All eyes are on Apple as the company prepares to unveil its Tablet device next week. But the dominant force in the e-reader market – Amazon – is about to shake things up in a major way by announcing what amounts to an app store for Kindle.

According to The New York Times, a formal announcement from Amazon will come on Thursday. The company expects developers to build a wide range of applications, from new ways to experience e-books to games and utility apps.

And just like iPhone, there’s going to be lots of money to be made: developers will keep 70 percent of the revenue from app sales. Content publishers also stand to make more money — the NYT reports that the app store model may represent a shift in Kindle’s relationship with newspapers and magazines, as those companies currently receive just a 30 percent cut of sales.

This is a huge development that completely changes the dynamics of the impending Tablet wars. Developers will suddenly have two huge new markets to target, content publishers will have some leverage in negotiating deals with Amazon and Apple, and consumers will have a lot more to think about when it comes to choosing which device sits in between their mobile phone and their desktop computer.

Tags: amazon, apple, Apple Tablet, gadgets, Kindle, software

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Microsoft has filed suit against TiVo, specifically accusing the company of infringing on its video purchasing and delivery patents. This comes just days after a lawsuit was filed by TiVo against AT&T, one of Microsoft’s biggest customers.

The best way to explain this complicated series of affairs is through a short timeline. Here’s the summary of what’s happened thus far:

– Last August, TiVo sued AT&T and Verizon over several patents involving its DVR technology. TiVo has succeeded in the past with these lawsuits, most notably winning $103 million in damages from EchoStar last year.

- If the lawsuit were to succeed, it could take down AT&T’s U-Verse TV service, which is powered by Microsoft technology. Specifically, Microsoft powers the video delivery platform and digital recording tech utilizing its Mediaroom technology.

- Thus, in defense of its partner and lucrative customer, Microsoft intervened in the lawsuit on January 15, asking to join the case on the side of AT&T.

- Now Microsoft’s decided to turn up the heat on TiVo by launching its own lawsuit. In a statement to Bloomberg, Microsoft said the following: “We remain open to resolving this situation through an intellectual-property licensing agreement, and we have initiated discussions to engage TiVo in negotiations.”

- Essentially, Microsoft’s offering TiVo the chance to settle this affair before it goes to court, but it doesn’t look like TiVo is backing down.

TiVo may be emboldened by the fact that it’s set a precedent of winning these types of lawsuits, but facing Microsoft’s legal muscle is probably the company’s biggest challenge yet. The future of DVR technology could be at stake if a court does eventually decide this case.

[via: WSJ]

Tags: att, lawsuit, microsoft, tivo

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In a video interview with Bloomberg, Twitter COO Dick Costolo said his company will not try to make an initial public offering this year, but instead focus on expanding and making more money.

That’s further affirmation of Twitter’s apparent strategy; co-founder Biz Stone said a month ago that he and his colleagues “are definitely not interested in selling the company.”

Costolo said he expects revenue growth from a new advertising platform that’s coming “very soon,” commercial accounts with analytics features for tracking tweets and traffic, and at least 10 more distribution deals in the future. Twitter has drawn some criticism because the company’s revenues are low for its $1 billion valuation. That is clearly a concern within the company, and something that needs to be addressed before an IPO. “Now we have to go build the business the business that lives up to that valuation,” Costolo said.

Expansion into new areas and features is part of the plan despite slowing growth (or maybe in response to it), but Costolo didn’t go into specifics in the Bloomberg video. He did say that the company will be aggressive in making acquisitions of companies that have something to offer in the areas into which Twitter wants to expand.

Tags: dick costolo, ipo, social media, twitter

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In fact, the release of idle usernames is almost sure to occur.  The cutoff regarding inactivity has probably been set, too – Martin Bryant found a policy referring to the automatic removal of accounts after six months.

The most important detail – when the big release will take place – is just a little fuzzy.  Bryant wrote, "We reached out to Twitter for comment . . . and a spokesperson for the company told me that the company plans to release all inactive usernames and deleted usernames in the future but doesn’t have a date set yet."

So make preparations for the event as best you can, whether that means signing into a few accounts you’ve let collect dust or setting up a sophisticated email alert system for when a username becomes free.

Something of a land rush is practically guaranteed to occur, and insofar as that’ll represent (and generate) more interest in Twitter, the company’s decision to make this move is looking pretty smart.

Related Articles:

> More Reporters Using Facebook And Twitter For Story Research

> Twitter COO Effectively Rules Out 2010 IPO

> Twitter Earns Itself A Candy Heart Phrase

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The new design, called the “wall of touch”, is an interactive touch screen wall comprised of up to nine 43 inch to 46 inch, 1.5 inch thick panels with a resolution of 1080p. Driven by an H-P Z800 workstation, the wall acts as a large immersive H-P TouchSmart computer both in terms of content and resolution. Users can access cable feeds, satellite feeds, downloaded and streaming content from the web such as YouTube, Hulu.com, and social networking sites, as well view DVR and DVD content.

Philip McKinney, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of H-P’s Personal Systems Group, recently stopped in New York to show off the technology. Unlike most touch screen interfaces, users don’t have to make actual contact with the wall for it to interpret their gestures.

The wall employs a touch mechanism that uses optical cameras and a magnetic strip to detect when users are nearing the wall. For users who can’t reach the far corners of the screens, the wall of touch also works with a standard keyboard and mouse.

The wall of touch is not the first touch screen PC/TV creation to hit the market, but is one of the largest. For example, SONY VAIO has an All-in-One Touchscreen with HDTV capabilities, but it’s a single display of up to 24 in. Smaller companies have developed attachable screens that can turn plasma screens into touch screens, as well as projectors that create touch-enabled surfaces up to 10 inches.

Mr. McKinney, who also leads H-P’s Innovation Program Office, says H-P first began working on the “wall of touch” prototype about a year ago, when Richard Edelman, the chief executive of H-P’s public relations firm, expressed interest in an innovative and interactive screen for Edelman’s new offices in downtown Manhattan. Since then it has attracted the interest of other clients, according to Mr. McKinney, and versions of the wall of touch are being shown in the headquarters of the NBA as well as at the Continental Airlines counter in Houston Airport.

“We’re in the process of building out the next handful of walls as part of supporting our customer base, with the intent that, if there’s enough interest, H-P will turn it into a mainstream product,” says Mr. McKinney.

He said “wall of touch” will not be widely available to consumers until 2011, and would likely come with a hefty price tag: anywhere from a couple thousand dollars up to $100,000 for more advanced systems with technologies like HD video conferencing.

For some, the wall of touch may seem like little more than a cluster of H-P TouchSmart panels stitched together that allow for already-available interactive experiences. Mr. McKinney says the company nixed the idea of one large single display, as it would require rear projection and a translucent screen material that would allow more light to pass through and potentially create issues with the resolution.

H-P has been pushing touchscreens for two years. It first introduced its line of TouchSmart PC’s in 2007, followed by a line of notebook computers in 2008, in efforts to boost sales of its personal computers and gain market share. Since then, the company has surpassed Dell as the top seller of PC’s. According to an IDC report from earlier this month, H-P shipped nearly 18 million PC’s in the 4th quarter, a 23% gain from the previous year. The report did not break out touchscreen sales.

Mr. McKinney declined to comment upon the company’s plans to build out more immersive display technologies or its expectations for sales of the “wall of touch” once it hits the market, saying the company is in a quiet period leading up to the company’s Q1 earnings release on February 17.

However, prior to then, H-P will moderate a panel at Sundance 2010, with representatives from Disney, Dreamworks, and the NBA, that will discuss the future of immersive 3-D displays. Mr. McKinney indicated H-P plans to unveil additional new display technology during the panel.

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I stumbled across this simple yet iconic packaging in Switzerland, and although it looks quite Swiss, closer inspection led me to a Spanish company, Chocolate Organiko. They’ve got a really robust portfolio of chocolates with really graphic packaging execution. I really like the use of colour and tension within the typography. 

Several more images after the jump.

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From Silicon Valley to Zhongguancun, Google’s surprise announcement that it may pull out of China has fueled an enormous amount of discussion in recent days, not all of it 100% accurate. Below are some misstatements and misunderstandings we’ve seen:

1. Google failed in China

Google’s China operations contribute a small fraction of the company’s overall revenue – the company doesn’t disclose the amount, but analysts estimate it was a few percent of its total $21.8 billion in 2008 revenue, or several hundred million dollars. But Google has made significant progress in China in recent years, raising its share of the Internet search market to roughly 36% in the fourth quarter of 2009 from 13% when it started its Chinese-language google.cn site in early 2006, according to data from research firm Analysys International.

