Mark Zuckerberg smarter than i thought

A few months ago I wrote in a blog that Facebook problem is, that they have only one business.

I have to admit this is not true. Facebook made since then a lot of small changes but extend their business extremely.

1. Places
Places is slowly but strong putting foursquare out of business and involved in the last few months. Places supports now events and deals.

2. Deals
Deals actually is a big competition to livingsocial and Groupon. Groupon as the biggest social coupon company has less than 70M and LivingSocial 29M users. Facebook has over 600M.



To get the program started, Facebook has enlisted 11 companies that already supply deals elsewhere. Restaurant reservation service OpenTable will broadcast offers for local eateries, while online ticket seller Viagogo will market events.
Not all offers involve discounts. Some are experiences people may not otherwise have access to, such as a backstage pass to Austin City Limits concerts, a tour of the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium, or a children's sleepover at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco with live-snake demos.
In some cases, you'll get a "friend bonus" — an additional discount — if at least one other person in your social network buys a deal.

3. Email (messages)
Facebook introduced a while ago username@Facebook.com email addresses. Since two weeks FB is forcing piece by piece their members to sign up for these emails. FB would be the biggest email provider and service in the world. A clear shot against google. There are approximate 200M gmail users. A third than FB members.
FB introduced this week the send button to get the email system very fast running.
How It Works
The Send button is a social plugin that websites can use to let people send a link to a friend through Facebook Messages, post it to a Group, or email it to an individual. For example, if you see a Mother's Day gift idea on 1-800-Flowers.com, you can now send a message or email to your family members to discuss. Or say you're training for a marathon and you come across a great article about running shoes on The Huffington Post. Now you can share it with your entire running group in just one click.

The Send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. They don't need to leave the web page they're on or fill out a long, annoying form. Compared to the alternatives, the Send button has fewer required steps, and it removes the need to look up email addresses by auto-suggesting friends and Groups.



4. Video upload
FB video upload function got a big boost in 2010. Facebook users watched 245 million videos in May 2010 and the growth rate is accelerating as more companies and people upload video to the site. FB is not yet a real competition to YouTube which had 2 Billion views a day in May 2010



5. Photos
Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site with over 2.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month. In 2009 it was only 850 million.
Facebook is now bigger than flickr.com

6. Questions
Facebook introduced last year questions. Different to google or bong, question is only finding results within FB and answers from users. However these answers might be better results than in classic search engines. Questions might become sometimes a good search engine. Till then FB uses bing to show within FB web results. No need to leave FB to search for something.



7. Groups
Groups is fairly new bit already one of the most used applications or Features in Facebook. Meetup is losing more and more members since FB introduced their free version of groups and meetings.

8. Payments
FB has FB credits and all games must use in the future FB credits for their users wen they want to buy virtual goods within the apps. Credits will be in the future the only currency on Facebook. A clear competition to eBay's paypal.
It will not take long till other e-commerce sites will accepts FB credits as secure payment.

9. Facebook connect
Facebook connect allows 3rd parties to utilize FB logins and like buttons. The like button is basically for companies a rating system. The beauty is that a FB user can see how many of their friends did like certain products. Rating systems like bazaar voice did not grow so fast anymore Since FB introduced the like button which is one year old.




I could go on for hours. Facebook learned their lesson and is introducing almost every week new features to bind their users closer to their portal.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:E Sheridan Rd,Salt Lake City,United States

Why the iPad is not yet a laptop replacement

We have in our house two iPads and the last few days I tried to use one of them as a notebook replacement.
As we know you can get over 60,000 applications for the iPad. But I did limit myself to only the most important application to fulfill my task. I tried to imagine how it is to have only an iPad and no other device. Which I did a similar attempt last year, but back in time the iPad was not so good and less apps available. I decided to try it again.

Therefore I reseted my mother in law iPad, to start from stretch.

