environment - to track the buzz in real time as it is happening and not like other mediums - tracking the buzz when it has happened.

But News is not just picking the buzz, it’s about the semantics that it encloses within it. A take on it’s past, present and future and it’s relation with the society. Out society in general, is well updated but not well informed.

Technology has changed the production (traditional media vs social media) and the distribution (agents to social bookmarkers, bloggers, diggers, twitterers) but one thing it has not created any significant impact on - is the quality of the News and the quality of readership.

Popularity: 68% [?]

Messenger TV comes to India - Now you can watch videos available on MSN Videos (India) with you friends and buddies through Windows Live Messenger

How to enable Messenger TV in Live Messenger:

1. In Internet Expolorer go to Tools > Internet Options > General > Languages : Change your language to English(India) [en-IN]
2. Go to MessengerTV’s India page and follow the steps to add MessengerTV Agent as your buddy in Live Messenger.
3. Sign-in to Windows Live Messenger and start chatting with a friend you would like to watch videos with. Double click on your friends’ name and open the chat window.
4. Click on the ‘Activities’ menu button on the toolbar above the chat window. Select ‘Messenger TV’ to send an invite to your friend.
5. Start sharing loads of great MSN videos!

What all things you can watch with your friends:

All the cool stuff that MSN Video - India has :). Video clips available across the channels like News, Entertainment, Music, Lifestyle, Specials and Sports.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Ani S writes this interesting story of how he still remembers the handwritten letters from the parents and ponders what is he leaving behind for his kids.

Remembering the times- when not so long ago - we were kids, and the postman used to drop that blue inland letter from Baba to Papa. Or that postcard that Maama write to Ma on Rakhi with the Money order. I still remember reading thru them - again and again. Though i rarely met Baba - we lived so far off - but i knew him through his letters. Even after so many years, i still remember how he used to start his letters lovingly addressing his son. And when the new years used to come - our homes used to be full of those cards - handmade, or otherwise. As years have passed, when I have my kids - these things seem something like history. In an age of mobiles and mails - and low tariffs of airtimes for both local and international calls - i guess we all have stopped writing letters - or even writing for that matter.

I didn’t get that many chances to write to my parents, as I was always with them. But sometimes when they used to go for a long vacation at our native place, we used to write to them. Our used to be a community letter where my elder brother used to start the letter, my sister in law used to write in between and I used to close with a short paragraph in the end. It used to be a blue inland letter available at 75ps, if I remember correctly. Otherwise, I have written lots of such letters to my other relatives and I remember writing on occassions like Diwali was used to be quite an affair.

Till some time ago we still used to send Diwali greeting cards to our relatives with some special personal message which was contextual to their lives and really enjoy it. Though my parents used to hunt for cards with more religious touch , I managed to convert them to cards created by NGO’s like HelpAge and Cry.

But I just realized after reading Ani’s post that I no longer do this and send a twitterish 140 charcter SMS, which is again just the foward of the best Diwali SMS that I receive from others.

But sometimes the warm is in the message and not the medium. I have moved to Bangalore but still call my old friends, neighbors and relatives from Bombay and I really love it when I can sing ‘Happy Birthday To You !!!" exactly at 12.01 am in the midnight and be the first one to wish my special and dear ones. The best moments of the life can be captured any where and memory can take any shape. I have some good ones captured and pixalized on my hard disk :). The handwritten warmth is taking a new form and shape over the emails, sms, instant messengers, photos, social networks and many many more things. You just need to pour your heart out on the keyboard.

Popularity: 38% [?]

I couldn’t find the online version of the article but read two articles in TOI related to topics that I was thinking lately - Screensumer.

Time to master the digital distraction - To tackle the information overload, experts see a rising push to manage the new tech tools. And here is the quote from futurist Simeon Spearman.

When you see the demands we put on computers these days and how much they can process, you begin to understand just how much we’re being hit by all the time

The other TOI article I could locate on NYTimes - In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Popularity: 58% [?]

