Most of us are curious on what is going to be the outcome on the battle between Apple and Adobe.  Recently the news has it that Apple will not be using Adobe Flash on their mobile OS  for any of its products like Iphone, Ipod, Ipad and other I’s to follow in the mobile space.

To end the speculation Steve Jobs has decided to clarify Apple’s stand on Adobe Flash products.  The following content has been directly replicated from the Apple website for the benefit of my our readers.

Thoughts on Flash:

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

I am awaiting Adobe’s response on this letter from Steve Jobs.  There is one article which outlines Adobe’s Chief response to apple’s letter you can read it here

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Gartner has always been on the forefront of conducting strong research on analyzing sectors across industries at a global level. Every year they come up with predictions on how various sectors are going to perform in near future. Gartner research and analysis has always been very helpful in gaining valuable insights that can help companies plan their strategy better.  I have been sent the summary report and i would like to share it with my readers.

Summary of Gartner Top End User Predictions for 2010:

• By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets.
• By 2012, India-centric IT service companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators in the market.
• By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social networks integration and Web socialization.
• By 2014, most IT business cases will include carbon remediation costs.
• In 2012, 60% of a new PC’s total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns the machine on.
• Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.
• By 2014, more than three billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile and Internet technology.
• By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.
• By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

This is a summary review of Gartner’s Predicts 2010 Special Report, which focuses on the new balance emerging in IT as organizations worldwide shift from a cost containment mode and prepare for a return to economic growth. Previous assumptions about revenue flows and ownership will continue to be challenged as a new balance between supply, consumer demand and regulation emerges. (Source Gartner Report 2010)

Download the summary report.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Every now and then there comes a disruptive technology that changes the rule of the game.  My initial analysis of using this application makes me believe that such mashups will play vital role as far as job search is concerned.  Applications like JobDeck will provide an alternate channel for employers to scout for new talent and at the same time give multiple opportunities to the jobseeker.

TweetDeck and TwitJobSearch have teamed up to provide you with a dedicated JobDeck. This makes it even easier to search for jobs, as well as staying in touch with what’s happening now, and connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Source: TweetDeck.

The Hiring ecosystem:

Since I run an HR services company and a social media enthusiast I am in a position to analyze the tool both from the employer and employee perspective.  My analysis of the positioning of JobDeck is given below in the table.

JobDeck analysis:

JobDeck consists of primarily 2 column layout where in the first column job related tweets are displayed using the powerful search engine developed by guys at TwitJobSearch. The tweets are filtered in a manner where the content is limited to job hunting.  There is a “Job Search Experts” user list. This area can be used to stay updated with the latest development in the job market and it has lot of HR and career related articles as well. The second column is a dedicated column that is directly connected to the main feed of TwitJobSearch which searches the web and returns search results relevant to jobs and job market.

What I would love to see in JobDeck

• Even more powerful search – based on location, job type, company name like you usually have on job boards
• Ability to filter updated just based on my career stream. Like a customized JobDeck for a sales professional in the telecommunication sector.
• Ability to develop contact base and tweet with each contact from JobDeck
• Trending like twitter
• Better integration with other social media applications

JobDeck is a pretty decent attempt made towards being innovative, it has a long way to go before it can become main stream and threaten the existence of traditional media like Job Boards. Did we just think about News Papers are traditional media?? Sorry that’s dead long time ago.

To me this is a brilliant concept and the first step towards a newer, smarter and a synchronous mechanism for a job seeker and an employer.

Related posts:

1. 6 part series – Topic 2 – Twitter You can read topic 1 on LinkedIn here. Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate...
2. My research and experience on how to manage multiple twitter accounts. Twitter has already become an integral part of every marketer’s social media strategy.  During the initial days of twitter...
3. twitcam and camtweet to offer live video streaming on twitter twitcam – developed by   Livestream and camtweet – developed by Justin.TV are utilities where anyone using their twitter login...
4. Now money can buy friends, followers, connections, fans on social media sites I always thought Money can help you buy materialistic things but certainly not family and friends.  Today I came...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

All of us surf the web on a daily basis and for most of us we are always online.  While reading various feeds in my Google Reader I came across this interesting post and I would like to share the details with the readers of this blog.  This post provides statistical information on internet usage in 2009 things like

