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Sunday 25 March 2012

"Buyer beware: The top tech traps to avoid"


iphone
Upgrade mania can be bad for your wealth. Waiting a while can pay off. 
TECHNOLOGY is transforming our lives faster than ever, but those who aren't careful about their spending on new gadgets can see their bank balances transform too.
Consumers should balance their purchases with research and an understanding of the costs involved to make sure they don't join the rising number of people filing complaints.
The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman says new complaints rose 17.8 per cent last financial year, but we're continuing to buy up big.
The latest Canon Digital Lifestyle index found Australians bought 6.6 million digital devices
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"The New Visible Hand: Can Social Data Illuminate Market Forces?"


Hand 
Just a short post this Sunday evening to reflect on a topic that’s been at the center of so many conversations this week:  how the social web is making everything visible,  and how making everything visible is not entirely good.

It’s a conversation, of course, that has several threads.  On the personal level, it’s easy to understand the complaint — on consumer social networks, people are making everything visible to marketers –  what they are thinking, what they are doing, what they are planning to do — every moment of the day.  Whether people understand that they are doing this is besides the point.  As many folks in the social media world have argued — especially those who earn a paycheck dispensing technology or advice — traditional notions of privacy are coming to an end.  Their message to unhappy consumers:  get over it.   But the debate is only just beginning to heat up, so if you are in fact in the social media biz, I advise you get over this as well:  the
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"Maturing The Social Media Market With Data"


 
Silentale, a start up out of Paris with offices in Montreal and New York City, believes it’s time to get serious about social media data and what it can do for a brand. By social media, I mean Twitter and Facebook and by brands I mean the likes of Ford, Travel Channel, BestBuy, JetBlue, etc.

This is part of an ongoing saga in the advertising universe where there’s a constant struggle by brands to reach today’s consumers who are on multiple devices, at the same time and using social media daily. In other words, it’s where the consumer’s eyeballs are. Social media is the soft spot for a new kind of advertising, a more personal touchy-feely way to connect to the consumer.

As this market matures, so does the marketplace for technology that helps measure social
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"Twice As Much Google+ Data Is Shared"

'Twice As Much Google+ Data Is Shared' Privately As Publicly: A Challenge to Facebook
Google's Bradley Horowitz
Google social media vice president Bradley
 Horowitz. Image via Flickr.


Google+ combines elements of both Twitter and Facebook: it makes public messaging easy, like Twitter, but it also advances Facebook’s friend model with a sophisticated contact management system that can restrict communication to certain groups of people. How Google+ would be used in practice has been an open question since it became available by invite in June: would users broadcast to the public or stick to their friends?

The answer, says Google social media chief Bradley Horowitz, is the latter: more than twice as many bits of content are shared privately on Google+ as publicly–a ratio that is increasing as later adopters join and use the service mostly to communicate with people they know (the private-to-public ratio was 2:1 recently and is now “between two and three,” says
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"The social network is making it easier for marketers to reach their targets."


Is Facebook Swallowing Up the Internet's Data?

Facebook logo
As marketers and other Web site owners move their efforts to Facebook, they give up control over the valuable data that their users leave behind.
The data that we throw off as we move around the Web—browsing habits, navigation paths, origins and destinations—have always been enormously valuable for the sites we visit. The software to analyze Web traffic is a $500 million business and growing, dominated by Google, Adobe and IBM. Consulting and services to help people parse the data is another $150 million, by Gartner’s estimates.
But Facebook is eating into big swaths of the measured Web. As people spend a larger portion of their time on Facebook, the social network is developing tools that make it
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"Could Smart Homes Keep People Healthy?"

Earlier this month, the Z-Wave Alliance–a consortium of companies employing Z Wave wireless mesh networking technology in their products–announced that there are now some 600 products incorporating Z-Wave technology available in the United States. At first glance, this is pretty boring tech news. But the implication of the spread of Z-Wave is actually fairly interesting insofar as it points to a rapid proliferation and democratization of so-called “smart home” or “home automation” products and various new uses for those products.