Barcamp Bangalore 6 is happening on 19th and 20th April at IIMB. Visit the website and checkout how you can contribute - by attending, by volunteering or simply by blogging about it. Such camps are collective and democratic effort. Come here, share your experiences, learn from others or just mix and connect with some like minded people. You can visit the Sessions page to know about what will be discussed and who are all going to talk at this event. But of course you will come across many more interesting people and can have a nerdy chat or fume about Bangalore Airport, Autowallas and traffic conditions also.

Now my story:

There are many exiting techie events happening from a quite some time now. But due to my work schedule and maramari in Mumbai, I was never  able to make it to any such events. Now that I am in Bangalore and life is much more peaceful, wanted to attend and did some twittering around to find about such happening stuff in Bangalore.

And guess what ? -  some good friends immediately replied back with a twitter. First was @aDese (blog) who had desiged a poster for Barcamp Ahmedabad and she informs that  Barcamp Mumbai Edition 3 is coming up on 29th. You should also visit her interesting blog and know her success story through such Ahmedabad event.

The second guy who replied back to me was @adityamishra (blog)who is actually the planner of Barcamps in Bangalore and Mumbai. Not only did he quench my thirst for info, he was also kind enough to connect me with others.

Thanks Aditi and Aditya, it’s nice to meet you and yes yes now I admit that Twitter is some serious stuff too.

Popularity: 68% [?]

Dear Indian Blogosphere friends, since I was handling my own products most of the time, my learning and observations were limited to the scope of work that I was doing and my deadlines . Would really like to understand from you if you have spotted some wonderful stuff in the Indian Internet Market for the following

1. Web Directory - Something like Dmoz. Nothing comes to my mind when I think of this.
2. Classifieds - Like Craigslist - Thousands and millions of them, but I almost end up calling Just Dial.
3. Search - Already done by Google, Yahoo and MSN. The rest that we have doesn’t give me something special, that I won’t find here. Which one do you use which is uniquely Indian.
4. Social News - Not like social gossip, I mean real news like OhMyNews
5. Tech Community - Millions of developers & IT professionals, what is there home page, where do they interact ? Where do they slashdot
6. Jobs - Naukri you are a rockstar !!!. Actually you, Jobsahead and Monster do such a excellent job that there are no further invention in this space.
7. Social Networks - A real, pure, raw, arrogant, desi twist. Not another mai-bhi orkut and facebook types.
8. Blogs - After changing 3 CMSs and at least 5 domains, finally I have a permanent place to call my home at my own domain now. Just within a month of active blogging, spotted couple of few cool blogs from Gaurav Mishra, Rajesh Lalwani, Rajesh Jain, Atanu Dey, Dina Mehta, Amit Agarwal, Kiruba and many others. Can you please share some few more.
9. Blog aggregator - I have seen many Indian blog aggregators come and go, which is the place where you belong
10. Events - There are so many blogcamps, barcamps and such. Really the cool ones but stupid me, I always end up checking that place few months later. Where do I find these updates, all at one place. Please recommend

Please don’t limit your comments, suggestions and feedback to this. Any insights, observations for Indian Internet would be very helpful to me or the readers. You can post in the comment, write on your blog, buzz me on twitter:@santoshmaharshi or hotmail:santosh_maharshi me.

Thanks in advance

Popularity: 71% [?]

So SEO is already gone semantic ? Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about semantic web seo service Semantify by Dapper.net and Deepak Singh has some more bytes. Yahoo had also spoken about semantic SEO recently. Michael Martinez throws some light on the meaning of semantic web from SEO perspective and Michael Marshell on its impact on search marketing. Frederick Townes explains that it is more about indexing content and not just keywords. Peasonified has the definitive guide to semantic markup. And found this slide on Deepak’s blog which is from Dapper’s team:

A brief history of SEO from WWW to RDF, Microformats and SPARQL can be traced through these slides:

Popularity: 49% [?]

Grassroots means involving the common people to form a group for fundamental political, economical or any other group. Here are some examples of Grassroots deployment or use of Internet and Web technologies.