• How many websites were added
• How many emails were sent
• How many internet users surfed the web
• Web servers in use
• Information of domain names
• Social media statistics
• Information on images
• Information on web browsers
• Information on malicious software

The content below is replicated from the original post on www.entireweb.com

Email usage statistics in 2009

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• 22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

• 62.7% – Internet Explorer
• 24.6% – Firefox
• 4.6% – Chrome
• 4.5% – Safari
• 2.4% – Opera
• 1.2% – Other

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Reference for internet usage statistics in 2009

Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

Related posts:

1. Google Wave – web based real time communication platform During the Google I/O keynote, Google utilized the opportunity to launch its new communication platform called Google Wave. We...
2. 6 part series – Topic 2 – Twitter You can read topic 1 on LinkedIn here. Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

We all know how big the market is for iphone applications and there are brilliant applications on iTunes which are broadly categorized into utilities, games, entertainment being the most sought after.   Apple Inc had officially released iphone SDK in March 2008 and since then the mobile development community has been busy dishing out awesome applications.  Smart organizations capitalized on the first mover advantage and developed an iphone app to promote/market their products and services.  I have been using iphone and now am on 3GS and am involved in recruitment business I am eagerly waiting for companies to develop customized iphone apps to provide/ facilitate recruitment services.

I would like to see companies provide iphone application which caters to varied interest level of internal employees, candidates/ consultants and clients.

Features that I would like to see in an iphone app by category

Candidates:

• Resumes submission
• Push notifications for jobs of their interest
• Search for jobs
• Contact details of recruiters
• Applications status
• Job referrals

Companies:

• Push requirements to the vendor
• Status on applications
• Contact details of the team working on the assignments

Internal employees:

• Access to internal recruitment system
• Quick submission of resumes to client
• Contact details of client
• Send out job alerts
• Access to candidates social networking details for quick connect

My research recruitment apps on iphone resulted into very few well designed apps.  A quick search on iTunes and Google search resulted in apps like:

• Radar Recruit – very well made application by an Australian recruitment which specializes in creative jobs in the advertising sector. Radar is primarily using this app to provide job listing by category where the candidate can search for jobs and apply or refer the job posting to someone. You can view the app screen shot here
• JobServe connect – Provides a job search engine where candidates can search for more than 50,000 jobs globally with locations services on, it has an interesting feature to find jobs near you. It also provide generic functionality like creating a search agent, emailing the job etc You can view the app screen shot here
• Korn and ferry – this is one company that is taking social media recruiting to the next level. They have developed an iphone app with a lot of real good features. You can read the features here
• Recruiterapp.com – these people have gone one step further and have developed a full blown app to manage recruitment cycle for recruitment agencies/ consultants. You can read about them here

The iphone app market is heating up and along with social media I foresee companies will have to develop innovative apps to reach candidates via mobile devices.

I would love to see a list of features that you would like in an iphone app that can facilitate the recruitment experience on a mobile device.

Related posts:

1. Recruitment post recession – Hiring upswing round the corner, are you prepared? The buzz across the world is that the recession is coming to an end and the worst is probably...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Google’s latest browser sizing tool will help developers and website owners to evaluate the amount of content viewed by their users.  The tool loads your webpage behind a colour full matrix which indicates the % of people who can see specific point on your webpage. By adding this tool Google has further strengthen its offerings in the web analytics space.  I constantly use Google Analytics to monitor my blog traffic and have been using various webmaster tools to optimize the blog.  A new tool from Google is always welcome and not loosing much time I evaluated my own blog to  check if it was useful only to developers or  also to site owners and publishers like me.

Visual evaluation of my blog:

Analysis of my blog:

• 30% of my visitors will not be able to see my banner ad which says advertise for free. If even you can’t then you can check this link here
• 40% of my visitors will not be able to see connect to Facebook icon on my blog
• 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the submit button to my RSS feed
• 20% of my visitors will not be able to see the following:
  • Team behind this blog
  • What we recommend
  • Our rankings across prominent sites – like blogged
  • Most importantly the second post on the blog

I plan to make certain changes and conduct a test run

I am going to  test run by:

• Moving the banner to the left so the visibility will be improved by 25%
• Making connect with Twitter and Facebook icons smaller in size to improve visibility
• Moving the subscribe button will be a design call so might take it up later

