January 2009

Kostengünstige Laptops werden immer populärer. Sie bringen zwar keine hohe Leistung, genügen aber für einfache Anwendungen wie für Internet und Textverarbeitung völlig. Gerade in der Krise.

Die Möglichkeit, sich aus kleinteiligen Elementen eine Gesamterfahrung zusammenzusetzen, zieht sich wie ein roter Faden durch die jüngsten Entwicklungen des Webs. Eine Analyse.

Earlier this week we posted a Guide to Recommender Systems, as part of our series on recommendation technologies. In this post we look at some of the challenges in building or deploying a recommender system.

Adobe has announced that they’ve recorded 100 million successful installations of Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, at the same time boasting that the newest version of Adobe Flash Player (10) was installed on over half of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release.

But don't be so quick to write Facebook apps off just yet. There is a new breed of app that may very well be more powerful than several poking and parking apps combined — and draw even more attention to Facebook's split personality as both a media property and a platform.

Analyst firm Gartner has just released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.

Die Gerüchteküche brodelte schon im vergangenen Jahr heftig im Bezug auf das sogenannte GDrive aus dem Hause Google. Verschiedensten Einschätzungen zufolge könnte das Angebot noch heuer eingeführt werden.

One of Gmail’s most requested features – offline support – is now available in testing. In other words, you can now use Gmail without an Internet connection, just like you can with desktop mail clients like Outlook.

The Android platform might still be in its infancy, but AdMob, one of the world's largest mobile advertising marketplaces, launched its first dedicated advertising unit for Android applications today. Even though the Android platform was developed by Google, Google itself has yet to release a dedicated advertising service for Android applications. While the iPhone and iPod touch now dominate AdMob's business, the company is clearly hoping for the Android platform to gain some market share in the near future.

We write about technology and entrepreneurship. These things are important, but not so important that we should fear for our safety or the safety of our families.

Berger-de Leon hat fünf Jahre den Klingeltonanbieter Jamba geleitet und hat erst vor einem Jahr die Leitung des Internetunternehmens Abacho und der Handwerker-Plattform MyHammer übernommen.

Er kam ohne seine obligatorischen Adiletten, trug dafür aber eine Krawatte: Mark Zuckerberg, Gründer und Chef von Facebook, war der Überraschungsgast auf der Burda-Digitalkonferenz DLD. Und er brachte eine News mit: Facebook habe inzwischen mehr als 2 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland.

As 2008 came to a close, we saw the first hints of a new developmental branch of Android called “Cupcake”. Promising video recording, copy and paste, stereo bluetooth and more, an endless clamor has rang from the userbase ever since.

Here are Inside Facebook’s top 10 ways business owners can more effectively leverage Facebook to reach their target audience and drive more business.

Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people's social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you'll need to take into consideration in the coming year:

THE ULTIMATE UBUNTU BOOK!
Written by award-winning author Keir Thomas, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a totally unique and concise guide for everyday Ubuntu use. It is the world's most popular and widely-read Ubuntu book!

We asked developers to share what they like and would they would like to see more of from Android, Google’s mobile operating system.

arissa Mayer treibt bei Google die Entwicklung der Suchmaschine maßgeblich voran. Obwohl das Unternehmen den Suchmaschinenmarkt beherrscht, sieht Mayer Google noch lange nicht am Ziel. Gerüchte, sie wolle Google verlassen, weist sie zurück.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

The social Web has given users great power: the ability to create and share content with people around the world – easily and quickly. The problem of course, is that power is often not compatible with effective and clear thinking. The thought that germinated in an instant can be immortalized in perpetuity on the Web. With the extraordinary growth of the Internet and the interlinking of information that the social Web has brought with it, it's time to examine the footprints we leave on the Web as we move into the future that promises to "throttle the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs,'" as described so eloquently by Jason Calacanis.

Die Mini-GmbH ist Teil eines Reformpakets, das die GmbH für Gründer attraktiver machen soll. Weniger bürokratischer Aufwand, praxisnahe Regeln für Stammeinlagen oder Geschäftsanteile – förderland erklärt, wie Gründer das neue Recht nutzen können.

The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.

