Reports and tutorials, updated daily,to keep you advised of the latest in online news and tips, brought to you from WebProNews.
WebProNews FeedCoinstar's Redbox announced today that it is has started rolling out Blu-ray rentals. The company says titles will be available at 13,300 kiosks nationwide.
"Offering Blu-ray rentals is an exciting opportunity for redbox to expand our product offerings and build on the relationships that we've established with millions of consumers nationwide," said Mitch Lowe, president, redbox. "Redbox is a convenient, affordable home entertainment provider and we're delighted to offer consumers their favorite movies on the increasingly popular Blu-ray Disc format."
"According to a recent report by the Digital Entertainment Group, sales of Blu-ray players increased 103 percent in the first half of this year," the company noted in its announcement. "The sale of almost two million set-top players during this time has increased the total number of Blu-ray players sold to an estimated 19.4 million, resulting in more consumers entering the Blu-ray rental market."
Redbox Blu-ray rentals will cost $1.50. Regular DVDs are only $1.00.
Redbox recently made public intentions to use a web service to expand its library, which would make it a much bigger competitor to Netflix. That appeared to be mostly forward-looking, however. It's hard to say when that will happen, and what its offerings will be exactly.
Google Earth is meant to give its users a realistic view of the world, and the program by and large accomplishes that. A new upgrade will make it even more accurate, though, by showing users whether or not they'd be getting wet if they were to visit certain parts of the globe.
Yes, Google Earth 5.2 is now supposed to account for both rain and snow - everything "from light drizzle and snow to hurricanes and blizzards," in fact - at least in some regions of North America and Europe.
As for how a person can take advantage of the new feature, it's not at all complicated. Software engineer Quarup Barreirinhas explained on the LatLong Blog, "First enable the clouds layer, then zoom in to a particular location where it might be raining or snowing." (You check out the radar layer to see what's covered if guesswork isn't your thing.)
Zoom in far enough, and you'll be able to see something like the image below, which was captured/generated around the time Hurricane Alex was passing into Texas.
Travelers and people who are weighing a move - along with folks who just enjoy interesting graphics - are sure to appreciate this information.
Maybe only weathermen will object to the development, since Google Earth is starting to represent a pretty decent alternative to watching the local forecast.
Google has announced a new advertising format for Google Merchant Center users. The format is based on the product extensions AdWords format that lets advertisers add specific product listings.
There is a difference with this new format, however. The format, which runs on Google Product Search, will show users products and prices without them having to click on a "plusbox" to expand the ad.
"These ads are a great opportunity to market the breadth of your product catalog and highlight any promotional messages directly to conversion-ready shoppers on Google Product Search," says Google Product Search Product Manager Andrew Poon.
Poon also notes that to take advantage of the new format, you should make sure your product extensions ad campaigns are being served on "search partner" sites.
This isn't the only new ad format from Google. The company also announced a new location extensions format with map features today. More on that here.
Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan points out how poorly Google handles those gaming Google News, using Google Trends as a starting point.
Do you find Google News to be too heavily polluted? Share your thoughts.
He found a blatant example when the term "chocomize" became listed as "volcanic" on Google Trends. When clicking for the results, he found several sites serving Google ads that presumably only created posts about the term because it was trending (as a way to get some easy traffic, and potentially ad clicks). In fact, some examples came from sites that were clearly aimed at entirely different niches, such as a horror movies site and a TV/Anime site. The biggest problem from the user's perspective is that there was nothing immediately indicating why the term was trending.
The real reason the term was trending was apparently because CNN ran a story earlier in the day about a company called Chocomize that makes custom candy bars (a pretty cool concept, I have to say), but when looking at the Google News results, Sullivan had to really dig to find that story.
"The pollution within Google News is ridiculous," Sullivan says. "This is Google, where we’re supposed to have the gold standard of search quality. Instead, we get 'news' sites that have been admitted — after meeting specific editorial criteria — just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article causing the term 'chocomize' to be popular, polluting the news results and along the way, earning Google some cash."