Wikileaks : The whistle-blowing Web site allows sources all over the world to securely and anonymously leak a variety of material from military training manuals to evidence of corporate malfeasance.[via DailyTitan]

Defective By DesignIt is an anti-digital rights management (DRM) initiative by the Free Software Foundation. DRM technology, dubbed "digital restrictions management" by opponents, restricts users’ ability to freely use their purchased movies, music, literature and software in ways they are accustomed to, with ordinary non-restricted media. [Via Wikipedia]

Web Standards Project: The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

Free Cycle: It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.

Global Giving: ‘intelligent’ philanthropy. You choose the project you care about. You give online. Your money goes directly to the project.Smart and simple.

Freerice.com - Improve vocabulory and donate rice each time you crack a word [Via @ragahavs]

Our Media: Grassroots media initiative, allows free hosting for video and podcast producers.

Grassroots.org : Mission from site: To serve as a catalyst for positive social change by leveraging modern technologies and business best practices.Our ultimate goal is to adopt 10,000 nonprofit members, and to provide them each with an average of $10,000 of services per year at no charge (for a total savings of $100 million per year!).

IT & Grassroots Democracy: A Case Study of Environmental Activism in China by Guobin Yang

Grassroots.com: Grassroots for enterprise. From communications strategy, blog strategy to products and cause marketing.

WorldChanging.com: From the site: WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Grassroots Campaign : Grassroots Campaigns, Inc. (GCI) is an independent, for-profit organization that does strategic consulting, fundraising, and field organizing for causes and candidates. They run face-to-face fundraising operations in neighborhoods and in high-traffic public venues to fundraise and build support for political groups, issues, and campaigns.[Via Wikipedia]

SRISTI: A non-governmental organisation setup to strengthen the creativity of grassroots inventors, innovators and ecopreneurs engaged in conserving biodiversity and developing eco-friendly solutions to local problems. [Via ThinkChange India]

IndyMedia: Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.

Tools for powering up and create your own grassroots initiative on the web:

Google Non-profits: Learn how to use free Google tools to promote your work, raise money, and operate more efficiently.

CivicSpace: Powering social change: A port of popular content management system Drupal but geared more towards promoting cause, communities, volunteering, events, discussions. This content management system is a great tool of non-profits and grassroots as a out-of-the-box solution. Try a demo here

Grassroots Real Time Collaboration Tools: Robin Good’s presentation of grassroots collaboration tools Traits and tools for virtual team workers. Jonathon has picked up the products listed in Robin Goods presentation and consolidated here

(Book) We The Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People By Dan Gillmor

Some more examples of Grassroots web initiatives:

Open source and grassroots media projects: A huge list of Open source projects and grassroots media initiatives

Social Change Websites:Social Change Websites is a directory of the best nonprofit, grassroots, and advocacy campaign websites dedicated to making a difference in the world. A nice site with categories so that you can find the grassroots in the area of your interest.

Popularity: 42% [?]

User generated is not limited to content, now it’s user generated mashup everywhere. User are building search engines like Mahalo and now the mashups is the lates hit. Microsoft Popfly and Yahoo Pipes are such examples and now we have Intel’s Mash Maker which I spotted on Kate Greenes article on Technologyreview

A new research project from Intel Research, in Berkeley, CA, is trying to take some of the mystery out of crafting a mashup. Called Mash Maker, the project aims to let people use their ordinary Web browsers to combine information from different sites. If, for example, you are looking at apartments on Craigslist, you can easily add information about nearby restaurants from Yelp, a recommendation site, essentially augmenting the data on the Craigslist page. With another few clicks of a button, you can put the apartments and Yelp listings on a Google map, which will also appear within the Craigslist page. The next time you visit the Craigslist page, you can reopen the mashup, and it will automatically use new data from the site. The idea, says Robert Ennals, is to let people create their own custom-made Web. "Right now, the Web is a collection of islands; each has its own information, but they aren’t really interconnected and personalized for you," he says. "We’re trying to move to where the Web is a single source of interconnected knowledge, presenting information that you want to see the way you want to see it."

