Recent Activity
- 16 days on
Skeptic Geek - PayPal Completes Online Payments Domination: Accepts Credit Cards
In a blog post largely unnoticed, PayPal announced that ‘Guest Payments’ are now live:
Guest Payments allows developers to collect credit card payments without requiring their customers to open a PayPal account, eliminating the complications merchants, developers and startups face in accepting credit cards.
Guest Payments are now part of it’s Adaptive Payments API and have been a much requested feature. Any app developer can now let users pay using their credit card, irrespective of whether the user has a PayPal account. This opens up the platform to virtually everyone as a buyer.
At the same time, Facebook – who partnered with PayPal for ads and credits – has started accepting PayPal for ad payments.
With the backing of an almost 500 million user social network and an ability to accept payments from users without an account, PayPal has further cemented its domination over the online payments space.
MasterCard and Visa are struggling to make some headway, but they may be too late to the party.
~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - The Art of Being Pragmatic In a World of Fanboys
For just about any topic or choice, there comes pressure to take a side, to align yourself with a group who can reinforce that your choice was the right one, and any alternative choice is somehow wrong or inferior. Even when choices, be they politics, sports or technology, are very similar, the differences are magnified, and camps are erected to defend one's position. It plays out every day in my RSS feeds and social streams, as you see a battle between Mac and PC, Facebook and Twitter or Buzz, Android versus iPhone. One's preferences even go so far as to define who you are, and who chooses to follow you, as most people would rather see their own viewpoints reinforced than gain insight into a differentiated position.
As technology improves, I've found the need to become entrenched and ready for Holy War, setting out to convert the unbelievers, is decreasing. For the most part, the leaders in any market are "good enough" for most needs, or the #1 property is clearly the best, and most all people are there. So I have been working to make my choices based on my own experiences, not rhetoric, data over emotion, and have increasingly made it easier to migrate data and profiles should the time come that I needed to switch.
It's enough to make my former would-be tattooed with the Apple logo soul turn over in its grave. Where I once gave Tips on Being an Apple Fanboy, I later spun up Windows 7 and found it to be pretty good, and I even turned my back on iPhone after finding the Android platform was a better fit for me. Just yesterday I sold back my iPhone 3G to Sprint and got a new HTC Hero for my wife so she too can be off the platform, and off AT&T.
I truly believe we are past the time where there must be opposition in all things. It can make for good headlines to pit one side over another, but if you think about it, we have more access to more things than ever before, and competition is making access to these products easier and better from more places. (Louis CK agrees)
I do not care what Web browser you use. I still harbor some disbelief that anybody uses IE, of course, but Firefox, Chrome and Safari are all good options. If you run Mac OS X or Linux or Windows 7, you are making an effort to be cutting edge. If you are rocking a BlackBerry or an Android or the newest model iPhones, you are probably on the right path. So good for you! I may have my personal preferences for "right now", based on my own insight, but the way I use technology is not the same way you do. The fact that I can tease out 10 to 20+ hours of battery life on my HTC EVO, but many notable bloggers can't doesn't make them wrong or mean I am lying. It's just a difference of use, and good tweaking on my part.
I do not care if you prefer Twitter to Facebook or LinkedIn, so long as you are getting what you want out of each service, and that it is serving you well. I may use them less than I use Google Buzz or FriendFeed today, but that doesn't mean I need to constantly play the role of evangelist to push you into agreeing with me. And I really don't care if you like WordPress or Posterous or Tumblr to my Blogger. That's your choice. Good for you.
So yesterday, when I did announce my finally moving off iPhone to Android, I got some response from around the Web saying I made the wrong choice, that I didn't understand how amazingly awesome the iPhone 4 was. Maybe, in a previous year, I would have been among the others saying the same. But now, I've decided I'll try new things and make a decision based on my experience, rather than going ahead in one way just because I always have. When I first tried the demo EVO from Google I/O, I was nervous with it, the same way I was the first time I sat in front of a Windows NT machine, expected to go to work. I didn't know if my experience would suffer, or I would be missing something. But, as you know, I found it to be quite good, and in the Bay Area, the quality of Sprint over AT&T was a major push for us to consider an alternative, after our family has spent hundreds of dollars each month to get less than acceptable service.
You know what my biases and preferences are. I'll talk about them here, and you can see me vote with my own activity. Maybe I'll convince you to like the same things I do. But I am working to shed any drooling fanboy label, and demonstrate an open mind. So do show me what you know that I don't. Introduce me to services and platforms I've never seen. It's a great time to be a tech consumer.~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - Traditional Media Outlets Flocking to Tumblr
Traditional media's first major adoption of Web 2.0 came with Facebook, as outlets syndicated their content on the popular social network by way of fan pages and official accounts. Then, Twitter went mainstream as writers, editors and the media organizations themselves signed up, sent out links, and chatted about related topics in 140 character bursts. Now it seems traditional media outlets are flocking to another service - one that is almost a hybrid of the others, allowing for short-form posts, but with richer format.What's the new trend among legacy media? Why it's none other than Tumblr.