Earning Google some cash indeed. There is no doubt that this goes on all the time, specifically with AdSense sites. Interestingly, in a story grouped with Sullivan's on TechMeme, the Wall Street Journal has some words from Eric Schmidt talking about Google's famous "one trick pony". Schmidt is quoted as saying, "But if you've got a one-trick pony, you want the one we have. We're in the ad business, and it's growing rapidly. We picked the right trick." The piece goes on to talk about how that trick is going to pay off greatly in the mobile space as well, as more and more people gravitate to the Android operating system.
Schmidt has said in the past, as Sullivan reminds us, that the Internet is a cesspool (referring to an excess of useless content). So, to be fair, Schmidt doesn't come across as being very enthusiastic about the sites that take advantage of Google Trends to game Google News. Still, there is money to be made, and if sites meet the criteria of what it takes to get into Google News, there's a fine line Google has to walk, regardless.
Can it all be so simple?
Sullivan says, “It shouldn’t be that hard for Google to police what shows up in response to what it publishes on Google Trends. Spam sites ought to be nabbed. AdSense sites ought to be shut down. News publishers abusing the very lucky position they have of being in Google News, by routinely tapping into Google Trends topics that aren’t relevant to their publications, should get the boot.”
While I greatly respect Sullivan, and value his analysis and opinions, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. We've all seen how the mainstream media sites turn to blogs to get their stories (sometimes without giving credit or links), just as the sites in question appear to have done with CNN. We spoke with Sullivan about this not too long ago after he became a victim of such a scenario.
It's hard to say that just because you use Google ads, you should be penalized. That's not to say there isn't an issue, but while there may be plenty of “garbage sites” there are some pretty highly respected publications that serve ads by Google. The horror movie blog pointed to, does appear to generally offer horror movie related news (while crediting sources), based on a quick glance of its most recent content. But if the Chocomize story on that blog doesn't credit its source, that is a problem. Maybe this is a “garbage” site, maybe it’s not. From Google's standpoint, determining that can’t be easy in all cases.
Looking beyond the credit issue for a moment, when it comes to topic-spam, who’s to say what a publication would find of interest to its audience? I’m not sure that I agree that a blog mainly focused on horror movies, for example, should not be able to blog about chocolate or another off-topic subject every now and then. That’s up to the publication and whether they want to risk alienating their own audience, if you ask me. Again, I’m not saying Sullivan is wrong about this particular site’s practices. I’m just looking at the bigger picture.
Maybe Google could do more to look at story sources, but that's got to be a difficult task across all publications, and there would no doubt be plenty of room for debate between publications about who broke a story first.
I'm not saying this is what happened either, but hypothetically, what if the horror movies blog actually talked to the Chocomize people first and had the story first, and CNN just happened to find it and find it newsworthy themselves, and do their own piece. Now, that's an unlikely scenario in this particular example, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility in other examples, such as the one Sullivan experienced recently himself.
Regardless of that even, it's hard to say "you can't have content about this topic because we posted it as a trending topic."
There is clearly a problem with Google Trends. Sullivan is right in that the result doesn't help explain why the topic was trending. He's also right in that the original source (CNN) should be more visible. However, cleaning up the "pollution" might not be such an easy problem to conquer. It’s hard to say if Google is allowing such pollution to go on so it can make more money or if the problem is just too difficult for the search giant. It could be a combination of the two.
What do you think? Comment here.
According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.
Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors. The firm will be presenting its findings at DefCON 18 this weekend, but the report is available here (pdf). Barracuda lists the following as highlights from its findings:
"Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and VP at Barracuda Networks. "Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users."
NetworkWorld points to some market share numbers, which seem to mirror the malware percentages presented by Barracuda.
To a person with poor eyesight, Yahoo, Bing, and just about every other organization trying to compete in the mobile search market might as well not exist. New stats indicate that Google has an overwhelming lead, allowing it to dwarf competitors by comparison.