Many other foreign companies doing business in China would gladly forgo big profits in the short term for comparable market-share growth in China—especially in an industry where China has more users than any other country (384 million according to the latest statistics). Google has also been particularly popular among the highly sought-after demographic of young, educated, white-collar urban professionals. The company’s powerful brand of business and ethics (“don’t be evil) has also earned it a fair amount of good will among Chinese Internet users, many of whom are now mourning its (still uncertain) fate. While rival Baidu still has a much larger 58% share of the search market, its brand has suffered as a result of scandals involving paid results and allegations of censorship of sensitive news stories.

Google doesn’t say if it’s profitable in China, but there’s certainly no reason to assume it’s not. Baidu, its chief rival, reported net profit of about $153 million on revenue of $468 million for 2008, when it said it had 6,387 employees. Google’s revenue would have perhaps half or two thirds that amount, but it likely has a much lower cost base in China than Baidu, since Google is believed to employ well under 1,000 employees in the country, and can use technology developed by its U.S. headquarters.

2. Google.com is not accessible in China

Before Google introduced its China-specific search engine, Google.cn, in 2006, its global site Google.com was subject to periodic blocking in China. But for the last four years, Google.com has been almost always accessible to users in China.

However, the fact that Google.com can be accessed from China doesn’t mean that Internet users can get to forbidden content listed in the site’s search results. Links to sites that are blocked in China will still return error messages or time out when they are clicked. (In contrast, Google’s Chinese search engine, Google.cn, will filter out links to sites that don’t comply with Chinese laws and regulations.)

And of course, given the unpredictability of China’s Web restrictions, there’s no guarantee that Google.com will continue to be available to users inside China, at least not without “scaling the wall.”

3. Google has Gmail servers in China

Some reports have said that the reason Chinese hackers were able to access Gmail accounts is that Google has email servers physically located in China. This is not the case. Google says it has no email servers in the country.

Indeed, Google has said keeping its servers out of China was a deliberate move to help protect user information. When the company announced its plans to launch google.cn in January 2006, executives said one of the safeguards it planned to use to protect user interests was that it wouldn’t host user-generated content like email and blogs on servers in China.

Google had reason to be careful. In 2005, there was widespread outcry among rights activists and the U.S. government after Yahoo turned over user information to the Chinese government, which was used as evidence to sentence journalist Shi Tao to 10 years in prison. Yahoo said that, because its Chinese mail servers were inside China, the company felt compelled to comply with the authorities’ request.

4. Google.cn search results are already uncensored

After Tuesday’s announcement, Web users ran amok on Google.cn, looking up sensitive terms such as “Tiananmen 1989,” “tank man,” and even “sensitive words.” But many have been disappointed with the results, as searches for these terms still turned up the familiar disclaimer that “in accordance with local laws and regulations, a portion of the search results are not displayed.”

Google says that it hasn’t yet started to remove content filters on Google.cn, a process that could take weeks.

How to explain the images of tank man and links to sites about the Dalai Lama found via Google.cn? Many of the searches yielding fruitful results appear to have been conducted in English, a trick that often turns up fuller results on Google.cn than a search for the same term in Chinese. (To see what we mean, compare these Google.cn results for “Dalai Lama” in English and Chinese).

5. Google has identified Chinese dissidents as the targets of cyber attacks

Since Google revealed that it has been the target of cyber attacks, and that it had identified two Gmail accounts that had been compromised, a number of prominent Chinese activists have reported that their Gmail accounts have been hacked, in some cases repeatedly. Google says that these intrusions were not part of the larger, sophisticated attack on its security infrastructure, but likely the result of more pedestrian phishing scams or malware.

6. Google has already shut down its business in China

On Friday, Ministry of Commerce spokesman Yao Jian said that neither MOC nor the Beijing Municipal Commission of Commerce had received any information from Google about a planned withdrawal of its investment. A person close to Google also denied rumors that Google employees in China have ceased to report for work.

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Memjet

Len Lauer

It was a bit of a mystery when Len Lauer resigned as chief operating officer of Qualcomm last month. It was equally puzzling when he surfaced a couple of weeks later at Memjet, a closely held company most people have never heard of.

Lauer has a reputation as a communications-industry heavyweight. After more than 10 years at IBM, he took jobs like chief executive of Bell Atlantic-New Jersey and COO of Sprint Nextel before joining Qualcomm in late 2006. In becoming CEO of Memjet, he is changing industries to lead an ambitious effort to shake up the printer market.

What’s so different about Memjet’s approach? For starters, conventional inkjet printers have a print head that moves back and forth across the page. Consequently, they tend to be slow, noisy and shake your desk. (Not so laser printers, of course, but they tend to be relatively expensive).

Memjet hopes to market it calls a “page wide” print head, which remains stationary and lays down ink across a page as the paper moves past it. That increases printing speeds by eight to 10 times, Lauer says. He estimates its technology will print 60 pages per minute; while some conventional inkjet printers advertise 30 to 32 pages per minute, they more often complete six pages or so in that time, he says. Lauer also estimates that Memjet’s ink costs will be 30% to 40% lower than current inkjet technology.

Memjet’s assertions carry a bit more weight than your average startup’s. The technology is the brainchild of Kia Silverbrook, a prolific inventor in Australia who was once a chief technology officer for Japan’s Canon, one of the longtime kingpins in printer technology. Silverbrook has been working on the page wide approach for more than a dozen years; Memjet says it holds more than 2,600 patents, with 2,000 more pending.

The company–based, like Qualcomm, in San Diego–has more than 600 employees, with about 400 of its engineers in Sydney, Lauer says. Memjet has never disclosed precisely how much it has raised, but Lauer says the amount comes to “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of dollars. Its biggest investor is Argonaut Private Equity.

Memjet doesn’t plan to make printers itself. Rather, it plans to sell print heads, ink and other components to companies that will sell printers. Potential customers could include the big companies that dominate the market–think of names like Canon, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox–as well as new companies that have never before been able to make printers.

In that way, Lauer says, the company could function a bit like Qualcomm did in cellphones–supplying chips to help scores of companies enter the handset market, which was once the exclusive preserve of giants like Nokia and Motorola. He says Memjet could help restructure the printer industry from a few vertically integrated giants to a broader “horizontal” ecosystem, with companies specializing in components, complete printers and so on.

“It’s a pretty vertical industry,” Lauer says, “and we come in with this horizontal play.”

Charles LeCompte, president of the printer industry research firm Lyra Research, describes what Memjet is attempting as the most interesting thing going on in printers. But the gestation period has been lengthy. Silverbrook announced the technology publicly in 2007 but Memjet still is not shipping any products. “They’ve missed a bunch of deadlines,” LeCompte says.

Lauer says Memjet expects to start delivering products in the second half of this year, initially targeting office printers, label printers and other business applications. It will take some time to generate the volume needed to drive costs down and approach the consumer printer market, he says, but he expects that to happen eventually.

In the meantime, all those patents could come in handy if some big company wants to use its own intellectual property to try to hobble the new competitor. “Is it helpful from a defensive standpoint to have those patents?” Lauer asks, rhetorically. “Yes, it’s very helpful.”

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“A polite alternative to the 10-foot pole. Such is the premise behind start-up company, Reality Bling’s, Ms. Taken – a new product based on an age-old concept for single women, offering them a way to protect themselves against unwanted suitors in social situations. Reality Bling engaged Hornall Anderson to develop the strategy, naming, identity and packaging for Ms. Taken’s “diamond ring” – inconspicuously packaged in the hidden compartment of a keychain fob, which serves as a delivery device for easy access when needed. We also designed an elegant, upscale ring box for additional storage that also functions as a POS display.

As an added touch of humor, we developed a series of tongue in cheek “Playaz” trading cards featuring 20 different illustrated characters representing the typical unsavory personalities that single women attempt to avoid. The result is a system of guideposts that packages and messages this product in a way that adds value, connects emotionally, and ultimately builds a community of single divas. It’s a great example of how, through strategic brainstorms, innovative thinking and inspired design, we helped bring this small start-up company’s big ideas into fruition.”

“We developed a concept basically via the hint of an idea meant to target women in their 20s and 30s with a sense of humor. The project included packaging an idea and creating a brand around it to which single women could really relate.”

– Larry Anderson, Creative Director of Hornall Anderson

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Joshua-Michéle Ross is SVP of Digital Strategy with Fleishman Hillard. He blogs at opposableplanets.com.

Social media has a loyal tribe of disciples. We follow each other on Twitter, connect on Facebook, read each other’s blogs and listen to each other at conferences. We provide each other moral support and though we are a minority, we have religion and we are here to change the world (I’m not joking).

