Gearing up For Apple Season

An article on CNET Apple and AT&T are both reportedly gearing up their employees for September, the month that the iPhone 5 is expected to launch, according to several reports.

Apple will be bumping up its staff in U.S. retail Apple stores early this fall, according to MacRumors. This follows prior reports of Apple looking to increase staffing in the U.K. from August through October as noted by SlashGear and other tech news sites.

Apple is also bringing back former employees to work part-time for holidays, product launches, and the back-to-school season, added MacRumors, citing a former employee who received an invite to work between August 15 and September 15.

Of course, boosting retail staff around the end of summer is likely a response to more traffic from students going back to school, noted MacRumors. But the timing does coincide with the weeks that Apple would need to prep the iPhone 5 for its retail shelves if the new phone is to launch this fall.

AT&T has also reportedly been revving up its employees to prepare for more foot traffic at its stores in September, a source told Boy Genius Report. The carrier has asked its managers and employees to finish any current training as soon as possible so that they can be available at that time.

The iPhone's other U.S. carrier is anticipating a fall rollout for the next model. Incoming Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam recently said he expects the next iPhone to debut in the fall, though even he isn't sure.

"You will have to ask Apple that, but we expect that probably sometime in the fall, and I think you will see a significant jump there when we get to that point," McAdam said last Friday during a conference call.

The next iPhone has been the subject of varied rumors over the past few months. Some reports say the next iPhone will be only a minor update to the iPhone 4, while other reports have pointed to a entirely new and improved model iPhone 5. Though a variety of launch dates have been bandied about, some of the latest sources have pointed to a fall release, specifically sometime in September.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20083435-37/apple-at-t-reportedly-prepping-staff-for-iphone-5-launch/#ixzz1TDnuLlOH

Joe Carretta

20 Most Expensive Google Keywords

According to Wired.com Google is now making $3 billion a month in advertising - the majority of which comes from little text ads next to search results.

You might wonder how that's possible, and who's spending that much money on search ads.

The answer, according to Larry Kim - the founder of a company that sells software to analyze text ad campaigns - is in industries where a customer is worth a lot of money over the long-term.

Wordstream, Kim's company, analyzed search terms that advertisers pay the most to have their ads show up next to, and grouped the top 10,000 by industry, using its own software. They multiplied the so-called cost-per-click - what advertisers pay Google for each time someone clicks on their ads - times the number of times people search on that word. They then divided that pie up by keywords that fit different industries.

The top industry? Insurance, where companies eager to outbid their rivals for new customers pay Google more than $54 for a click. Together they make up 24 percent of Google's revenues from search advertising, according to Wordstream's calculations. Companies in the business of issuing loans come second, with CPC rates of more than $44 - providing nearly 13 percent of Google's revenues.

"There are lots of lawyers finding clients," Kim said. "Even if they have to pay for 50 to 100 clicks to get a client, they can get that back in a court case that last for years, all the while billing $500 an hour. The same thing happens with CRM software, where companies pay a high month fee."

(For more on how Google prices ads and tries to ensure ads are relevant, check out this great feature story from Wired Magazine about the money-making machine that is Google ad auctions.)

Speaking of lawyers, the mortgage and legal industries show up third and fourth, respectively.

Rounding out the top 20 is an odd entry - Cord Blood.

"I didn't know what that was," Kim told Wired.com. "Turns out the industry has to with rich parents preserving their child's umbilical cord with idea that the stem cells in it will be able to cure diseases in the future. And storage of cord blood has huge upfront cost and substantial ongoing payments."

Again - an industry that can make lots of money from a customer over a long period of time - making it not unwise to pay $27 per click, even if only one out of 50 of those who click on the ad actually signs up for your service.

The top 20 categories account for about 70 percent of Google's ad revenues, according to Wordstream's calculations. Wordstream, which offers some free keyword analysis tools, sells software that lets companies and search engine marketing consultants organize and manage their advertising campaigns.

As for the remaining 30 percent?

About 1000 different categories combine to make up that last 30 percent, each getting thinner and thinner - which Kim refers to as the "Long Tail," a reference to the Wired magazine article and later book by Chris Anderson. Those categories together "represent a tremendous amount of spend," Kim said.

This blog is a re-post from WIRED

Twitter Hashtags Coming to Google +

By adding a single character to Twitter's vocabulary nearly four years ago -- # -- Chris Messina unlocked a wealth of useful information in Twitter.

Now he wants to bring the same creation, called a hashtag, to Google+.

Hashtags are terms beginning with the pound sign, also called a hash, for easy identification as a recognizable label.