The web is really getting user centric. When I think of future I really wonder what would be the future ecosystem like. What about the usual gateways of the web - search engines, directories and social web ? Is the future of web really personal, personal islands of web connected through semantics. In that case, the definition of social networks will change and if you really think deeper the future of social network is not on web. Where it is then ? Well that’s a secret, post your thoughts. Clue - it’s the stuff that you already now and use on a daily basis

Popularity: 30% [?]

Found these excellent articles all on the same day :). Must reads…

• Top 10 Brand Measures by Brad
• Chris Anderson on the Two Dimensions of Quality on Jonathan Mendez’s blog
• What great design is and isn’t by Olivier Blanchard.
• Startups That Fail to Invest in Trust Will All Die by Steve Rubel

Popularity: 25% [?]

Yes, I precisely wanted this to explain to myself and the web users what would be the impact of Health 2.0 on the health system. I knew why Health 2.0 would succeed as it would tackle the issues faced in the current health system, but I am not or I was not sure how it can impact the health system. I still feel it’s a long way to go and we will have to wait for the serious impact of Health 2.0 on the health care system, but it’s not too much to hope for and it can of course be a reality sometimes. Scott Baradell explains it nicely on his blog:

And yet, despite the sneers and snubs, I now believe more strongly than ever that Health 2.0 is the disruptive innovation that is going to turn the U.S. healthcare system on its head — and ultimately, save it from itself. Health 2.0 will give doctors more time with patients. Health 2.0 will give patients control over their own health records. Health 2.0 will eliminate those annoying clipboard moments at the doctor’s office. Health 2.0 will make sure we don’t mix the wrong drugs. Health 2.0 will give people access to "been-there buddies" who can provide the support they need during the darkest periods of their lives. And Health 2.0 can help people to save money on prescription drugs, too. What we’ve seen so far is just the beginning.

Scott almost steals the word from my mouth, as couple of things I would want from the system are. (I have parents who are diabetic and hypertensive, my mom was miraculously saved from a paralytic attack and this is what I felt while going through the problem myself)

Consultative Doctors: What Scott terms as ‘more time with patients’. This is the biggest problem that I have faced, some doctors with lack of their consultative approach make you feel miserable even if there is nothing wrong and on the other hand if the doctor gives you a proper time and consultation may make your feel really strong and prepared even if you are facing the worst. This is the reason which drives people towards web searching and self-help as they are not satisfied and seeking out an answer to the question they themselves don’t know.

Preventive Vs Curative: Almost 100% of the preventive health care today is centered around treatment and curing, very little towards preventive. A hot babe who just passed out from a six-months hot pants aerobics or yoga course doesn’t qualify as the health care expert for me. I really wish serious medical students getting into health care, people not just with b***s and biceps but with real brains and experience. Preventive health care has been just reduced to the measurement of carbs and proteins and pumping iron. Preventive health care would really be preventive when you would see your MD helping you with those extra sets and running besides you. The preventive health care would also need to tackle the wholesome health - diet, activity, mind and soul.

How web is helping now and what are the challenges: Web has helped people find out about their issues and the semantics around that issue - treatment, precautions, therapies and all. Web has also helped people be proactive about their health and if you look at sites like Yogajournal, Men’s Health and WebMD you can really find that information which was never available to you, it’s professional and it’s free. But it has also triggered the rise of fakes who are trying all the tricks in the books to cheat you, not just with your money but with your life. I am positive that Health 2.0 would not just tackle the problem in the real world but also the problems on the web and make it more sane, meaningful, authentic and realible - that’s what you want from things that matters to your life.

Some of the other things that I hope for from Health 2.0:

-  Health 2.0 should be not be just limited to people with access to web, it should be really at the grass-roots level. Something like Graamin Bank, where people carry it to the people who want health advice and treatment desperately. Health 2.0 should cover the haves and haves not and break the health care divide that exists not just in developing countries but also in the most developed nations.