I will be keeping a close eye on Google analytics for the next whole week specifically on these links to see if the analysis is true.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

On 30th October at the ICANN conference in Seoul, Korea the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which governs domains, registrations, Internet Protocol addresses, and many other aspects of the internet decided to fast track the process to internationalize domain names (IDN). Very soon domain names would be made available in local languages and this to me is going to create a paradigm shift as far as localization of internet is concerned. This certainly is a brave step forward.   ”Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom, Icann president, said. “So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.” Source DNA

By early 2010 we would be able to book domain names in Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and a lot of other languages

Impact of localisation of domain names

Local reach: Doman names in local language will help companies to reach the large segment of the market which cannot access the web due to the absence of English speaking skills. Companies will have another avenue to market their product and services by creating websites that will have highly localized content online. For example a lot more people would be able to read this article in India considering the diversity in regional languages in India.

Acquire desired domain names: with restriction to Latin characters (A to Z) a lot of companies were forced to choose domain name that were available. With localization companies will have the opportunity to choose the desired name especially companies catering purely to local market will be at an added advantage.

Decide your own extension: One of the other major advancements discussed at the event was to allow companies to acquire new top-level domain names ending with extension of their choice. This change will enable businesses to use their business name as extension for example www.iphone.apple this will not only improve the branding but help them create series of domain names for their different products and services.

Drive search engine traffic: Search engines are focusing more and more on localized search and indexing and promoting local search results to users. As of today the percentage of people using local search as compared to global one is very low but moving forward the traffic generated by local searches will be significant. Proactive companies will be able to take an early movers advantage.

Service Providers: Service providers like registrars, hosting providers, web designers and SEO people will have tremendous opportunity to grow. The key here is to focus on selling domain name internationalization services at the right time.  I would say start a campaign to gather database of people by displaying “register domain name in local languages” like in India register domain name in Hindi.

Companies will have to think fast and act upon it the moment it’s out in the open. The early movers will have to strategize and plan their domain name localization initiative.  Companies who are agile in adopting local domain names will reap the rewards primarily in addressing local target audience and also win the search war when the localization of search heats up.  Here in lies the opportunity for services providers to identify opportunities and grow their business.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The latest Hollywood offering, ‘2012‘, is a $200 million movie about the end of the world is based on myths backed by the Mayan calendar.  Since the first promotion and marketing event of the movie 2012 there has been a casual buzz about world coming to an end and people are highly curious about the prediction.   In the past there have been numerous predictions about the world coming to an end.

To me the Barack Obama online marketing campaign was the best in terms of strategy and execution. The team at Sony has similarly done a great job at strategizing and executing online marketing campaign for the movie 2012.

Online marketing Lessons we can learn from 2012’s.

Strategy

• The What: Exploit people’s fears and generate curiosity amongst the target audience
• The Where: social media – primarily websites, Facebook pages, myspace twitter and video viral
• The How: Use of organic Google search coupled with highly focused SEO, SMO and SEM activities

Execution

It all started with a phrase “Find out the truth, search Google for 2012″. This prompted people to do just that and as a result in Google and SEO parlance the key phrase was searched over and over again in very short period of time. This increased the SEO value of that keyword and since it was passed around over various social networking sites there was a huge viral effect. Initially 2012 was not ranking first in Google it came right up there in couple of days

Big Viral effect

Search Google for 2012 the movie and you will see loads of articles, websites, videos, images, fan pages, groups, social organizations, NGO’s and last but not the least even NASA has to get into the act.  This topic appeals to wide variety of audience the viral effect was very strong and fast, this can be clearly seen in the research on Google Trends

Google Trends

Alexa Ranking

In addition to the official movie site, whowillsurvive2012.com, the search results pages include Wikipedia pages as well as Web sites built by devotees of the Mayan doomsday prophecy, lending more credibility to the premise of the film. You’ll find the same type of results at Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.

There has been a negative impact of this marketing campaign as well, since the news that the world is going to end by 2012 spread like wild fire authorities like NASA has been bombarded with people asking them to question if the world would really end.  The authorities at NASA had to create a FAQ page on their website clarifying that the nothing wrong is going to happen.

To me the marketing campaign of the movie 2012 is a huge success considering its effectiveness online coupled with its offline marketing and promotions activities.