According to a new book written by Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin called “Stealing MySpace”, MySpace failed to acquire Facebook for $75 million back in February of 2005. Mike Arrington, who has access to a draft copy of the book also states that toward the end of 2005, the two companies met again, at which time Mark Zuckerberg requested $750 million, nearly ten times what he previously asked for only a few months earlier.

Der Internetkonzern Google konnte im vierten Quartal bei Umsatz und Gewinn die Prognosen der Wall Street übertreffen. Google erwirtschaftete im vierten Quartal einen Gewinn von 382,4 Millionen US-Dollar (1,21 Dollar pro Aktie) nach 1,21 Milliarden US-Dollar (3,79 Dollar pro Aktie) im Vergleichszeitraum des Vorjahres.

When you think of a wiki, you’re probably envisioning an editable content page where multiple users can add content, make edits, roll back to previous versions, and even embed content. If that’s all you thought wikis could do, MindTouch’s Deki Wiki and the Washington Post might make you scratch your head and think, I had no idea wikis could look and do all that.

Google today released a new tool that will make learning and testing code for Google's Javascript APIs a lot easier. Google's interactive AJAX API Playground gives developers an easy to use interface to write some basic Javascript code for Google's eight Javascript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries, and Earth).

The BBC Music Beta project is an ongoing effort by the BBC to build semantically linked and annotated web pages about artists and singers whose songs are played on BBC radio stations. Within these pages, collections of data are enhanced and interconnected with semantic metadata, letting music fans explore connections between artists that they may have not known existed.

As Paul Buchheit proved with his simple Javascript experiment, FriendFeed’s APIs already allow him or anyone to create a simple Twitterish UI in a few hundred lines of code. While this particular take doesn’t do everything he or I’d want it to, it does viscerally prove the underlying point — that FriendFeed can shapeshift into Twitter while Twitter can’t return the favor. If the user can get all the benefits of Twitter plus those of FriendFeed, why use Twitter?

es gibt Beispiele, bei denen es bereits funktioniert. Welche Faktoren dann zusammenkommen, möchte ich hier einmal aufzeigen. Außerdem wage ich einen kleinen Blick in die Zukunft, wo manche ein “iTunes für News” als Möglichkeit sehen.

Eine aktuelle Studie von Download Chip.eu mit dem Titel “Internationale Web-Trends” bietet wertvolle Informationen über die Nutzungsgewohnheiten und Entwicklungspotenziale im Internet in verschiedenen Ländern West- und Osteuropas. Die Umfrage gibt Gründern und Dienstleistern gute Hinweise darauf, für welche Services und Internet-Innovationen die Internetuser offen sind.

As President Barack Obama was giving his inauguration speech, another transfer of power was happening online. At exactly 12 PM ET, Whitehouse.gov, the official Website of the President switched over to a new design. There are links to Obama’s Agenda and a Briefing Room where citizens will be able to find Obama’s weekly Web video address, appointments and nominations, executive orders, and slideshows.

Today Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. As several million people attended the inauguration in Washington D.C., Facebook and CNN invited the rest of the world to watch the moment online. Online visitors to CNN.com were able to use its video player to watch the live broadcast coverage of the event. We also saw what has be one of the most brilliant examples of the real-time web in action: next to the video, the Facebook status updates of those watching streamed by in the sidebar.

Comments are currency. I learned this first from Liz Strauss. They are the ultimate in social proof, because if we’re all supposed to be about joining the conversation, and yet you aren’t getting a lot of back and forth in the media you’re making, it might be time to look at this a bit more. If comments matter to you, read on. Here are some thoughts to help improve your back and forth.

Can content aggregator FriendFeed turn Twitterholics into FriendFeed addicts? Certainly, much of the content being imported into FriendFeed comes from Twitter feeds, and there’s a huge amount of overlap between the two user bases.

It may be Obama Day today, but it was definitely also Facebook Day – the company had its Facebook Connect service integrated nicely into the live CNN.com coverage of the inauguration. Facebook users could log into Facebook while watching the event, read comments from friends (or anyone) and leave their own.

Bei den Social-Media-Angeboten nehmen Brand-Communitys eine immer wichtigere Stellung ein. Sie stellen einen interessanten Weg dar, um effektives Marketing zu betreiben und die Community-Mitglieder zu Co-Marketern zu machen. Die Agentur Komjuniti hat in einer Studie 461 internationale Netzwerke untersucht und jetzt die Resultate veröffentlicht.