- Health 2.0 should not be perceived as the threat to the professional medical system. There are millions of serious health care practitioners who people really respect and treat them as the GODs. Health 2.0 should be perceived as the helpful medium and the technology enabler which would allow these practitioners to treat their patients more effectively.

- Health 2.0 need not be just patient to patient, doctor to patient or patient to doctor medium. The power of Health 2.0 will be that it would be a platform for medical professionals, where they would be able to interact with each other, share the experience, bring up the issues and help each other out.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Richard Waters writes an excellent article on world-wise web, also known as Semantic web, proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who had also invented the present web. The article talks about the various development around the semantic web and the companies who are contributing towards buildling it up.

From Wikiepdia - Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows:

“ I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

From the article:

Imagine, for instance, being able to ask a computer, “Where should I go on holiday?” and receiving an answer that is as suitable as anything you could have come up with yourself. That level of computer-generated reasoning is on the horizon, says Nova Spivack, one of the entrepreneurs involved. It may still take 15 years or more to be fully realised, but between now and then lies a series of breakthroughs that will revolutionise the way we draw information from the web, he adds. This technology draws its inspiration, and some of its techniques, from a field that has provided more than its fair share of disappointments over the years: artificial intelligence (AI). Based on a collection of technologies that includes natural language processing, image recognition and expert systems (programs that try to emulate the skills of experts), AI is a 50-year-old dream that was meant to lead to intelligent machines.

Paul Miller had a discussion on semantic web with the man himself and puts across couple of insights on his blog

How the Semantic Web will benefit the user ? : Michael Marshall discusses what will be the impact on search marketing . Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks and inventor of the term Web 3.0, gives a micro-interview to Tassilo Pellegrini on the logic of versioning the internet, popularizing the Semantic Web and the secrets of the Radar Networks Laboratories.

 

Tim’s Video on Semantic Web

Popularity: 33% [?]

Met Tim Napoleon at Akamai’s user forum in Mumbai, yesterday. Tim spoke about the future of HD on web and how Akamai can help realize that. You can check out the HD web proof of concept on loveearth.com.

HDTV is defined by the industry to be video with significantly high pixel resolution of 1080i, 1080p or 720p. In the broadcast world, the industry is undergoing a series of transformations that are standardizing the delivery of high-definition video to the home. For the Internet, Akamai is making the HD web possible by continuing to refine the infrastructure required to bring the HDTV experience to online audiences. Additionally, Akamai will continue to lead this effort with new service launches, device integration, and partnerships with technology vendors, expected in the coming months. Akamai has architected its platform to comply with the following technical criteria that content owners must leverage to successfully enable an HD web. Akamai believes that it is the first and only platform to meet these technical requirements which include offering:

- Technology and an operational model to operate serving devices in the largest high-throughput networks around the world (servers need to be physically in the networks, as that is where the capacity lies)

- Established relationships with the largest high throughput networks Support for delivery, storage, and management of files greater than 2 Gigabytes

- Support of VC-1 and MPEG-4 video standards, achieving visual parity with other broadcast video networks Support for files with resolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p

- Client-side technology that is deeply integrated into its delivery system to be deployed as appropriate

Tim also shared some best practices for producing on demand video on web.Tim likes photography and spicy Indian food

Popularity: 38% [?]

Alex Moskalyuk points to this iCrossing study - how america searches for health and wellness. Almost 41% of online users used the Web to self-diagnose or self-treat a condition. I feel it’s mainly due to the rising health care costs and lack of guidance and support from the health care professionals. The most important attribute for any health care professional is to offer consultancy, how often do you get that advice from the doctor. Most of the expertise is focussed around treating and curing and not towards preventive health care. Preventive health care is becoming a luxurious ’spa’ like industry or sweat it out ‘gymming’ industry, with 1000s of newbies posing as the ‘health experts’. Where is the preventive or the most common health knowledge in the public domain ?. Most importantly, where is the ‘care’ in the health care ‘industry’. I have parents with diabetes and BP and had to change 3 doctors and finally get to the 4th one who offered not just medicines but advice and consultation too.