Examples include #wwc hashtag for women's World Cup soccer or the ever-popular #fail hashtag for complaining when things go wrong. By following a particular hashtag, it can be easier to concentrate on content you might be interested in.

Messina sees hashtags as, ideally, a way that people can sift their Google+ "stream"--the collection of posts from all people a Google+ user follows.

"Lots of people have requested the ability to target content [to] their followers based on topic (i.e. only share content to people who are following me AND interested in, say, comics). Since the product doesn't support that kind of targeting, I'm just making something up, like I did with hashtags back in 2007," Messina said in a Google+ post; last week. But so far it's a manual process: "So, if you see 3 to 4 topic hashtags at the beginning of my posts (like subject lines but for topics), they're there so people can choose to ignore my post if they're uninterested."

The move is a bit surprising--not that Messina and others would want hashtags, but that Google, a company obsessed with organizing information and making it accessible, didn't do so itself.

Just because Google didn't build the feature into Google+ on day one doesn't mean the company has rejected it, of course. Google is particularly fond of releasing projects as early as possible then updating them as rapidly as possible. Public feedback on Google+ can help steer priorities for the company.

One possibility would be to augment Google+ with tagging abilities that parallel the service's linked names. By typing "+username" into Google+, the service inserts a live link to that user's posts. A "#" operator could similarly link to a live search of Google+ posts using the hashtag, though Google might need to work on presentation to balance how relevant and recent a post is and to show private posts shared with the person doing the searching. People also could follow a particular hashtag the way they can watch a particular circle's comments in the stream.

While Messina brough hashtags to Twitter, tags themselves long predate it. The Flickr photo-sharing service and Delicious bookmarking service use tags extensively, for example.

And Google itself has shown some appreciation for tags. Gmail labels, for example, are tags that can be applied to any message, and Google Docs collections work the same way.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20080274-264/hashtag-creator-brings-his-idea-to-google/#ixzz1STRDXZd1

Courtesy of CNET<http://www.cnet.com/>.com

Joe Carretta
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Autobot, Decepticon, or Router...

For anyone who has seen Transformers 3 and works in Information Technology should know what this blog is going to be about. If you do not, well then you simply do not have as watchful an eye as I do.
During the third and final piece of The Transformers Trilogy, we saw the fine art of product placement moving beyond pristine looking new cards that morph into highly advanced machines and into the world of networking.
Still unsure of where this is going?
At least half a dozen times throughout the movie, audience members were granted with a front row seat to Cisco equipment in use at numerous terms. Whether hosting a teleconference from space, building an elaborate in home alien robot tracking network, or simply adjusting the FBI's internet access, Cisco's logo and products were front and center.
The placement was subtle when compared to past Transformer movies that had me questioning every Corvette or Denali I saw speed past me (robots in disguise??). But then again blowing an air horn is subtle when compared to the sound of the Transiberian Orchestra.
Will the future in Information Technology advertising be product placement?
Did anyone else notice this but me?
Feedback is always appreciated, but never expected.

PS: http://www.google.com/search?q=cisco+product+placement+transformers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Joe Carretta

How Google+ Can Become the "Next Facebook"

Great article from CNN about how Google+ can catch Facebook.

If Google+ wants to be the next Facebook, it has to capture the key demographic that drove Facebook's early growth: college students, who blast out status updates and multimedia messages about as often as they blink.

The new social networking venture is still in trial mode with a limited number of users, but a swarm of twentysomethings are already kicking its tires. It's the features that Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) pitches as unique -- the detailed privacy controls of "Circles" and the "hangout" group video chat -- that have college-aged users the most intrigued.

"The ability to have more control over who sees my profile and activity is certainly a major plus," Harsh Sinha, a finance and computer science major at New York University, says of Circles. "It addresses a big concern."

Privacy is one area where Google -- despite its past stumbles -- may have an opening to edge past its rivals. Rachel Kraus, a recent graduate of Stanford University, says she started off with a higher regard for Google than its competitors: "I saw Facebook and Twitter as marketing tools, not social networks for my benefit," she says. "But I joined Google+ immediately because I trust that Google makes its products for the benefit of Internet consumers. Even the data they give away seems unobtrusive, and actually makes being on the Internet more efficient and specific to the kind of information I'm consuming."

Google+ is also appealing to those drawn to a clean slate. "Now that we have all learned what a social network really is, and realized that it doesn't really help to have 1000+ friends, I look forward to starting afresh with Google+ by only adding the people that I regularly keep in contact with," says Kim Saloner, a psychology major from Stanford.

But prying people away from their existing social networks won't be easy.

"Most people already have a Facebook that is well established," says Sinha from NYU. "They need a reason to divide their time and online lives."

Count Jenny Wales, a product design major at Stanford, among those who don't want to make that effort.

