technology & science
tetris mole still going strong
at&t (nyse:att) announced the top selling mole games from their wireless store for the first quarter of 2008.
tetris is still #1.
i am not surprised, but that fact alone tells you a lot about the state of the mole game market. i mean tetris is a fun game, but the #1 selling game? no way.
this is all about discovery and merchandising. taking a quick look at the list, i think the only game that has been released in the last year is guitar hero iii mole. all of the other les have been around for awhile.
at&t's top selling games in q1, 2008:
1. tetris
2. bejeweled
3. pac-man by namco
4. wheel of fortune 2007
5. diner dash
6. midnight pool
7. ms.pac-man by namco
8. world poker tour - texas hold ?em
9. world poker tour 2
10. guitar hero iii mole
compare the above list to the bestselling downloadable pc casual games on g fish games. the oldest game on their top 10 list was released on may 14, 2008 - not even a month ago.
two downloadable platforms with a similar consumer make-up with dramatically different games being downloaded. one lives in a frictionless open environt and one lives in a weirdly fragted and friction rich environt. watch this space.
internet & programming
generation y - wel to their world
we've showed how gen y is going to change the web. in doing so, gen y is also changing the world. despite all of this, the world of generation y eludes a lot of the previous generations. generation y is absorbed in a world made possible through technology. this is a key factor that is left out of the misconceptions made about gen y. here's a glimpse into the world of gen y and how they're using technology.
raising social awareness through facebook
generation y is arguably the most socially conscious generation in existence. they're well aware of how social changes affect them and use the internet as a tool to keep them aware of what's going on. gen yers are making their stances well known on facebook. in 2006, the top 10 advocacy groups on facebook were:
- reduce the drinking age to 18! - 111,275
- legalize same- marriage - 80,458
- americans for alternative energy - 69,465
- support a woman's right to choose - 66,806
- support stem cell research - 55,219
- abolish abstinence only education - 54,712
- governt + religion = disaster - 47,949
- aids / hiv research - 24,789
- equal rights for s - 24,013
- pro-life - 22,409
while gen y still participates in rallies, protests, and group meetings, for them it's a lot easier to start a movet with a facebook group and let the mes join in. these groups are not being ignored either. money is donated daily, boycotts are being arranged quicker, and news is spreading faster. gen y is taking technology and advocacy to another level.
adopting new mediums of information
generation y doesn't read books. well, a lot of people aren't reading books these days. however, one should always factor in the following: technology is very important to generation y. they may not always read books because they're are newer mediums of information to utilize. looking at the old medium such as books from libraries, according to a y done by the pew internet & american life project:
"gen y are the leading users of libraries for help solving problems and in more general patronage.
libraries drew visits by more than half of americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems tioned in this survey. and it was the young s in tech-loving generation y (age 18-30) who led the pack. compared to their elders, gen y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose.
furthermore, it is young s who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of gen y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library."
however, gen y is a technologically advanced generation. so, of course gen y won't read books or newspapers in the way that previous generations did. gen y goes online to get information. they read more blogs than any other generation. they receive the news from online sources and they may even venture into buying an ebook or two. gen y certainly won't write off traditional mediums of information. however, they've adopted and embraced the technological advancets that are taking place to better receive information.
a real p2p network
generation y is full of lazy and self-indulgent kids. if only i had a dollar for every time i heard that statet. this is probably the most ridiculously perpetuated stereotype of generation y. gen y expects to be rewarded for doing the smallest amount of work. they're only in it for themselves. however, they can't be too bad if they're the most marketed to generation. while they're occasionally self-indulgent (who isn't?), gen yers do their part when it s to helping others.
for example, when entering college, peers amongst gen y are more than willing to go out of their way to help the incoming cl of ents. on my college campus, groups are set up on facebook and myspace to help ents get to and from walmart. web site addresses are exchanged for ents to find out the campus ratings for their professors. tutoring sessions are done online and offline by juniors and seniors, not the faculty, and these are activities that are seen across college campuses nationwide. they've advanced the real-life version of peer-2-peer systems using social networks and more.
moving above and beyond
this is only a glimpse into the world of generation y. while generation y is very technologically advanced, they're more likely to adopt technologies that help themselves and others whether it's for organizing boycotts, keeping up with the news, or helping peers. they don't just adopt these technologies just because they're out there. they adopt them because of what they can do with them. to conclude, ad agency executive marian salzman, states:
"some of them are the greatest generation. they're more hardworking. they have these tools to get things done. they are enormously clever and resourceful. some of the others are absolutely incorrigible."
