How cheap can laptops go? PC World looks at three sub-$500 laptops offered by Dell, HP and Acer. With laptop market driving PC growth in many countries, PC World experts predict that by late 2006 some brand new laptops might start selling for $300.
I’ve been testing MeasureMap, a brand spanking new counter service from Adaptive Path, a Web consulting company in San Francisco that coined the term AJAX. Jeff Veen gave me an invite during the recent TechCrunch get-together, and MeasureMap was presented there as a counter service that as Webmaster-friendly as it gets.
It contains only the stuff that matters to most of the bloggers out there - data on unique visitors, incoming links, comments and post popularity.
MeasureMap requires the Webmaster to insert JavaScript one-liners into the blog source code, and they support all the major blogging platforms. However, instead of overpopulated and frequently meaningless lists of incoming referrers provided by AwStats and Webalizer, MeasureMap tries to extract some meaning from the incoming links. The Webmaster can always see which links are new, how many visitors they brought in, which outgoing links were followed from the blog (as far as I know, none of the server-based ISP-provided stats packages do this) and which search terms the visitors used when arriving at the site.
The Search Terms view allows the Webmaster to track the most popular search engines and most popular queries used to find the blog.
It’s hard to give a good review to a service that’s still in early beta, but overall MeasureMap tries to please the Webmaster and is one of the easiest tracking systems to use.
In Saturday episode, that involved some chair-throwing and guest appearance by Donald Trump, James Cramer set a $450 price sticker for GOOG:
I believe that Google can earn at least $9 a share in 2006. Based on a 50 times earnings multiple, because of its unmatched growth potential, I now believe the shares can see $450 over the next 12 months.
Posted in Money at October 31st, 2005. No Comments.
With so many financial providers it didn’t take that long for an aggregator in the field to appear. BusinessFinance.com helps startups and financial institutions find one another.
BusinessFinance.com lists the lending and investing criteria of more than 4,000 sources of capital in the United States. By providing specific information on your business industry, the type of financing you are seeking, the amount of the loan, and some specifics about your company, the business capital search engine quickly pares your matches to a manageable size. For example, a search for a 5 year old company with $5 million in sales that was seeking $500,000 in asset backed loans, turned up 50 potential matches. The list included large lenders such as GE Capital and Finova, several big banks, and a host of smaller more niche lenders from around the country. Currently 150,000 business owners use BusinessFinance.com each month to connect with the more than 4,000 sources of business financing.
The TechCrunch party Friday night was a blast, thanks a lot to Mike for hosting it. Good food, good wine, and companies presenting in Mike’s office on a large LCD display. Check out techcrunch tag on flickr.
Meebo was presented first, a pretty cool AJAX Web-based instant messaging aggregator that supports AOL IM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and Google Talk messengers. The founder has just quit the Stanford School of Business the other day to continue on with Meebo. A large portion of their users are school kids, who asked for such features as being logged in under multiple identities.
Tony Conrad presented Sphere, a new blog search engine with better results and better suggestions of what to read. Conrad said we are at the tipping point, where so much information is contained in blogs, that the recommendation services are needed. Plus none of the existing players do a good job.
HealthLine presented, just a better vertical search engine for medical information. We discussed the possibility of Google getting into personal health records outside. Healthline emphasizes information from professional sources and paid some content provider for doctor-generated medical infirmation.
Wink is trying to build a new social search engine, where the results are tagged and grouped by the users, hence resulting in better search results. You can rate the search results you got with stars (they also asked about yes-no option), you can save the searches to a collection, you can assign tags to certain search results.
Flock social browser demoed as well. I grilled them about the business model, but they didn’t seem to be terribly concerned about it, and pointed to me that Mozilla Foundation was doing pretty well being a non-profit. Right now the goal is to provide better browsing experience through Firefox-based browser that plugs into del.icio.us and major blogging platforms.
MeasureMap is a brand new service from AdaptivePath that, according to the demo by Jeffrey Veen, seems to get things right. What Webmasters really need is up-to-date referrer information, with search engines broken down, referrer spam dealt with, and important things like sudden surge in traffic to old posts, described. I will be testing the service with my personal blog, since Jeff was nice to invite anyone who asked for it.
Pandora is all about discovering music and making recommendations. These guys have been around for a while, and got some pretty impressive coverage.
The name ZVents makes you understand how hard it is to get a 6-character domain nowadays. It’s a pretty cool service that tries to be a flickr for your calendar. The events can be private and public, and the public ones are then aggregated into the common calendar. One can subscribe to events, and blog about them, and then get the latest blogs discussing the same event. When the event expires, ZVents event stays on the site. There’s a blog, too.
Also notice that they’re not in beta anymore, they’re in delta. Touche!
Loomia is all about podcast recommendations and ratings. Pretty nifty site, quite easy to use, and provides some interesting information like overall tagging cloud for the podcasts out there.