Most importantly, we share stories. These stories are all about finding common ground and building a defensible position on the what/why/how of our new orthodoxy; what is “social”, why you need it, how it actually works and how you measure it.

In this giant food-mill of collective meaning making we are defining the significance of new terms and putting our arguments to the test. Like any self-interested group however, we easily slip into dogmas that serve our purposes but may not serve our clients. Lately I have become increasingly aware of the oversimplified answers that social media consultants apply, often regardless of business context.

So let me be the first to tell you: Social media may not be for you — yet.

Are You Willing to Act? Can You?

One of the most common issues big organizations have with social media is a reasonable fear that customers will air their grievances on a company-sponsored platform such as a blog, Twitter or Facebook page. The nearly universal response to this fear, one that has been hammered home at every conference, and in every blog post is, “your customers are already saying these things about you. Wouldn’t you rather have them talking on your site?” This response rings true because, by and large your customers are online –- and they do have the means to talk about you. If you are a sizable company and you look around it is very likely that someone, somewhere has said some pretty shocking things about you. Sometimes they even work for you.

The hackneyed “you better join the conversation” is often an appropriate response. But it isn’t always the appropriate response.

First, there is a difference between isolated criticism that a company may receive here and there on the Social Web from people of varying influence and veracity, and painting a target on your back by hosting that conversation.

Second, and more importantly, when an organization makes an investment in social media it is a constructive opportunity to consider not only what could go wrong, but why it could go wrong. In other words, what are the valid criticisms that customers and employees might have and what you are willing to do about it. If you aren’t willing to consider the former and have no power concerning the latter, social media might not be your best bet.

Be Prepared to Change

All too often the person making the social media investment has a narrow mandate — quarterly growth — that exists within a parochial frame of reference (“it’s still marketing, isn’t it?”). All too often the company has not thought through (or perhaps willfully ignored) what its response to criticism will be.

So it might not be the best idea to “join the conversation” if you just want to make your quarterly numbers. Don’t create a Facebook Fan Page if your product is a letdown. Don’t use Twitter if your intern will be running the campaign. Above all, don’t engage in social media if you aren’t prepared to change in the bargain.

Ultimately if your company is willing to take the feedback and turn it into action, then social media is a competitive game changer. Connecting with customers, partners and employees can drive innovation, decrease cycle time, improve customer service and so on. This usually involves bringing various internal constituents to the table; marketing, customer service, product development, legal etc. But social media isn’t for every company or every situation. It has a transformative power but, like fire, not everyone is ready to wield it without getting burned.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
– The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
– 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business
– HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
– HOW TO: Use a Start Page to Stay Organized
– 5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest
– HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
– HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, timsa, lisegagne, topshotUK

Tags: business, List, Lists, small business, social media, social networks, strategy

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Kodu, as it’s known, is available in a public beta for the PC.  And a press release explained, “With Kodu, budding developers string together simple and intuitive cartoon icons that define the rules of their game world, rather than using complex programming language.  The result: Anyone from seven to 70 can create a game in minutes.”

This is a neat idea that should produce much better results than tossing “C++ for Dummies” books at tots.

Developers may just want to consider how many home computers they have to spare, since kids are pretty much guaranteed to take over one if they become especially interested in programming.

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As it turns out, there is a lot more to Seattle than meets the eye. Aside from the beautiful mountains and scenery, there is an underlying culture of free living that I have not seen before. The attitude is all about, “Do what you want, do what makes you happy.” That explains why people like Quincy Jones and the Bill Gates live there. And, everyone knows that Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana and Pearl Jam all began their musical careers in Seattle. Duff McKagan, who was part of my favorite band of all time, Guns N’ Roses, and now writes for Playboy.com is also from Seattle.

So what exactly is the magic formula that gives a small town of 600,000 people such a creative edge? I’m not sure what it is, but for the first time ever, I’m finding myself wanting to visit Seattle and experience it for myself. I’ve gone onto Flickr and pulled some amazing photos that were all taken in and inspired by Seattle. I’ve given credit to the photographers below. The stories associated with these photos all paint a picture of Seattle that is happy and beautiful. Click on the links below to learn more. Also, you can read the original Fast Company article by clicking here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine

Thank you for sharing your Seattle pictures with us, you are so talented!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theta444/16800827/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/surrealize/3628340618/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanswan/3085338823/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adelmann/3302583508/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adelmann/3320573029/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/suomynona/3756172346/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adelmann/3339203467/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adelmann/3332283820/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/piero/23712191/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/surrealize/3605986857/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moog55/4173956236/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiveminutebreak/2267760768/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncle_buddha/2993571961/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/qwkdtsn/2364634400/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thepressure/2583476903/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincos/158512082/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleeker/151015066/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/apexrally/4059260046/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bala_/2792159590/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21654792@N03/3424904314/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanvirus/4024845201/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robgmsft/174254157/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/papalars/3634344633/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindes/100015540/

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It was a real treat to see the work of the Curb, the world’s first natural media company. For Natural Media, it means that they solely use natural earth elements, such as sand, snow, water, grass, etc, all for the sake of our media needs. And they rock doing it.

“We have created a portfolio of unique eco-advertising services and a crack green team of creative experts, to provide clients with outstanding natural marketing which impacts on their target consumer without impacting on the environment.”

Check out their site for more of their great work: Mind the Curb.

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Last year Samsung made public a plethora of phones before and after MWC 2009. Should we imagine that the company will take a similar approach to MWC 2010? Today the company officially announced three new phones ready to meet your social networking needs on the go. These are all part of the Shark series, the Shark S5350, Shark 2 S5550 and the Shark 3 S3550.
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B.L. Ochman is a Managing Director of Proof Digital Media; publisher of What’s Next Blog, and co-founder of pet site Pawfun.com. Follower her on Twitter at @whatsnext.

Companies large and small are rushing to understand and get involved in social media. But most of the agencies and consultants who are being paid to establish social media campaigns for corporations are afraid to tell their clients three things they don’t want to hear.

1. Everyone Must Work Together

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In most big companies, IT, digital, marketing and sales not only don’t work together, they compete with each other. Until they start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media.

For example, I recently handled social media advertising for a major retail chain’s holiday microsite. The promotion was conceived by the digital department and involved augmented reality. But the IT department refused to allow a link from the homepage to the microsite because the microsite’s design was done by an external agency.

Further, the marketing department refused to allow a dedicated e-mail to go out to the company’s mailing list, and when placed in the company’s normal promotional e-mail, the link to the microsite was lost in a sea of weekly specials.

These hurdles made it very hard to drive traffic to the microsite.

But more than that, this lack of internal collaboration and contact makes any kind of social media involvement virtually impossible.

A company that hasn’t learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire.

2. Top Management Must Be On Board

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If the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.

Despite the best intentions of agencies and consultants, social media integration is bound to meet huge resistance until top management says it’s OK to spend time and money to integrate it into the company’s marketing and culture.

Example: The marketing team of an international manufacturer of electronics wanted to know how the company could begin to use social media and we discussed the many possibilities.

Listening and responding to what customers are saying about the brand in social media can supply good intelligence and give the company a chance to interact with customers.

“Our management doesn’t want to listen to customers,” the PR director said. “They want to talk to them.”

However, that doesn’t work anymore. The status quo is dead. Any company that isn’t willing to listen to customers and be nimble and quick enough to respond, and, when necessary, change, will soon be unable to compete with smart, tech-savvy companies that can turn on a dime.

Willingness to change is the new bottom line for every business today. But top management has to buy in before change can begin.

3. Don’t Expect Overnight Success

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Sure there are videos that go viral, contests that attract a lot of buzz, and Facebook pages that get a lot of fans. But what comes after those efforts?

After the tools change (and they surely will) how will social media fit into the company’s overall strategy and help it reach long-term goals?

Example: Smart companies look at the long-term. The Fiskateers, now in its sixth year, is the brainchild of digital agency Brains on Fire, for their client Fiskars.

With the scissors brand losing market share to foreign knock-offs, the company enlisted several actual crafters to blog, attend events, and represent the brand to customers as part of a new community strategy.

“If you empower your customers to become your evangelists, you’d better be prepared to continue it,” says Brains on Fire’s Geno Church. “It’s permanent when you engage in this type of marketing.”

Once you have created the community, listen to it. Fiskars made several changes to its products based on what it discovered through its Fiskateers community. Doing so helped build customer trust and loyalty.

Where Should Your Company Start?

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Realizing that employing social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick manageable, measurable goals.

