Google to Launch Another Cuecat

I was at Google's NYC HQ last night for an interesting Meetup with The Advertising Club of New York. Google's speakers included Tim Castelli, New York Sales Director; Long Ellis, Head of Sales, Television; Joseph Anastasi, Team Manager, Audio East; Sarah Carberry, Team Manager, Consumer Packaged Goods; Patrick Grandinetti, Senior Agency Lead, East Region; and Tiffany Shen Miller, Account Executive, Print Ads.

Anyway, the talked-about news of the night happened when Tiffany alluded to Google placing 'bar codes' of a sort in print ads in hopes that people would take a picture of them with their software enabled cell phones and be redirected to a website. The idea is that these bar codes would make it easier for consumers to get more information and easier for marketers to track the effectiveness of their print ads.

All I could think about was the CueCat. I had one of these things plugged into my computer for ages. I had the PS/2 version, not even USB. Anyway, at first I thought it was pretty cool that I could scan barcodes in my latest issue of Wired, but it quickly wore off. Google's taking a little bit of a different approach, using cell phones, but man, they have a long, long way to go with this one.

Good luck Tiffany.

I Wish I Were Moving Today

Man, I wish I were moving today, not this summer. I just found a place on Craig's List that I love. I'm a big fan of these converted factories, especially because they usually let you build out the space. There's so much room to build the apartment of your dreams.

I like this area too. It's right along the L train, which, lately, can do no wrong. There are a lot of great stores and restaurants here too, along Knickerbocker.

Damn... I wish I were moving today. I would snatch this up.


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Just Saying

I've been extremely busy this week, but I just wanted to quickly point out that I couldn't care less about Bono, Gore or Robert F-ing Scoble.

Cheers.

iPhone Acupuncture

I've always had extremely low volume from my iPhone's speaker. My roommate's iPhone, much louder than mine. My girlfriend's iPhone, much louder than mine. I've had speaker envy.

Today I read about a trick on Engadget that involved poking holes in the speaker housing with a needle. Sounds scary, but what the hell, can't get any worse, right?

Right. In fact, it worked great. My phone is significantly louder. I couldn't believe how much louder. The is by far the best mod I've ever seen.

iPhone Update for my Jail Broken iPhone

I have an iPhone running software version 1.1.1. It's jail broken and full of great applications. I'd like to update to 1.1.3, which was announced at MacWorld. Does anyone have instructions on how to roll back my jail break, update to 1.1.3 and then re- jail break?

Would be very helpful... Thanks.

My Facebook Account Was Hacked

Someone broke into my Facebook account and posted messages on all of my friend's profiles about an amazing new site for free ringtones. Yay.

Why the Facebook system let my account post 100 wall postings within about 30 seconds is beyond me. I got a system message from Facebook saying that they reset my password.... about 4 hours after several of my friends told me about the problem and I had already reset the password on my own.

Oh well.

In spite, I am now @Zuckerberg on Twitter.

NewsGator Products go Free

NewsGator, makers of NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, NewsGator Go and more, have announced that they are providing all of their products for free. You can read the announcement in their latest blog post.

This is great news. I've been using NetNewsWire on my Mac at home for a while now and I love it (I also use NewsFire, which I like a lot too). Via this announcement I learned about NewsGator Inbox, an Outlook plugin, which I'm installing right now at work to replace Attensa (which I generally don't like at all).

On a side, but related note, I recently reached out to Brad Feld, one of NewsGator's investors. It was about a topic I don't really want to get into here, but I did want to give him some link love and let everyone know, in general, that he's was a very nice and very helpful guy. Subscribe to his RSS feed in your new NewsGator software.

Of course, don't forget to subscribe to mine as well.

Some Clarity on SXSW

South By South West (SXSW) has a confusing website. I could not figure out, for the life of me, if I needed a conference pass to attend music shows at the various venues around Austin during the festival. So, I e-mailed them and asked, this is their answer:

Tho it seems given your job that you should seriously consider registering to attend SXSW 2008, this should answer your questions:

We sell a limited number of single admission tickets to most, but not all, SXSW Music Festival shows. Cost varies by show and venue. Tickets are sold on a walk-up basis only and must be purchased at the venue where the show you wish to see is being held. They generally go on sale about an hour before the first band of the night at that venue is scheduled to start.

Please keep in mind that we cannot guarantee that you will be able to access every show you want to see. If you remain patient and keep your options open, you're bound to have a good time.

And remember we always have three nights of free to the public shows at Auditorium Shores at Ladybird Lake.

Thanks SXSW, I appreciate your very quick response! Now... I gotta decide if I want to spend money on the damn conference pass (it isn't cheap!) or just go there and wing it.

Is Mint Not Converting Users?

I've been using Mint to manage my finances for a few months now. I first wrote about them here.

Mint is a free services that makes money by making offers, based on your spending trends and existing accounts, that it feels could save you money. For example, if you're tracking a Visa card that giving you a 14% APR, they'll offer a Discover card with 9.9% APR and show you, based on your spending, how much you could save over the period of a year. The idea extends beyond credit cards too - to things like your cable and phone providers.

