Amazon - Programming Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’

16 Mar 2010

We’re here at SXSW Interactive waiting for the keynote with Twitter CEO Evan Williams who will discuss "The Next Generation of Social Media." There has been some speculation that an announcement of Twitter’s ad platform could occur at this event, but that may or may not happen. We’ll see.

Either way, I’ll be liveblogging the keynote below. Please forgive the inevitable typos.

Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab."

Liveblogging starts

02:00: Still waiting…

02:01: Introduction beginning…

02:03: Here we go…

Evan Williams announces…A new platform for integrating twitter into websites: it’s called @anywhere

Signin using twitter id, your own publications can be followed starting with amazon,huffpost youtube yahoo,….a bunch of others.

Umair asks – if i’m at newspaper and i want to read one of fav columnits

ev: @anywhere reduces friction – not strict rules lleaves alot of innovation up to devs and third parties…a lot to be done with it

easily tweet from column itself. you may just want to follow the columlnist….straight from byline

"one of the things we’ve found with twitter is discovery is one of the hardest challenges…"

twitter is very easy way to keep in touch.

Umair: what are key benefits to site?

ev: give you connection back to users that you didn’t hav before – twitter drives tons of traffic, so should reslt in more followers for a site than just sending out links…

hopefully result in more people who are your fans using twitter, talking about you content…

you can bring in users’ tweets into your site, and create a sub community with it

Umair: people and organizations build stronger relationships?

about lowering barrier to that according to Ev.

03:13: Ev: We’re still focused pretty much on how do we create the best experience for users and businesses…

How do we create a business out of this? There’s tons of business users on twitter today..

We just want to make that better, easier, and faster.

What is Twitter? Maybe the right question is what is twitter evolving to?

It’s always been a difficult question to answer. We think of it as an information network to help people discover what they care about (in the world)

You can follow the flaming lips if that’s what you care about….you can be smarter and make better choices…that’s valuable…

its like saying "what’s the internet?" it’s about who you are. what you need at the time.

02:16. As we grow, one of the things that becomes painful is having a lot of centralized decision making and forcing poeple through slow processes, so we have teams and try to give them the resources they need…

Role for interacting with teams?

I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code…I personally like to get inovled in product and strategy…what we should be doing…the nitty gritty, work wth product teams. half my time. the other half think about company and right culture internally…

been thinking a lot lately about how to scale the company and adopt the characteristics we want…how to define these characteristics..paralllel between service and the company we want to create – openness big value of twitter . transparency. a company that behaves by that as well. easy to say and harder to do as you grow…

02:19 Openness means a lot of things. we debated whether openness or transparency is the right word. you can let people see what you’re doing, but a door lets people come in and mess with what you’re doing ..users have taken twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. ….we’ve encouraged and supported that. a core part of being open.

Your basic assumptions are usually wrong. "Openness is a survival technique."

We talk about nine assumptions you should have one of them is assume there are more smart people outside the compay than inside. it’s a key thing to remember as you get bigger…

02:21: Deals with Bing/Google first guys we shared full stream of public twitter data with. a lot of debate…people inside twitter…if there’s all this data that could be highly moentizable., does it make sense to give this data away? We came to the decision by going to the principle by how do we create the most value for the user….the reason google/bing could help that – ther’es valuable knowledge within the twitter network. there’s a lot of valuable tweeting that people don’t necessarily see…it’s a way to bring more valuable to the tweets.

02:24: It was a tough decision to come to….big partners aren’t who they want to limit it too..announced a couple weeks ago that they would license the data to other partners…

One of the exciting next things to happen with the ecosystem …creating core experiences that fill holes in user expereince…sharing photos, shortening links, apps, etc.

Real businesses built off twitter – cotweet,etc. we know twitter can be used for customer support, but twitter.com interface isn’t built for that. cotweet recently got acquired who wants to focus on that more.

We’d love to see much more focus on creating those deep experiences.

"We’re pretty open." THere is some control we need to employ. if we were completly open, it could hur the users in time….it has to be managed a lot – being open and having an open api makes it much easier to build apps to spam twiter. sending cease and desists every day to spammers – using the twitter brand…

One reason third parties are so important – a lot of people falling for these guys’ tricks…we have to assert some kind of control.