Pick a small number of social media goals for the coming year. Some possibilities:

- Turn the company newsletter into an internal blog and give all employees the ability to contribute
– Establish a social media policy for employee participation in social media on company time and beyond
– Let employees vote on the best ideas suggested by other employees
– Resolve to respond to customer service issues within three hours, via social media

Don’t try to do all of these things at once. Pick the ones that are most likely to be possible for your company to start and sustain.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
– 5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest
– HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
– HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
– HOW TO: Use a Start Page to Stay Organized

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, cmcderm1, Yuri_Arcurs, endopack, hjalmeida

Tags: business, List, Lists, MARKETING, social media, strategy

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Originally posted at Relevant Results

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“It is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that I am resigning from my role at AOL,” Mr. Seth wrote in an email to staff. “Very recent developments in my personal life have made it impossible for me to maintain an executive role that requires extensive travel.”

Mr. Seth was based at AOL’s offices in Silicon Valley. The job required frequent travel to the company’s headquarters in New York.

Mr. Seth said in the email that he was approached last week by a “Bay Area company” and accepted their offer to join. “This new role will enable me to remain local, and gives me lots of flexibility in where I work from (we might move to India for some time) and be available for my family, yet gives me something interesting and challenging to work on.”

Mr. Seth couldn’t be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Mr. Seth was hired in September as AOL’s senior vice president of global advertising products. He worked at Google from 2005 to 2008, where he most recently was head of monetization at video site YouTube.

“While Shashi was only with us for 90 days, we appreciate the early steps he took to help us redefine AOL’s advertising roadmap,” Jeff Levick, president of AOL advertising said in an email to staff.

Jamie Fellows will lead AOL’s global ad products group in the interim. Yahoo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The news came the same day that AOL announced the majority of its domestic job cuts to staff after failing to reach its goal of cutting about a third of its staff through a voluntary buyout program.

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From China Real Time Report:

The news that Google (GOOG) might pull out of China has quickly become the hottest topic among China’s millions of Web users, prompting expressions of shock and disappointment — as well as flower offerings.

“I heard people talking about Google’s leaving a couple of days ago, but I was still was completely stunned by the news when I arrived at the office this morning.” wrote Twitter user Fenng. “Ten years online has turned me from an optimist into a pessimist.”

Some Web users are showing their support for the company on Twitter, which, though blocked in China, can be accessed by tech-savvy netizens, where they began organizing to take real-world action. At Google offices in China, pictured below, fans of the company gathered, some bearing flowers and messages wishing Google well. The so-called “flower campaign” gave rise to several slogans, such as “Farewell for Reunion” and “GoogleBye.”

In Beijing, supporters gathered early to offer flower bouquets in front of Google’s office in the Tsinghua Science Park, pictured below. Attached to the flower bouquets were handwritten notes, including one reading “Google: Pure Man.”

One supporter, Zhou Zhijun, a 35-year-old Web site administrator, said he took a taxi for 20 yuan to the Google office to offer his respects, and spent another 60 yuan for flowers. When asked why, Zhou said, “I am not necessarily a die hard fan of Google, but I want to show respect for the fact that Google refused to censor.”

The campaign soon spread to other parts of the country. At Google’s offices in downtown Shanghai, employees gathered at the 16th floor reception desk to photograph three vases of flowers sent by local supporters of the company’s decision. As the employees read the cards, some said they had learned flowers were being sent Google offices from reading messages on Twitter.

A colorful cardboard Google logo was placed atop bouquets of orange roses, below, that had been hand delivered earlier in the day.

The card below was signed in English and Chinese by a group of self described Twitter and Google fans. An English note said “Thank you for holding values over profits!” Another note, in Chinese, reads, “Google, the mountains can’t stop our contacts, and we’ll get over the wall [a reference to the “Great Firewall”] to find you!”

Meanwhile, in Guangzhou, where the company set up an office just months ago, Google employees said that they hadn’t received any flowers from Chinese Web users.

Another group of Web users in Beijing are preparing for a gathering in front of Google’s office this evening to show support to the company. “Let’s use the slogan ‘GoogleBye’ for tonight’s gathering. See you at half past five or six o’clock!” wrote one Twitter user.

Others are taking a more wait-and-see approach. “We are waiting for an official confirmation of the news,” said Yu Yang of the Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, “If true, it would be a shock, emotionally, to all international firms operating in China.”

He added that Google’s withdrawal from China would have a negative impact on the user experience and China’s search engine market.

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From China Real Time Report:

Google (GOOG) may be setting a new standard that could have sweeping impact for foreign companies in China – and possibly have ramifications for its tens of millions of Chinese users. But no one will be more affected than the U.S. company’s hundreds of Chinese employees, including some of the nation’s top engineering graduates. Until recently they had what were considered some of the most coveted jobs in China’s technology industry. Now, they’re facing an uncertain future.

For staffers, saying goodbye to Google–if it closes its China office, as it warned might happen—would mean saying goodbye to the company’s plush offices. Its Beijing headquarters has video games, a gym where people can take yoga and salsa classes, and a cafeteria that Google employees have boasted is top-notch.

On a more serious note, aside from potentially losing their jobs, Google employees in China may find themselves also may find themselves caught in the middle of any antipathy from the government over Google’s public snub. Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond assured in his statement stressed that the decision was made “without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today.” Google’s decision to review its business operations in China “has been incredibly hard,” the statement said. “It will have potentially far-reaching consequences.”

But there may be some silver lining for Chinese Googlers: they are likely to be prime candidates for poaching by eager Internet competitors. “I bet the biggest crowd outside the Google office in Beijing this morning [was] a crowd of headhunters,” says an only half-joking Dan Brody, an ex-Google China employee and CEO of Koolanoo Group, which operates several Chinese Web sites.

Technically, a closure of Google.cn doesn’t necessarily mean the company will be forced to exit China completely. Aside from a number of investments Google has made in Chinese companies, Google may also have clients in China who want to advertise on its English Web site. But since the company has yet to begin de-faltering its Chinese content, and Chinese authorities have yet to respond to Mr. Drummond’s statement, it’s hard to say just how difficult things will get, or how many people will stick around to find out.

–Loretta Chao and Aaron Back

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It’s been one year to the day since Yahoo brought in former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz as its new Chief Executive. During her tenure so far, Yahoo under Bartz has focused on slimming down, cutting costs, and shoring up flagging revenue.

In the past year, the company has effectively cemented the road map to get out of the search game by completing a partnership deal with Microsoft. They’ve integrated with Facebook Connect and added Twitter to search results. They also launched a new branding campaign and brought in entertainment talent to create original programming for Yahoo’s web sites.

In the cost-cutting department they’ve trimmed the staff, shuttered GeoCities and offloaded Zimbra to VMware. They even closed the Yahoo offices for the holidays, leaving only critical staff on duty, in an effort to shave expenses.

Still, with both Yahoo and Bing losing ground to Google, and revenue still declining, the company still has work to do to manifest a turnaround. On the other hand, profits exceeded analyst expectations in the latter half of 2009 (in large part thanks to the cost-cutting measures), leading some to speculate Yahoo’s big picture has begun to stabilize.

One year in to CEO Carol Bartz’s tenure, the executive gave herself a B- for her performance thus far. How do you think Yahoo has fared under her leadership?

Tags: carol bartz, ceo, executives, Yahoo

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The FTC–like regulators in New York, Japan, South Korea and Europe–accused Intel of a series of improper tactics to hobble rivals, notably AMD and Nvidia. AMD filed its own antitrust suit in 2005 that was settled in November, after Intel agreed to pay $1.25 billion. AMD’s case, and those of government agencies, was based partly on the argument that AMD chips introduced in 2003 had clear advantages but gained market share more slowly than expected because of Intel’s actions.

Intel has flatly denied the allegations against the company, which in the case of the European Commission and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo were reinforced by emails from Intel executives and its customers. Intel’s written response to the FTC case, which was filed Dec. 31 but not widely noticed, uses a similar tactic in backing up its arguments that AMD’s problems were largely due to AMD’s own failings.

Intel cites, among other things, internal statements in 2004 by Henri Richard–then AMD’s top sales exec and now a senior executive with Freescale Semiconductor–that a person looking at the situation “with an objective set of eyes” would never buy AMD chips. “I certainly would never buy AMD for a personal system if I wasn’t working here.”

Some of Richard’s other comments are redacted, but he goes on in the document to rail against AMD selling only microprocessor chips themselves, and not a “platform” of those products and accessory chip sets, as Intel does. He described that AMD strategy as “pathetic,” for “exposing a partial story, particularly in the commercial segment, that is clearly inferior to Intel’s, if we want to be honest with ourselves.”

He added that AMD is saddled with a reputation that “we’re cheap, less reliable, lower quality consumer type product.”