Sponsor
For those unfamiliar with the service, Tumblr is a blogging platform that lets users curate images, videos, quotes, and other forms of media onto minimalistic personalized "tumblelogs." Much like Twitter, there is a one-way follow function that lets users view a stream of entries from others of their choice. The quick ability to comment, favorite and "reblog" others posts makes the service incredibly social.
As noted in a Business Insider article Friday, several outlets of traditional print media (newspapers and magazines) are suddenly popping up all over Tumblr with their own pages. Newsweek seems to making great use of the platform by posting mainly photos, and quotes - two of the most shared forms of media on Tumblr. The New Yorker also recently joined the service, sharing mainly videos and photos, including high-resolution images of their popular artistic covers.
The venerable New York Times has even jumped in the mix, though its account is so far empty, save for a single post announcing more content is "coming soon." The Business Insider article lists several other traditional media outlets providing sharable content with fans on Tumblr, including Life Magazine, The Travel Channel, The Today Show, Elle, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and several others.If anything, these new additions to the Tumblr ecosystem provide a human face through which the various outlets can communicate more freely with their readers. Newsweek has been discussing rumors about its impending purchase on the Tumblr, and many of the sites seem perfectly content with posting material would think would be found objectionable on the main homepage or in print.
So is Tumblr the next big thing for traditional media outlets? From the looks of it, the large media outlets seem pleased with the service and the kinds of interactions it allows for. It would not be surprising to see Tumblr become the third common place aside Facebook and Twitter for media organizations and corporate brands to further reach their audiences.
Discuss~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - Dear LinkedIn: If I Wanted You To Be Digg, I Would Have Asked
Life as a LinkedIn group manager isn’t much fun, given the limited control you have over your group. Now LinkedIn’s rolled out a new discussion format that makes things even worse, not to mention confuses the difference between “discussions” and “news” items. Apparently, LinkedIn has serious Digg envy. Let the spam commence.
How Things Were
Previously, LinkedIn Groups had a “discussion” area, where anyone in the group could start discussions on topics with other members. In addition, there was a separate “news” area where anyone could submit news items to share. These have now been merged — and without any heads-up that I see being given to the poor suffering LinkedIn group administrators out there.
Now, I oversee our Search Engine Land group. For about a year now, I’ve had some very strict rules in place, with the primary one being that discussions shouldn’t include links, because way too many people were starting “discussions” that were merely product pitches, attempts to get traffic to blog posts or outright spam. I also had rules that no one was supposed to submit news stories. Again, this was to fight spam submissions that added little value to the group.
Rules & Premoderation Wishes
For those who care, you can read more about these rules as they are posted in our LinkedIn Group, here and here. To ensure people saw them, I had them flagged with big “READ FIRST” headlines and tagged to be at the top of the default discussion mode. I had to do this because LinkedIn has failed to give LinkedIn group admins the ability to moderate discussions and news items submitted.
Today, I still don’t have moderation controls. To make matters worse, I can’t even feature the rules in the way that I used to. You really, really suck, LinkedIn.
Policing LinkedIn: Old School
Let me step a bit back and share what I sent LinkedIn last November, documenting what a joyful experience I had to deal with working with their terrible group system on a daily basis. My routine, as I explained to them (feel free to skip all this, if you don’t want some back history on LinkedIn problems):
Visit the Search Engine Land group in the morning.
Hit discussions and sort by most recent, so that I can see what new discussions have been started.Look for spam or people who simply start a “discussion” that’s really a link drop.Copy and paste the person who started the discussion’s name, since I can’t remove and block them from the discussion itself (FEATURE REQUEST). Delete the discussion.
Go to manage. Search for the person. Hope I can find them. Sometimes people join, post, then quit so you can’t remove and block. Well, why not preapprove? Because that’s a pain. Let me locate ANYONE in LinkedIn and proactively block (FEATURE REQUEST). Also, when I’m dealing with some names, looking them up can be hard since I have to figure out where exactly the last name begins. You get lots of people who also have “names” that are generic descriptions of what they do.
Remove and block that person, when found. Be VERY CAREFUL not to accidently hit the Change Role link that’s right above the remove and block button (at least it doesn’t say Promote To Manager” any more. Rinse and repeat this for each person who has abused the discussions feature.
Go to News. Curse again that I can’t restrict news to just come from my own feeds or whatever feeds I want to enable (FEATURE REQUEST). Instead, in order to keep people on the Search Engine Land Group updated with news from Search Engine Land, I also have to let anyone submit. Wish at least I could premoderate.
