Apple has begun to use iTunes to distribute the latest version of their Safari web browser, and the company now finds itself in the midst of a growing controversy for using questionable tactics to “trick” Windows iTunes users into downloading Safari.
The controversy arose on Wednesday, when Apple began including the Safari web browser as part of a software update for both their iTunes and QuickTime for Windows products. Macdailynews.com is reporting that many Windows users feel that Apple’s inclusion of the Safari web browser with iTunes and QuickTime updates undermines their trust in Apple.
The updaters “allow” users to update their browser to Safari as part of a general iTunes or QuickTime update, but many users have mistakenly installed the browser because the “install Safari” box comes pre-selected with the software update, and many busy users simply rush through the procedure without reading exactly what they are installing.
Apple is being roundly criticized for this tactic of pre-selecting the option to install Safari on Windows computers, and many Windows users feel that it is an attempt to deceive, something reminiscent of the tactics Microsoft routinely employs — but not what Apple is known for.
Software manufacturers have been using this sneaky tactic for years. Google, for example, seems to look for any opportunity to push its Google toolbar, and many software application updates contain the Google toolbar pre-selected by default to install on the user’s machine. Yahoo and many other companies have used similar tactics. But Apple users have come to expect something different than these Microsoft-like dirty tricks.
Technically, the biggest complaint about what Apple is doing is that the software updater for iTunes is installing Safari version 3.1 by default on Windows computers, even those that have never had Safari in the past. Critics contend that if a previous installation of Safari was detected on a Windows machine, offering to update the browser by default would not be such a big deal.
But when Apple uses a pre-selected update box to “push” its software on Windows users, it does nothing but anger users, and undermines the trust many people have in the company.
While there is no denying that Apple’s Safari is an excellent web browser, and that many users might be better off installing it than settling for Microsoft’s Windows Explorer, that’s not really the point. Any update tactics that give the appearance of tricking the user into installing software are not worthy of Apple’s good name, and will likely do more harm than good to the company’s image.
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Trying to surf the Web on a mobile phone used to be an exercise in futility. Although smart phones have included Web browsing for quite a few years now, it is only recently that mobile Internet speeds and interfaces have improved to the point where accessing the Internet on a mobile phone is practical and enjoyable.
The introduction of the Apple iPhone set a new standard in mobile phone Web browsing, and a new study from M:Metrics reinforces the commonly held assumption that, given a good mobile Internet browser, users will take full advantage of Internet services on their phones.
The study, which followed the phone habits of over 10,000 adults for a period of six months following the iPhone’s release in the US, found that a full 85% of iPhone users access news and other Web content on a regular basis. The study found that users of other smartphones used the mobile Internet considerably less — only 58% surfed the Web regularly from their phone.
The numbers get even worse for users of regular mobile phones, with only 13% regularly surfing the web from their cell phone.
Mobile Internet experts attribute this to the iPhone’s groundbreaking touchscreen interface and intuitive Web browser. And although many new smartphones have attempted to emulate the intuitive iPhone interface, so far none have succeeded in creating a more user-friendly mobile Web surfing experience.
The study by M:Metrics confirms information released by Google in February, indicating that the Google search engine received 50 times as many search requests from Apple iPhones as from any other competing smart phone.
Another contributing factor may be Apple’s partnership with AT&T. The company offers an unlimited data plan, which thousands of iPhone users have taken advantage of. If they’re not paying anything extra for surfing the web heavily on their phone, it stands to reason that users will take advantage of Web content and services more often.
But experts agree that what really separates the iPhone from its competition is the uniqueness of its Web interface, and the simplicity of the phone’s touchscreen. This allows iPhone users to maneuver their way around the web intuitively, and even provides possibilities unheard-of with a desktop PC.
For example, by touching and “pinching” the screen, iPhone users can manipulate web sites in ways a regular desktop or notebook PC cannot. This allows for a slightly different web surfing experience, but one that is not so different that it requires any additional thought. In other words, the iPhone has managed to strike a careful balance between uniqueness and familiarity — something we all want in any new technology.
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Last Wednesday saw the official launch of Hulu.com, a brand new video web site created by an odd partnership of NBC and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Hulu has been available in only a few markets for testing purposes since last October, but the new heavyweight streaming video site has already garnered 5 million members.