The graph below, which was constructed by Pingdom's bloggers using data from StatCounter, pretty much speaks for itself. The bars corresponding to the mobile market shares of "Yahoo," "Bing," and "Other" just peek above the x-axis, and would be almost impossible to discern if not for the orange-on-black color scheme.
A post on the Royal Pingdom blog concluded, "If Google firmly believes that mobile is the future (which is the opinion of CEO Eric Schmidt), they are making all the right moves."
Indeed, according to StatCounter's records, "One year ago, [Google's] share of the mobile search market was 95.58%. That's significantly less than today's 98.29%. Who knows, in a few months, perhaps they will pass 99%. At this point this actually seems plausible."
But it should also be interesting to see if the launch of the Windows 7 Phone mobile operating system is able to in any way affect Google's dominance. Bing is supposed to be the sole default search option, after all.
Microsoft - and maybe every other company trying to compete in this field - can hope, at least.
Playdom has been in the news a lot over the week as Disney announced its agreement to acquire the social gaming company. Today, Playdom announced a partnership with Harrah's Interactive Entertainment to launch the Official World Series of Poker game on Facebook and other social networks.
"We are very excited to bring the thrill and excitement of the World Series of Poker to the social
gaming space with Playdom," says WSOP VP Craig Abrahams. "We will immediately start to work on enhancing the game, bringing unique WSOP promotions and sweepstakes into the offering and ensuring that the battle for WSOP virtual championship bracelets can become a
Facebook-friendly endeavor."
"There is only one brand in poker that stands out and that is the World Series of Poker," said Sean
Phinney, VP of Business Development for Playdom. "We think big brands will win on social networks and we are excited to start working together to create a unique and fun social gaming experience."
The app is also available on MySpace, with other social networks following soon.
Playdom currently boasts over 46 million active monthly users across its network of games. Disney is paying $563.2 Million plus an earn-out of up to $200 Million.
In other online poker news, the New York Times reports that the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill that would effectively legalize online poker and other nonsports betting, overturning a 2006 federal ban. The publicatno also reports, "Two of the biggest European operators of Internet betting sites, PartyGaming and Bwin Interactive Entertainment, said Thursday that they planned to merge, forming the world’s largest publicly traded online gambling company."
I would imagine that we'll be seeing a lot more happening with this industry.
Representative Paul Hodes (D-NH) introduced today a bipartisan resolution to protect online out-of-state sellers from having to collect taxes in states where they have no physical presence.
The resolution (H.R. 1570) "Supporting the Preservation of Internet Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses," says that Congress should not impose unfair tax collection burdens that would hurt the U.S. economy and consumers.
The resolution is a response to legislation introduced in July 2010 by Representative Bill Delahunt (D, Mass.) which would force all U.S. online retailers across the nation to become tax collectors for states that have joined the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP).
"Don't believe it when tax collectors say their software makes it trivial for tiny sellers to collect everyone's sales tax," said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice.
"Small sellers will spend thousands of dollars making changes to their website software, plus endless time and accounting fees to handle exceptions, customer questions, and state tax audits."
Under the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court Quill v. North Dakota decision, the court found that the 45 state and 7,600 local sales tax systems across the country were too complicated for a retailer realistically to know how much tax to collect and remit.
Currently online retailers are only required to collect sales tax from out-of-state customers if they have a physical presence, such as a brick-and-mortar store.
"Representative Hodes and his colleagues are to be commended for standing against a national tax system that would saddle small retailers with new collection and compliance burdens," said DelBianco.
"We all support a simpler tax system, but the streamlined sales tax project has become the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing."
Google has announced a new location extensions ad format with map features. Businesses can feature their locations and phone numbers on an expandable map ad that can appear on mobile sites and apps in the Google Display Network.
This format shows up as a banner text ad with a business icon that expands to show the business location on a Google map, including ad creative, a click-to-call phone number and an option to get directions.
"Since ads can be served based on the user's location, a potential customer will see the phone number and map of the store location that’s nearest to them," explains Dai Pham of Google's Mobile Ads Marketing Team. "By providing mobile consumers more options to connect with your business you can drive more traffic to your store, visits to your website or calls to your business."