Sort by Latest News, to see if there’s any really junky submissions. Open each article to review it, which loads with that really annoying LinkedIn frame. Then open the comments for each story, in case I need the person’s name in order to remove and block them. I also leave the news tab open, so that I can delete the stories.
Curse that for the past five days now, LinkedIn has stopped pulling in our own news feed. Wonder if the support message I sent on Friday will get answered. Decide that I will just turn off the News portion and then curse that you have to have both Discussion & News together, not separately (FEATURE REQUEST).
Later in the day, a summary email will go out to all members of my group. Often, despite the fact that I’ve killed offtopic discussion and news spam, it will still be there, because it was automatically prepared at some point. Wish that I could get a preview before it went out, or I could manually trigger a send if I want (FEATURE REQUEST).
In the news area, I just want to have news from my own site or a collection of sites to go out.
In the discussion area, I want to be able to have only approved discussions go live.
These don’t seem that hard to implement. At the very least, I wish I could toggle what I want, news, discussions and/or jobs. Jobs is options, but to have news, you have to have discussions (and vice versa).
Since that time, LinkedIn made only one improvement, the ability to easily click on someone’s profile and select the “Remove, Block & Delete All Contributions” button. That wiped them out, along with all the spam they submitted.
That button is still around, but locating it is harder. More important, trying to ferret out the spam and unauthorized submissions in now an incredible nightmare.
The New Horror Show
Here’s what I see in my group right now:
Previously, what I chose to feature as a discussion was right at the top of the page. Now, my “Manager’s Choice” gets shoved into the lower right corner (marked A in the screenshot above). In place of my choices, LinkedIn decides on its own which are “popular” topics and shoves them up high.
Even further up, LinkedIn shoves an invitation for people to “Like” new “Discussions” (marked B in the screenshot above). The problem is, these aren’t discussions. These are predominantly articles that have flowed into our group from Search Engine Land’s news feed. And soon, they’re also going to be any links that anyone in the group decides to share, despite that being against our group guidelines and despite experience showing that we’ll be flooded with spam.
In particular, take a close look at the new “Start A Discussion” section:
See the “attach a link” section? That’s a big, huge fat invitation for people to start spamming us with links. It also fundamentally changes one of the unique features that LinkedIn offered over Facebook. It was more “discussion” oriented, more designed especially for business professionals to ask question of each other and get help. Worse, it’s difficult to tell when you’re going to click on a “discussion” and get sent out of LinkedIn to a news article or stay within LinkedIn where an actual discussion is taking place.
I can’t even police my group rules. Without asking me, LinkedIn just made these changes to merge news and discussions, explicitly encouraging members to share links without bothering to ask the group administrator (that’s me) if I wanted this. I can’t turn off the functionality, either. My only choice is to completely kill the new combined “Discussions” section entirely.
I don’t really want to do that, because that’s what made our group compelling — members could talk to each other and do so in a largely spam-free environment.
Policing for spam is also harder, because all the feed content gets mixed in with new submissions / discussions or whatever LinkedIn is calling them now. After finally locating the “new discussions” link that was previously easy to find:
I have to scan through all the news feed “discussions” from us to spot things that members have submitted:
Then I have to look at each submission to decide if it they violate our group guidelines — not that some of these people submitting can even find our guidelines now.
Basically, LinkedIn has shoved Digg down my throat. I don’t need that — Search Engine Land’s sister site Sphinn is already expressly designed for people to share internet marketing news stories, complete with a moderation team that fights spam.
What I asked for (such as in this LinkedIn product forum) was premoderation. What I heard back was:
Pre-moderation is definitely one of the additional moderation tools in the near-term pipeline (among which is the digest-quality-scrub option discussed in another thread in this forum)
More than a half-year later, I still don’t have it — but I do see LinkedIn found time to make my life, and probably those for many other group moderators, a hell of a lot harder.
So, here’s a request to LinkedIn. Give moderators back the “classic” look if they want it. If you can’t, then the very next thing I want to see from LinkedIn is the ability for group managers to premoderate what goes out in our groups. Because they are OUR groups, in the end. For me, if I can’t control spam, if I can’t ensure a good signal for my group, I’ll just shut it the hell down.
Are you a list admin who’s unhappy with the changes? Chime in on the discussion thread I created in the LinkedIn Groups Product Forum.
~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - Microsoft Comms Head Smacks Back by the Numbers (Plus a "Rocky"-Inspired Internal Email!)
After what he considered weeks of unfair press coverage and running down of Microsoft (MSFT), the software giant’s Corporate VP of Corporate Communications, Frank Shaw, posted a pugnacious corporate blog entry today that trotted out some impressive numbers about Microsoft’s business.