The Intel document cites similar admissions from other AMD executives, some of which are also blacked out in the document. But one theme is AMD’s execution problems, including those that resulted when it landed Dell as a chip customer after years of failures–resulting in problems delivering chips to other customers.

Michael Silverman, an AMD spokesman, declined comment on the remarks cited by Intel, citing the settlement with the company. But he added: “The decisions of Japan, Korea, the European Commission, the New York Attorney General’s Office, the US Federal Trade Commission and Intel itself in settling with AMD – including paying us $1.25 billion – speak for themselves.”

Richard couldn’t immedately be reached. It should be kept in mind that, during his AMD years, he said plenty of positive things about AMD and its chips–and negative things about Intel’s behavior.

Following one 2007 meeting with analysts, for example, Richard bitterly complained about how little attention Intel’s tactics were getting in the press. “In any other industry what is being done would be on the front page of every newspaper,” he complained at the time. “For some reason it is tolerated in the computer industry.”

The Intel response, more broadly, reiterates its contention that the microprocessor market has relentlessly brought innovation and lower prices to consumers–and the FTC’s complaint seeks to micro-manage its business in ways that would disrupt this efficient operation of the free market. “The complaint seeks to turn Intel into a public utility,” Intel states, seeking “remedies that would restrict Intel’s ability to innovate and develop products that benefit consumers when competitors might be disadvantaged by those innovations.”

The company’s arguments could hardly be more different than the FTC’s conclusions in its Dec. 16 complaint. Without the remedies it is seeking, the agency wrote, the consequences for consumers and computer makers “have been and likely will continue to be supracompetitive prices, reduced quality and less innovation.”

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Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts.

Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a
campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with social media.

There are many different forms of social media, so it’s impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working them all, at the very least you should claim your name or company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t want to find out later that someone has the user name that you want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available try http://Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry later.

So how do you monitor all the buzz? How do you monitor your brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you pull out your wallet.

These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often referred to, will help you to define keywords or phrases you wish to track and then watch for any mention of your company name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor your online reputation. Similar to High School reputations, protecting your image online is the name of the game, and just as in real life, everyone has one to maintain.

Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at your disposal:

1) http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email alerts of new findings.

2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others, you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to your topic.

3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks several different websites to bring you what’s “hot” right now.

4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for your chosen topic.

5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies you of any findings.

6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a spreadsheet format of what it finds.

7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only. Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use.

http://www.google.com/alerts : I’ve been using this “secret weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you receive the links. Free and nice.

9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation. Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at $1.00.

10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine.

11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out what’s being said about you. The results returned are gathered from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and many more.

12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands, companies, even the competition. Sign up for free weekly updates on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old “press clipping” service.

13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites, including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services. Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account $88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a “personal” account free for 14 days.

14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources, Twitter and others to find out what’s being said about you or your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there is a free version that provides “5 filters” and 15 days of what they call “article history”.

15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos and more.

16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and off it goes to gather results.

17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a “conversational search engine” they index millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media.

18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000 results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond, or Platinum.

19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out everything there is to know about you online, and if negative information is found they try to have it removed. Different types of plans are available such as “My Reputation”, “My Privacy”, starting at only $14.95 a month.

20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be amazed at what you find.

If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL

Just as there are many ways to market your company using social media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some level. How smart are you?

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Are Your Ears Burning? – 20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing

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Google’s well-known corporate motto of “don’t be evil” has become a bit of a punchline in recent times. No longer the innocent David against the ruthless Goliath (Microsoft), many have taken a more watchful eye towards the search giant, its vast ambitions, and the seemingly infinite amount of data it seeks to collect about us.

This afternoon though, by standing up to censorship in China, Google reclaimed some of the mystique that once made it so special. In the growth market that everyone is after (and Google still trails significantly in), the company is putting principles ahead of profit.

Writing on the Google blog today, the company’s Senior Vice President David Drummond said, “we launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results,” a position that was met with plenty of criticism at the time.

However, now that it’s seen the breadth of Chinese censorship by way of implied state sponsored attacks and surveillance of Google products, the company has been prompted to action, declaring in as straight forward a way as possible that “we have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.”

Mind you, if Google’s ultimately successful, they do stand to gain plenty –- a search engine operating in a free and open market is more profitable than one in a closed and censored one. But we think it’s unlikely that China will essentially reverse course on some of its fundamental values in a matter of weeks, and as such, Google will likely feel pain to its bottom line in the short-term, especially if competitors like Baidu, Microsoft, and Yahoo don’t take a similar position.

It’s too soon to give Google a standing ovation – we’ll wait and see what kind of agreement, if any, they’re able to strike with the Chinese government before full adulation. But at least for a day or two, we can once again think of Google as a company that stands for more than a never ending quest for market share and profit.

Tags: china, Google, Political

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Vudu is in “meaningful” acquisition discussions with a potential buyer: superstore retail chain Walmart, according to Peter Kafka at All Things Digital

Vudu is an HD-streaming and DVD movie and TV show rental service that’s a cross between Netflix and iTunes, but is currently mostly reliant on partnerships with TV set manufacturers like LG, Sanyo, Toshiba and Sharp for distribution. The company has failed to attract widespread consumer attention and rumors suggest it’s been looking to sell its service.

While a seemingly unlikely buyer, especially given the nature of Vudu’s TV manufacturer partner relationships, Walmart could be interested in acquiring the company in the hopes of turning around a failed four-year history in the online and DVD rentals space. Walmart could also expose Vudu’s arguably superior HD-streaming experience to a much larger audience.

Kafka writes:

“After trying for two years to compete with Netflix’s DVD-by-mail business, Wal-Mart gave up in 2005 and agreed to send its customers directly to Netflix (NFLX). In 2007, with the backing of all the big studios and tech help from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the retailer tried to launch a download service, a la Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes. But it abandoned that effort in less than a year.

Meanwhile, sources say Vudu has been seeking a buyer–in the form of either a big-box retailer or an electronics manufacturer–for some time without success. Internet executive Mark Jung ran the company for a year but left in November 2008; founder Alain Rossmann became interim CEO when Jung left and has kept the title since then.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Vudu has raised at least $21 million from Benchmark Capital and Greylock Partners. I’m told that when the company was marketing itself last fall, it was looking for a sale price of $50 million or more. But it may not have much leverage to command a premium.”

Should Walmart live by the adage that the third time is a charge, then we can expect to see it go head-to-head with Apple and Netflix and attempt to become an entertainment conglomerate. Of course, it will also have to mitigate deals with the same movie studios that are putting Netflix new release rentals on pause and appease TV set makers already supporting Vudu.

Tags: business, Film, tv, vudu, WalMart

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Is there a point where adapting to Google’s changes becomes impossible? Share your thoughts.

To a very drastic extent, Google drives how the search engine marketing industry operates. With Google holding such a dominant share of the search market, it’s not hard to figure out why. While some may tell you it’s not the most productive use of your marketing time, businesses who hope to find success in driving people to their website (or even brick and mortar store) often hang on every word Google says and every change Google makes to its search engine and/or search results.

Liz Gannes with the tech blog GigaOm recently spoke with Google Engineering Director David Glazer about Google’s approach to social for 2010. And we come back to that changing search landscape. Social plays a huge role in it, and Glazer acknowledged just that. Gannes reports:

In 2010, Google plans to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use — Gmail, Google Talk, etc. If you use Google products, the company already knows who your most important contacts are, what your core interests are, and where your default locations are. Glazer said to expect many product and feature launches that start to connect that information in useful ways.

What does "social" mean to Google? "Who I am, who do I know, what do I do," said Glazer. (emphasis added)

Back in October, Google released its experimental Social Search feature, which Google said would help users "find more relevant public content from their broader social circle."

Relevance of social search has been questioned though. WebProNews recently discussed search trends for 2010 and beyond with comScore‘s "Search Evangelist" Eli Goodman. Believe it or not, social search is counted among these trends, and he mentions such a lack of relevance in social search results.

The real question is: is SEO going to become less relevant? Before you get all worked up, I will acknowledge that SEO is based on adaptation and changing along with the search engines. In fact, that was essentially the topic of a recent WebProNews article. Hear me out.

Right now, search engine optimization as we know it is still very relevant for businesses, but as Google learns more about who people are, they’re going to direct them to what they think is right. Social search and personalized search are very closely related.

Think about Google’s universal search, which aims to deliver results Google thinks you might want. These results draw from a wide variety of different places – Google News, Google’s real-time index, YouTube, etc. Each set of universal results takes more attention away from the regular old organic results. How long until social search (or something like it) becomes a part of this.