Problem with health information available online: How many users can really make out that the page they are on is researched or a professional material like a journal or something like MensHealth. There are thousands of content posers in this domain who have a ‘professional looking’ blog or a product page and directing you towards the ads of dubious companies. This trend is not good for people, if they start following the advices or products that they get online. The problem is not finding the information, its about the right information from a right source - the information that you can trust.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Photo Credit: Stephen

Ian Harvey writes an apt article on mobile web a case of delayed gratification

Most users see the mobile Web as a novelty, and not a necessity. They face frustratingly slow load times and expensive data charges when they navigate to feature-rich pages that, by comparison, pop up in an instant on their PCs. To complicate things further, users have their choice of hundreds of different mobile devices, two major operating systems, 40 different browsers and four mobile Web platforms.

Standardization: This is the most difficult of all, different browsers, different mobile OSs and different screen sizes. The biggest problem is different handset resolutions and expectations. If your handset supports ‘web’ it doesn’t mean it would look good too. My best experience on net has been so far on my HTC touch phone with Windows Mobile 6. The handset makers have to market their handsets appropriately, common mobile cannot be a replacement for a computer

Connection / Mobile operators as the gateways: In Indian markets, the mobile operators are just pushing ring tunes and other not so serious VAS stuff. And they also think that they can provide content on their own. They would have a better business if they focus of becoming a gateway to the mobile web world and partner with web content providers. By this, the web content providers won’t have the problem of competing with Mobile operators and would have a incentive to provide much better experience to the mobile web users, as they would have a better traffic.

Popularity: 37% [?]

UK is thinking about the proposal to ban the users who download the illegal stuff from the net and this will be done through the ISPs. It will be a legistlation that ISP have to block the users making the illegal download. This is not only a privacy violation but also would be a big headache for the ISP and the general public. What if your 10 year old down downloads a illegal game or what is some technically challenged employ of yours downloads a illegal software utility from the web. If the blocking happens to these kind of incidents then the whole office / home at a loss.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Ben Macklin and Karin von Abrams, Senior Analysts on Emarketer throw up some interesting data on Europe’s 350 million Internet users.:

Europe is a diverse region comprising 48 countries, 27 of which are in the European Union. The region contains some of the world’s Internet usage leaders, such as the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where penetration is around 80% of the population.

In contrast, countries such as Greece, Russia, Poland and Italy lag well behind the European average. But most of these nations are enjoying a surge of Internet growth. Within five years, only Russia will have less than half of its population online.

In terms of sheer size, Germany is the largest Internet market in Europe, followed by Russia and the UK, according to eMarketer’s recent estimates.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Slashdot points to recent study that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. This study was conducted by Starcom, Tacoda and comScore. This requires change in how we look at advertising :

“While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns,” said Erin Hunter, executive vice president at comScore. “For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.”

Before coming to any conclusions, I would wait to know where were these clicks measured - search engines, social networks, portals, community sites…. The user behaviour and returns from the ads would vary across these sites and would it be wise to generalize the outcomes ?

Questions ?

• Where do consumers spend time, how you can build context on sites with high engagement but less ad context (social networks), would you want presence or conversions there ?
• Where consumers are seeking information (news, nice content, bookmarks), since there engagement is low, do you want to have impressions there or the clicks which are very very relevant to the page where user is directly landing in ?
• On any high trafficked home page of any web property, which is more wiser, impressions or clicks ?

Popularity: 35% [?]

Slashdot reports TimO’Reilly interview with Devin Wning, CEO, Reuters. It talks about the fast and smart news which not only offers the news without any latency but also does it smartly by automatically detecting linkages in it ; name, place and things. Reuters has provided free and open access to Calais API, which turns returns a formal meaningful RDF graph from an unstructured text.

Softlab adds:

Secondly, Wenig claimed that we are coming to the end of an era where the company with the least time delay in delivering news held a competitive advantage. This second point exposed a very important trend for the future of news data: that the timing of news is no longer a crucial factor, but rather the sources of the news and the information which can be derived from connections between them. In other words, the processing of the data. This is where the Semantic Web steps in. The aim is not just to mark data with semantic metadata, but to use the semantic data to derive added-value additional information from the original data for the consumer, where the consumer may be another news company, or the end consumer. Thus, the focus is on making insights from the data through semantic technology.