Of course, he also took the opportunity to put up some not-so-much figures about competitors such as Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX), Salesforce.com (CRM) and, of course, Google (GOOG).
My favorite dig is the stat on the “percent chance that Salesforce.com CEO [Marc Benioff] will mention Microsoft in a speech, panel, interview, or blog post.” The answer, natch: 100!
As it turns out, that was a follow-up to a very sharply worded letter Shaw sent out to communications teams across Microsoft (MSFT) earlier this month, obtained by BoomTown, in which he noted at the start:
“It has been a rough couple of weeks for us from a coverage standpoint. It seems like every time I turn on the computer, or talk to a reporter, or pick up a publication at home, or do a scan of my RSS feeds or Twitter client that I see more stories and opinions about the challenges we have, and how great some of our competitors are doing. iPad this, Droid that, sheesh.”
Sheesh? Who says that anymore?
Still, I like his gumption in using it! Thus, Shaw–who is an active blogger and Twitter poster–is apparently mad as heck and not going to take it anymore!
Here’s the blog post below, followed by the internal email Shaw sent (apparently inspired by the landscape at our eighth D: All Things Digital conference earlier this month):
Microsoft by the numbers
25 Jun 2010 12:30 PM
You probably saw the news this week that we’ve sold 150 million Windows 7 licenses in 8 months. That’s more than 600,000 per day. And, perhaps fittingly for a product called Windows 7, it adds up to 7 copies every second of every day since launch.
As a communications guy, I’m generally most comfortable with words. But since Microsoft is a pretty numbers-driven company, the Windows 7 milestone got me thinking about some *other* numbers, too.
Of course, numbers are only one dimension of a story. And we live in a hyper-competitive industry, with loads of challenges to go along with loads of opportunity. All the same, with Windows 7, Office 2010, Bing, Xbox 360, Kinect, Windows Phone 7, our cloud platform, and many other products, services and happy customers, 2010 is shaping up as a huge year for us.
So, without further ado, a few of my favorite numbers:
1
150,000,000
Number of Windows 7 licenses sold, making Windows 7 by far the fastest growing operating system in history.[source]2
7.1 million
Projected iPad sales for 2010. [source]58 million
Projected netbook sales in 2010. [source]355 million
Projected PC sales in 2010. [source]3
>10
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2008. [source]96
Percentage of US netbooks running Windows in 2009. [source]4
0
Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in November 2009.10,000
Number of paying customers running on Windows Azure in June 2010. [source]700,000
Number of students, teachers and staff using Microsoft’s cloud productivity tools in Kentucky public schools, the largest cloud deployment in the US. [source]5
16 million
Total subscribers to largest 25 US daily newspapers. [source]14 Million
Total number of Netflix subscribers. [source]23 million
Total number of Xbox Live subscribers. [source]6
9,000,000
Number of customer downloads of the Office 2010 beta prior to launch, the largest Microsoft beta program in history. [source]7
21.4 million
Number of new Bing search users in one year. [Comscore report--requires subscription]8
24%
Linux Server market share in 2005. [source]33%
Predicted Linux Server market share for 2007 (made in 2005). [source]21.2%
Actual Linux Server market share, Q4 2009. [source]9
8.8 million
Global iPhone sales in Q1 2010. [source]21.5 million
Nokia smartphone sales in Q1 2010. [source]55 million
Total smartphone sales globally in Q1 2010. [source]439 million
Projected global smartphone sales in 2014. [source]10
9
Number of years it took Salesforce.com to reach 1 million paid user milestone. [source]6
Number of years it took Microsoft Dynamics to reach 1 million paid user milestone. [source]100%
Percent chance that Salesforce.com CEO will mention Microsoft in a speech, panel, interview, or blog post.11
173 million
Global Gmail users. [source]284 million
Global Yahoo! Mail users.[source]360 million
Global Windows Live Mail users.[source]299 million
Active Windows Live Messenger Accounts worldwide. [Comscore MyMetrix, WW, March 2010--requires subscription]1
Rank of Windows Live Messenger globally compared to all other instant messaging services. [Comscore MyMetrix, WW, March 2010 - requires subscription]12
$5.7 Billion
Apple Net income for fiscal year ending Sep 2009. [source]$6.5 Billion
Google Net income for fiscal year ending Dec 2009. [source]$14.5 Billion
Microsoft Net Income for fiscal year ending June 2009. [source]$23.0 billion
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2000. [source]$58.4 billion
Total Microsoft revenue, FY2009. [source]fxs
It has been a rough couple of weeks for us from a coverage standpoint. It seems like every time I turn on the computer, or talk to a reporter, or pick up a publication at home, or do a scan of my RSS feeds or Twitter client that I see more stories and opinions about the challenges we have, and how great some of our competitors are doing. iPad this, Droid that, sheesh. Even BusinessWeek got into the act, taking some unfair shots at Natal under the guise of looking at our consumer strategy all up. Man, when someone is beating on Natal prior to E3, you can bet we’ve got momentum against us.
