|  |  |  | | | | | Mashable! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Nokia’s new Lumia 800 looks fantastic — easily one of the most impressive Windows Phone devices — yet the Finnish company remains mum on its plans to bring it to the U.S. market, aside from a few cryptic statements alluding to plans to “introduce a portfolio of products in early 2012.” This is a big problem, not just for Nokia, but for Windows Phone as a platform. I get it. Nokia sees Europe as a more important market than the United States. In fact, research firm Strategy Analytics predicted that the partnership with Nokia could help Microsoft double its smartphone market share in Western Europe in 2012. Nokia has long fallen out of favor in North America, but in Europe, the brand still has strength. Leveraging European strength certainly makes sense, but does that require ignoring America? From my perspective, it appears as if Nokia thinks that success in Europe and success in the U.S. cannot co-exist. Perhaps it’s my North American bias speaking, but I think success can take place in both markets.
It's Like the N9...But Not
The Lumia 800 is nearly identical in appearance to the N9, Nokia's first -- and last -- MeeGo handset. Like the N9, it sports a beautiful polycarbonate body with a curved glass screen, a rear camera with LED flash and edges that feel great in the hand. Click here to view this gallery.
Nokia Needs to Emulate Motorola
Despite once being a market leader in the U.S., Nokia fell out of favor with carriers and users as it started to transition into the smartphone market. In the pre-smartphone days, Nokia devices were popular, well-designed and ubiquitous. After 2005 or so, that stopped being true. Of course, Nokia isn’t the only company that struggled with the transition from cellphone to smartphone. Motorola Mobility went from making the most popular non-smartphone of all time (the original Razr), to fighting for its life. What did Motorola do? It signed a big contract with Verizon in the U.S., partnered with Google on Android and crashed onto the scene with the splashy Droid Does campaign. Motorola, as a result, catapulted back into the spotlight and was instantly recognized as a provider of high-end smartphones. It helped kickstart widespread adoption of Android across the world. The Nokia Lumia 800 could be the device to really give Windows Phone a face and a chance at eclipsing BlackBerry as the number three smartphone platform, but it needs to be available throughout the world — and that includes America.
The Waiting Game Doesn’t Work
When Nokia says that it is planning on bringing a “portfolio of products” to the U.S. in early 2012, that could mean January or that could mean March. Make no mistake, the longer Nokia waits, the slimmer the chances are that the phone will find success in the U.S. To use Motorola as an example again, the company’s eagerly anticipated Droid Bionic was supposed to hit the streets this spring. Eight months after appearing at CES, it finally did. It’s still a solid device — and a great 4G LTE handset — but the momentum built up around the phone had already disappeared. Moreover, the competitive landscape had increased, with Motorola facing competition from a fleet of new devices that appeared months after the Bionic was supposed to make its debut. Motorola and Verizon have essentially made the device obsolete themselves, with the announcement of the Droid Razr. Nokia can’t make the same mistake with the Lumia 800. Already users are complaining about the lack of a front-facing camera and its ability to “only” record 720p video. Other Windows Phone Mango devices from LG and HTC have faster processors. The longer Nokia waits to make a big global splash with the Lumia 800, the more it risks losing a chance to sway the markets.
In the U.S., Carriers Matter
Microsoft has struggled to get widespread carrier support in the U.S. Walk into a T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon or Sprint store and you’ll see Windows Phone devices, but oftentimes, these devices aren’t promoted as well with signage, placement or employee training as handsets running Android or iOS. This is a problem in the U.S., where the carriers matter just as much as the phones themselves. Yes, the rare device can make or break a network, but carriers can also make or break a platform. From a device-maker perspective, Apple, Motorola and RIM are at an advantage in that they support one platform. That makes the branding easy. Even before Google announced its intentions to acquire Motorola Mobility, Moto was synonymous with Android. This is where Nokia could have a big opportunity in the U.S. Not only does Nokia finally have a hardware/software combination that can appeal to U.S. smartphone consumers, it can put its marketing muscle behind promoting Windows Phone as a platform.