02:29: An email i recently got…to support – someone in chile thanking twitter for helping communication…this is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important to make twitter reach the weakest signals in the world…because twitter’s so simple….sms still really important to us…

We’re really happy we’ve been able to get sms coverage…not as easy as just providing a service on the internet.

02:21: To me it comes back to is someone getting value out of twitter. if they’re search google and they come upon a tweet and get value out of a tweet, we consider them a user…ther is a curve for adoption. "we have a pretty wide definition of user." we’re trying to lower the barrier…at the beginning a lot of focus was on telling the world what you’re doing…now we’re getting to the point where there’s something interesting on twitter for almost everybody…mentions flaming lips again…critical that it’s a two way medium, but this could be as simple as a retweet or a reply…

02:35 Press secretary of the white house started using twitter in an authentic way from inside the white house in a way that you wouldn’t usually see things….official channel, but they’re using it in a new way. "very fun" to see. It’s about reducing the walls beween people who have a lot of influence and the people they influence. That’s the most profound promise of the Internet, and we’re riding the wave I started on ten years ago with blogging…"

02:41: There’s more and more stuff every day you may want to follow and search for…our goal is not just to maximize that. We understand that people have limited time/attetion. We have no interest in increasing just the amount of time you spend on the Twitter site. "If anything, we’d like to decease it."

The open exchange of info has a positive impact on the world…

02:46: The obvious stuff will be just signing in and tweeting more stuff, but there’s another level of value created by lowering frition (@ platform)

If the channel helps the business get better, that tha’s very powerful.

02:49: If you live on the web, you’re used to having a relationship with companies/services you use..

A lot of people walked out of this keynote. I’m pretty sure the guy next to me fell asleep. No joke.

Go to Source

No Comments
Tags: Amazon, business users, evan williams, havas, huffpost, own publications, strict rules, twitter, YouTube

SxSW: Founder Billy Chasen on what to do with a Stickybit

In: IT news

15 Mar 2010

As the SxSW conference has grown in popularity, so has its influence. All around Austin for a week every year, techies wander around glued to their phones and listen to each other expound on technical minutia. Over the past few years, companies launched at SxSW have gone on to much critical acclaim (if not always monetary success).

This year, everyone’s been talking about Stickybits. Basically, they’re barcodes that let people attach digital content to real world objects. When scanned by the Stickybits app, any user can see that content and upload their own. A pack of 20 stickers are available on Amazon for $9.95. Barcodes are also available for free downloading on the Stickybits website.

With investments from Polaris Ventures,
Stickybits launched this week at SxSW. When attendees at SxSW opened their schwag bags, among the various flyers, stickers and branded fortune cookies was a packet of Stickybits. People immediately set about tagging items around the convention center and uploading their own content to them. There are unlimited uses for information that can be attached, to branded items and otherwise. But like any user generated item, there’s also potential for clashing messages.

Founder Billy Chasen ran Chartbeat.com, a real time analytics service that’s been “infoporn.” I caught up with Chasen at SxSW to talk about Stickybits and what he hopes to achieve with it.

Everyone’s been talking about your company this week. How’s that feeling?
I’ve been so overwhelmed with all of the use and praise. The stream
of love has been great. We launched four days ago here and there have been some interesting use cases already. Someone attached a Stickybit sticker to a dollar bill to see where it would end up. Someone hid a coupon for his website in the convention center.

Where did you get the idea for Stickybits?
I came up with the idea last fall. I had this idea of wanting to attach virtual graffiti onto a wall. I was getting upset that latitude and longitude on QR codes weren’t accurate enough. It could tell me that I’m sitting here, but it can’t tell me about the chair or the wall that are right here. So we came up with the idea of stickers to figure out what is what. I pitched it to Seth Goldstein, who ran scialmedia.com, the Facebook advertising company. He loved it, and we started hashing out different use cases.