Sitting there at the All Things Digital conference last week and hearing from our competitors really got me thinking, though. What is our differentiation? Why do we make certain decisions? What drives the way we think about business and technology? The morning after the Steve Jobs q&a (which everyone should watch), I dragged myself out of bed to go for a run. As I’d driven into the hotel, I noticed with a sinking feeling that there were lots of hills. I asked the desk clerk if they had a jogging map. They did not. I asked if he could point me a direction that did not have a bunch of hills. He laughed and pointed “up” the driveway and said that if I turned left there would be a nice running path. “I drove in that direction,” I said. “Seems like it’s uphill.” He shrugged, and away I went. Up.
And to keep my mind off the elevation gain, I was thinking about that previous question–what drives Microsoft? Coming up the second hill, I got it. Fundamentally, we believe that we have the opportunity to make life better for billions of people around the world through our products and services. Not millions, not tens of millions, but billions. We started with the idea of a computer on every desktop, and even though the computer looks a lot different today than it did those years, and even though the developed world probably does have a computer on every desk, there are still billions more to go, and we are going to get there. And when you start thinking about serving billions, which we do, we’re playing a game that nobody else in the industry is. I don’t know about you, but I come to work thinking about what I can do to help w/ that big goal. And it’s not all altruism and unicorns, when we do a great job of creating products that make life better for billions, it makes us better as a company, we sell more, we learn more, our partners do better, we do better. And when you have big dreams and big ambitions (like we do) and when you set the bar high (which we do) then sometimes we don’t get over the bar. There are people in the world that see that and call it failure; but failing to hit the mark doesn’t mean quitting. That’s part of our culture, too.
The run back to the hotel was easier. I even scrambled up a bluff next to the path (imagining the theme to “Rocky” in my head) and stood looking out over the Pacific for a bit. And I thought about our challenges, internal and external. External is easy. Internal is harder.
There is a saying I’ve heard a bunch since I’ve been at Microsoft: “Hope is not a strategy.” Heck, I’ve used it myself, and felt pretty superior while saying it, since I was talking about something I didn’t really own. But standing on the bluff, I wondered.
In my last mail, I referenced the need for us all to be comfortable in the gap between what is and what we desire to create. If we simply live in what we have, we become cynics. And if hope is not a strategy, then neither is cynicism, and we have lots of cynics among us. It is a challenge, especially for those of us who help tell our story. I often see it used, and use it myself, to cover up the pain of not meeting a goal, or seeing a product/service be ill-received by the market. If I am able to mock and sneer, then nobody outside the company can make me feel worse at setbacks and even failures.
As the evangelists for the company, we must guard against this. Hope can’t be a strategy, but it (and its cousin belief) is a needed ingredient in any success. Think about this for a bit. Each and every one of us needs to be grounded in our challenges and our wins. Right now, we are massively over-indexed in thinking and knowing about our losses and challenges. But what of our wins?
At the conference later that day, I had a chance to engage in a spirited and mostly friendly discussion with some folks who thought we were doing a crap job all up. Stock price flat, no iPad, etc. Instead of shrugging and agreeing, I talked about our wins and our momentum. We’ve built a huge server business over the last decade, something else nobody has done. Windows 7 sales are up about 39 percent year over year, against a huge base. Office 2010 beta largest ever, Office is in the cloud. Bing is one year old, 4 points of market share–nobody has grown search market share against Google but we are doing it. They are copying our look, our home page. New Hotmail is driving them to offer something other than threaded email for Gmail. Xbox Live has 23 million users–again, only two companies in the last decade have built subscription services like this (Netflix is the other). Windows Azure has 10,000 paying customers, we just announced 700k deployment of live@edu, probably the largest cloud deployment in the world. Natal is coming, it’s cool. Yes, we want to (and will) do better in phones. Yes, we want to (and will) have more cool thin slate/tablet/other form factor devices that run Windows. I’ll tell you, while I don’t think I created any true believers, I did force people to think differently about Microsoft and what we’re doing, and I call that a win.
This is our job. We don’t just represent the products and services we work on, we represent the company all up. Be ready to tell that story. Tell it to your co-workers here at Microsoft, to your family and friends, to members of the media. They know about our challenges, they don’t know about our wins and momentum. So tell them.
fxs
~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - Automattic Buys Up Thing Labs’ Plinky To Help Bloggers Overcome Writer’s Block
WordPress developer Automattic has acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, the creators of social media application Brizzly. Plinky essentially aims to inspire content creators. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Plinky’s technology prompts you with an intriguing question or challenge and (like a question, or a challenge) and you have to answer. Depending on the prompt, your answer could contain photos, maps, playlists and more. You can then share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. For example, a sample question prompted from Plinky is “What’s your favorite summer memory?”