Making It Happen
In February, I argued that Microsoft was Nokia’s last best hope for reversing course. At the same time, I cautioned that “execution is essential” and said “the longer it takes for the first Nokia-branded Windows Phone to hit stores, the lower the chances for success it will have.” Eight months later, Nokia is about to release its first Windows Phone. Now it just needs to make the big push to the U.S. More About: Lumia 800, Nokia, op-ed, Opinion, Windows Phone Mango For more Mobile coverage: 
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Rohit Bhargava is SVP of global digital strategy at Ogilvy, an award-winning marketing blogger and the best-selling author of Personality Not Included, a book about creating a more human brand. His is currently writing his second book called Likeonomics on how to be more believable. When an irate traveler tweeted about how he had arrived late to The Four Seasons in Palo Alto and been "bumped" to an inferior room, the hotel saw it immediately and responded, promising to make it up to him. Turns out, the customer spends about 60 nights a year in Palo Alto for work, and promised in his next tweet to spend many of those nights at The Four Seasons. The brand has had several similar stories posted online by delighted customers, and they are exactly the kind of successes that justify the investment in social media for customer service (which, in turn, drives sales). Oct. 27 was the first day of the Social Media for Customer Care Summit in New York, a gathering of some of the largest brands in the world focused on how social service can be leveraged more effectively. Nearly every brand was struggling with the same three big questions, which became discussion topics and hashtags in their own right: - How can customer care better integrate with other functions across a company, like marketing? #integration
- How can an organization take the efforts of one or two pioneering individuals and employ it brand-wide? #scaling
- How can social media be used to mitigate negative posts or a brand crisis? #crisis
Throughout the day, there were many strong ideas and lessons offered on these topic. Here are just a few of the highlights.
#Integration
 1. Don’t allow any one team to own social media. (KLM) In April 2010, Dutch airline KLM was thrown into the jaws of social media head first thanks to the Icelandic ash cloud that covered Europe and grounded flights across the continent for nearly a week. Moving quickly, KLM earned credit by creating a rebooking tool for Facebook within 24 hours and created a “multi-functional” team across customer service, marketing, PR and operations. For the world’s largest airline, this forced integration was just what they needed to build a highly sophisticated view that social media belongs belongs everywhere across the company. When they recently launched 24/7 support on Twitter and Facebook, they did it through a highly engaging "Live Replies" campaign in which they responded to tweets with a small army of staff in an airplane hanger holding up signs. 2. Go through the experience to really get it. (Telus) Canadian telecom brand Telus shared an important lesson about walking in someone else’s shoes. For them, it meant bringing executives into the real "down and dirty" conversations that customers were having with service reps on social media channels. As Carol Borghesi, senior vice president of the brand’s Customer First initiative candidly shared, Telus was rated high on the Canadian list of companies with the "worst customer service." Social media is a key component of how they plan to be the first telecom in Canada to make it off that notorious list. 3. Help your customer service people feel like rock stars. (Zappos) Of course, no conference about customer service would be complete without a great Zappos story, and Scott Klein and Marlene Kanagusuku from its customer loyalty team certainly delivered. A key thread in their presentation was how every employee is required to take four weeks of customer service training, and they are planning to cash in for the holiday season by bringing everyone from across the company in to man the phones and work with customers directly during that busiest time.
#Scaling
 4. Get top-level buy-in through stories and data. (Citi) Frank Eliason became something of a rock star within the world of social customer care thanks to his work founding the @comcastcares Twitter account and helping to change that brand’s corporate culture. Now he's got a unique point of view on how and why social media for customer service is a failure, and how brands can fix it. One of his main points was that you need to combine data with real powerful stories in order to actually make a change. As he shared, "I've never met a CEO who wanted to create a bad customer experience." Amen. 5. Find your ROI formula to justify your own existence. (Xbox) Everyone has his own secret strategy for how to answer the big ROI question. But McKenzie Eakin, LIVE community programs manager for Xbox pulled back the curtain on her relatively simple formula: Unique customers engaged with Xbox on Twitter x The percent of people who say they would have called instead of tweeting x Average cost per call = $$ saved in call center costs. It's not a perfect methodology, but it’s all about finding the right lens through which to view data your company cares about. 6. Consider and leverage employees’ personal passions. (Best Buy) No discussion of scaling a social media for customer service effort would be complete without delving into the amazing work of Best Buy and its Twelpforce. All 180,000 of their employees are encouraged to use social media tools (a staggering number) and they have many training programs and content creation initiatives (like an in-house production studio). One important key — they let employees share their personal passions for technology and intersect those with their jobs. More companies should find a way to do this.