Goowy is working on the concept of virtual desktop - a set of AJAX-based Web apps available from any computer that has a browser and Internet connection. Right now the apps include an e-mail client, calendar, search boxes, address book and some Flash games. Pretty impressive demo, very detailed and nice user interfaces, I asked them if Microsoft Office documents were supported, the answer was - not yet, but if the users ask for them, who knows what will happen.
RealTravel is all about social travel - blogging, pictures, sharing experiences. It aims to cover destinations in general, specific hotels, restaurants and venues. Something we’ve seen with Epinions before and something we’re seeing with Yahoo! Travel, maybe a nicer and more streamlined interface. They invite people to start blogs, but I like their idea of being specific about topics - just travel blogs, places you visit and restaurants you eat at.
Kevin Burton presented TailRank, a web log recommendation and personalization search engine. Some of the stuff you’ve seen in Findory, and some of new features. See screenshot here.
Joyentall inside a browser. Also, as often needed by small businesses, users can read one another’s e-mail, if the e-mail owner chooses to open it up, so Bob from accounting can always see what Mary from sales promised to the client as far as discounts.There’s blog, too.
OQO was presenting its ultra-portable and uber-priced (at $1,899) PC (that I got some pictures of), allowing everyone to play around with the thing. Pretty useful, and Dave Winer told Robert Scoble to check it out right away, saying “it’s your dream come true, it runs Windows”. Pretty sleek Windows XP machine, pluggable into external mouse+keyboard+monitor at work and at home, but the price??
Other posts on TechCrunch meetup
Mark Canter on Dave Winer’s keynote speech
Robert Scoble was there as well.
Report from Ethan Stock.
Mike Arrington thanked everyone for coming.
Post from LaughingSquid.
Dave Winer gave a keynote, which NoSoapRadio mentions and Sylvia discusses in more detail.
Tara took lots of photos.
Andrew Wooldridge wrote about his experience.
Jared also wrote up some thoughts of his.
Zoli Erdos wrote up a pretty long report of the stuff he saw and liked, and his post pointed me to a post by Philippe Lewicki with some details from TechCrunch BBQ.
Posted in Entertainment, General, Silicon Valley, Startups, Technology at October 23rd, 2005. 2 Comments.
Short summary: It’s getting pretty bad.
PC Magazine reviews online social bookmarking services that allow saving and tagging.
Clipmarks received 4 stars out of 5 possible:
Clips that mix text and graphics don’t always display properly, but otherwise everything works like it should. All told, Clipmarks is an exceptional 1.0 effort and a concept that should join bookmarks as a de facto part of Web surfing.
del.icio.us, probably the household name among the geeks out there, got a dismal 1.5 stars:
For such a confusing place, del.icio.us offers precious little help. Although a few features are explained on the About page, even tech-savvy users may have difficulty figuring out various functions.
Jeteye beta social community got 2.5 stars:
Jeteye will undoubtedly iron out these kinks, at which time the service could attract a strong following. It has applications both fun and practical, and the option to make Jetpaks private or public (including publicly modifiable, like a wiki) enhances the appeal.
Shadows got some good word, but still 3.5 stars:
Although Shadows looks attractive, especially compared with del.icio.us, navigation can be confusing; it’s not always clear what to click or where to go. There’s no way to see a complete list of your tagged bookmarks, nor even to sort your tags (though it does offer an alphabetized view of the latter).
Finally, Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 got 4 stars, which is the same rating Clipmarks received, but according to the editors, this service could be considered the winner of the competition:
In the meantime, a massive user base coupled with generally well-rounded features make My Web the best place to get social about your bookmarks.
Too bad PCMag missed the fact that MyWeb 2.0 doesn’t require Yahoo! toolbar installation.
The server was back again yesterday, so the delays were temporary. Looks like the audio books section got a lift, although there are not many titles there for now.
Posted in Entertainment at October 19th, 2005. No Comments.
Folks from BestCashCow are looking for customers ready to invest their hard-earned cash into an FDIC-insured certificate of deposit in order to go around the bank industry and ask for the best rate available. This is the concept of the buyer’s club applied to the the cash investors. People investing in CDs are supposedly conservative with their income goals, but are looking for the utmost reliability, and one can’t go wrong with FDIC guarantee of up to $100,000. Pledges are accepted informally on BestCashCow Web site.
Posted in Money at October 18th, 2005. No Comments.
Yahoo! has a mandatory office ergonomics class that new employees have to attend, since a job that requires sitting by the computer all day long might be a bit stressful on the eyes, hands, neck, back and other parts of the body. They actually give some pretty valuable tips regarding the position of the monitor on the desk, ways to abuse your hands when using PC mouse, etc. The instructor mentioned a pretty interesting case, where the guy had a pretty bad injury due to frequent thumb usage for the Space key.
The cause for the injury? The guy was programming in Python, with its reliance on white space. With all respect to Paul Graham, C++/Perl/PHP are just healthier for you.