GigaOM » customization

With $1.4M, Qloo finds films, fashion, food and more that match your taste

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:15:54 +0000

If you’re looking for recommendations online, Netflix can customize movie picks, Pandora can personalize music and Foursquare can suggest restaurants and other places you might like. But Qloo, a New York-based startup, wants to be your one-stop shop for discovering all kinds of cultural things and places.

The company launched in private Alpha in April and on Thursday is announcing that it’s launching with $1.4 million in funding. Kindler Capital led the round, which also included actors Cedric the Entertainer and Danny Masterson. The startup’s advisory board includes entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis and men’s clothing maker Duncan Quinn.

On the site, users select one thing across eight categories (film, TV, music, fashion, nightlife, books, travel and dining) that best reflects their taste in that category. Then Qloo (pronounced “clue”) generates suggestions in each of those categories based on the selections provided by other users with similar taste. But instead of just receiving suggestions from those who share their taste in a specific category, the site lets people select the aspects of their taste that they want to inform each new search.

“It first evolved from the idea that there are relationships between taste in different areas of culture,” said Alex Elias, who co-founded the company along with Jay Alger. “So someone’s taste in music might implicate where they might enjoy having a drink or their fashion sensibilities. Or your taste in literature might implicate the films you’d want to watch or where you might want to travel.”

In a sense, its approach is similar to Hunch’s notion of the taste graph, which uses a disparate selection of a person’s preferences to guide discovery. But while Hunch now helps eBay personalize shopping online, Qloo wants to personalize cultural recommendations.

Given the trend toward personalization, Qloo provides an interesting value proposition, but I will be curious to see if people want a cross-cultural experience when they can already receive personalized suggestions on vertical-specific platforms.

Even though Facebook, Foursquare and other social platforms may offer social data that could reveal users’ cultural preferences, Elias said Qloo chose not to integrate them (beyond letting users sign-in with Facebook) because they felt it was too noisy.

“People might like things on Facebook for different reasons,” he said. “We want to know what five restaurants really represent you.”

Qloo is invite-only but people can request an invitation on its site.

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Google wants to mobilize your Web site – for free

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:02:09 +0000

Google wants to bring more small websites to mobile phones, and to help nudge those sites along it’s willing to foot the bill for a year. Google, with the help of mobile Web optimization startup Duda Mobile, is offering for 12 months free hosting and customization of Web sites for mobile browsers in an effort to make more Internet content mobile-friendly.

Fortune first broke the story Thursday morning, reporting that the initiative as a new service, but according to The Next Web, the offer is really an extension of the Go Mo program Google launched in November. TNW cited a post on Duda Mobile’s blog that has since been removed from its Website:

“Our hope is that by offering both the education AND the service at no cost for one year, we can help businesses make the shift to mobile more quickly, benefiting both their business as well as us consumers who no longer want to pinch and zoom our way through their regular websites on our phones.”

The service wasn’t exactly expensive beforehand, costing $9 a month, but even a $108 annual fee can be a barrier for entry for a mom-and-pop site with good content but no online revenue stream. Duda keeps its costs low by using templates that automatically plugs content optimized for PC browsers into fields designed to fit into the much smaller footprint of the mobile browser. Duda offers free customization tools as well as gratis support via e-mail and phone.

Google has a significant motivation to bring more Websites mobile. The more phone-friendly content available on the Internet, the more mobile searches Google can generate and the more mobile ad revenues it brings in. From the Fortune story:

Even with the advent of fully capable browsers on current smartphones, many companies are still failing to take even the first step into the mobile space, says Jason Spero, head of mobile sales and strategy at Google. According to Spero, 62% of Google’s top advertisers don’t have a mobile site. “Businesses are kind of late to arrive to this consumer trend, and a large part of that is because they don’t know exactly what to do,” Spero says.

Still this particular promotion isn’t targeting those big advertisers or businesses. Duda’s tools are geared at getting small companies a basic mobile Web presence, not building sophisticated mobile interfaces or m-commerce sites. Duda’s templates don’t yet support Flash, framesets or e-commerce.

Companies that depend on the Internet to generate their revenues have already seen the mobile light. As my colleague Ryan Kim wrote in January, companies ranging from Twitter and Pandora to the newest startups are taking a “mobile first” approach to their services, realizing that the phone and the tablet will ultimately be the primary source of their traffic and profits. Those companies don’t need Google and Duda’s help. It’s the legions of sites out there still unfamiliar with the mobile Web that Google is trying to nudge along.

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Apple Reintroduces 15-inch MacBook Pro Matte Screen Option

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:13:33 +0000

Good news for those of you who were holding out for a matte screen option from Apple on something other than the most expensive, 17-inch MacBook Pro, and bad news for image and video professionals who already bit the bullet and picked up a 15-incher recently. Apple now offers a matte screen option on the 15-inch model.

The new customization option appeared sometime early this morning in Apple’s online store, and allows you to choose an “Antiglare Widescreen Display,” instead of the usual “Glossy” option, for an additional $50. For those unaware, the modification also rids your computer of the pretty black bezel that frames the notebook’s screen, and instead introduces a silver bezel that looks decidedly old school. Aesthetics aside, though, the antiglare option is reportedly a thousand times better for professional usage, and if you find the new glossy optical glass displays distracting.

This is a good sign that despite a recent rash of anti-Apple sentiment even from normally vocal supporters, myself included, over App Store disappointments, Cupertino is still very much committed to giving its users what they want, at least on the hardware side of things. People clamored for the option, and Apple clearly heard the complaints and delivered. I suspect it’s willing to broaden the availability of that option to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, too, if demand appears strong enough and the introduction of the 15-inch option proves beneficial to its bottom line.