But, is Mint having trouble converting users over to their 'Ways to Save' page? I got this e-mail this morning:

Hello,

We're excited that you're now managing your money using Mint.com. We hope that you're feeling more in control of your spending and that you're taking advantage of the savings ideas we've found for you.

If you've found a savings idea that intrigues you, the best time to act is now. The sooner you start earning lower interest on your credit cards - or higher interest on your savings - the sooner you'll achieve the financial goals that are important to you, whether it's paying off debt, building a cash reserve, or maybe even starting that "down payment" fund.

If you want to input the interest rate you currently pay/earn on your existing accounts, you can now do that easily on the Ways to Save page. Mint will recalculate the estimated annual savings opportunity for you right then and there. We work quickly, because we want you to start saving now!

Cheers,
The Mint Team
feedback@mint.com

Now, I'm not connected at all with Mint, so I have no idea if this means they're having trouble or if they're simply engaging in some proactive marketing. I have actually participated in the Ways to Save, signing up for a new Discover card.

I wish I could dismiss deals and see others though. They keep suggesting that I change my Time Warner Cable to Verizon FiOS, which I would love to do, but I can't - it's not available to me.

The Pudding Media Misconception

Bloggers have a foul taste in their mouth over Pudding Media receiving $8 million in funding. The idea is, like Google reads your e-mails and search queries, Pudding Media will listen to your VOIP phone calls and serve you contextual ads around keywords they extract. The misconception is that these ads will be served by some kind of computer-voice-thing.

Pudding Media will listen to your calls and pick out keywords, but the ads are displayed on your computer, in the Pudding Media interface. At least, that's how I understand it. I don't think that's horrible. Think about using Skype for free, but it shows you ads based around what you're talking about. No biggie.

To quell your privacy woes, they don't actually record your conversations. They don't even save the keywords gathered from your conversations. Each new call starts an entirely new session - where they know nothing about you.

I think it could be quite useful, actually. Just as sponsored search results in Google are useful.

I'm Glad Scoble's Not My Friend

You've probably heard the buzz all over the web - poor techie-hero Robert Scoble was booted from Facebook for using a Plaxo script to scrape his friends information from Facebook and import it into Plaxo Pulse. A clear violation of Facebook's TOS, Robert's cry is that all data should be open and free.

Well, I disagree. I'm not friends with Scoble on Facebook, but if I were I'd be pissed if he took my information, without my permission, and gave it to another company (in this case, Plaxo, the spam kings). I hope and trust that none of my Facebook friends use this tool. Where I put my e-mail, name and birthday should be entirely up to me.

What's the solution here? Plaxo should create a Facebook application that asks you for this information. Yes, asks your permission. If I wanted to use it, I could then send an invitation to my friends to participate and they would have a choice.

Quick Thoughts on the Iowa Caucus

Fairly predictable results: Obama and Huckabee got the nod in Iowa. My prediction: Obama goes all the way. And great, he's got my support. He's smart, he supports technology and our industry, he's a great speaker and, most importantly, he seems..... completely reasonable and largely non-political.

Most Popular Posts of 2007

Here are the most popular posts in 2007 on this blog. Note: this particular blog was born in Aug, 07, so we've only got about 4 months of data.

1. Broken iPhone Screen, Sept 22
2. Uploading Mobile Photos From the iPhone to Facebook, Oct 03
3. Mac vs. PC on Web 2.0 Websites, Oct 15
4. Johnny27 Answers All of My Questions, Dec 10
5. Using Gmail on the iPhone, Sept 28
6. Brandframe Takes Product Placement Online, Aug 12
7. Last.fm Let Me Down, Sept 13
8. Marketing to Bloggers, Oct 09
9. High-Give to Urban Dictionary, Sept 19
10. In Rainbows Update, Oct 09

Most traffic was driven from organic search results. Here are the top organic search terms driving traffic:

1. Andrew Baisley
2. Broken iPhone Screen
3. iPhone Broken Screen
4. Shane Goes
5. Johnny27
6. Brandframe
7. iPhone Screen Broken
8. Scrobble iPhone
9. Broken iPhone
10. Facebook Email Photos

It's obvious why Broken iPhone Screen is my top viewed post. However, I should also note that the vast, vast majority of visitors view the homepage only, as opposed to clicking through to the permalinks. So this data could be somewhat misleading.

Welcome to 2008

I'm back from a great vacation. D.C., West Virgina, Nashville, Memphis, and Austin. Austin is a great town and I'm really looking forward to going back for SXSW. But, for now, it's time to focus on the New Year. There have been some recent changes at ROO (which I see as a big positive) and I'm ready to hit the ground running.

Some things I want to tackle this year:

• Cut back on the smoking, maybe even quitting entirely.
• Move this summer into an awesome, huge and super cheap apartment (and get a dog at the same time).
  
• Take better care of my health - body and mind.
• Take control of my budget and where I spend my money. My long term goals (401K, stocks, etc) are solid, but I burn though tons of cash on food and drinks.

I suppose most of us have lofty goals around this time of the year. I do too and I'm going to do my best to reach them.