Movie reviews for 2012 look promising the world over,I only hope that the movie lives up to the hype and expectation.

Related posts:

1. Hubspot – Measure effectiveness of your online initiatives In today’s day and age we are surrounded by the web world and most of our time due to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

twitcam – developed by   Livestream and camtweet – developed by Justin.TV are utilities where anyone using their twitter login details can start streaming live to its followers, create live chat rooms and archive each streaming event.  This is not a ground breaking technological neither it’s an innovative concept.  To me it’s smart thinking and right timing on part of both companies to take advantage of their expertise and applying to the critical mass of twitter.  There is virtually no difference between twitcam and camtweet.

Twitter is certainly one of the most successful social media concepts to hit the web recently and is growing exponentially.  The more I hear about twitter’s success the more I am made to believe that micro blogging platforms will soon take over from the current main stream communication avenues like emails and blogs.  There are a lot of smart people out there who have jumped on the early innovators band wagon and developed some really cool applications around twitter and hopefully with that would have developed a business model around it as well.  The idea of developing applications and concepts around twitter is to target real time conversations and thereby making highly effective marketing campaigns.

There are many applications/utilities built around twitter and are doing reasonably well. The reason twitcam and camtweet needs a special mention is because I feel they surely are a game changer.  Services like these are likely to take tweeting to a whole new level both at personal as well as corporate marketing and relationship building exercise.

What really is live streaming on twitter?

Twitcam and camtweet are tools which lets you broadcast live using your webcam and tweet it to your followers. It’s going to be as simple as turning on your webcam and start streaming live to your followers in 3 simple steps.

• Connect your webcam
• Login using twitter credentials
• Click broadcast button.

How it can help us:

People by their very nature love interactivity and synchronous communication with other people and twitcam will help us get one step ahead of plain vanilla chat

Twitcam and camtweet will help us strengthen the relationship building exercise over the web by attaching a face and voice to each communication.  This will help us build trust and thereby resulting into stronger and deeper relationships.

• Marketers can create viral campaigns using the power of video to reach out to their customers
• Businesses can use it as a productivity tool for people working on the same project but are in different parts of the world
• Live streaming can be used by companies to provide higher level of customer services vis twitter
• Researchers can use it to understand the market better by developing greater insights into each communication
• Individuals can create their own streams and use it for fun as well as academic purpose
• Families spread over the world can have a quick live face to face update on their each family member

These are just few advantages that come to my mind when I first downloaded and tested them. I am sure moving forward people will find innovative and abstract ways of using and abusing a service like twitcam.

Livestream says that twitcam was built in about a week and uses new player tools that are going into an updated version of its API that will be released in the near future. The company hopes these will let anyone build a similar service with their own branding, and audience tools–preferably with a chat system that does not require so many tweets.

I believe that the biggest danger in developing a twitter related application is that it can be copied very easily and the early mover advantage lasts for a very short while.  It will become increasingly difficult for these companies to create a sustainable competitive advantage and ongoing revenues to justify their existence

Related posts:

1. 6 part series – Topic 2 – Twitter You can read topic 1 on LinkedIn here. Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate...
2. My research and experience on how to manage multiple twitter accounts. Twitter has already become an integral part of every marketer’s social media strategy.  During the initial days of twitter...
3. Now money can buy friends, followers, connections, fans on social media sites I always thought Money can help you buy materialistic things but certainly not family and friends.  Today I came...
4. TweetDeck + TwitterJobSearch = JobDeck – helps you find your next job. Every now and then there comes a disruptive technology that changes the rule of the game.  My initial analysis...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

IntenseDebate – super charge your commenting system

I installed IntenseDebate to offer highly interactive commenting system to the readers of GigaThoughts.  As always it started with a lot of research, which led to final two competitors to choose from – IntenseDebate and Disqus. After testing both commenting system on local machine for a week, I finally chose IntenseDebate primarily because it’s an Automatic company and for those who are not aware they are the same guys behind wordpress and more so IntenseDebate offers all the features that are offered by Disqus.  I have been using it since a week on the live site and I am really thrilled with interactivity it can offer to the readers.  I would recommend using IntenseDebate to everyone who wishes to offer a better user experience to their readers.