Even though Apple’s willing to grant you the antiglare option, it seems like it would rather you didn’t, as is clear from its wonderful little piece of subtle copywriting: “Choose a standard glossy display that lets you view graphics, photos, and videos with richer colors and deeper blacks, or an optional antiglare display.” Wow, they sure do make that antiglare display sound…optional.

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How-To: Change the Default OS X Boot Icon

David Appleyard — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:00:11 +0000

The OS X boot image epitomizes the simplicity and elegance of the operating system itself, showing a basic Apple logo set against a light grey background. I’m a huge fan of this simple layout, but was very interested to hear about BootXChanger, a tiny application that can alter the boot image to anything you’d like.

BootXChanger comes with an excellent set of PNG images already at a boot-screen-appropriate size and resolution, along with a set of instructions for creating your own. It makes this Mac customization, which would otherwise require some fairly complex digging around, remarkably simple.

Installation

Installing the application follows the standard “Drag to Applications” process and, after double clicking the BootXChanger icon, you are presented with a very straight forward interface.

BootXChanger

You’re able to drag-and-drop any PNG file into the window before clicking “Apply” and entering your administrator username and password. If you’re unhappy with the outcome, reverting to the default image only requires one click.

Available Images

BootXChanger comes bundled with a range of nostalgic Mac icons, bound to recreate a few memories.

Included Boot Images

It also has a range of limitations, put in place deliberately by the developer. The most notable is that BootXChanger will not change the background color of the boot screen (it remains the standard #BFBFBF hex color). This is done so as not to damage the appearance of the loading spinner, displayed as your computer boots. It means that the background of your images must be the same if you’d like them to blend in with the background.

Other limitations center around the number of colors that can be used in the image. The developer suggests that you keep it below 100, and stick to using GIF or PNG-8 image formats.

Intel Macs also have further limitations as images must be compressed to fit inside the boot file. Images that are overly complex may not be suitable for use. BootXChanger checks all these possibilities for you, and will refuse to alter your system if the chosen image is an incorrect format.

Examples

Here are a variety of different examples, showing the outcome of various BootXChanger images:

Backup First!

As with any software that alters system or boot files, I would certainly recommend making a backup of your system prior to experimenting. If anything goes wrong (and your Mac won’t boot), insert your OS X installation CD and select your hard drive as the startup disk for the subsequent restart.

BootXChanger is a fantastic, simple application to make adjusting your boot icon a straight-forward process. It’s likely to automatically prevent you from making any problematic changes, so have fun experimenting!

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UI Customization in Leopard

Stephanie Guertin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:00:29 +0000

As you might have guessed from my past articles here, I tend to heavily customize the appearance of OS X on any machines I use regularly. Looking at my desktop, I see no default icons, my dock isn’t much better, and every time I use someone else’s machine, I’m generally surprised by the candy-colored dots springing out of the top of my windows.

Then I upgraded to Leopard.

To my faint surprise, most of my icons were gone. Some, fortunately, stuck around – the sea serpent body parts that I use for drive icons, notably – but others, including the complete replacement of the system icons (David Lanham’s Agua set; see my previous posts for a link) had gone. My utter loathing of the boring, front-on, barely-embossed Leopard default folders began. The candy buttons were back, too. The new install ate ShapeShifter and Samui. As if that weren’t enough, I keep my dock on the left, meaning I’m left out of all the fun of customizing my dock; the dark-glass theme completely overrides any modifications made, even if they show up when the dock is at the bottom of the screen.

The Leopard-default replacements aren’t particularly good, either, failing usual interface guidelines in terms of color, shape, and aesthetic rules. For example, take the icon for the music folder. On the left, Leopard’s default; on the right, a Tiger-style music folder. Note how the rich green of the music note really makes the purpose of the folder pop. Look, too, at the difference in shape – the off-center cant and the overrun of the default folder shape by the note make the music folder stand out from any other folder. Why, if the point of different icons for different purposes is to make finding what you want easier and quicker, would anyone choose icons that look all the same?

To my dismay, there doesn’t seem to be any solutions for this. Pixadex’s website doesn’t mention Leopard at all. CandyBar is incompatible with Leopard. So is ClearDock, ShapeShifter, FruitMenu, WindowShade…. all the Unsanity apps, in fact.

Is the fate of all the customization apps Apple’s way of telling users to leave the UI alone? I certainly hope not. That said, though, does anyone know of any solutions to this, short of changing each and every icon manually? For that matter, what about all the UI elements – the toolbars, the buttons – that can’t be changed through the Get Info pane?

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Color Your iPhone: Let your teenage girl come out

Josh Pigford — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:30:06 +0000

Don’t think that just because you’ve got a new phone that cost as much as some PC’s that you are somehow above customizing the look of your phone. You know good and well you want to be in the crowd of 13-year-old teenage girls who customize their phones by changing out the shell of their phone with something pink and then sticking on fake diamonds all over it. Admit it.

Unfortunately I can’t help you out with your freak need to look like a 13-year-old girl, but I do have something here that can help you out with changing the color of your iPhone!

ColorWare has just released their Customized ColorWare iPhone product.

You can send in your iPhone to get colorized for $149 (you’ll need to part ways with it for 8-10 days). Or you can purchase a new iPhone at $649 for the 4GB or $749 for the 8GB.

They have 29 color combinations available letting you pick practically any color you want.

This certainly isn’t for everybody (I personally love the simplicity of the iPhone’s design)…but if you’ve got the cash and your in to it, then these are guys to do it for you.

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