The first step failed, I had to connect the iPad to a computer with iTunes to activate. To pretend having no computer, I went to the Apple store. These guys were really nice. They offered me (free) to activate my iPad, however I had to have am appointment with the genius bar. I scheduled the appointment directly at the store using one of their computers. 2 hours later I had my appointment. They activated the iPad and gave me some important tips how to use the iPad and even did set up my exchange to use my office email and calendar.
Next step, I went back to the office and tried to install software I thought I might need.
Pages, Numbers, keynote, photoshop express and dropbox. Less than $20 in total. Good price to have a complete office version on the ipad (contacts, calendar and email come free with ipad). Unfortunately I was not able to install any of the production apps. They are all between 51 and 69MB. Our company wifi is not open, so I could only use 3G but over 3G you can't install apps over 10MB, at least with ATT.
I had to go to the nearby Starbucks to use their Wifi. Was not to bad, at least I got a good non fat latte.
All apps installed easy and I was ready to use my iPad for work. Back at work I got an email with a link to a document in our intranet which is SharePoint 2010 based.

I clicked on the link and the document opened in my iPad. Awesome. I even could open it in pages. I made my changes in the document and went back to our intranet. I am amazed how well SharePoint works with Safari. SP 2007 did only work with IE.
But here came the problem I could not upload my document. The choose file button was disabled.





I had to email the document to somebody in the office to do the upload for me.
Next somebody asked me to help with CRM. We use Dynamics and unfortunately it does not work with Safari and we don't have the mobile version activated. This is not really and iPad problem but a Microsoft issue. Not a big problem, I had as well at Starbucks some more apps downloaded like instant messenger, Skype and LogMeIn and blogspot.

I chose to start LogMeIn ($29.99) to connect directly to the CRM server to run the browser there to help with the user issue.

LogMeIn is expensive but powerful and necessary. There are other RDP programs and even cheaper, but we use LogMeIn in the company as our tool for user support and I knew it will work as long I am in our wifi domain or over VPN.

Reading email worked fine, but handling meetings is a pain. I could not see when I created a meeting, if the attendees are available at my proposed time or if one of our conference rooms are free.



Maybe I don't know the ipad calendar good enough. But it seems the calendar is not usable for company use. I ended up using our outlook web access for calendar and notes. I had as well to use the outlook web access to switch my out of office assistant on. It is a work around but it worked.

I had to do a presentation at my meeting and used a PowerPoint presentation I got from somebody. But before the meeting i made some changes on it. Keynote did open the presentation, but because keynote is not PowerPoint some fonts were off and missing and the transitions did not work well. I basically had to rebuild the whole presentation but I can tell, keynote results are looking so much nicer.

I have to admit, pages, numbers and keynote are very limited on the iPad it is not comparable with the full apple version. Keynote is missing as example all 3D effects.



Presenting the presentation and even switch between programs and browser worked pretty good using the video cable and adapter to our projector. The complete iPad is mirrored.

Overall using the iPad at work does seem to be possible with some hurdles. It is not possible to use the company shared drives, but I could use dropbox or mobile me to share documents with others.

I guess companies which are not so heavy on in-house systems and are using a lot of browser based apps might have it easier to integrate the iPad.

The next tasks came at home. Still pretending not to have any other computer, I started my process like every day. I ate with my family, played with my son and after he went to bed I started to write my blog. I had to do research for a blog entry. The website page, which would have the answer I was looking for,was done in flash. I was screwed. From home I am not able to use LogMeIn because the VPN does just not work. It says i am connected but our firewall at the office does think different, otherwise I could remote to one of our windows server.
However this would be anyway not good hence my research is private. I decided to buy cloud browse. Which is basically the same as RDP but only within a browser to another remote browser.


I could now see the flash page. In the meantime I opened the present my wife had for me. A new DVD, the A-Team. Awesome, but stop. How do I get it into my media library? I use of course iTunes on my iPad. But I don't see a DVD drive I can connect to my iPad to rip the DVD and to put it into my media library.

I guess, when we have iPads we don't buy DVDs anymore. Ok this is cool.I just need to rethink. I opened iTunes on the iPad and was able to rent or buy a movie.





It downloads the movie directly into your iPad.





Now my iPad is only 64GB (biggest you can get). An HD movie is around 3.5GB, in best case if only use the iPad for movies, I would get 16 movies on my iPad.

Movies to buy are between $4.99 and $19.99. The tourist was $19.99 in HD. Below are movies for $4.99



But what is when the hard drive is full? When you buy movies you don't want to delete them. Apps bought from the app store can be downloaded all the time, but the movie I downloaded, if I lose the movie, I have to buy it again. There is a flaw in the system. I can on the computer (at least) claim in iTunes I lost the movie and download again, but only once. And you need to have a computer to get the iTunes extra.




