Twitter: “Really Cool” Ads and Commercial Accounts Coming Soon

By Liz Gannes | Friday, November 20, 2009 | 7 comments |

Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo. Continue »

Windows 7 Will Throw Down, But Not Just Yet

By Sebastian Rupley | Friday, November 20, 2009 | 3 comments |

The Windows 7 trumpets are blasting with gusto, with Steve Felice, president of the small and medium-sized business (SMB) division of Dell, claiming that Microsoft’s new operating system is fueling a surge in demand for PCs, according to Computerworld.  “As soon as Oct. 22 hit, both our consumer business and our SMB business had a very healthy increase in demand,” Felice is quoted as saying. Meanwhile, David Coursey reports that with Vista on the sidelines and a well-reviewed new OS, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer “has a new ‘f’ word” to describe Windows: ‘Fantastic.’”

These comments fall in line with recent lofty predictions from Dell founder Michael Dell about Windows 7 driving the PC market forward. But is that, in fact, true? Moreover, is it not still too early to measure the operating system’s success? Continue »

Infoaxe’s Search Engine: More Current Than Real Time

By Liz Gannes | Friday, November 20, 2009 | 1 comment |

Updated: Infoaxe is revealing to the world today its alter ego: a search engine. Unlike other real-time search engines such as OneRiot, Infoaxe doesn’t depend on Twitter streams and the like (Update: OneRiot emailed to note that it also uses a panel in addition to social sharing streams). Instead, it anonymously harvests data from its millions (low millions, for now) of people who use its personal search history plug-in. Continue »

Nokia to Consolidate Handset Lineup…Finally

By Colin Gibbs | Friday, November 20, 2009 | 7 comments |

Nokia said today it’s slashing 330 research and development jobs in Europe as it looks to consolidate its handset lineup and focus on high-end smartphones. The move is a small one and long overdue, but it is a step toward getting Nokia back in the game. Continue »

NYC Still Hearts the Net

By Stacey Higginbotham | Friday, November 20, 2009 | 1 comment |

The New York City Council is voting on a resolution this morning supporting the idea that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against web traffic on their networks. As gestures go, this resolution supporting net neutrality is more symbolic than it is useful, and to that end has already yielded a couple of photos of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg shaking hands and looking concerned about the future of NYC broadband. Continue »

Location, Location, Location: SimpleGeo, Twitter, Flook

By Liz Gannes | Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 8 comments |

In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t exactly been a difficult task. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:

Continue »

Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line

By Stacey Higginbotham | Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 9 comments |

With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. In the wake of the Redmond giant’s developer conference, where it detailed more of its plans, it became clear that Azure is striving to be a general purpose cloud offering for enterprises that doesn’t make developers sweat the small stuff or compromise on bigger things. Continue »

Pandora: 24% Of Our Users Signed Up on a Mobile Phone

By Paul Bonanos | Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 0 comments |

Perhaps no other digital music company this side of Apple has made the transition to the mobile sphere as seamlessly as Pandora, the Internet radio company that was fighting for its life as late as of this past summer before a royalty agreement stabilized its future. I chatted with CTO Tom Conrad this afternoon, and he shared a few stats that showed just how significant mobile uptake has been in the company’s growth — particularly in introducing the service to new users rather than converting desktop listeners to mobile ones.

Fully half of the company’s first-time users are now signing up via mobile devices, he told me, and since Pandora arrived on the iPhone in July 2008, 9 million people have created new accounts on smartphones, including iPhones, BlackBerrys, Palm and Android phones. That’s 24 percent of Pandora’s total user base, which is currently at 38 million and growing. Pandora has been installed on 13 million smartphones to date, meaning that about 70 percent of its smartphone users didn’t have desktop accounts previously. Continue »

AOL Discarding Opportunities for Web Relevance

By Liz Gannes | Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 3 comments |

As AOL lays off a third of its work force as it prepares to go independent, it’s looking to drop its ICQ and MapQuest units, according to reports by Kara Swisher. But with the deluge of information hitting web users these days, location and presence are two of the most promising ways to parse the online world (GigaOM Pro sub. required). They’re also two of the most innovation-rich veins of the last year, with projectile growth of mobile location apps and the ongoing real-time status arms race. While AOL is busy revising itself to be about content and advertising, both of those areas of focus benefit greatly from context and relevance.

Continue »

Choosing the Right Tool Is Key for Mobile Advertisers

By Colin Gibbs | Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 0 comments |

Text messages and banners on the mobile web are the most noticeable kinds of wireless ads, according to new research from Parks Associates, but mobile video and click-to-call campaigns draw the best response from consumers. Such contradictions underscore why advertisers need to use a variety of tools as they deploy their mobile campaigns. Continue »

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