"This new ad format is available on mobile devices with full Internet browsers and allows you to expand your advertising campaigns to reach highly engaged mobile users with relevant local information as they use their favorite apps or websites to check the weather, read the news, play games or pursue other mobile interests," adds Pham. "Advertising with location extensions on mobile devices is also great value because you’re only charged when a user clicks to call the business or clicks to visit your website. You are not charged when users click to expand the map or gets directions. The cost of a click to call your business will be the same as the cost of a click to visit your website."
To utilize the new format, campaigns must be opted into the Google Display Network, and Google suggests setting up separate location extensions campaigns for search and display networks.
YouTube announced today that it has extended the upload limit to 15 minutes for all users. It was 10 minutes before. If you've tried to upload one in the past that was rejected for length, but would qualify now, you'll have delete it from "My Videos" and do it again.
"We want YouTube to be the best place to upload video," says YouTube upload and video management product manager Joshua Siegel. "Without question, the number one requested feature by our creators is to upload videos longer than 10 minutes."
Additionally, he says YouTube has spent significant resources on creating and improving its ContentID system and other tools for copyright owners.
"Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube," says Siegel. "Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today. We will continue our strong commitment to provide advanced technology and tools to protect the rights of small and large copyright owners worldwide. We’ll also do everything we can to release incremental improvements like this one that benefit our video creators."
If you tag your videos with "yt15minutes" and upload it by August 4, YouTube may select it to feature on the YouTube homepage.
John Pozadzides of the Web analytics company Woopra wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb looking at the web's top sources of referral traffic. He breaks it down in to the following categories: social network, social bookmark, search, and media.
Six versions of Google top the list for search before Bing makes an appearance. Facebook takes the cake in social networks, followed by Twitter and LinkedIn. In the social bookmark category, StumbleUpon leads, and in media, it's YouTube.
Mashable's Jolie O'Dell reports that a court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia has demanded a Russian ISP block access to YouTube because it hosted what it says is an extremist video. The Internet Archive and three online libraries were also reportedly blocked. As O'Dell points out, a number of other countries have also blocked access to YouTube at different times.
The New York Times reports that the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill that would effectively legalize online poker and other nonsports betting, overturning a 2006 federal ban.
Pocket-lint reports that Amazon claims ebook sales will overtake paperbacks next year. It's a pretty astonishing notion, but not too hard to believe considering that Amazon recently announced that ebook sales have overtaken hardback sales.
Mobile Crunch has pointed out that RIM has purchased the domain BlackPad.com, speculating that a long-rumored BlackBerry tablet could be called the BlackPad.
News surfaced yesterday that a directory containing personal details of over 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on a file-sharing site. BBC News spoke to the man responsible who says he harvested the info for a security tool.
Back in early May, it was discovered that Google had invested in something called Recorded Future. Now Wired reports that the CIA is involved as well, in the company that monitors the web predicts the future.
Facebook launched the long-awaited Questions feature yesterday (in beta). Search Engine Land has a detailed walkthrough of the feature.
According to Ben Patterson at Yahoo News, citing information from Courant.com, U.S. libraries are loaning more DVDs on a daily basis than Netflix and Redbox are renting them. This make sense given that many libraries offer free DVD loans, and cheap prices on new releases.
GM is working on a campaign to promote its 2011 Buick Regal and has launched a website called "Moment of Truth."
GM promises its Moment of Truth site will include all reviews and consumer opinions no matter if they are negative or positive.
"We are inviting consumers to find out on their own that Regal is a true performance sedan and worthy of their consideration," said Craig Bierley, Buick advertising director.
"We are making it easy for the consumer to get unbiased opinions in one online location."
Moment of Truth will pull in content from a variety of social media sources and give users the ability to share via social networks. It includes YouTube videos, Flickr photos, comments from Buick's Regal tab on Facebook, tweets from Twitter, as well as automotive reviews and blogs. Anyone can be a contributor to Moment of Truth by sharing their stories related to the Regal and posting them online.