What are you telling people to do with them?
We wanted to build this so that it’s as open as possible. You don’t have to buy stickers, and can attach it to any QR code. You can download codes and attach them to random things. But we also knew that when you bring users in and say they can do anything with something, they don’t know what to do. Also, we wanted to give people some best use cases and solicit they were using it.

All it does is turn QR codes into a unique number and let people attach new content. It’s user-generated content. Basically, the first person that attaches to the code is considered the moderator and can delete anything that’s added afterwards. Soon we’ll have ways for brands to manage their Stickybits. Right now we’ve launched the consumer model.

What are some examples of use cases for Stickybits?
Imagine if every refrigerator had its manual attached to a QR code. With branded examples, you can add content, or give bonus content. With CDs, for example, there are fewer, but they’re still sold. People sill want to hold them in their hands. You can a barcode, get all the 30 second samples

There are coupons, special offers — the options are limitless. We’re hoping to see how brands will interact with these people. This is their best audience, they took the time to scan a code and add something to it.

Why launch at SxSW?
Our main goal in SxSW was to give it to everyone. There are 12,000 in the bags, and we’re handing out another 2,000 ourselves. We thought we’d launch and learn.

I think it’s already proven itself. SxSW is what made Twitter, and Foursquare was a huge hit last year. Having such a concentration of the geek elite is really important. If they like something, they’ll run with it. That’s why we wanted to target this conference more than anything else.

We put so much thought into what we wanted to do in SxSW. For a lot of companies, it’s an afterthought. There are screen cleaners in the bag and the like. So we wanted to do something that people will enjoy and have value. And people have noticed. Someone tweeted that Stickybits were the only thing of value in the bags.

How about marketing? Are you working on anything beyond getting techies to use it here?
Our main push was to get it into people’s hands. We have some things in store for later on. But the people here can definitely influence and understand a product. When Twitter launched, people were confused about what it is and why they would use it. The people who embraced it were these geek elite people – and they explained it in different ways to people who aren’t in this bubble.

We have an easily explainable product, but people only get it by example. When I say this allows you to attach digital content to real world objects, they say: “What does that mean?” But then when they see it in action, they think it’s great.

Do you need critical mass for it to work?
The benefit of the product is that it works with both critical mass and the individual case. You can just use it to send a postcard. The use case can be one to one, or one to a few. Critical mass would be nice, obviously. But we don’t need it.

What if a bigger brand starts hedging in with new QR code technology?
We’re gonna make sure we’re doing that better than anyone else. There are tons of companies in QR space, but no one’s really gotten the fact that you should empower consumers to write. Just a seamless experience, what do you want to add. So easy. And when you scan it, it just starts playing.

No Comments
Tags: Amazon, branded items, chasen, fortune cookies, latitude and longitude, schwag bags, sxsw conference, time analytics, virtual graffiti

Plastic Logic Says Que E-Reader Delayed

In: IT news

14 Mar 2010

Plastic Logic, the maker of an e-reader targeting business users, told customers on Thursday that it would delay the delivery of its first Que readers until the summer. The company had said at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that the device would be delivered in mid-April.

: Plastic Logic; Plastic Logic’s e-reader

In an e-mail to customers who pre-ordered the product, Plastic Logic’s CEO Richard Archuleta said that delay was due to an effort to “fine-tune the features and enhance the overall product experience,” he wrote. He added: “I can imagine that you want to get your QUE proReader as soon as possible. We are sorry for the delay. For your inconvenience, the shipping charges will be on us.”

Betty Taylor, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mail that that Plastic Logic has seen “overwhelmingly positive response” to its device since CES. “We’re confident Que is going to remain on the most wanted list of mobile business professionals – and that there’s still ample room in the nascent eReader market to compete, especially for those who are not solely focused on the crowded eBook space,” she wrote.

As for the reasons for the delay, Taylor said delivering cutting-edge technology sometimes take longer than expected. The company wants “customers to have an optimal experience when Que ships,” she wrote.

Plastic Logic, which expects Que models to be priced between $649 and $799, joins a crowded field of E Ink-based e-readers that are competing at one end of the market with Amazon’s dominant Kindle, and on the other end with Apple iPad, which arrives in stores in early April.