WordPress has already added Plinky as a feature of its blogging platform to help writers get their creative juices flowing.
Thing Labs, which was founded by a former Googler who worked on WordPress rival Blogger, actually started as “Plinky” and then changed its name last summer after shifting focus to developing Brizzly.
~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - 3 Ways To Filter Vuvuzela Noise From The World Cup
The vuvuzela is a cheap plastic horn that’s recently begotten international fame during the football World Cup in South Africa.Most people agree that a vuvuzela noise mildly irritating – as if there were a mosquito stuck in your ear. Multiplied by the thousands, it produces a deep, hypnotic rumble, straight from the gates of hell.
While not everyone may hold as big a grudge against it, the sound is testing the nerves of many a soccer fan worldwide. FIFA might still decide to ban the instrument in future endeavors, but until then, here’s how to get rid of the vuvuzela noise yourself.
(Optional) Rerouting The Broadcast Audio
For the first and second (and optionally third) method, you’ll need to find a way to route your broadcast audio through your computer. If you’re watching the game on your PC, all the better. Otherwise, look around for one of these: a stereo RCA to a 3.5 mm TRS jack. These can be found in most houses, and go over the counter for a few bucks.
If you’ve got another method of routing your audio through your computer, have at it. The most important part here is that we turn the TV audio output into a computer input.
1. Devuvuzelator
This little tool was cooked up by Jeff Bargmann from Stardocks, the same guy who was behind Fences. If you manage to run your broadcast audio through your computer, this is probably the simplest tool to remove vuvuzela noise. Simply download and run the app, without a required installation.
You can experiment with certain levels of strength (too weak, and you’re left with vuvuzela ; too strong, and the other audio gets distorted) until you’ve got the most favorable setting.
To hear the filtered audio, double-click on the speaker icon in your taskbar (or use right-click) to open the volume control mixer panel. Look for Microphone or Line In and turn the volume up. It might even be muted to avoid feedback with ‘real’ microphones.
2. LabVIEW Vuvuzela Filter
If the Devuvuzelator doesn’t work (or you want more advanced settings), you can use this alternative Vuvuzela Filter, designed with LabView. On the page, you’ll find a Windows installation that’ll take care of both the runtime environment and the filter. There are also (two) separate downloads available for Mac OS X.
If you know what you’re doing, you can adjust the number (and frequency) of harmonics. More harmonics can do a better job of removing the Vuvuzela noise, if your system can handle the strain. If you don’t hear anything, again make sure that the microphone volume is turned on, as described above.
3. Using EQ Filters
The german site Surfpoeten first figured out the frequencies that need to be ducked in order to surpress the vuvuzela noise. Both of the above are pre-made EQ filters that make use of this technique. You can, however, simply use a manual EQ filter to make your own. The application you use doesn’t matter. That’s why, although the set-up is easier, you don’t (always) need a computer. A lot of TV’s come packed with EQ options as well!
On Windows, one option is to install VSTHost with the ReaEQ filter. On Mac OS X, Garageband will suffice.
The frequencies you’ll want to duck are 465Hz and 235Hz, both reduced by at least 40dB. You’ll need to see what your computer can handle though. Using most applications, you’ll have to create multiple EQ filters, each with part of the offset (as can be seen in the screenshot above).
Do you think the noise of those vuvuzela’s is motivation enough to hook up your TV to your computer? Let us know what you think, and how these filter tricks fared you!
Our latest mega giveaway: zozi is sponsoring a FREE 7-day, wine-tasting trip in New Zealand for two. Here’s how you can sign up. Contest ends June 25th.
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~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - HiveFire unveils web content aggregation and distribution tool Curata
To help marketers supplement their blog and website content development, marketing technology company HiveFire has released a new web content aggregation and distribution tool called Curata.Curata integrates with any company’s website or blog, and targets marketers looking to continuously provide relevant and timely content to drive web traffic, generate leads and engage potential customers. The tool can aggregate and deliver content — in about 20 minutes a day — around specific search terms users create. The company claims it uses a natural language processing technology that automatically collects relevant web articles, blog posts and social conversations into a customer dashboard. This content can then be re-published.
While gathering web content that isn’t your own might appear to be a bit unethical, the company does include a link back to the original content with only a few lines of the actual article. This format probably works out better for the initial publisher of the content, who now receives the added traffic and SEO as well. It’s not hard to see why a tool like Curata would be attractive to marketers. The process of creating and distributing enough online content to drive web traffic and SEO can be a timely and expensive endeavor.