And let’s not forget about mobile. Smartphones are taking the world by storm, and Google is doing everything in its power to take over this market (though it still has work to do). Google knows your location if you let it. Then you have Google Latitude. Google knows your friends’ locations if they let it. Then, what happens when Chrome OS (Google’s Operating System) comes out. It may not catch on as much as Google would like, but then again it may. It starts on netbooks, but how long until that grows into something bigger?

Google just keeps on releasing more products. More products means more opportunities for the company to encourage use of other Google products. They also keep acquiring more companies by the way, and that includes the recent acquisition of a mobile advertising agency and an attempted acquisition of Yelp (the failure of which, was quickly compensated for to some extent by Google’s release of the "Near me Now" feature).

As Gannes notes, Google has this month brought on strategists Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina, who she says are "widely known for their advocacy of the open social web." This likely will lead to more social and personalized experiences related to search.

Chris Brogan, one of the posterboys for social media, read the article too, and makes some pretty good points for businesses. Rather, he asks questions. Questions like:

- Does your company know how you are?
- Do they know who you know?
- Do they know what you do?

Questions like these are already important for a business looking to establish its identity (not to mention tell its story), but they could become increasingly important in an era of new SEO strategies.

"People expect a certain level of customer service as table stakes to the game," says Brogan. "In the new, much more wired world, I believe we’re asking for more. I want my airlines to know just how often I fly, which seat I tend to choose, how often I upgrade, and whether I normally check my bag. Think about how helpful they could be if they did something with that information."

Naturally, privacy plays a big role in the scheme of things, and as Brogan notes, that means opt-in. However, I think people generally trust Google (the search engine), at least to the extent that they will continue using it for the foreseeable future. I am well aware that many people do NOT trust Google, but within the broad spectrum of the general public, people trust it. Google’s search market share is evidence of that.

So, moving into the future, as Google makes efforts to tailor the user experience to a more social and more personalized one, where does that leave traditional SEO? Can it survive? It’s always been about adaptation and will continue to be, but is there a breaking point where SEO will be trumped by who users know and where they are? Who they are? Can you optimize for every individual customer? That’s where things could get tricky.

If you have thoughts on the matter, we would love to hear them in the comments.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Social Search Experiment

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

> Succeeding In SEO Requires Change

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Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Twitter’s growth has stalled for yet another month, according to new numbers from Compete and Quantcast. In fact, Twitter.com’s traffic peaked in July 2009 and hasn’t reached that level since.

According to web analytics firm Compete, Twitter’s U.S. traffic grew by 1.45%, from 22.48 million in November to 22.81 million unique visitors in December, hardly numbers to brag about. It’s even worse when you consider that these are lower numbers than June 2009. We started to notice this trend all the way back in May, but could never have guessed then it would continue into the new year.

Quantcast’s numbers tell the same story. Since its peak at 29.2 million users in July, Twitter has dropped down to 23.6 million U.S. uniques, a loss of nearly 24%. The six month graph from Quantcast tells the story:

Twitter Looked Rosy Just a Few Months Ago

Just a few months ago, Twitter seemed unstoppable. We argued all the way back in August 2008 that Twitter’s growth could not be stopped. And for a long time, the numbers agreed with us. Twitter grew 752% in 2008, but that was nothing compared to the 1,300%+ year-over-year growth in February and March.

Shaq, Oprah, Ashton, and CNN all helped lead Twitter to the attention of the mainstream media and countless businesses. The social media company’s growth threatened Facebook and even affected world politics.

In fact, Twitter still commands the world’s attention, but part of the reason so many people have turned to it is because it’s perceived to be a rapidly growing platform. Unfortunately, the numbers say otherwise.

What will happen to the Twitterverse when more people are aware of these numbers?

Potential Reasons for Twitter’s Flatline

Figuring out why Twitter won’t grow is the billion dollar question. If the company can’t find a solution, and soon, it will be forced to try more dramatic moves or even allow itself to be acquired.

We’ve heard many potential reasons for the growth ceiling. Here are the ones that make the most sense to us:

– Twitter’s growth isn’t stalling. Rather, these stats aren’t capturing Twitter users utilizing apps, a growing chunk of the Twitterverse.

- Twitter itself has a limited appeal. Only a small amount of people “have something to say” on a consistent basis.

- Twitter’s user retention rate is famously weak. The issue became public in April 2009, but has yet to be solved.

- For many, Twitter hasn’t hit critical mass. Part of why people are on Facebook is because everybody else is on it. We may still be far away from that inflection point for the common Internet user.

What Twitter Needs to Address

We think the true answer behind the Twitter flatline phenomenon lies somewhere within these four reasons. Twitter apps have grown and have become a larger percentage of Twitter’s user base, but even with that factored in, Twitter still has the other three problems.

Twitter has find a way to expand its appeal, either by adjusting its image in the eyes of the public or by helping change the public into more rabid content creators. It also needs to work on more effective ways to get those who sign up to tweet long after they sign up.

The company has to address these issues before it can attain an undeniable critical mass that will propel its growth again. Without it, Twitter risks marginalization rather than ascension.

Tags: compete, Quantcast, social media, twitter

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Social note-taking tool Evernote has been on a roll. In the last month, the company has raised $10 million in funding, launched an Android version, and most recently, surpassed 2 million users.

At CES 2010 last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, to discuss the Evernote phenomenon. How did he get Evernote to two million users in just a few years? Why do half of Evernote’s users have the iPhone app? How does the company intend to improve its retention rate? And how in the heck does someone create over 80,000 different notes? I asked him all of these questions, plus many more.

We filmed the entire 12 minute interview, so be sure to watch the whole thing and let us know what you think of Evernote and the discussion surrounding it in the comments.

Tags: business, CES, CES 2010, evernote, interview, video

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In the wake of its relaunch as an independent company, AOL could lay off around 1,400 people starting today, according to a memo to the HR team. It’s not going to be pretty.

We knew this was coming. Back in November, AOL revealed that it was going to need to downsize by 2,500 employees and asked for volunteers. According to the memo, the company found 1,100 people who offered to leave, all of them with voluntary separation packages.

That leaves 1,400 or so to be let go this week in order to reach the 2,500 mark. The memo states that most of the layoffs will occur on Wednesday, but that the process will continue even after January 13. Several European offices, including those in Sweden and Spain, will be closed entirely.

This will be a harsh and tough week at AOL. We’ll try to assess the fallout, both for AOL and for the companies that are likely snatch up the company’s exodus of talent. Here’s the full memo:

Memo to AOL HR Staff

“In November, we announced that the company would take a $200 million charge and that we planned to decrease the size of our global workforce by one-third. Late last year, we offered Voluntary Separation Program to enable employees to decide what was in their best personal and professional interest. We had approximately 1,100 employees opt to join the Voluntary program. At that time we announced the Voluntary program we noted that if we didn’t reach our target reduction of a third we would need to follow the voluntary program with an involuntary action. We did not reach that target.

The next phase of our restructuring plan will include an involuntary layoff. Our process internationally varies by country and is subject to local laws. We began meeting with employees throughout Europe today. For example meetings have already taken place in the UK, Germany and France, and we announced plans to shut down many of our offices in Europe, beginning with those in Spain and Sweden. In addition, we will be beginning the consultative process with the Workers’ Councils in relevant countries this week.

In the United States, we will begin notifying a limited number of individuals impacted by the involuntary layoff today, with the majority of notifications taking place in the U.S. on Wednesday, January 13. As of this point, this layoff will not trigger the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in any of our locations. For many of the employees impacted in the U.S., Wednesday will be their last day in the office.

Since April, we have been moving through a process that started with strategy, then focused on structure, and has most recently been centered on aligning our costs with the company’s strategy and structure. As a part of this process, we’ve looked at every aspect of this business. We evaluated our competitive position and product portfolio in every market – and we asked the hard questions about areas that were no longer core to the strategy and our profit profiles in the businesses and countries where we operate.

We will be offering packages to impacted employees in the U.S. that will include severance, benefits and outplacement assistance, among other things.

All of our cost alignment work is about ensuring AOL’s sustainability and future success. Project Everest is the completion of phase one of AOL’s turnaround.”

[via Business Insider]

Tags: aol, business

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In November, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said he needed 2,500 “volunteers” to give up their jobs, but not enough of them got the message — only 1,100 walked away on their own.

Now Armstrong is entering the second phase of his corporate slimdown, and is firing some 1,000+ employees.

AOL officials say the company has begun notifying European employees of its plans to shut down many of its offices there, and has started tapping some American workers as well. The bulk of the US layoffs are slated for this Wednesday, the company says.

This is a very sad story indeed. While we keep hearing forced words of hope and encouragement that “things have turned around” we get crap unemployment numbers in December and news like this from one of the industries that is supposedly “doing well”. Let’s be honest, you need to simply count your blessings if you are in a pocket of performance no matter what industry you call home and the online space is no different.

