So this Saturday I have to have my final capstone presentation done to get my Master’s Degree in Info. Sys. Mgmt. The Saturday after that the 50-80 page paper is due. I’m going a bit nutty getting it all done. I took a StumbleUpon break and came across this… video? Let me know what you think. I like it!
Back in January, I talked about the possibility of having an iPod-esque device that would enable you to use Pandora while mobile. I called it the PandoraPod, and beleived that it would usher in a new era of profitability for Pandora, a service I’ve come to see as extremely valuable. What I like about them is the algorithm-based music recommendations that allow me to hear new and undiscovered music based on my preferences. I prefer this over “other people that liked this also liked…” because in the latter, you run into the same old stuff over and over again - the system has a tendancy to feed itself.
Today I’m happy to see that along with a very nice site redesign, Pandora has announced that you are now able to use the Pandora service through four different Sprint phones for the very reasonable price of $2.99/month. Yes, along with your Sprint data plan, you are now able to listen to an unlimited amount of new music for the price of 3 songs on iTunes. You can even get a free 30-day trial!
Especially due to the threat of raised rates for internet radio (now coming July 15), I am very glad Pandora has found a way to not only monetize its services, but increase the value of its services by going mobile.
Great job, guys, and I’;ll be happy to see this work out uite well for you. I’ve been pushing for you guys to go mobile, and I sincerely think this will singlehandedly launch Pandora to the top of the internet radio services.
It looks like the new iGoogle name for Google Personalized Homepage is starting to make a little more sense. They’ve rolled out a new feature where you can make your own Google Homepage modules - “no programming required”. Apparently you can make them publically available, or send them to certain people. In any case, this is a good step.
In the past, you could customize your homepage with publically-available knowledge that mattered to you. Now you can include private connections to other people in the same place. I like it! Unfortunately, it doesn;t seem to be available for Google Apps users yet for their Organizational homepages. I can easily see this as an easy way for companies, departments, teams, etc. to make inter-company information available to the people who need it.
Good job, big G! Even if they’re not the first in this space, it makes for a good value-add to an already-popular product.
The users of Digg have finally had enough with the false ‘management’ of front-page stories and the censorship of certain stories by Digg management. Upon posting stories naming the HD-DVD master key, several were taken down, as stories of that nature are on Digg. Users refused to give up, and began a massive flood campaign listing the key on Digg. At one point yesterday, the first five pages in the ‘technology’ section were all related to the incident, ad Digg had at least a 10+ minute downtime as the servers lost their ability to keep up with the flood.
Finally at around midnight last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose posted his own story listing the HD-DVD key and cited his post from the official Digg blog:
“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you ’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”
As of the time of this writing, the post had been digg’ed 23,800 times after its listing 10 hours, 48 minutes. The digg system is still in recovery mode.
Personally, I feel any usefulness of Digg was lost when it was discovered that certain stories are engineered by the Digg staff to make it to the top, and some are killed. While it’s fine to have a directory service, it’s not OK to describe your service as being driven by the users when there is clearly a large amount of control being placed on the system by its management.
Digg the Kevin Rose post, and make sure to let Digg and other fake “crowdsourcing” companies know that although we’re “just users”, most of us do still have some sense of what’s morally right and wrong and we’re not afraid to act on it, even if it isn’t in the best interests of a company (or site sponsor’s) marketing strategy…
eBay is rolling out a new feedback system. The trouble with buying on eBay has always been that sellers can hold your feedback hostage until you give them a good rating. eBay’s partnership with PayPal should make this automatic - PayPal sees you paid for the item, and you get positive feedback for paying for it. Instead, what mostly happens is that the seller will either not give feedback to you whatsoever, or they will demand you leave feedback first, so they can leave bad feedback in retribution if you do the same.
Feedback for buyers is important. For those who may want to sell someday, buying has been one way to establish a good reputation to the eBay community. When they’ve established themselves as reputable, they usually have no problems getting people to trust them as a seller.