It is possible to have only the iPad and no other computer but it is no fun.
As long the iPad is so strong connected to iTunes and iTunes the only way is to get your data off the iPad to store, as long you need to have a second computer.

I could move all in the cloud, using flickr mobile.me, for my photos and dropbox for my files and Netflix to stream movies. Plus a cloud backup. And this might be the future. But if you have no wifi router at home or a bad wifi connection like me than it is no fun. And it it gets expensive most of these service cost money. A 320GB hard drive cost $80. Mobile.me is $99 per year and backups in the cloud cost another $120 a year. I get for this two hard drives with more GB.

I think as soon iTunes goes into the cloud and the movies and backups are getting cheaper then the chance is good that the iPad could be the only computer in a household.

For work it is even a longer way to use the iPad as the only computer. It does not fit well in a Microsoft and on premise software environment. But most American companies are in this environment.
I can see the iPad in some cases as the only computer, like for airplane inspection or in hospitals, schools and kindergarten or other niche markets where standard software and document sharing might not be important.

For these cases the iPad can be a good replacement, which we already see.
NJ bought for one kindergarten for all students iPads. Mercedes Benz bought for their sales team iPads (MB built their own app for this).

But otherwise IT would need to build a whole infrastructure and software around the iPad to integrate it better into company infrastructure and this is right now almost not possible and very expensive.

I think we still need 15 months till we see the replacement seriously starting.

BTW I did not talk about printing, because I almost never print. The iPad has the print function but works only with a few printers. Non of them I or my company has.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Photos- the next social frontier

Many of us are using flickr, Apple me, google picasa or for uploading their images into the internet to make them viewable for friends and sometimes the rest of the world. But it seems that till now advertising did not really take advantage of it.
More and more smart phones have high resolution image capture of 5MB even 8MB photos and the most important part they have geo tagging. And there are more and more pocket cameras with GPS for geo tagging.
I am imagine a new photo/travel service coming up. A portal to upload picture and for others to see them on map.
I travel a lot, i might want to upload images from my trip, maybe only images from buildings or nature. Other people can see them and maybe decide to go to a small town like Bretten in Germany because they liked what they saw. I know this is not really new, other services are already offering this.
But what if this portal is a travel portal, and we can not only upload images with geo information but as well Twitter tweets with things what we ate or saw etc. Twitter already has Geo data capturing when we use our phone for the tweets. Basically everybody can have in this portal their own travel guide with real time info and locations.
Financed is this service from local stores and restaurant and global brands. An user might upload a picture of the eiffel tower and tweet how he liked the food in Paris. A local restaurant bought ad space and the restaurant shows up in the page like in the yellow pages with current menu.
This is just a high level of the idea, but I see here a great method to get local advertisement where it makes sense.
Everybody is talking since years about better local advertisement, but nobody really found the golden egg. This is the golden egg, because the ads would reach travelers and friends.
To give this service more hype, an user would get for each uploaded photo points, enough points will give the user a coupon for a local business nearby the users current location. When a tagged image is uploaded a local business shows up and the user can rate it to get more points. Every other user who looks at the pictures and clicks on one of the shown local ads (local to image location, not local to viewer location) will give the person who clicks a coupon.
This service will have mobile version as well. On mobile devices the user can collect QR codes instead of print coupons. These QR codes are the coupons which the local store can scan to give the user discount.
These codes or always unique and only valid for one scan. As soon it is scanned the target page to redeem is not available anymore.

The user has to use his facebook account, to register on this travel portal. This helps the user not to remember another login and the portals owner can better customize and personalize the page to the users interests.

To be a member of this portal the user need to have an invitation from another Facebook user similar like rockmelt is doing.
And of course it can run as well as a Facebook app. And because myspace is coming back, the portal would show to the images the favorite songs of the person who did upload the photos.

A portal like this would combine social like Twitter and Facebook, geo tagging, QR Codes, coupons, loyalty points and local ads in one place without annoying the users.

These are all the latest trends combine in one. Why is not anybody thinking about this?

Or do i miss something why it should not work?

You want to know more about the concept? Email me and I will tell you more in details.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States