Of course, that’s far from the YouTube’s 80 million worldwide users, but many pundits are predicting that Hulu will quickly close the gap to become a major player in the online streaming video market. ABC news.com is reporting that Hulu is focusing more on professional video productions, and leaving YouTube to dominate the amateur and homemade video niche.
To put it in baseball terms, Hulu is attempting to be the big leagues, leaving YouTube to the vet out talent in the minors. Hulu is definitely filling a gap in the marketplace by providing professional quality films, shorts, documentaries and sitcoms, as well as made for Web productions of a very high standard. Ideally, both Hulu and YouTube will find a place in the market, and the two will have a type of symbiotic relationship.
Although both sites feature streaming video, Hulu has a completely different business model than YouTube. To begin with, Hulu is not a free site like YouTube. The site is monetized in the time honored tradition of broadcast television, by airing commercial advertisements between breaks in shows.
While this may sound like a continuation of the over-advertised nature of broadcast television, and something that is sure to put off Web surfers, in reality Hulu uses shorter commercial breaks and high quality ads that are often quite entertaining in their own right.
Hulu is attempting to find an appropriate balance between monetizing the site with commercial advertisements, and keeping the “free-for-all” noncommercial vibe of sites like YouTube.
It is interesting to note that two of the biggest “old media” players are backing Hulu: NBC and News Corp. By and large, traditional media outlets have been slow to adapt to the realities of the new online world, and even slower to integrate their traditional programming online. NBC and News Corp. are taking a big chance here, but it was a chance that had to be taken by “old media” sooner or later.
With more and more young people turning away from television in favor of online gaming, streaming video and social networking sites like YouTube or MySpace, network television (and even cable) find themselves looking at an increasingly aging and sedentary demographic — not exactly an advertiser’s dream.
On the other hand, the coveted 18 to 39 demographic is spending more and more time online, providing advertisers with a young and trendy audience to market to — in other words, exactly the kind of consumers advertisers want.
Will Hulu wind up being the YouTube killer? For now, that looks doubtful, but they will most certainly find their place in the market; and assuming they can get the balance right between free Web content and tasteful advertisements, Hulu looks destined to be a big success.
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EverNote (www.evernote.com) is one of those ingenious software ideas that comes along ever so often and offers a totally new perspective on day-to-day life. In its simplest terms, EverNote is an online software database for collecting and storing any information that comes into your life — at least any information that can be digitized.
You can use EverNote like a massive digital scrapbook, collecting clippings, text files, e-mails, images and Web content– basically anything that can be rendered into digital format. But that’s just the beginning: EverNote allows you to tag each item entered into the database, and categorize it according to any number of self created folders.
EverNote also applies an automatic timestamp to each item entered, and Geo tags where applicable. Over time, users can create a huge library of information, with an unlimited number of categories that can each be cross-referenced. Every item entered into your EverNote database becomes easily searchable by content, tags, timestamp and category, making it easy to track down even the most obscure bits of information you have saved.
The user interface of EverNote is also quite clever, and allows the user to scroll vertically through their virtual notebook, or select any date on the calendar bar to jump to that point in time and view all information entered on that date. There are also several different ways to search and sort information within the program, and “to do” lists can be easily created by selecting an unobtrusive box next to each item.
But probably the most amazing feature about EverNote is its built-in digital image and handwriting recognition program. In its simplest terms, this allows any text within a digital photo (whether from the Web or your personal camera) to become part of your searchable database. For example, if you have a vacation photo of a sign saying “Welcome to the Canada,” those words would be recognized by the program and would be instantly searchable in your database — pretty cool, huh?
It’s not difficult to see how this technology could have very practical applications. For example, you could take a picture with your camera phone of a great little restaurant you find hidden among the back streets of Boston’s theatre district. Then just upload the photo to your EverNote database, and both the name of the restaurant and its geographic location become instantly searchable within your EverNote database.
Of course, there are millions of other uses for this technology, including categorization and organization of complex data for businesses purposes (keeping track of customers or orders, for example). And because EverNote is an online program, it is compatible with both Windows and Mac, and can be accessed from anywhere you may find yourself in the world. As long as there is an Internet connection, your “digital life” will be right there waiting for you.
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Google Maps has opened up the world to Web surfers, but not everyone is happy about the democratization of maps and satellite images of the entire world being only a click away. The US Department of Defense issued a warning to Google last week that street-view images of terrain and territory are not allowed on military installations and bases.