This system is completely flawed. The idea of feedback is to attest to a seller’s quality of service and product. The buyer has already taken the first step of trust in paying for an item they don’t yet have, it should be their right to control the situation. Not surprisingly, it is quite difficult to build up enough feedback as a buyer so you’ll be trusted as a seller, and this may account for the dominant sellers on eBay who are able to hide frequent bad feedback either by the intimidation listed above or simply by drowning the bad feedback with a flood of positive feedback from small transactions.
eBay is hoping to address some of these issues with the introduction of a Detailed Seller Rating. It doesn’t fix the situation of sellers intimidating buyers into good feedback, but it does provide buyers with a way to leave more detailed feedback that might not be so unilaterally damaging as a whole to the seller.
From eBay:
We have made a number of significant changes to the current Feedback system, specifically to the Leave Feedback flow and Feedback Profile page, in order to increase transparency, improve a buyer’s ability to accurately rate a transaction, and enable our best sellers to differentiate from others.
Detailed Seller Ratings add a new dimension to eBay’s premier online reputation system, allowing buyers to rate transactions based on item description, communication, shipping time, and shipping & handling charges.
In addition to the current positive, negative or neutral comment, buyers rate the sellers on these specific transaction aspects based on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest rating. The average of all ratings is displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page.
Additionally, the transaction’s item title and price will be visible below the Feedback comment on the Feedback Profile page for 90 days after the Feedback comment is left.
New header: We changed the page name from Member Profile to Feedback Profile to more accurately describe the page’s function. An updated Header enables members to easily find the most important information about the member, while providing important links to Contact Member, Items for Sale, and the member’s Store.
Detailed Seller Ratings module: We added a new module that provides the average of each Detailed Sellers Rating left by buyers for the seller in the past 12 months. A seller must have at least 10 Detailed Seller Ratings to have an average displayed. In addition to the average, we display the total number of ratings left for each Detailed Seller Rating in the past 12 months.
New tab names and order: We changed the tab names to more accurately describe the underlying Feedback comments associated with the tab. We also changed the order of the tabs, placing the “Feedback as a Seller” tab first because data showed that the majority of people viewing the Feedback Profile page are looking for information on seller performance.
Item title and price: We added the item title and item price to the new Feedback Profile page, just below the Feedback comment and User ID. This information will remain available for 90 days
90-day separator: We added a separator within the Feedback Comments area to explain that items below the separator do not have the item title and item price since the Feedback comment is more than 90 days old.
The price listing is something I like, but most of it (except for the new feedback module) is just a page re-design.
In the end, I think it’s the right idea, but eBay still has a long way to go towards providing a fair and comfortable environment to buyers on the site. Whether or not they are interested in doing so may be a different matter, as sellers are the ones that eBay profits from. It seems that because of this, sellers may always have the upper hand in eBay transactions, which doesn’t seem fair.
I just can’t help but wonder how far it would go for them to make the tranactions a little more even for all parties. After all, sellers would be plenty happy to have a greater number of happy eBay buyers to sell their products to.
I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this on any of my feeds. It seems like once again the RIAA has done its thing once again, except this time to eradicate internet-based radio. Keep in mind that the extreme rate hikes they’re implementing apply only to internet radio; five times higher than sattellite, and nothing for terrestrial.
I can’t even describe how ridiculous this is to the future of the entire music industry, so I’ll let the long history of educated posts at Techdirt do it for me. Here’s a link to Pandora’s founder on the subject, please digg it up on your way over if you’d like to see a level playing field in this industry. Completely ridiculous - I can’t stand industrial dirtbags putting an extinct business model over fairness, and these guys are reigning kings of that genre.
I’m in charge of purchasing for a large organization, and if you take a walk around any of our facilities, you won’t be able to find one Sony product. Not a CD-R, not an A/V cable, absolutely nothing. The same goes for my This list also holds the oil companies (to as great a degree as I can manage), but that’s a whole other story.