technology & science
first syman foundation devices in 2010
society & gossip
idol fatigue
people - especially young viewers - are over american idol.
are u?
internet & programming
mint adds support for mortgage and loan tracking
mint, the popular personal finance site that won techcrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported insutions. in addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, mint also monitors users’ savings accounts, credit cards, and investts.
mint doesn’t deal with any actual fund transfers. instead, it monitors users’ spending hats, producing coherent graphs that are designed to help people save their money (or at least know where it’s all going). users can also elect to receive sms and email alerts when lls are due or their balance drops below a certain level.
mint has seen extremely quick growth since its launch at techcrunch40, and is now
monitoring a total of $11 llion in ets, with 350,000 registered users, it says. ceo aaron patzer says that mint will eventually be able to move money around, but that functionality won’t be coming until 2009. until then, patzer says that the addition of mortgage and loan tracking will let mint users effectively monitor their entire financial portfolio. it’s too bad we’ll still have to rely on our banks’ websites to actually pay the lls.
crunch network: molecrunch mole gadgets and applications, delivered daily.
internet & programming
transportation ll sets aside $45 million for maglev train
read more of this story at slashdot.
sport
ronaldo wants out of manchester
society & gossip
tila tequila, still the queen of ?kinda .?
tila is working hard to convince people that she’s a lesan; all this an obvious counter response to all the criticism that she isn’t really a lesan and that her mtv show, a s at love, is really a fraud. this week she decided to give lesan loveline advice to lindsay lohan and samantha ronson.
us magazine says, “i think that the fact that everyone knows about it makes it fine,” she told usmagazine.com at the mtv movie awards in universal city, ca sunday.
her advice for the clandestine couple?
“just go all out with it!” she said. “if you?re going to do something, do it all out.”
tila, i wouldn’t stress, this seems like too much effort. just go the route of the hills.
technology & science
motorola selling unlocked, 3g-less q9e online
what do you get when you take a fairly solid product, strip it down, and sell it for an outlandish price? fired, typically. at motorola, you’ve just up with their new online store item: the motorola q9e.
the q9e is just a q9h, stripped off the good stuff. same windows mole 6.0, same 2 megapixel camera, without the 3g.
if you’ve been wanting a q9 but just can’t vibe with all this 3g non-sense, you can grab one from the motorola online store for 500 bucks. or you could just get a q9h in all of its 3g splendor from ebay for around 300.
[via everythingq]
poblogs
the 'natives'
technology & science
nds news: soutpeak announces roogoo for nintendo ds
internet & programming
delegating the focus and blur events
nowadays many javascripters are aware of the advantages of event delegation. chris heilmann and dan webb, among others, have discussed its advantages, and i've been using it as much as possible for about two years now.
event delegation is especially useful in effects like dropdown us, where lots of events on links may take place that can easily be handled at the root level (an <ol> or <ul> in this case).
there used to be one problem, though: although event delegation works fine for the mouse events, it does not work for the focus and blur events we need to make dropdown us keyboard-accessible.
in the course of my ongoing event research, however, i found a way to delegate the focus and blur events, too. maybe one of those frightfully clever javascript library authors will use this technique to shave off a few milliseconds of computing time
for all i know they're already aware of this technique; but it was new to me so i publish it anyway.
news & headlines
un deploys 5 more helicopters to burma relief efforts - voice of america
 boston globe | un deploys 5 more helicopters to burma relief efforts voice of america - by voa news five helicopters working on cyclone relief for the united nations arrived saturday in burma's former capital of rangoon. burma arrests celebrity critic who organized cyclone relief burma hits out at cyclone reports |
news & headlines
[obvious] city of dallas lets residents vote on new name for industrial boulevard. residents offer and choose cesar chavez boulevard. city of dallas going to ignore residents, choose their own name: free boulevard
sport
bench-clearing brawl, ejections mar red sox-rays game
technology & science
jvc unveil?s the hd video duo
section: video, dvd players/dvrs, hdtv, portable video
sometimes, we just can?t let go ? original eight track records, vintage clothes, hard-to-find comic books, first edition volumes? even with the digital age, some people still prefer to rock on with their ogs.
if you (or your father) are like this, jvc hears you. the company recently announced that it has released two new video recorders capable of handling vhs, dvd, and even hdd recording.