Google claims to be on a mission to organize information and resources and make them accessible to anyone worldwide, but the U. S. military takes exception to this noble cause when it comes to maintaining the security of its bases and other sites.
Google recently presented street view images showing a detailed layout of Fort Sam Houston located in San Antonio, Texas. The Department of Defense reacted quickly, issuing an official communiqué to Google informing them that they were violating United States law — the military’s version of a “cease and desist” letter.
A Google spokesperson said it was not the company’s policy to request access to private military installations or other sensitive facilities. Google emphasized that the policy of Google Maps is to stay on public roads, but that a driver working for the company had inadvertently violated that policy by venturing onto Fort Sam Houston.
Google has since removed the street-view pictures of the base, though satellite and map views continue to be available on Google Maps. Contradicting Google’s official line, a spokesperson for NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said that that Google requested access to Fort Sam Houston. The Pentagon then issued a directive on February 28 requiring Google to remove any images from their database depicting US military sites. Lt. Commander Gerry Ross of NORAD said, “it has operational risks for force protection and the safety of personnel.”
Ross also pointed out that Google is not the only company who must adhere to the military’s “no images” directive. Other companies, particularly online mapping and information gathering services, must refrain from including sensitive installations and military bases on their web sites.
The US military is just one of many organizations concerned about Google Maps and Google Earth, the company’s worldwide satellite imaging service. The New York Times is reporting that the government’s of Russia, South Korea and India are among those that have expressed reservations about Google’s satellite image categorization of the planet.
Particularly, governments are concerned that the satellite images might reveal sensitive details about military bases, increasing the likelihood of terrorism. Google claims they have a very simple procedure to process official request to remove images, though many governments would like to see tighter self-regulation on Google’s part, to avoid making sensitive information available in the first place.
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What is Bebo? That’s the question many people are asking today. Businessweek.com is reporting that AOL has pulled out it’s sizable checkbook to purchase the pre-teen social networking website known as Bebo. Buying Bebo gives AOL access to their growing teen and preteen audience, as well as providing a way to compete with the other big social networks online, including MySpace and Facebook.
AOL will pay $850 million for the California-based Bebo, a move which surprised many analysts. Bebo is a relatively small web site, but their growth has been significant over the past year, and they’re now the third most popular social networking site online.
“Old media” corporations are in a bit of a feeding frenzy, seeking to buy into the social networking bandwagon. Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp purchased MySpace a few years back for $580 million, and Facebook has received plenty of offers as well, though the company has remained independent thus far.
Bebo was established in 2005 and currently has 40 million users around the world. The influx of preteens to the site has helped Bebo grow significantly over the past year. Visits to the web site have increased by 60% from January of 2006, and Bebo now boasts approximately 7.1 million unique hits per month.
Even though Bebo is growing at an impressive rate, its user statistics are still humble compared to MySpace’s global audience of more than 100 million. Facebook also has a significant advantage, with over 64 million members and a 200% increase in visits to the site over the past 15 months.
But where MySpace and Facebook have focused on attracting older teens and young adults, Bebo is attempting to carve out a niche for itself with the younger teen and preteen audience. The challenge AOL will face in adding Bebo to its roster of online real estate is to differentiate the site from the other popular social networks.
AOL CEO Randy Falco says that the company plans to merge Bebo with AOL’s instant messenger service, and monetize the site through teen-oriented advertising. Analysts predict that advertising on social networks will increase to $2.89 billion in 2009.
Bebo established itself quickly as an online presence, and garnered coveted partnerships with the likes of MTV, CBS and even the BBC. AOL will seek to expand the site, and the challenge will be to bring in the advertising dollars without alienating Bebo’s notoriously fickle teen demographic.
Users of social networking sites — especially teen users — are known to be wary of heavily advertised, overly commercial ventures. Bebo’s members could quickly bail on the site if they sense Bebo is becoming too predictable and commercial. So in this sense, AOL must walk a tight rope between increasing the advertising revenue of the site, while maintaining Bebo’s low-key, irreverent attitude. Whether AOL can successfully turn a profit from Bebo will depend on the subtlety of its adverts, and the uniqueness of content it can contribute to the site.