As a technology, Z-Wave has been around since 2001, when it was created in Denmark by a couple of engineers from Nokia and Erikson. In North America, it didn’t really start to take off until about 2005, when suddenly five large companies adopted Z-Wave at the same time, and the Z-Wave Alliance was born. Its objective, according to Z-Wave Alliance chairman Mark Walters, is to promote the use of Z-Wave technology and its use in home controls. “The key and most important factor is that these products be interoperable with each other,” he says. “The idea is that
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"Can Solar Reduce The Impact Of Two High-Profile Data Centers? Amazon Engineer Weighs In [Updated]"


The sun sets on the horizon across 42nd street...
Solar arrays may not be able to provide the power density needed by data centers, one expert argues. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)
Solar power may be not be best way to reduce the environmental impact of sprawling data centers built by companies such as Apple and Facebook, James Hamilton, an Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer argued on his personal blog last Saturday.
“If we had $x dollars to invest in lowering datacenter environmental impact and the marketing department was not involved in the decision, I’m not convinced the right next step will be solar,” Hamilton wrote.
The catch: Apple has said little publicly about how much power its Maiden, North Carolina data center uses. If Apple’s data center uses significantly less power than Hamilton estimates, the solar array at that facility is more efficient than Hamilton estimates — or both — then solar could become a useful tool for reducing the impact of
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"Groundwater Mapping Hits Times Square"


The Colorado River from Laughlin
The Colorado River from Laughlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In honor of World Water Day, a U.N. conceit designed to focus attention on water issues, two digital signboards in Times Square that span 19,000 square feet have begun showing a 30-second animationdocumenting declines in the world’s groundwater.
Can such nuance compete with ads featuring David Beckham’s abs? Maybe not. But the fact that an artistic depiction of scientific data on groundwater – gathered from space by NASA and analyzed by the University of California Irvine – has hit prime media real estate is a sign that the urgency of world water issues is beginning to dawn on the masses. The animations, part of the HeadsUP! design visualization competition, will play several
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"NRG Energy To Build A $100M Electric Car Charging Network For California"

Meet The Microhybrid: A New Class 
Of Green Cars 
California announced Friday it has reached a $120 million settlement with NRG Energy over power contracts that contributed to the state’s energy crisis a decade ago, and it plans to use most of the money for building a network of electric car charging stations.

Fisker Taps Former Chrysler Chief As
 New CEO Of Electric Carmaker
  
The state plans to use $100 million of the settlement for the charging station network in regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles and San Diego. The remaining $20 million will go to programs for lowering electricity costs for consumers.
The settlement will benefit NRG, which has gotten into the electric car charging station business and branded it eVgo. The company will be building the $100 million charging network over the next four years, NRG said. NRG was a co-owner of power plants
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"Google Working on Better Ways to Measure Online Ad Impact"


Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of
display advertising
 
Still the king of search ads, with no end in sight, Google has for years tried to diversify into display ads, the pictorial banners that support most Web sites. Despite those efforts, Facebook has zoomed into the lead in display ads. But with the rapid growth of Google’s own display ads on partner sites, its YouTube service, and Android phones has some forecasters predicting the search giant will capture the lead next year.

Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of display advertising, shed some light on what’s coming next in display for Google at Federal Media Publishing’s Signal SF conference this morning in San Francisco. Here are the highlights of his talk with Federated Media Founder and Executive Chairman John Battelle, author of The Search who also writes the seminal Searchblog:

Q: What about the controversy about Google going around the privacy protections of the Safari browser to put a cookie on people’s machines?

Mohan: We announced a few months ago we’d be placing +1 buttons on ads on our display
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"Facebook Doesn't Want Employers Asking For Users' Passwords"


Facebook has officially taken a stand on the controversy  over the Maryland Department of Corrections and other employers asking job applicants to hand over their Facebook passwords so they can peruse private content to ensure no red flags before hiring. The Maryland DOC, for example, was looking at private photos and wall postings to ensure that wannabe guards were not affiliated with gangs. (Poked by a gang leader? No job for you!)
 
Sen. Richard Blumenthal has plans to draft a federal law that would make the practice illegal. He can count on support from Facebook. In response to the “distressing increase in reports
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