#Crisis
 7. Don’t freak out. (Four Seasons) Earlier in the post, I started with a great customer service example from The Four Seasons hotels. While this tip itself was not something that Andrew Gillespie, Four Seasons's manager of guest services, shared from the stage, it was an important reminder. Not every piece of negativity from a customer is bad news. Many times, it’s an opportunity to confound expectations, deliver something unexpected and completely turn that experience around. 8. Respond with empathy, but defend your brand. (Comcast) Kip Wetzel didn't have an easy job when he became the new voice of the @comcastcares Twitter handle. At the conference, he talked about striking the right tone, how a human quality like empathy can be translated into 140 characters, and how engaging on social media doesn't mean you need to let go of defending your brand. Be real and genuine and detailed, but also share the truth. 9. Don’t feed the trolls. (Samsung) In one of the final sessions of the day, Carla Saavedra from Samsung shared the important reminder that not everyone is worth engaging online. Some people are looking to pick a fight, get free stuff, or just get some attention on Twitter. Ignore those trolls and have a real strategic or customer-centric reason for responding to content online. This relates closely to the scaling topic because you can't scale without prioritizing your responses. More About: branding, contributor, customer service, features, Social Media, social media marketing, Twitter For more Business coverage: 
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Facebook is releasing a new method for accessing your account when you lose your password: a little help from “trusted friends.” The social network says it is testing a new tool in the coming weeks that will let you designate three to five friends you trust. If you forget your password or can’t access your email, Facebook will send your friends a code that they can pass along to you. We’ve probably all been there: You forget your password and have to go through the “Forget your password?” process of waiting for a new one to arrive by email. Or, if we use Facebook’s comparison, you lock yourself out of your house — and now can go to a friend who has a spare key. Your spare key for Facebook is the code. The new system doesn’t actually seem much more efficient than the usual route if you’ve simply forgotten your password, but if for instance your account has been hacked and you’ve been locked out of your email, this is a new solution. It adds a new layer of security (the feature was announced for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month) too, since your friends can verify your identity more easily than any automated email. Security firm Sophos points out, though, that a hacker could also remove or change your trusted friends settings and render the feature useless. To set up “trusted friends,” go to your Security Settings Page (Account > Account Settings > Security), and click on the Trusted Friends section. From there, you can scroll through your friends and choose up to five. (You may not have access to this just yet — this section doesn’t appear in my settings.) SEE ALSO: Facebook Privacy: 10 Settings Every User Needs to Know Facebook offers similar, lesser-known security tools as well, like being able to log out of your account remotely and receive a temporary password for accessing public computers. The social network also announced this week a new option to use different passwords for third-party apps. To set this up, go to Account Settings, and in the Security tab, go to the App Passwords section. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, malerapaso More About: Facebook, security 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Google TV had such potential when it launched in October 2010. But for many users, the lack of Hulu — along with the awkwardness of the interface and lack of cooperation from TV networks and content providers — was a huge turnoff. Now Google aims to fix that with a massive overhaul, upgrading Google TV with its Android operating system. Google announced on its Google TV blog Friday that the platform will be upgraded to Android 3.1 (otherwise known as Honeycomb) for Sony devices Sunday, with the Logitech Revue set-top box getting its upgrade “soon thereafter.” What will you get with this software upgrade to Android? Google says it’s “much simpler.” Its customization capabilities will go a long way toward alleviating the awkwardness of its first iteration, which Google itself admits was “not perfect.” And the addition of the Android Market will open up a variety of applications, with the promise of more — perhaps thousands more — on the way. One welcome improvement will be an easier ability to search across all the TV shows at your disposal. With this update, Google’s trying to answer that age-old question, “What’s on?” If Google can pull that off, it could be a powerful thing indeed. The company says it has learned from its mistakes with the first version of Google TV and is “committed to find the best way to discover and engage with the high-quality entertainment on your television.” So does that mean Google TV will be able to find all the shows from whichever cable or satellite provider you’re subscribing to, or from the web via all of the apps within Google TV, such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and HBO Go? Maybe. Of course, Google plans to improve Google TV’s search across YouTube, its own video streaming service. In the blog post, Google also hinted at future software updates (Ice Cream Sandwich, anyone?) and new devices “on new chipsets from multiple hardware partners.” Hey, this is getting interesting. We’ll have to reserve judgment until we can install this software update on our Logitech Revue box, but for now, clearly this update has great potential. It makes perfect sense for Google — purveyor of Android, the Chrome browser, YouTube and by the way, the world’s search expert — to leverage these powerful capabilities in its TV set-top. The hurdle Google needs to navigate is not so much a technical or software one, but a matter of negotiating and arm-twisting of content providers. Will the company gain cooperation from TV networks and movie studios, allowing their content to be searchable on the Google TV platform? That’s the key to Google TV’s success.