intuitively, the dr-hx500 has a 500gb hard drive while the dr-hx250 has half that capacity (250gb). that?s where the difference ends. both devices boast of a built-in og/digital tv tuner, an hdmi socket, a vhs player, and a dvd burner/player. both are capable of handling dts and dolby digital formats.
parents can now relive their old clics while their children indulge in the latest hollywood releases. recorded clips from tv, such as american idol episodes, can either be stored on the hard drive or burned on dvd’s.
the hx500 can go for as much as $906 while the hx250 will post a $715 tag.
via [pocket-lint]
full story » | written by elisabeth young for gadgetell. | comt on this article »
news & headlines
today is national donut day!
internet & programming
how to comt about your company on blog posts, without being spammy
for every 1000 people who read a tech blog post, there may be one that leaves a comt. lurking in the crowd are any number of people who work for companies related to the ject of the post. they almost never comt, and when they do they often across as obnoxious, self-promoting and spammy. it doesn't have to be that way, though.
there are a number of ways that you can join in a conversation online, even though you have economic interests in it. you who work in the various sectors we cover often know far more about the products, people and trends at issue than we who cover a relatively broad beat do. we like it when you leave good and useful comts. what do those look like?
being transparent about who you are and what your interests are is fundatal, but beyond that there are a variety of ways you can add value instead of being an annoyance. below, we discuss five of those ways; we hope you'll add thoughts of your own about how to comt appropriately - unless you work for one of the comt hosting companies, of course (just kidding!).
the fundatal mood of a good comt
bad comts from companies are loud, self-centered, only semi-relevant and often have the tone of a spurned lover. good comts from companies are super humble, gently engaged with compeors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.
a grey area
one comt type that lives in a grey area is the "don't forget about us" comt. that's one of the most common types. it's annoying. this author at least wels emails like this because it's hard to remember all the relevant companies in any given sector. leaving a "what about me?" comt publicly though just looks bad.
here are five ways you can add more value than by just throwing your company's name and link into a blog post's comts. an example is provided for each strategy; these are decent examples, really great examples are still too rare, unfortunately. we know you're capable of really nailing it though and we don't want you to be afraid to try.
1. update us on new developts
when we write about any company or service, one thing that we ought to make sure we do is consider where that company's compeors are in the market. we hope to compare feature sets, user growth and any number of other factors. that's easier said than done, though, so we wel comts from compeors that provide us updates about where their service is at.
this is especially true when we're talking about a new technology that only a limited number of vendors have impleted support for. a good recent example can be found in the comts on our story about c-shirt, the creative commons remixable t-shirts ped on by qr code and mole phones. qr codes are common in japan but are just starting to emerge in other places.
in a comt responding to that post, eric from a semi-compeive company called springleap complited c-shirt's integration of qr codes and creative commons, then pointed out that springleap would soon be adding qr code support to their online clothing service too. qr codes are unusual enough that we were glad to learn about another company moving in that direction.
feel free to comt about updates to your service that we may not be aware of when they aren't so rare, either. if you can focus on the update more than on the "me too" feel, then we'll appreciate you taking the time to broaden our knowledge of the field.
2. clarify your product or market position
never is it as obvious that top tech bloggers have limited knowledge about the things we write about than when we write about you or your company. who knew we could be so wrong?
at those times, a good blogger will wel your clarification. we may not have used your product enough to know about the g differences between it and other products it got thrown in a list with. we might have some real misconceptions about where the company stands in growth, history or target audience. please, let us know in comts so we can be more informed next time we write about you or your sector in the future. this is a conversation!
when we wrote about the adoption rate of microsoft silverlight earlier this week, we said it could be picking up the pace compared to the adoption rate of adobe flash. we were (i was) wrong in our esst of the situation. adobe's john dowdell jumped in to comts and put some numbers in perspective for us. he also offered some ytical perspective of his own, as someone deeply engaged in these issues. his comt wasn't particularly gentle, but that's ok - he works for adobe and we were very wrong in the ertion he was comting on.