“The biggest competitor is marketers trying to do it themselves using a blog platform,” the company says. “Many use Word Press and try to supplement it with plug-ins, but these programs are not as effective or technologically advanced.”
While HiveFire counts publisher-focused curation services like Drupal as indirect competition, it says it is more concerned about the smaller companies, like Curation Station, cropping up now that marketers and publishers are more often one and the same. That said, it insists that it is the only platform that combines aggregation and distribution for B2B clients, giving it a leg up over more recent entrants.
Investors include Desh Deshpande, father of founder Pawan Deshpande, and Eric Swanson, who also serve on the Board. The company would not disclose its investment history. There is no venture capital funding to date.
The Cambridge, Mass. based company, founded in 2007, appears to be targeting business-to-business companies. According to its website, customers include Novell, Airvana, Metaswitch and Vectron International.
Tags: Curata, online curation
Companies: HiveFire
People: Desh Deshpande, Pawan Deshpande
~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - Google releases 500 scans of Ancient Greek and Latin texts for research
Shared by Mahendra
Posted by Will Brockman, Software Engineer
Hats off!
As an undergraduate I dabbled in Classics, and I remember being surprised by the term hapax legomenon (ἅπαξ λεγόμενον). That's "written once" -- a word that occurs in only one place in the written record. It seems impossible, but happens surprisingly often: over 300 words in the Iliad appear nowhere else in Greek. So much has been lost (all but 7 of Sophocles' 123 plays, for instance) that every text that survives is precious. They communicate the self-understanding of their cultures -- which helped shape the modern world -- and have commanded scholarly attention for centuries. For these artifacts of a long-vanished world, passed down by generations of hand copying, merely establishing the text requires careful study of crabbed handwriting and critical comparison of divergent copies.
Modern scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin, continuing in this tradition, are working to create comprehensive electronic editions of these texts. For anyone who remembers studying Latin the old way, constantly paging through a dictionary, these electronic texts are a revelation. Now we have Caesar's Gallic Wars (Perseus Digital Library) with every word parsed and translated, along with linguistic commentary and a collection of references to the text from other works. We can read about Sophocles’ 123 plays in the Stoa Consortium's electronic edition of the Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia. And scholars around the world can now consult a high-resolution digital scan of Venetus A, one of the best manuscripts of the Iliad, at the Center for Hellenic Studies.
I'm pleased to announce that Google Books is now assisting this work by sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Of course, downloadable versions of over a million volumes in all fields are available from books.google.com, in a more compressed form.) Jon Orwant and I created this collection using a list of several thousand important Classics volumes identified by our collaborators Professor Gregory Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University. We are analyzing additional volumes and expect to be able to release more high-resolution scans in the future.
These scans will aid the development of accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithms for Ancient Greek, and provide the basis for electronic versions of important editions of these Classics texts; but perhaps their greatest value will be for the development of new methods in this emerging field. We’re honored that Professor Crane called this donation “a major contribution to what scholars can do.”~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - My Open Letter To TweetDeck. Please Add These Features.
First off, thank you for making Twitter the amazing tool it is. Without you Twitter would have never caught on the way it has. I hope Twitter has stopped to thank you.I have a few requests I REALLY, REALLY want and I think it would be relatively easy for you guys to do (says the non-programmer).
Yammer
Seriously you’ve added Foursquare but not Yammer? It seems like such a no brainer. Who checks in to Foursquare from TweetDeck? I’m really glad you added Foursquare just so I can filter is out but Yammer seems like it would be so much more useful.
Please, please, please add Yammer. It would really help out at work.
Your Own Hosted Microblogging Channel
Aren’t all of these Twitter outages super annoying? It’s got to be really frustrating as a Twitter Client to be dependent on a product that stops working at the most crucial times. I have a great idea and you don’t have to look far to figure out how to do it. There’s this company you are probably familiar with called StockTwits. I know you know who they are because Betaworks is an investor in both your companies and they used you guys as a model for their Twitter Client.
What’s really cool about StockTwits is that they have their own microblogging functionality built on top of Twitter. So you can choose to post only to StockTwits or when the USA soccer team scores a goal their community can keep on chatting without Twitter.
StatusNet and/or Identi.ca
You could probably even use StatusNet to create your own microblogging channel. While you’re at it adding Identi.ca support would be awesome. In fact you could probably just do Identi.ca and not StatusNet but I think you’d get a lot of value out of having your own branded community built in to TweetDeck. This wouldn’t compete Twitter or anything. At least not anymore than them buying Tweetie competed with you
Thanks Again
That’s it really. I sometimes wish TweetDeck had tabs so I didn’t have to keep scrolling left and right (I have a lot of columns) but that may just be me.
I’ve tried every client out there and I keep coming back to TweetDeck. Keep up the great work.
Photo credit by tveskovSimilar Posts:
- What Twitter as email would look like.