Welcome to #3, RIAA. Be ashamed.
In the meantime, those artists who have sold their souls to RIAA for a monetary profit canjoin the shame party. For everyone else, go ahead and fire up RIAA Radar to make sure you’re not responsible for funding this type of thing. In fact, RIAA Radar just found a new home in my blogroll.
(I’d like to note here that I really am a well-meaning, good-natured guy, but stuff like this really rubs me the wrong way, especially because I know what it’s like to work hard, get something going, and have someone kill it because they’re too lazy to compete at a higher level. [many stories, multiple times...])
Apparently the biggest hit at South-by-Southwest yesterday is the announcement of a new music service like Pandora and Last.fm called Slacker centered around a device very close to what I described in the PandoraPod post I did about two months earlier.
I still believe the concept will be the next big thing, and a potential iPod killer, and apparently BoingBoing, TechDirt and others are starting to believe in it as well. Too bad I have to have a job, I wish I could work on a ubiquitous internet-connected device like the PandoraPod, but with the ability to connect to any of these services.
This brings up a good point. Ideas are cheap, that’s for sure, but what’s a guy to do when he’s got a dozen ideas but also a load of responsibility to be a provider for his household? It’s not too late for me to be an internet/technology revolutionary (I don’t have kids to take care of yet), so what to do?
I’ve started learning Ruby/Rails with a lot of help from Andrew at Teabass (check him out) and the NW Chicago Ruby Users Group. I’ve even lowered my grad class load this semester to get more time to work on learning how to do Rails development. I think that will cover the web-applications side of things, but I’ve been coming up with more and more hardware. Short of flying to Malaysia and asking people at the airport where to go, how does one get a handheld device prototype / production model created? I’m pretty anxious to work on the next generation of product, such as the PandoraPod or my WiMax/Skype RAZR phone. Any ideas?
Anyway, it really is great to have some validation that yes, maybe I am tuned in properly to the way things are going, but in addition to my side project to try and get hired by Google as a future applications visioneer, where do I go from here? Anyone have some good advice?
Here in Chicago, there are magnetic sensors in the interstates surrounding the Chicagoland area. I saw a special on TV once showing the central system, it was pretty cool. The sensors report in to a central machine, and update a display every 2 seconds or so to show traffic flow. By knowing how many vehicles travel through a given set of checkpoints over a given amount of time, they can estimate average speed, and assume that slow traffic (like 30 mph) means a traffic jam.
Originally meant for emergency crews, this information has been used to give real-time traffic reports to the public. The best site I’ve seen that uses this info (at least in Chicago) is the one over at gcmtravel.com. I like it, because not only are you able to look up traffic conditions, but you can look up historical traffic statistics. This doesn;t sound like much, until you realize that if you look at the data, you can save (and I do) over 15-20 minutes in the car by shifting your departure time as little as 5 minutes. This is accomplished by timing your travel so you’re not in the congested sections of highway when they traditionally have problems.
The problem in the past has been that I’ve had to look up directions, then go look up traffic. Not anymore! Google maps now offers the same color-coded type of traffic information that I’m used to, and it looks like it’s a great value-add for the Maps service.
Suggestions:
All in all, great job, maps team. Yet another example of the success of a value-added feature that rivals the value of an entirely new service, all while leveraging an existing product/user base.
CC photo by Douglas - westbound
Back on January 24, I commented on the new interface of Google Image Search, and how it was more difficult to use for what I (and apperently, many others) use it for. Google has heard the comments, and has returned Google Image Search back to the original format.
A big thanks to the Image Search crew over at Big G for listening to the user community! That’s something that still can’t be taken for granted, and it’s nice to see that responsiveness.
I still can’t help but wonder why they just don’t give the user the option of having the display they prefer. They’ve got the design for both…offer both? I prefer the old one, but I’m sure some people like the “clean” look.
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