"No matter how much better or different Google+ is, there is no replacement for the five years of people, photos and comments I have access to on Facebook," she says. "I like that I can read about and relive those memories on Facebook."

Right now, college students are the youngest users Google is targeting: Google+ is restricted to those 18 and over. A Google spokeswoman said that rule will remain in place "until the right teen safety features [are] in place," so that younger users "are not seeing content they shouldn't be seeing."

Read the full article here

Video Chat and Bell Bottoms and Facebook and Skype

According to our friends over at CNET<http://www.cnet.com/> Video chat is the big thing again, (like bell bottoms once were) at least according to Facebook, which let loose a new video chat service yesterday. Powered by Skype, the new feature lets Facebook users start video calls with one another while continuing to use the site.

While other video chat tools may have been built on top of Facebook's application platform, this now comes out of the box for Facebook users, old and new. The result is that Facebook's added yet another way for its 750 million users to communicate with one another.

But moving beyond the hype, the big thing you're probably wondering is how this new service stacks up to the groovy video chat tools found in Google+, the social network Google recently launched as a "field trial" (see CNET's hands-on). One of its crowning features, besides providing an alternative to Facebook, is that you can video chat with your friends in multiple ways. How do the two compare? The short of it is that Facebook is simpler to use. The longer answer is that you might be happier with Google in day-to-day use.

To help illustrate that, I've delved into some things you might want to do with these services to see how they really compare. The best way to do that is with common scenarios you'd run into when wanting to video chat with someone else. Below are five I ran into when putting both services through their paces (Google+ over the past week, and Facebook's all of today).

Scenario: You want to video chat with a technologically impaired friend/family member

How it plays out on Facebook: Facebook's added a video call item to every user profile to let you (or them) start a chat from that page. If they've never used the feature before, Facebook has them download a tiny plug-in file to run, which installs without requiring a browser restart. They then click on a button that confirms they want to chat, and the video starts up.
Want to start a video chat with someone on Facebook? It&#39;s hard to miss the option to do it.

Want to start a video chat with someone on Facebook? It's hard to miss the option to do it.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Arguably the most difficult part in all this is getting someone to download that plug-in and install it. Facebook says it only takes about 10 to 20 seconds, but you're going to want to make sure your friend or family member can actually find the plug-in installer file in the first place. Luckily, modern Web browsers do a pretty good job nowadays with helping you locate what you just downloaded. Facebook also does a bit of hand-holding here, telling you what to do to first get going.

How it plays out on Google+: Pretty much the same deal as on Facebook with regards to the plug-in aspect. The big difference is in where Google surfaces the video chat option.

There are two points of entry to get a video chat going: the chat list on the left hand side and the hangouts feature. These are entirely different chat experiences, with the chat being a one-to-one experience, and the hangouts being a place where you can chat with one or more users at the same time. Between the two options, it's easier to search for, and find someone to talk with from Google+'s home page using the chat tool. Facebook arguably has the edge here in keeping its buddy list equivalent on the same part of your screen at all times--something that's useful for folks who get lost easily.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-20077359-2/facebook-and-google-s-video-chat-tools-compared/#ixzz1RRNuNRa2

Full article can be found here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-20077359-2/facebook-and-google-s-video-chat-tools-compared/?tag=topStories2

Joe Carretta

Google Showing Symptoms of Something Viral?

An interesting look at the way Google went viral today thanks to our friends at geek.com

Full article can be seen here.
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/googles-releases-nexus-contraptions-rube-goldberg-game-2011076/

We’ve seen some pretty cool advertisements for phones in the past. Take the commercial for the Touch Wood SH-08C that featured a Rube Goldberg-esque creation of a wooden ball rolling through a homemade xylophone in the middle of a peaceful woodland scene, for example. Google has created an equally cool Rube Goldberg advertisement for its Nexus S phone, and instead of a video, Google has offered up an interactive game.

The game, called Nexus Contraptions, is more like a puzzle. It features sharp graphics, crisp sound effects, and all sorts of physics and gadgets that would make Goldberg proud. The goal is to get the little app balls into a funnel by building Rube Goldberg-like machines. There are fans, bombs, rubber band-contraptions, bubbles, magnets, and time-warps. There are four levels for each app – Gmail, Google Maps, Search, and YouTube — and each gets increasingly harder.

A timer counts the seconds of each level and your overall time. If you beat the top scores, you can put your name in the Nexus Contraptions Hall of Fame. The game is super addictive, so make sure to put aside a good 15 to 20 minutes of your day to complete the four levels. Some of the levels are downright hard, and make you wish you had the Angry Bird’s Mighty Eagle to clear the level for you.