3. articulate differentiation
you know your company and your compeors better than we do. tech bloggers tend to know the nitty gritty about one or two niches that they personally engage with most closely, but we often write about far more than that. that's ok, but we could use your help, vendors, in fleshing out the details and differences between various service offerings. our readers to our sites to learn about what tools are available to solve particular problems. there is no way we could articulate the full breadth of options and the differences between them as well as we plus our comting readers can.
as long as you don't stop at "me too," go on too long or talk only about yourselves - comts about differentiation are more than wel.
when we wrote about hedge fund power research suite firstrain in april, we tioned another service called rivalmap. rivalmap's kris rasmussen jumped into comts and let us know his company's product was adding several of the features that firstrain offers (foreshadowing yesterday's announcet of a partnership with newsgator) but that the primary differentiation was a price margin of tens of thousands of dollars!
there are probably even better examples of company comts intended to articulate differentiation. one of the inspirations for this post was a comt left by iterasi (disclosure: a consulting client) in a post about compeor laterloop over at webworkerdaily. company blogger alex williams thanked wwd's jason harris for tioning his company in a review of a compeor, praised the compeor's unique feature set, then articulated some fundatal differences between the companies that harris didn't tion in his review and finally closed the comt with more appreciation for the compeor. that's a model example of a company adding value in a dignified way to a blog post about a compeor.
4. talk up the other team
have you seen the blog posts on places like techcrunch or gigaom about one company announcing a round of funding or being acquired, where that company's compeors leave a nice short comt simply congratulating them on their good fortunes? just a short congrats, signed by the name of a representative of a compeor, with their name linked via the url field in comts to their company's site. that's cly. don't throw your url into the text of the comt or take that time to talk yourself up. just offer a dignified congratulations and the unspoken message is that your niche is further validated, a rising tide lifting all boats. don't act like you're drowning.
a different but good example of this kind of comt can be seen in our april post about the ongoing success of aggregator popurls. we wrote about popurl's new sponsored collaboration with intel.
semi-related compeor diystartupnews.com left the following comt:
"this ia great idea and reminds me of techmemes sponsored news sources.
this is smart marketing move by intel, more companies should look at sponsored branding of sites like this. i should imagine they are getting a good return on their investt. "
well, we bet you think it's a great idea, diy, maybe you'd like a little of that kind of action yourself. also, why enter your url in the "name" field? is that what your mother calls you? we'd love to get to know you as a person in this industry.
criticism aside, that was a good comt - popurls did up with a smart model that's reminiscent of another successful model, techmeme's sponsored feeds. we hadn't thought of that comparison, otherwise we would have tioned it. that was a useful celebration of popurls' success and a good comt to leave.
5. add humor or insider insights
people who eat, sleep and breathe wikis, video hosting or local review sites for example all have jokes, details and perspectives that those of us who simply use and occasionally write about such services just can't have. leave some of that information in comts! we'll all feel smarter, we'll feel like readwriteweb is the place to for deep insider knowledge and everyone will appreciate you and your company for it!
when we wrote about the growing number of serious uses for wikis last month, whit from wiki.answers.com jumped into comts and pointed out that comscore called wiki.answers the fastest growing site of 2007. touche! that was something that we suspect wiki-heads probably knew. (i've consulted for wiki companies and remember now that wiki.answers were tioned as a g player.) as a non-specialist in the field of wikis, though, that's the kind of detail that i just didn't know. it was self promotional, and a link would have been nice, but it's an undeniably important detail in a general conversation about the growth of wikis.
an even better example of offering insider knowledge in comts can be found in a comt from this morning to our coverage of japanese video site nicodou. jane from akibanana.com, a news site that supports a company offering tours of a particular japanese -culture, left an incredibly helpful comt that included two good links to sites other than hers, some updates on the topic of the post and other information that we simply didn't have the context to include in our original post. it was a fantastic comt and gave readers a great reason to click through the comter's name to learn about the company she represents.
conclusion
a lot of this is common sense, but some of it is particular to the emerging culture of the social media market. we're blessed at least in the us to have a very active social media economy - so lots of our readers here have jobs with companies related to the jects of our writing. we want you to participate, you have so much you can add! it can be a great way for you to increase you visility in the market, as well. see our post about the new robert scobles for a discussion about other ways this can be done.
if we saw half as many simple "don't forget about me!" comts and twice as many comts focused on humbly adding value to the conversation from the perspective of someone working at a related company - the quality of conversation in the tech blogosphere would be dramatically improved. we'd love to see that happen.
are there other ways you've seen value added appropriately in comts by company representatives? we'd love to learn about more strategic options; spamminess is really annoying, learning together is fun and fulfilling.
images via flickr cc: "i must be getting old" by idogcow and "wel hands" by dtcchc
sport
roger penske?s 300th win caps milwaukee mile weekend
poblogs
urbanisasi..