Since its launch in 2004, Digg has attracted more than 30 million unique visitors and 327 million page views per month. Its social bookmarking features allow users to submit their favorite pictures, videos, and articles to be voted on by their peers. The most popular and relevant of which, based on Digg’s algorithm, are promoted to the front page for all visitors to see.

Most people want a few more dollars in their wallets. But between an employer and family, the time most of us can devote to a second job is severely limited. Running a small side business can provide a few more options: you don’t have to show up at a set time and you can use skills you already have. Not all will be perfect for everyone, of course, and I’m sure that you’ll have a few ideas of your own after reading this list. If you’d like to share any other business ideas, please add them in the comments.

My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geoapps. When going for a run, bike ride, or drive, I would record my trajectory and publish it online. I would let digital applications help me decide where to work, play, and eat. And I would seek out new people based on nothing but their proximity to me at any given moment. I would be totally open, exposing my location to the world just to see where it took me. I even added an Eye-Fi Wi-Fi card to my PowerShot digital camera so that all my photos could be geotagged and uploaded to the Web. I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets!

Inside the GPS revolution it's more than maps and driving directions: location-aware phones and apps now deliver the hidden information that lets users make connections and interact with the world in ways they never imagined. The future is here and it's in your pocket.

Die offiziellen Newsquellen für Entwicklungen rund um das Geschehen der Android-Plattform wurden zwar noch nicht auf den neuesten Stand gebracht, allerdings pfeifen diese Meldung bereits die Spatzen von den Dächern. Grund für das muntere Gezwitschere ist eine E-Mail von Eric Chu, der bezüglich des Starts vom Android Market auf dem europäischem Gebiet mehr oder minder verantwortlich ist.

New York-based Peachtree Media Advisors has just released its annual report summarizing mergers, acquisitions and amounts of capital raised in the online media market last year. The report is available as a PDF download (2MB). In 2008 there were were 707 merger, acquisition and capital raise transactions in the online sector of media – which was 92 more transactions than 2007. The breakdown was 348 capital raise transactions and 359 acquisitions. Despite the increase in transactions however, the actual dollar value declined from 2007.

Pew Internet hat eine neue Studie veröffentlicht, in der die Nutzung von Social Networking Sites durch Erwachsene untersucht worden ist. Demnach hat sich die Zahl der erwachsenen Internetnutzer, die ein Profil bei einem der Social Networks pflegen, von 2005 bis 2008 mehr als vervierfacht – von 8 Prozent im Jahr 2005 auf jetzt 35 Prozent. In der Untersuchung zeigte sich des weiteren, dass 18-24 Jährige am stärksten vertreten sind. Hier liegt die Quote bei 75 Prozent. Was zu erwarten war: Verfolgt werden mehr persönliche und private Zwecke als berufliche. Aufbau und Pflege von Freundesnetzen dominiert gegenüber rein professionellen Netzwerken.

It’s time for an update on the progress we’ve made on the low cost touch screen tablet that I first wrote about in July 2008 when I asked for a dead simple touch screen web tablet that boots right to the browser. Here’s our first post on the tablet, which we’re now calling the CrunchPad internally.

Swedish search engine Twingly is launching just that – a new microblogging search tool – today. Use it to search a variety of sites – Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de, Bloggy.se and Pownce archives (since the service is now dead). They’re calling it the worlds first federated microblog search.

ein paar wirklich gute und lesenswerte eBooks zusammen zu stellen um eine möglichst zentrale Stelle zu haben für das Thema Social Media Marketing. Natürlich kann diese Liste nur unvollständig sein, schließlich gibt es sicher noch ein paar versteckte und wirklich gute eBooks zu diesem Thema. Aber ich werde diese Liste auch erweitern und somit steht erst einmal diese Links zu den eBooks online.

“Feed Me: Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites“. The report is a collaboration between Cameron Marlow and Thomas Lento, researchers at Facebook, and Moira Burke of Carnegie Mellon University. The purpose of the report is to explore what motivates users on Facebook to become more active. Below I’ve listed out the hypotheses, testing methods, and the findings.