ReadWriteWeb has some more information on Calais API and how it matters for Reuters.

The future of news thus in not limited providing or publishing the news but to make the connection and provide much more insight into the news. And as the news is not just limited to a textual story, the outcome out of a semantic news will be pretty complex, challenging but very very interesting. On a semantic news platform the thing has to make sense through the main participants of the news - name, place, things (date, people, location, time, company, etc) and as the also through the various media formats available through the news (audio, video, pictures and text).

Generating semantics through text itself is not easy and making sense of media would add to the overall challenge. Would this be done by the publisher of the media or the extraction through this can be done machines ?. Definitely it means lots and lots of processing and has to start with seeding of metadata from the publishers and using the to build up the AI through natural language processing and learning.

Popularity: 36% [?]

I was just going through this press release from Comscorewhich says that U.S. Internet Users Viewed 10 Billion Videos Online in record breaking month of december.

This makes me think:

Can online video create the same impact on the music industry as MP3, Napster and file sharing did.

Is the citizen media progressing towards multimedia citizen media and not just plain text.

Has TV & Film industry noticed it and if they have what are they going to do about it.

Will it change the consumption habits of audiences where they would want to consume everything in capsules. Or they will be maintain the differentiation between online consumption and traditional screen consumption.

How it is going to impact the future delivery of entertainment in your theatres, on your TV, on your monitor or on your handhelds.

How is it going to impact the news broadcasters, with camera in hand (device/mobile) users can reach where reporters cannot so it’s worry some for news broadcasters or entertainers.

What will be the power metrics of a channel or a studio, will they just become the distributors ?

What should be the roadmap for any media company, to embrace online video or keep a distance and position themselves as premium content providers.

What about the audiences, for news they go to internet, for classifieds they go to internet, for music they go to internet and for video now they go to internet. Is their newspaper and TV consumption dying. Will we now have a generation which will have no newspaper no tv.

Overall is it a good news or a bad news for the media industry. What will happen to their revenues, their quality, their audiences and most importantly their advertisers.

Music industry is still in the denial mode for mp3 & it’s sharing, but at least now you can download a song instead of a album. What will happen to films and TV ?

What about the artists and producers, they should now produce for the studio or the public, who is their audience ?

Popularity: 29% [?]

 
By Daniel F. Pigatto

Jan Dennis, Business and Law Editor @ UIUC has a nice article on web 2.0 user influence - Study: Web sites influence users, even when they don’t communicate directly. Mi Xia, BA professor says " the seemingly impersonal voting, tagging, ratings and even music catalogs offered on so-called Web 2.0 sites can influence users, not unlike more traditional written commentaries posted on blogs and in chat rooms.". This new method of communicating with each other without really interacting may be termed as "ballot box communications", where you can know what’s really popular and what other users are thinking without communicating directly with the users. If you see the trends of social influencing you can see it everywhere - in news, in videos, in images, in social networks, in music and in general all over the web. In other words also called as ‘Memes:

A meme (pronounced /miːm/), as defined by memetic theory, constitutes a theoretical unit of cultural information, the building block of culture or cultural evolution which spreads through diffusion propagating from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution.[1] Multiple memes may propagate as cooperative groups called memeplexes (meme complexes).

As more and more people are shifting from paper to screens and becoming the digitial natives, the trend of onlien social inflluence would grow. No longer people, people keep pages to themselves, they act and they influence. The influence need not be limited to clicks and views but it also spreads through blogs and slashdot like communities, where the topic is discussed online as it would be discussed in an offline world. Researchers are taking a note of this trend and are advicing the businesses to not just to look at the ‘elite influencers’ and also involve these normal public who are now the ’social influencers’. You may wait endlessly fot that ‘tipping point and completely miss the social trend that these social influencers propogate.

Popularity: 28% [?]