Android Market
The Android Market, a familiar sight for smartphone users, is coming to Google TV. Click here to view this gallery. More About: android, google tv, honeycomb 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Google TV had such potential when it launched in October of last year. But for many users, the lack of Hulu – along with the awkwardness of the interface and lack of cooperation from TV networks and content providers — was a huge turnoff. Now Google aims to fix that with a massive overhaul, upgrading Google TV with its Android operating system. Google announced on its Google TV blog Friday that the platform will be upgraded to Android 3.1 (otherwise known as Honeycomb) for Sony devices early next week, with the Logitech Revue set-top box getting its upgrade “soon thereafter.” What will you get with this software upgrade to Android? Google says it’s “much simpler.” Its customization capabilities will go a long way toward alleviating the awkwardness of its first iteration, which Google itself admits was “not perfect.” And the addition of the Android Market will open up a variety of applications, with the promise of more — perhaps thousands more — on the way. One welcome improvement will be an easier ability to search across all the TV shows at your disposal. With this update, Google’s trying to answer that age-old question, “What’s on?” If Google can pull that off, it could be a powerful thing indeed. The company says it has learned from its mistakes with the first version of Google TV and is “committed to find the best way to discover and engage with the high-quality entertainment on your television.” So does that mean Google TV will be able to find all the shows from whichever cable or satellite provider you’re subscribing to, or from the web via all of the apps within Google TV, such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and HBO Go? Maybe. Of course, Google plans to improve Google TV’s search across YouTube, its own video streaming service. In the blog post, Google also hinted at future software updates (Ice Cream Sandwich, anyone?) and new devices “on new chipsets from multiple hardware partners.” Hey, this is getting interesting. We’ll have to reserve judgment until we can install this software update on our Logitech Revue box, but for now, clearly this update has great potential. It makes perfect sense for Google — purveyor of Android, the Chrome browser, YouTube and by the way, the world’s search expert — to leverage these powerful capabilities in its TV set-top. The hurdle Google needs to navigate is not so much a technical or software one, but a matter of negotiating and arm-twisting of content providers. Will the company gain cooperation from TV networks and movie studios, allowing their content to be searchable on the Google TV platform? That’s the key to Google TV’s success.
