Archive for May, 2006
Talkety is a new VoIP-based phone service which works in a fairly novel manner:
Talkety will connect any two phones, cellular or landline, by number. With ease and effectiveness, all one must do is type in his number, the number he wishes to dial, click “connect” and let Talkety do the rest.
The caller’s phone rings. By answering, the call is triggered, and the second phone rings at the other end, connecting the two individuals with clarity.
No software or hardware needed and rates are fairly competitive (e.g. 5 cents per minute Mexico-U.S. and 3 cents U.S.-France vs. zero and 2.5 for SkypeOut).
Some people have commented that you still need to pay your local phone service fee but that’s only an issue 1) if you live in a country/area where naked DSL is available or 2) you’re not using it mainly for long distance calls where the savings usually are greatest.
May 26th, 2006
It used to be that the only option to check Mexico City/Monterrey street-level maps online was fairly mediocre (compared to Google Maps et al.) Guia Roji site (no smooth map scrolling was particularly annoying). Checking out local.live.com after reading TechCrunch article I found out to my delight that it finally had street-level maps at least for Mexico City and Monterrey. Images below are linked to map locations.
The only issue is that I couldn’t get search for streets to work (it searches for places such as stadiums and parks just fine) which somewhat limits its usefulness. If someone knows what I’m doing wrong, feel free to comment.
May 25th, 2006
Deviant Abstraction points to a very interesting 188-slide presentation of Yahoo’s strategy. As Nicolas Toper seems to be right about blogosphere silence, I’ll try and make some noise. A lot of people underestimate the value of investor presentations to gain insight into corporate strategy and this one is particularly tedious and long (they usually run at 20-30 slides)
There’s a lot to be perused there, but the most interesting idea is this strategy, summed up in a list:
- Use Yahoo’s huge user reach (500M+ users) to build up a critical mass
- Use that critical mass to launch/strengthen a social network-type application e.g.
- Yahoo! Answers (social search)
- Flickr (integration into Olympics and general news coverage)
- Now almost 30% of Y! web search page views
- Take advantage of “social search” to strengthen traditional search (happened in Taiwan where Yahoo! won market share from Google)
- Monetize (the average revenue per user went from 35 cents per month in 2001 to 79 cents in 2004)
- Rinse and repeat.
Read/WriteWeb is the other blog with interesting analysis of other parts of presentation
May 23rd, 2006
Via NogzBlogz comes a pointer to Snap, a very interesting search engine. Although it all starts with a simple search box:
Results page is a pleasant surprise with easy keyboard navigation (Up, Down, Enter) and page thumbnail fairly quickly displayed on the right side. Based on few searches I did, results quality is not bad at all and seeing a preview of the page helps immensely.
Update: Wisdump wrote a very nice review of Snap, including some very valid critique
Tags: web-20
May 19th, 2006
An article in NYT argues that this time it’s different, which as David Dodd once said are four most dangerous words in the English language:
Venture capitalists are also tending to show far more restraint before deciding to invest in a start-up — such impetuousness to be part of any deal perceived as hot helped to fuel the Internet mania of the late 1990’s.
Sure, the focus now is now on “users” not on “eyeballs” and there are no theglobe.com type IPOs, but current situation is still too close to the Last Great Bubble to be comfortable:
- Industry still with low barriers to entry in most sectors (see YouTube vs. Google Video, MySpace vs. Friendster, Google vs. Yahoo, etc.) — maintaining competitive advantage is hard
- Advertising once again is the king for most of the startups, with few notable exceptions (37signals’s applications come to mind)
- Huge amount of press and buzz around hottest startups, Google especially (I still think its valuation is ridiculous by the way)
May 19th, 2006
Via Jeff Bridgforth, Yahoo just launched a preview of their new, AJAX-enabled home page. On first impression, the design looks very clean and AJAX is put to a good use:
For example, the left menu the links seem to be a sort of tag cloud with frequently used ones bigger:
And the quick access menu on the right doesn’t require reloading to obtain recent email, Y! Messenger contracts or local weather (though option to switch to metric seems to be missing):
Tags: web-20
May 16th, 2006
Cameron Olthuis points to a great article on Slate explores the reasons for popularity common to both MySpace and YouTube:
I’ve got a different theory. YouTube and MySpace are runaway hits because they combine two attributes rarely found together in tech products. They’re easy to use, and they don’t tell you what to do.
The article has very good points, but it’s interesting that the Google Video seems to have lost the game to YouTube even when there was a time when Google was the epithome of no nonsense, keep it simple principle.
Tags: web-20
May 13th, 2006
A complement to always interesting Google Zeitgeist, here comes Google Trends, a much improved version. You now can
- See search count graph for specific words over 2004-2006 (no absolute numbers though)
- Filter the results by a specific region (country level)
- See from what cities, regions and languages the searches are coming from
A curious aspect is that one coworker of mine wanted something like that badly a couple of months ago and we talked about why hadn’t Google released such a thing.
[Via TechCrunch]
Tags: web-20
May 10th, 2006
Frank Gruber points to Quintura, a new search engine based on visual semantic maps.
It’s a new and interesting twist on the old “words related to your search” story. Instead of offering a plain list of suggested words, it shows a spatial map of words, distance indicating degree of relatedness.
My only objection could have been it focus on desktop application, but Frank points out they have just launched a Russian-language web-based search which seems remarkably similar to the desktop application:
English version of the web-based search and the 2.0 version of the desktop application are on the way.
Tags: web-20
May 8th, 2006
After praising NetVibes in my earlier post, several people pointed to PageFlakes as an alternative. So I’ve decided to do an informal comparison of the two content aggregators:
Design
Both sites are quite nice looking, however on purely subjective criteria I like NetVibes more.
Content selection
NetVibes as well as Pageflakes offers a selection of standard display widgets like weather, web search, TODO list, Flickr photos, etc. Judging by the menu Pageflakes beats its hands down in its breadth, with 68 widgets vs. 16, however NetVibes supports user-created modules via Mini API. Considering those, NetVibes has additional 60+ modules
Interface
Interface on both pages is very similar, down to widget drag & drop, support for multiple tabs and fairly heavy use of AJAX.
Social
Pageflakes is the only one that supports page sharing and it allows you one of three options:
- Private
- Share it with a select group of people
- Share it with everybody
Overall
As it stands, NetVibes vs. PageFlakes is virtually a tie with an almost identical set of features and the personal choice would probably be dictated by subjective factors or availability of a particularly needed widget. I can easily recommend both for a day-to-day use.
Tags: netvibes, pageflakes, web-20
May 6th, 2006
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