Errors, issues, problems and fixes while installing IntenseDebate on Wordpress 2.7.1

Like a lot of people who tried installing IntenseDebate I was faced with several issues and it wasn’t a smooth installation process.  But persistence and the urge to offer better usability to the readers i was able to find solutions of each one and hence I wish to share my experience so that other people can benefit from it and I am sure it can help ease their installation issues.

Error 1: “Login failed. Please check your credentials and try again” Login Failure while accessing ID via wordpress admin once the plugin is activated. This is the first error which most people would face and it blocks the further installation and synching process.

Solution 1:

• First try and reset the plugin by downloading the cleared.php and do the following:
  Please use these instructions:
  1. Uninstall and remove the IntenseDebate plugin
  2. Install, activate the clearID.php plugin
  3. Uninstall it.
  4. Install the latest version of the plugin and activate it.
• Step 2 is to change your username and password on the ID website and try installing the plugin again and try again. Make sure your password does not contain any special character like #$% as that will not work
• Step 3 is to check missing Blog Title, while accepting the username and password ID check if the blog has a valid blog title if not it will reject the request. So if you don’t have a title you need to have one but this will lead to the text appearing above your logo in the header. You need to reduce the font size in the theme CSS to 0 so for the application the title will still be there but it not be visible on your site.

Error 2: Post installation all the comments have not been synchronized.

Solution 2:

• I would say first check for the comments on the ID website in your account if they are there.
• if not wait for couple of days after installation and try and synching process again and see if that works
• Under your WP admin settings section there is an option under the ID tab to reset the plugin in most cases this should solve the problems of missing or disappearing comments in ID

Error 3: IntenseDebate plugin has skewed the layout of the site.

Solution 3:

• The issues is noscript tag present in your comment.php or main php file
• Or one of your existing plugin is dynamically adding a noscript tag

ID works on Java Script and there are a lot of browsers, themes and plugins that block java script and as a result the layout is thrown out of order.  There can be a case where in your comments.php, or your main php file or the comment template file has a <noscript> tag if you can locate that then your problems is over normally the lines would say

<noscript> Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser“.
</noscript>

The problem arises because that is part of a block of content that gets nested in another <noscript> tag, which becomes invalid and throws the nesting out in your HTML.

You can do two things either remove those lines and yes its ok to remove those lines or add a // before these lines and it will indicate that the text following // is for information only and not action and then you layout should be back to normal.

If this does not solve then it means that one of your other plugins might be dynamically adding the noscript tag to your comment form. The solution for that is to disable all plugins and activate only ID plugin and check if works and i am sure it will work. The next step is to activate each plugin one by one and check if it’s creating any conflict with ID plugin.  After this long exercise you will be able to identify a plugin which is causing the layout issue. Once you have identified the plugin you need to click on edit option where the plugin is listed and again look for the noscript tag in that plugin and follow the same // process  mentioned above.

In my case it was the plugin WP-SpamFree plugin dynamically adding the noscript tag and hence causing the conflict with ID plugin. I added the // tag and it worked fine.  But remember once you upgrade the WP-SpamFree plugin the next time it will again add the noscript tag so be careful before upgrading.

IntenseDebate Support:

The support team at ID is amazing and they have been through the entire episode with me and have helped me with solution at every stage of my problem.  We all need to remember that ID is a open source utility and it’s an unpaid support as a result you will have to be patient with the team and they will surely help you with all your issues.  I would particularly like to thank Beau form the ID team who have helped me almost on a daily basis to resolve my issues.

Contacting ID Team:

Getsatisfaction.com there is wealth of information and i am sure it will solve most of your issues by visiting the ID page

IF that doesn’t work email ID support team on support@intensedebate.com and try and give as much information as possible also first do some research then they will be able to help you better

Follow ID on twitter: twitter.com/IntenseDebate

Follow ID on Facebook: IntenseDebate on Facebook

Contact me:

Please feel free to contact me and I shall be more than happy to help you solve your queries.

• Email: desaiamit (at) gmail (dot) com
• Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/amitdesai
• Twitter : http://twitter.com/amitdesai
• Facebook: http://facebook.com/amitkdesai

Related posts:

1. How to Upgrade Wordpress version 2.6.5 to 2.7.1 Matt Mullenweg and a whole lot of creative and highly competent technology professionals came up with the most talked...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.