To underline just how different this world is the following was noted in the article written by Peter Kafka.

The company hasn’t released a breakdown of cuts by territory or by department. But I’m told that the company’s editorial/content production staff, which Armstrong and his lieutenants have been emphasizing as a priority in recent months, will not remain untouched.

This just means that the outsourcing of content production is likely the way that AOL will go more and more. Pure speculation on my part but if your strategy moving forward is creating more and more content then taking away part of that internal team just means it’s likely cheaper to outsource.

The full release can be found at ATD but the closing remarks are as follows.

We will be offering packages to impacted employees in the U.S. that will include severance, benefits and outplacement assistance, among other things.

All of our cost alignment work is about ensuring AOL’s sustainability and future success. Project Everest is the completion of phase one of AOL’s turnaround.

Interesting how they name something like this as if it were a military undertaking and the curious use of a mountain’s name that few have conquered and many more have failed to climb.

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The head of NBC programming left in July to team up with IAC/InterActiveCorp for a new venture, Electus, to churn out original programming for the Web and other distribution points.

At CES today, Mr. Silverman announced the outlines of a deal with Yahoo to create original video programs for the Internet portal. The plans tie content and advertising, a hallmark of Mr. Silverman’s stints at NBC and as a producer of TV shows such as “The Office.”

Mr. Silverman and Yahoo said there’s enormous demand from advertisers for more online video programs with which to reach out to consumers. “I have no doubt: There’s a lot of demand for this,” said Joanne Bradford, Yahoo senior vice president and the company’s link to the marketing world.

One of the first Yahoo original programs, Mr. Silverman said Friday from Las Vegas, may be finance-themed, and will fit with Yahoo’s popular Yahoo Finance pages. The first wave of Web programs is expected to start by the end of March.

Yahoo has a long and complicated history with original video content deals. In 2004, it announced a much ballyhooed collaboration with former ABC executive Lloyd Braun, who left the company in 2006. More recently, the company has focused on generating less expensive original video content, including a show about celebrity fashion trends called “The Thread.”

Mr. Silverman wouldn’t give specifics about the new content, but he said top-flight people are champing at the bit to get involved with his Web video projects. “I think you’re going to see a floodgate of creative voices migrating to this platform.”

IAC and Yahoo declined to discuss financial terms of their online-programming deal, but Ms. Bradford said the two camps have agreed to split revenue.

Mr. Silverman jumped to IAC after two bumpy years at NBC that were marked by a continued slide in the network’s primetime ratings, and headlines devoted more to Mr. Silverman’s personal antics than to his programming prowess.

Mr. Silverman and Barry Diller, IAC’s chief executive, are big fans of one another. Mr. Diller had been an investor in Reveille, the independent production company Mr. Silverman ran before he took the NBC post.

(Reveille now is owned by Shine, a company founded by Elisabeth Murdoch. She is a daughter of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal.)

–Jessica E. Vascellaro contributed to this article.

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At the end of the Qualcomm chief executive’s first Consumer Electronics Show keynote, audience members learned that 300 of them would be walking away with a coupon to get a mobile gadget that plays live television from the company’s FLO TV service. The good news was delivered by sports announcer James Brown, who told audience members to look under their seats to find the coupons. Lively applause followed from the lucky winners.

Neither the giveaway nor the reaction were too surprising. Attendees clearly got some value. The device — priced at $250 when it was announced last fall — is being given to them with six months of free service, Brown said.

Qualcomm also has reason to take unusual marketing steps. The company has admitted the service has grown slowly among U.S. users, at least compared to the rapid adoption of mobile TV in countries such as South Korea. Jacobs said another step Qualcomm will take this year is to add more programming to target sports fans (that’s why Brown was on stage — he pronounced it a “must-have” item for real sports fanatics).

If FLO is struggling a bit, other parts of Qualcomm’s business are rocking — at least to judge by the procession of partners that showed new developments based on the company’s chips and other techologies.

For instance, Todd Bradley, an executive vice president at Hewlett-Packard, showed a prototype of a potential “smartbook” that uses Qualcomm chips based on ARM Holdings technology. The potential customer win was announced Wednesday night, but the on-stage demo made a few things clearer about the potential of the product. For one thing, it uses Android software and a touch screen, allowing users to flip through photos in the fluid manner of an iPhone user.

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing showed its own much-discussed smartbook and another Qualcomm-powered product that is likely to have an even bigger impact on its business: the computer maker’s first smart phone. His on-stage appearance was preceded by HTC CEO Peter Chou, who showed a new phone design it calls HTC Smart. Not only does it use Qualcomm’s chips but also the company’s Brew software platform, despite all the recent focus on Android and apps for that Google operating system.

Jacobs’ speech went on for well over an hour and touched on many topics, and he threw out many facts and stats about how far mobile technology has come. For example, he said that cellphones have now exceeded the reach of TVs, standard wired telephones and just about everything else.

“The cellphone has become the most widespread platform that human beings have ever created,” Jacobs said.

Perhaps the greatest crowd pleaser among Jacobs’ guests — after Brown and the free TV players, at least — was Eric Topol, a cardiologist and genomics professor who has become a kind of Pied Piper for the use of wireless devices in medicine. Topol, who among other things is chief medical officer of the West Wireless Health Institute, showed a series of applications on handheld gadgets that showed his vital signs, ultrasound images of his body and a remote patient, and the vital signs of a patient in an intensive care unit in Texas.

“Consumers have been concerned about the economic crisis” in medicine, Topol said. “But we can innovate out of that.”

Now that’s the kind of optimism people come to CES to hear.

More CES coverage on Digits

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“In the real world, far away from here, these little devices have already done more to improve lives at the base of society’s pyramid than perhaps any other technology in history,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told a crowded auditorium during his keynote speech at CES. The cellphone company’s competition, dubbed Calling All Innovators, will kick off in February, and the winner will be announced in June, he said.

For many people across the world, primary access to the Internet would come through their mobile phones and not from personal computers. The goal, then, is to make basic cellphones more affordable, he said, because “they have, in fact, become a necessity for upward mobility.”

For example, while there are 4.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions across the world, there are only 1.6 billion bank accounts. So Nokia will launch its Money apps during the first half of 2010, Mr. Kallasvuo said, so users can manage their finances and make mobile payments without having to travel long distances or wait hours in line at banks.

And while 75% of the world’s population doesn’t have access to email, Nokia’s app store, Ovi, now offers a free email service. Five million people signed up for accounts in its first year, he said.

“Mobile apps have been big in bringing hope and higher living standards to millions of people,” said Mr. Kallasvuo. “This trend promises to accelerate in the coming decade as the capabilities of the smart phones spread across the globe.”

Nokia’s roving cultural anthropologist Jan Chipcase, whom Mr. Kallasvuo jokingly referred to as the company’s Indiana Jones, also took the stage to explain how the company observes consumer habits in places like Afghanistan, India, China and Brazil. Mr. Chipcase said the company sought to learn from the adaptations people had made, because “scarcity is what leads to real innovation.”

“Once objects become small enough to fit in a pocket, they rapidly find a way around the globe,” he said. Mobile manufacturers, then, should know that they’re competing with the best in the world. “That’s now the benchmark for these consumers,” he said.

More CES coverage on Digits

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Any developer can now go to the Palm Developer Center, sign up, and start developing and distributing applications for webOS devices.

“We’re thrilled to open the doors of a program that offers mobile developers unparalleled freedom and choice in how they distribute and market applications,” said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc.

“The combination of our highly accessible web-based platform, groundbreaking integration opportunities and open, flexible distribution program makes Palm webOS the best place for developers to create the next generation of innovative mobile applications.”

To kick off the official opening of the Palm Developer Center, the company is launching a $1 million Hot Apps bonus program for webOS developers. The program starts February 1 and runs through May 31. The program is open to developers worldwide and will award $1 million to the most successful applications distributed during this timeframe.

The developers of the top free and paid applications each will earn a $100,000 bonus; in addition, 40 developers will receive $10,000 (20 each for free and paid), with 400 developers awarded $1,000 (200 each for free and paid). Awardees will be notified in June.

Each element of the Palm developer program is designed to help developers promote their work and drive application sales and downloads. Developers receive a 70/30 split (developer/Palm) of gross revenues generated through sales (after applicable taxes).

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Yes, the company that is basically everywhere to a sometimes frightening degree just got a little creepier. Behold: Google toilet paper.

Apparently the picture above depicts a very popular brand of Vietnamese toilet paper (which is made of “100 percent virgin pulp” — score! No one likes a promiscuous pulp).