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CBS has teamed up with AOL Time Warner to create a massive online radio partnership, according to CNN.com. The proposed deal will allow CBS Radio to advertise to AOL’s large online audience, and the merger is expected to pump new life into online radio, and perhaps even threaten the dominance of satellite radio stations.
Under the new deal, CBS will provide advertising, local news, sports and entertainment content to AOL radio. AOL’s online radio site has become one of the most visited web sites for streaming audio over the past year or so, and a partnership with CBS should help solidify AOL’s radio dominance online.
The teaming up of AOL and CBS should, in theory, be good for both companies. CBS has reported declining profits in their radio division for more than a year, and AOL has considered selling or splitting off its Internet radio division. By combining their efforts, the new CBS/AOL online radio should shake up the market considerably.
AOL’s radio web site averages 1.2 million listeners per week, according to the Arbitron results for January, 2008. This will provide a sizable market to receive advertisements developed by CBS, and the inclusion of CBS news, sports and entertainment content should increase listener-ship significantly over the next year.
The concept of Internet radio first began to capture the imagination of broadcasters back in the 1990s. Unfortunately, at that time bandwidth was so limited that streaming audio was a dicey proposition at best.
But these days, with broadband Internet access being nearly ubiquitous, Internet radio is poised to make a serious dent in the market, and could even pose a real threat to satellite radio providers. It wasn’t so many years ago that all the experts predicted satellite radio would dominate the marketplace by now; but the huge number of subscribers predicted for online radio has not materialized as yet.
Even the jump from terrestrial to satellite radio by massively popular shock jock Howard Stern did not attract the number of subscribers predicted. The reasons for satellite radio’s lackluster performance are varied. Terrestrial radio has proven to be a stubborn business model to defeat, and now with the Internet set for an explosion of high quality online radio, satellite’s troubles are likely to only get worse.
The new CBS/AOL merger will create the most powerful, wide-reaching online radio station yet. And with AOL radio already capturing a respectable number of listeners every week, the addition of CBS content could be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back, ushering in a new era of Internet radio.
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We all know that creating a blog network can become very profitable if it is well maintained, updated, and taken care of. Blog networks have the potential to generate massive amounts of money in the right hands, however, they can also be very expensive to start up, let alone the costs of hiring consistent writers. Few people have the resources to get a blog network off the ground and rolling, but there is a cheaper alternative that can still net awesome profits and the best part – it won’t cost you a dime!
There is a simple theory behind starting your own free blog network. It will take a lot of time, hard work, and effort, but it can pay off greatly if you stick with it. Basically, what you need to do is identify a group of topics that not only are you interested in, but are special niche areas that you can have a chance at getting ranked on Google. For an example, let’s say you are interested enough in pig breeding that you can write about – bam! You have your first blog. Head over to a popular free blog website like blogger.com, and register pigbreeding.blogspot.com. Write a few articles and post them to get it started, install Google Adsense, create a sitemap and submit to Google. After you’ve completed your first blog and got it online, you can move on to the next step, which is rinsing and repeating. Find another topic that you can write about that isn’t overly exploited, and run through the same process as before.
As you can imagine, you could have several dozen blogs set up in a very small amount of time. If you started on a Friday and worked over the weekend, you could easily have a small army of 50 blogs. Before you make fun of blogspot blogs, keep in mind that they are typically Google magnets (that may have something to do with the fact that Google owns Blogger.com), so even though the domain name might not look pretty, with enough decent content, you’ll have no problem getting listed in the search results rather quickly.
Expanding on the last example, let’s say that you did indeed register 50 blogs, and put a few articles on each to get them started. The best way to monetize is to start out with a goal of each blog making $1.00 a day with Google Adsense. If you do the math, $1.00 a day x 50 equals $50.00 per day. $50 per day x 365 gives you an annual salary of over $18k! This might not sound like much, but just think if you doubled your little network to 100 blogs – we’re then talking $37k per year, which for some could be a sustainable annual income to live comfortably on (depending on what area you live in, of course).
Playing with the numbers is fun, and there is really no limit to how many free blogs you can have in your network, as there is no limit on the amount Blogger will let you have. Imagine if your 50 or 100 blogs started averaging more than $1.00 a day over time as they developed? You could be talking about a serious income. Remember, all you invested was your time! As your network grows (which it undoubtedly would) you could even take some earnings and hire writers for your blog, which would let you concentrate on other, more important tasks – like taking all of your money to the bank ;-)
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My, how times have changed. A decade ago, nearly 96% of all Web surfers used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to navigate the Web and display pages. But these days Internet Explorer has some serious competition, and Mozilla’s Firefox continues to gain ground against Microsoft with its open source browser.