Other elements of the Buick Regal advertising campaign started earlier this month in unconventional and traditional outlets. The campaign continues to build on advertising outreach that Buick started with the LaCrosse launch last year.
Groupon, the service that provides daily deals that save customers money, is getting a lot of attention these days. Now, they'll be getting much more. Late yesterday, the company announced a big feature in Personalized Deals. Today, they have released an FAQ for those.
"Personalized Deals is the biggest thing we’ve done since we launched Groupon," the company says. "While Groupon won't look much different, sending different deals to different users transforms Groupon in four big ways."
If you thought Groupon was getting big, this feature might be the ticket to making it a household name. Along with the launch of an Android app last week, Personalized Deals is likely going to put Groupon on a lot more people's mobile devices.
Learn How Groupon Works! from The Point on Vimeo.
As a result of the Personalized Deals feature, users will start getting offers from a growing number of businesses, which are tailored to their location, preferences, and buying patterns.
"Groupon has become so popular with merchants that we can’t keep up with demand," Groupon says. "Over 35,000 merchants are queued to be featured on Groupon, and with 97% of our merchants wanting to be featured again, that list is only going to get longer. As a response to unmet demand, Groupon has become one of the most prolifically copied websites in the history of the Internet, with over 500 worldwide Groupon knockoffs appearing in the last 12 months."
There's no question that the Personalized Deals feature is going to continue to attract businesses to Groupon. Customers have more of a reason than ever to use the service.
Microsoft's cloud computing division has scored a significant victory. Three of them, even, as this morning, the company was able to announce that Dow Chemical, Hyatt Hotels, and the University of Georgia will use Microsoft cloud computing solutions.
A Dow VP indicated in an official statement that Microsoft's experience and expertise contributed to his corporation's decision. That's arguably a bit of a snub to Google, which is making every effort to catch up to and overtake Microsoft in this field.
Meanwhile, the CIO of Hyatt Hotels complimented Microsoft's flexibility. Also, if anyone's counting, Hyatt said this development will affect around 40,000 deskbound employees, plus perhaps another 17,000 workers who don't have full-time access to a computer.
Finally, the CIO of the University of Georgia said, "With Live@edu, we believe we will have a best-in-class communications and collaboration infrastructure . . ." And for the record, something like 85,000 University of Georgia faculty, students, and staff should be using of that.
Again, then, Microsoft has scored some big wins, and Google - with the delay in L.A. representing its most recent cloud-related headline - seems to have lost this round.
Microsoft's stock is down 0.06 percent at the moment, a little behind the Dow (which is up 0.07 percent), but ahead of the Nasdaq (which is down 0.28 percent).
Motorola announced its Q2 financial results today. These include sales of $5.4 billion. The company shipped 2.7 million smartphones during the quarter, but mobile device sales were down 6% from the previous year.
Other highlights include:
"In the second quarter, our Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Networks businesses continued to deliver best-in-class market leadership and financial returns, with strong operating earnings and excellent cash generation," said Greg Brown, Motorola co-CEO and CEO of Motorola Solutions.
"In addition, last week, we announced that Nokia Siemens Networks will acquire the majority of our Networks business. We are very proud of the operational and financial performance of our Networks business and are excited to have reached this agreement to combine our Networks team with such an industry leader," Brown continued. "This is great news for our customers, our investors and our people and will allow us to sharpen our strategic focus on providing mission-and business-critical solutions for our government, public safety and enterprise customers."
"The Droid X launch has been very well received and is seen as one of the best smartphones in the market today with a 4.3 inch high-resolution display, Adobe flash and an 8 megapixel camera. As we continue to execute on our business strategy, we are in a strong position to continue improving our share in the rapidly growing smartphone market and improving our operating performance," added Sanjay Jha, Motorola co-CEO and CEO of Motorola Mobility. "The Mobile Devices and Home businesses remain focused on developing next-generation products to capitalize on the convergence of mobile experiences and home entertainment."
More details about Motorola's second quarter can be found here.