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Similar Posts:- What Twitter as email would look like.
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~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - It’s Official: Guest Payments Is Now Live
Hi all – Naveed here with an exciting announcement. As you may remember from Innovate 2009 and my blog post yesterday morning, we announced that one third of the future PayPal X roadmap would be devoted to features driven by feedback from our PayPal X developer community.And we’ve been listening. Our developers asked for an easy way to accept credit cards using our Adaptive Payments API and that’s why I’m excited to unveil Guest Payments today. Guest Payments allows developers to collect credit card payments without requiring their customers to open a PayPal account, eliminating the complications merchants, developers and startups face in accepting credit cards.
We’re aware that no matter how innovative the ideas are, our developers look to us to provide the features to make it all possible. We’re thrilled to provide this new functionality to meet this need and look forward to seeing the ground-breaking apps our developer community will create with this.
For more information on Guest Payments, make sure you sign up to attend our upcoming Webinar on July 13 at 11 a.m. PT. And keep the feedback coming!
~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader - Google Activates Android "Kill Switch," Zaps Useless Apps
This week the engineers at Google remotely activated the so-called Android "kill switch," a technology that allows the company to remotely remove applications installed on users' phones. The applications in question, designed by a security expert for research purposes, were described as "practically useless." They were not used maliciously nor did they access private data, or so says Android Security Lead Rich Cannings in a company blog post. Instead, the apps simply misrepresented their purpose to encourage downloads. "Most users uninstalled the applications shortly after downloading them," Cannings wrote, dismissing the impact of these questionable apps. But if the apps were effectively harmless, why zap them?
Sponsor
Zap that App!
Unlike smartphone rival, Apple, Google's transparency in the matter is actually refreshing. Apple very seldom makes any official announcement regarding applications that are removed or rejected from its App Store, unless it's responding to public outcry, such as was the case with the Pulitizer Prize winning satirist, cartoonist Mark Fiore's app or the banned Web comic version of James Joyce's Ulysses, both of which Apple later admitted were mistakes. (Censorship is a slippery slope, is it not?)
But with the Android kill switch situation, it's still seems a little odd. If the apps weren't malicious, were generally uninstalled by the duped users and were already voluntarily removed from the Market by the researcher in question, why zap them off everyone's phones, too?
The kill switch is designed to remove dangerous applications from phones - those that steal or access private user data, contain malware or viruses, or access system resources without permission... is it not?
Well, actually, no. The kill switch, per the Android Developer Terms of Service, may be used against any app "that violates the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or other legal agreements, laws, regulations or policies." If that's the case, then "Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your Device at its sole discretion."
Interesting Timing on that Kill Switch, Google...Very Interesting
But what's really interesting about this news is the timing.
The Google blog post arrived only one day after news broke about a frightening, but perhaps inflated, report from security firm SMobile Systems that described how one-fifth of Android applications expose private user data. This means, SMobile decided, these apps could be used for malicious purposes. It was quite a leap, though, to claim that because an app accessed private info it was dangerous. A contact organizer, for example, would have access to your phone's address book, but is that really a concern? No.
A Google spokesperson also responded to CNET's coverage of the news, refuting the report's claims and reminding the public that Android apps "must get users' permission to access sensitive information," something worthy of noting, to say the least. "Developers must also go through billing background checks to confirm their real identities, and we will disable any apps that are found to be malicious," the spokesperson said, seemingly referring to the kill switch technology.
And yet, in this case, Google removed "non-malicious" apps. Yes, of course there was the obvious misrepresentation by the researcher as to the apps' purposes, the general uselessness of the apps in question and the need to enforce a Marketplace where developers play by the rules, but it's still worth pointing out that Google has activated its kill switch for non-malicious applications the company itself described as "useless." And it did so just one day after a security firm, albeit a questionable one which apparently has ties to AT&T, blasted the company for the growing number of spyware apps on the market.
If anything, the remote app zapping looks like a response to those (reportedly bogus) claims, which is either a case of very coincidental and or bad timing on Google's part, or... well... could it be that there was actually some truth behind all that hype?
Is asking for permission not really the panacea Google claims it should be on Android?
After all, over the years, putting the onus on the user to be mindful of their own security concerns has led to pop-up ads that resemble computer error messages, Facebook "recommendations" that instantly publicize your private data, user agreements and EULAs that install spyware, adware and toolbars on your computer, and a number of other undesirable situations for end users.
It seems like, when it comes to Android security, there's a fine line between safe applications politely accessing your private data with permission and those that could do a bit more, perhaps, than you had originally intended. The question is now, how much of this will be the user's responsibility to manage and how much can the user rely on Google - and its Android kill switch technology - to manage it for them?
Discuss~1 month on
Mahendra's shared items in Google Reader