Computerworld.com is reporting that Firefox now has more then 17% of the worldwide market, when it comes to browsing the web. February was the fourth consecutive month that Firefox’s market share increased, and if it continues to grow at this rate, analysts predict Mozilla will have nearly 50% of the Web browser market by 2011.
Obviously, this would be a serious setback for Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer Web browser has dominated the market since the mid-90s, when Netscape began to falter. Despite the loss of market share for their Internet Explorer browser, and disappointing sales of the new Vista operating system, Microsoft stock has continued to do well on Wall Street, showing substantial gains in the last quarter.
Meanwhile Apple’s Safari browser is also on the increase. The Mac browser represented 5.7% of the marketplace in February, a rise of nearly 1 percentage point from February 2007. Even the small Opera Web browser is gaining ground, though not nearly as quickly as either Safari or Firefox.
The success of these “alternative Web browsers” has certainly had a negative effect on Microsoft. Their Explorer has lost market share for eight months in a row now, and analysts predict this trend will continue through 2008. And although the latest version of Internet Explorer has added many new useful features, and increased security, it could be a case of too little too late.
The company is currently testing the latest version of Explorer (Internet Explorer 8 ), though few details have been revealed so far about the browser. Insiders say that Internet Explorer 8 will “borrow heavily” from the success of Firefox, by including many optional plug-ins to enhance the user’s Web surfing experience. As an open-source program, Firefox has benefited from having many third-party web application designers develop free plug-ins for the browser, many of which had become extremely popular.
The idea of customizing a Web browser, by adding a series of integrated plug-ins is certainly not new, but it has really taken off with the Mozilla Firefox application. Microsoft is said to be looking at ways to include the same level of user customization, but with one noticeable exception: Internet Explorer 8 will not be open source; therefore we are likely to see significantly less third-party applications developed for the browser when it finally does arrive.
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There’s just no denying that YouTube has been a phenomenal success online. Although many members of the YouTube community feared that being bought out by Google back in 2006 would “ruin the YouTube experience,” by and large, Google has been good for YouTube, and the online video site has continued to flourish.
The fears that Google would “over commercialize” YouTube have been largely unfounded. It is true that YouTube now features more online advertising than before, but mostly those ads are unobtrusive, and do little to diminish the experience of watching videos on the site.
But the question for many dedicated Web watchers is now, “where does YouTube go from here.” In the online world — just as in the off-line world — you’re either growing or dying, so it is critical for even phenomenal success stories like YouTube to expand into new markets, and adopt new technologies to constantly improve the end-users experience on the site.
With that in mind, there had been rumors for some time that Google has been experimenting with adding a type of live streaming video to YouTube. The site’s cofounder Steve Chen indicated an interest in adding live video as far back as 2005, though he admitted at that time the company simply lacked the resources (read: money) to make it happen.
But Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 gave the site a firm foundation and nearly unlimited resources to experiment with new technologies. In a recent interview, Chen was quoted as saying, “… we’ve never had the resources to do it [live video] correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually launch something this year.”
So it appears that the many rumors circulating about YouTube 2.0 featuring live streaming video were correct after all. But how will this change or (hopefully) improve YouTube? Actually, it could have a greater impact on the future of Internet entertainment than any of us realize at the moment.
Live video has traditionally been the domain of broadcast television networks. If Google can create a viable system to broadcast live video via YouTube, it will effectively create a massive online broadcast network like nothing the Web has seen before, and it will undoubtedly blur the already murky line between Internet and television entertainment.
Of course, live streaming video online is not a new idea — Yahoo, Ustream and Justin.tv have all experimented with live video, for example. But none of those sites have been particularly successful in applying the technology. Overall, they lacked the resources, infrastructure and money to develop user-friendly live video on a large-scale.
Google, on the other hand, has no shortage of resources, infrastructure and financial wherewithal. If anyone has the capability of perfecting live online broadcasting, it is surely Google. Look for YouTube to begin featuring a beta live video section later this year.
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