We’re not exactly sure if the product is named after the search giant, and when you type “Google” into Google Translate (naturally) — Vietnamese to English — the results simply read “Google.”

Can anyone — perhaps our international readers — help us solve this mystery?

[via Weird Asia News]

Tags: Google, humor

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Could it be that Netflix will finally find its way on to the Nintendo Wii (currently the only console without the rental streaming service)? There’s been rampant speculation about a deal in the works since October of last year.

In an interview with Peter Kafka at CES, CEO Reed Hastings never mentioned the Wii, but he did say that the chances of Netflix on Nintendo are “excellent.”

That’s certainly welcome news as Netflix could use a little positive press following a week full of scrutiny. The company has faced a barrage of bad press after it was revealed that that the online video rental company would delay Warner Bros. new release rentals by 28 days.

[via Gizmodo]

Tags: Film, netflix, streaming movies, trending

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Google recently applied for approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the right to purchase and monetize energy, just like the utility companies you are already familiar with do. Google has said that its actions had more to do with the enormous amount of energy it consumes itself (consider all of the machinery and equipment it takes to keep a company like Google running at its current pace on a daily basis).

Questions have been raised however, about if Google could actually end up functioning as a utility. From the sounds of it, the company isn’t exactly ruling it out.

Jeffrey Marlow with the New York Times asked Google’s "Green Energy Czar" Bill Weihl if the company views its work on alternative energy as a money-making component. In his response, Weihl noted that some of Google’s initiatives come from Google.org (the company’s philanthropic arm), and said:

The reason Google.org is not just a foundation is that lots of people believe that if you want to have a big impact at scale on the world, then you need to go beyond what a 501(c)3 can do, which is to make charitable grants, so you need the ability to invest in companies, to do engineering projects, to do things that might at some point actually make money.

We’d be delighted if some of this stuff actually made money, obviously; it is not our goal to not make money. All else being equal, we’d like to make as much money as we can, but the principal goal is to have a big impact for good.

Google says its goal is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. Coal is said to be the source of about half of the electricity consumed in the US. Google is looking at concentrated solar thermal, enhanced geothermal, and wind energies.

Related Articles:

> Google Gets Energetic Syndicate content

> How Much Energy is Consumed by a Google Search?

> Google Testing PowerMeter To Save Energy

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Your Twitter profile needs to be human

It’s no good to use Twitter for business marketing to consumers if you are hiding behind the “corporate veil.” In other words, your Twitter username can be in your business name, but even if you are representing a large corporation, your actual name should also be on the profile along with your photo. People relate to people, not business logos.

A real person tweeting for a company is able to establish relationships with consumers that an anonymous corporate/company Twitter user cannot. Add bits and pieces of your personal interests to help create relationships.

You need to provide information before you provide sales pitches

If, for example, you are a footwear company using Twitter to attract new customers, it’s not enough to constantly tweet about new shoe styles your company is offering. You need to also provide useful information.

You might tweet links to research reports on the effects of going barefoot most of the time. Or you might tweet a link to a blog discussing cultural differences in what is acceptable footwear for “business” dress.

If you want people to trust your company enough to buy its footwear, you need to demonstrate you are trustworthy by helping consumers to know more about your field of footwear. You want to be known as a source of good information besides good footwear.

You can offer special deals to your Twitter followers

Although the majority of your tweets should NOT be sales pitches, it’s certainly acceptable to offer special deals for your Twitter followers as part of your Twitter marketing campaign. You can do this by providing a promotional code to be used on your site. And Twitter’s 140 characters makes Twitter ideal for getting your offer across in brief messages.

Also consider doing a fundraising campaign on Twitter – your company name is thus linked with a good cause. For example, anyone using the promo code will have 10% of his/her purchase go to a specific nonprofit organization.

Encourage questions from your Twitter followers

Use Twitter for business marketing by getting immediate feedback on issues of importance to your company. For example, if you introduce a new style in limited quantities, solicit opinions. Yes, some of the opinions may be negative. But it is better to know these opinions now while your footwear is in limited production than to find out this information after you’ve produced millions of pairs of this new style.

And make sure you monitor all mentions of your company on Twitter. You want to jump on positive comments – and thank people for those comments – as well as jump on negative comments. It’s much easier to put out a small fire than a large blaze.

In conclusion, how you use Twitter for business marketing to consumers is limited only by your imagination. If you share information first and then gently pitch your products, you should be able to reap the benefit of new customers who are loyal to your products thanks to having a strong connection with a real person from the company.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How to Use Twitter for Business Marketing

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Social software company Jive Software has acquired the social media monitoring company Filtrbox.

Jive’s mission is to create what it calls Social Business Software by combining collaboration and social monitoring software in one platform. Jive plans to integrate Filtrbox’s technology into its Jive SBS platform, while also keeping Filtrbox available as a separate product.

Jive and Filtrbox are just two examples of companies focused on making social media monitoring and engagement easier for brands and businesses to manage. The social web is so vast that more automated solutions and aggregation solutions are not only helpful, but often necessary to actually get a clear look at what data is out there.

We expect enterprise- and business-focused social media tools to really take off in 2010. Now that businesses have finally embraced social media and social marketing, tools that can help in the process are going to continue to emerge and compete for marketshare.

Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Tags: filtrbox, jive software, ROI, social media roi, social media software, social monitoring tools, web apps

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Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Although not sure what’s so interesting about owning a digital camera with a front-facing LCD (apparently it’s easier for photographers to picture themselves in the fun), it’s not me to decide what Sammmy offers to their clients. These being said, check out the newly introduced Samsung TL210 and TL205 cameras that the company has added to their DualView collection.

If both shooters feature a 12MP CCD sensor and 1.5-inch LCD screens on the front, the new Samsung TL210 comes bundled with Samsung’s Advanced Dual Image Stabilization (IS) technology, a larger back-mounted 3-inch display, 5x optical zoom, 720p HD video recording at 30 fps and an option HDMI adaptor to connect it directly to your HDTV or HD monitor. As for the younger TL205 brings a 2.7-inch display, only 3x optical zoom and a lower quality 640 x 480 video recording mode.

Other than that, the TL210 and TL20 also feature the company’s Perfect Portrait System, Smile Shot, Blink Detection, Red-eye Fix, and Beauty Shot technologies for perfect portraits.

Expect to have them in stores starting this March.

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HP seems to be on a roll this days as the company is announcing one product after the other. The hottest of them all should be the much anticipated Microsoft tablet, the Courier, which has been developed by Redmond together with HP.
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Read the rest of HP Announces Four New Eco-Friendly LCD Monitors [4 New HP Displays Get Launched: HP Compaq LA22f, HP Compaq LE19f, HP ZR22w & HP ZR24w]

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According to its official website CES 2010 features a record number of 330 new companies that will be showcasing their new products along with more than 2500 exhibitors booths that you can find at this year’s show in Las Vegas.

If you monitor the Twitter #CES stream you will find enough reasons to start drooling over your keyboard: ranging from mobile devices to 3D TVs, CES 2010 will be showcasing and premiering the near future of entertainment and communication.

Here are three gadgets I’ve spotted and that are already on my #WantList

Parrot AR.Drone
The French company Parrot presents the first quadricopter that can be controlled by iPhone and iPod touch. It includes a camera and uses WiFi to connect with the device. Look at it in action:

Skiff Reader

Forget about the Kindle. Skiff takes the e-reader a step beyond into the future making any e-reader look like a Apple Newton: Slick, thin and FLEXIBLE, if publishers adhere to the business model that the company proposes this will be the e-reader to have, flexed in your pocket.

According to the company’s website the Skiff Reader has an average battery life of one week, it features 3g and wifi as well as  mini-USB port and 4GB of internal memory that you can extend by using any SD Card. That will allow you to put lots of books, magazines and newspapers on it.

Kodak PlaySport Zx3 Camcorder

With a target retail price of $149.99 and a release date that points to March/April 2010, Kodak’s Zx3 is a video camera that allows you to record videos in full HD 1080p or 720p and take 5 megapixel still images that you can then easilly share on different video social networks like YouTube or Vimeo.
This would make this camera already interesting but add all the features to the fact that the Zx3 is waterproof up to 3meters/10 feet and you will have that #Lust factor rising tenfold.

What gadgets have caught your interest that are being presented at CES 2010? Please let us know in the comments!

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Originally posted at The Digital Home

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Korea’s Viliv has a lot of goodies planned for 2010, and their four new products have been leaked before their impending CES official reveal. The company has something for the whole family including a new tablet, an ultraportable computer, and a pair of PMP devices.

(…)
Read the rest of Viliv’s Four New Products Leaked [Tablets, Ultraportable Notebook, PMPs From Korean Company]

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