Hi all! Here is another cool stuff episode. For more where this came from, see the archive, subscribe to the feed or follow me on Twitter.
Marketing stuff
- How To Improve Your Branding With Your Content.
- Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability.
- Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success.
- Apple is a premium brand, but Microsoft’s new campaign is trying to paint Apple as a luxury brand.
- Michael Stelzner interviewed some 900+ Internet marketers to determine how they are using social media to promote their businesses, what social media tools are more popular among marketers, how much time are they spending on social media sites and so on. You can download the full report as a PDF.
- 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page - Alison Driscoll goes in-depth with the best tools for creating amazing Facebook pages, as well as brands that have gotten it right.
- Blogger and social media specialist Meg Pickard posted an image to Flickr this week showing how many “Web 2.0″ era companies have failed to date.
Photo and printing stuff
- Danish photographer Peter Funch stakes New York City street corners out for two weeks at a time, taking pictures of passersby from the very same spot. He then uses Photoshop to composite the results into single images.
- Polar Rose Recognizes Faces in Flickr Photos. It lets users import all their photos from a Flickr account to an account on Polar Rose, where the images are then automatically assembled into groups dedicated to various individuals.
- Face Recognition Demos.
- DeepZoomPix (DZP for friends) is a service whereby users can share their pictures with others, benefitting from a number of inherent advantages. For example, users of the site can zoom in and out of pictures at will, without the need to navigate to higher resolution versions.
- Web photo retouching service Picnik just announced a new partnership with Photobucket-based Twitter photo sharing service Twitgoo on its blog.
- Pixer.us Crops and Sharpens Your Pictures – Yet Another Image Editor.
- Ever reading a blog or online news article and want to print it out, but don’t want the sidebar and other graphics to waste your ink? Enter PrintFriendly, a new site that simply lets you enter the URL of a webpage and get a printable version: just the content and inline images, in a very readable font.
- Tweetbook will let anybody take a Twitter stream and have it turned into a PDF document.
And now the most interesting news.
Mobile cameras are everywhere, but due to the thin casing of most phones, the lens sucks so much, that it is virtually impossible to make nice pics. However, Samsung is developing a new MEMS shutter that measures just 2.2 millimeters in diameter and would essentially allow camera phones to grab blur-free images even with ultra-high megapixel sensors. It could make the mobile photo market explode.
Social media stats
Every now and then I like to see how the big guys are doing. Well, they are doing pretty well.
- ComScore: Facebook is conquering Europe.
- Ning, which recently announced that more than one million social networks have been created using its service, is currently the 2nd fastest growing social networking property.
- Bebo, which we recently reported saw a one month surge of nearly 50 percent on the heels of a redesign and AIM integration, has grown 148 percent in the past year, and now reaches more than 6.1 million people in the US.
- Twitter is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565 percent. In total, it reached more than 13 million people in the US during the month - and that’s just on its website (i.e. - not counting clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop).
- Facebook continues to extend its lead over MySpace. In March, it saw 69.1 million visitors, versus 55.9 million for the News Corp-owned social networking site.
Something practical: how to simplify your Social Media Routine - Leo Babauta goes step-by-step with how you can make your use of social media more efficient and less of a time drain.
Slightly technical stuff
- Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites. Recently, Hyves launched OpenId, too.
- Windows 7 adds native Virtual WiFi technology from Microsoft Research. Once your Wi-Fi hardware supports it, Windows 7 will feature an incredible new technology capable of connecting to multiple wireless networks or, more enticingly, creating mesh networks that extend Wi-Fi endlessly.
- Six steps to a successful virtualization deployment.
- Scale-up vs. Scale-out: A Case Study by IBM using Nutch/Lucene.
- The Web Browser Address Bar is the New Command Line.
The really cool stuff
- The guys over at IDEO Labs were fortunate enough to grab a tour of WATG’s Wimberly Labs and EON Reality’s new immersive 3D room.
- Hans Veldhuizen was involved in the launch of a new music initiative: http://100000fans.com/. Check it out.
- Wolfram Alpha, the new "computational knowledge engine", has launched. The search-engine interface enables the user to use "free-form input" -- that is, natural-language queries -- to search expert-level knowledge and to compute "whatever can be computed about anything." In that sense, it’s more of a Wikipedia alternative than a threat to Google.
- Intelligent search engines are fun: see the Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs. Or even the 10 Even Better Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs… Hey Wolfram, are you self-aware?
- Yooouuutuuube Puts YouTube on LSD - This YouTube mashup tool may be one of the trippiest things you have ever seen.
- Lego waterboarding – Lego always does it for me - need I say more?
Until next time, friends,
