Google Analytics Annotations are now available to all users. Annotations allows any user with access to a Google Analytics profile to leave shared or private notes right on the over-time graph. Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, capture the tribal intelligence of your company – which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all. A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers.
NTT DoCoMo Japan Releases Android Phone
January 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Japan’s largest mobile-phone company NTT DoCoMo Inc. had released its first ever Android powered mobile phone HT-03A model in May an year ago. Marching ahead the company is now ready to release a new smartphone model, Xperia, as it aims to make a difference in the Smartphone market.
Xperia, created by Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB will run Google Inc.’s Android operating system and is scheduled to reach the Japanese market by April. The basic features include a four-inch screen with a touch-panel display, 7.2Mbps down/2.0Mbps up, Wi-Fi connectivity, an 8.1-megapixel camera and will roll out in “Sensuous Black” and “Luster White” colors The model is said to be priced between 35,000 yen to 40,000 yen with some discount offers for a 2 year usage period by the customer.
The move is said to be Docomo’s attempt to attack its rival, SoftBank Mobile Corp., the company which sells Apple Inc.’s iPhone in Japan and is currently a major leader in the smartphone business in the country. DoCoMo already offers RIM Ltd.’s BlackBerry and mobile devices using Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Mobile software.
At an event that was held to promote the new model, company President Ryuji Yamada said, “ This is a model that we can call the nouvelle entertainment machine. With this handset, you can handle such data as music, pictures and movies as you like…I’m confident that Xperia is superior to iPhone in terms of both hardware and software.”Image source: ubergizmo
Eden Platform – Content and Marketing Management for Small Business
January 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you’re looking for a very intuitive, web based content management system then I recommend taking a look at Preation’s Eden Platform. Major features of Eden include an iGoogle like drag ‘n drop content module, built-in slide show/album support, and even the ability to add ecommerce.
Eden helps users manage pages intelligent through its visual page tree interface: “… see your entire website in front of your eyes with our industry leading page tree interface. Making changes is easy. Just click on a page and drag it to another location in the page tree and your website’s navigation is instantly updated…”
One of my favorite features of Eden is the built in search engine optimization. The entire site as well as individual pages are given a score based on how well each is optimized, furthermore Eden provides recommendations on how to improve the optimization score. There is also a section which handles URL redirection and you can certainly tell it was built with search engines in mind (one of the redirect methods is “Page-Rank Transfer”).
Pricing starts at $10/month for 1,000 page views and there is also a 15 day trial so you can test drive Eden with out any commitment.
Screen shots below (click to see full view):
Google, Yandex, Bing, & Ebay up 50%+ in Searches
January 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment
According to Comscore, Google accounted for two thirds of the 131 billion searches conducted in December 2009. Overall there was an increase in searches (across all engines) by 46%. Yandex had the greated increase overall compared to last year, followed by eBay, Bing and Google.
Google Sites ranked as the top search property worldwide with 87.8 billion searches in December, or 66.8 percent of the global search market. Google Sites achieved a 58-percent increase in search query volume over the past year. Yahoo! Sites ranked second globally with 9.4 billion searches (up 13 percent), followed by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8.5 billion searches (up 7 percent). Microsoft Sites saw the greatest gains among the top five properties, growing 70 percent to 4.1 billion searches, on the strength of its successful introduction of new search engine Bing. Russian search engine Yandex also achieved considerable gains, growing 91 percent to 1.9 billion searches.
| Top 10 Search Properties by Searches Conducted December 2009 vs. December 2008 Total Worldwide, Age 15+ – Home & Work Locations Source: comScore qSearch |
|||
| Searches (MM) | |||
| Dec-2008 | Dec-2009 | Percent Change | |
| Worldwide | 89,708 | 131,354 | 46% |
| Google Sites | 55,638 | 87,809 | 58% |
| Yahoo! Sites | 8,389 | 9,444 | 13% |
| Baidu.com Inc. | 7,963 | 8,534 | 7% |
| Microsoft Sites | 2,403 | 4,094 | 70% |
| eBay | 1,327 | 2,102 | 58% |
| NHN Corporation | 1,892 | 2,069 | 9% |
| Yandex | 992 | 1,892 | 91% |
| Facebook.com | 1,023 | 1,572 | 54% |
| Ask Network | 1,053 | 1,507 | 43% |
| Alibaba.com Corporation | 1,118 | 1,102 | -1% |
Can YouTube Make the Jump to Paid Content?
January 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Today the Hitwise blog took a deeper look into the trends/data around the news that YouTube is launching movie rentals. Summary of the post below:
- Last week, YouTube ranked 6th among all websites in the US and visitors spent an average of 25 minutes and 25 seconds with the website.
- YouTube ranked second behind Momo Mesh for websites that receive traffic from the search term ‘movies online’ for the 12 weeks ending January 16, 2010.
- Last week, among all of the search terms that drove traffic to YouTube, 2179 included the word ‘movie’ or ‘movies’, although 291 also included the word ‘free’.
- There are many competitors to the new service offering from YouTube including NetFlix, Apple and Amazon. However, in general, NetFlix has become synonymous with movie rentals online and appeared three times in the top ten search term variations of ‘movie rentals’ for the 12 weeks ending January 16, 2010.
YouTube to Charge $5 for Movies
January 21, 2010 By 1 Comment
According to the YouTube blog, YouTube has partnered with the Sundance Film Festival to make five films from the 2010 and 2009 festivals available for rent for U.S. users on YouTube starting this Friday and running through Sunday, January 31.
These are early days and in the coming weeks we’ll also invite a small group of partners across other industries, in addition to independent film, to participate in this new option. Anything that brings more content to the YouTube community is a good thing. And making content available for rent will give our partners unprecedented control over the distribution of their work — they can decide the price of their videos and the rental duration; they can decide when and where their content is available; and they can keep 100% of their rights.
The videos will cost around $5 but the exact price will be set by individual filmmakers. Coverage from USA Today mentions that YouTube will split revenues, but will give the lion’s share to the filmmaker.