Android Market
The Android Market, a familiar sight for smartphone users, is coming to Google TV. Click here to view this gallery. More About: android, google tv, honeycomb 
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Warner Bros., one of the world’s major film studios, will not be providing Blockbuster with DVDs for rentals. The decision came after Blockbuster went day-and-date with some Warner Bros. titles without the studio’s permission. Right now there is a 28-day industry standard between the date that DVD’s go on sale and the date they are available to rent. Blockbuster has been pushing against this 28-day window as a way to beat streaming rental services and establish itself as a go-to for early rentals. Movie studios, however, are not taking so kindly to Blockbuster’s business move, with Warner Bros. the first to crack the whip. Tensions flared when Blockbuster put up rentals of Horrible Bosses and The Green Lantern earlier than the 28-day window without Warner Bros.’s permission, reported Josh Halliday at the Guardian. Blockbuster will fight back by simply buying Warner Bros. movies when they come out and placing them for rent. This is obviously a risky strategy considering the rental chain is used to getting films at wholesale. And it certainly won’t put Blockbuster in the studio’s good graces. "They felt it was important to continue to offer day-and-date rental so rather than work with us they went around us," Warner Bros. Home Entertainment President Kevin Tsujihara told the Financial Times. Oddly enough, both Blockbuster and Warner Bros. are partners in UltraViolet, a new streaming service backed by a coalition of Hollywood and industry organizations. Warner Bros., like most studios, is at risk of losing even more sales to piracy and streaming services such as Netflix and Redbox. The 28-day window provides a stop-gap where DVD sales are relatively protected. Warner Bros. and other studios are rumored to be trying to push that window even longer to generate more sales. SEE ALSO: Timeline: How Netflix Lost Two-Thirds of Its Value in 3 Months Is Blockbuster’s power move smart business? Is Blockbuster trying to provide for its customers or save its own skin? Sound off in the comments. Image courtesy of Flickr, Gage Skidmore 
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We’ve seen this deal from grocery stores and apparel retailers — but a buy two get one free tablet deal? BlackBerry is now offering business customers a free PlayBook tablet computer with every two purchased, in a new marketing plan running through Dec. 31. The company is likely trying to increase its share of the business user market with the deal, as few individuals purchase multiple tablets for personal use. But, dare we say, giving away a third tablet seems like the company’s gotten a bit desperate to spread the device. SEE ALSO: BlackBerry PlayBook Enters the Tablet Race [REVIEW] Each purchase will also come with a premium accessory, such as a leather sleeve, charging pod or high-speed cable. The 16GB PlayBook starts at $499. The deal applies to the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models, although all three must be the same storage configuration. What do you think of this deal? Does it reflect badly on the future on BlackBerry tablets or will it help spread the RIM device? Let us know in the comments.
BONUS: The 10 Most Influential Tablets on the Market
Manufacturer: Apple, Inc. OS / Version: iOS 4 Screen Size: 9.7 inches Screen Resolution: 1024 x 768 Processor Type / Speed: Apple A5 / 1.0 GHz Storage: 16, 32, 64 GB Click here to view this gallery. More About: blackberry, Mobile, RIM, tablets 
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J. P. Gownder is vice president and research director at Forrester Research, where he leads a team that serves consumer product strategy professionals. You can follow him on Twitter at @jgownder and read his blog or his team's blog. Between 2006 and 2010, American brand loyalty has declined sharply. During that same time span, fewer consumers self-reported that "owning the best brand is important to me." Why did this happen? One glaring reason was that the recession diverted priorities, particularly among the jobless, away from brand names and toward lower prices. Brand loyalty (the propensity to repurchase a brand) isn't merely an elite or expensive proposition. Economic instability can actually promote brand loyalty for lower price bands. (The Wal-Mart brand name was built on the promise of low prices, as was Payless shoes and 99-cent stores.) There's more to the story than the recession alone.
Technology Erodes Brand Loyalty
Beyond economic conditions, there's an even bigger culprit affecting the decline in brand loyalty. Rapid innovations in consumer technology have provided buyers with new tools for discovering, comparing, evaluating, choosing and experiencing brands. Smartphone app ShopSavvy literally expands buyers' choices on the spot and offers alternative products (along with peer reviews and location-tagged alternative stores nearby). Amazon's customers have increasingly become loyal to the channel – Amazon – rather than to the products within. Finally, comparison shopping sites like Bizrate, Google Products or Expedia offer shoppers both product and channel comparisons, increasing the likelihood shoppers will find a new brand or a better deal to entice them away. Armed with these technologies, customers are becoming increasingly brand agnostic. Furthermore, statistical analysis shows that the more technology-optimistic a consumer is, the less loyal she becomes. Technology optimists – consumers who value and report using technology – tend to be higher-income, quicker adopters of new technology products (smartphones), new technology channels (iPad shopping apps) and new technology promotions (Groupon). Because technology optimists like to have the latest and greatest, they’re more likely to switch to new brands because of their high expectations and strong desire to be on the leading edge. This effect has only increased over time. The correlation between technology optimism and lower brand loyalty grew more pronounced over the past five years, according to a quantitative study conducted by my company. Nearly every company is seeing its best, most digitally fluent customers become less attached to the brand names they've nonetheless bought before.
Digital Product Experiences Can Reestablish Brand Loyalty
If technology optimists are abandoning their brand loyalty, what can companies do about it? The answer is to empower consumers with digital technologies that reinforce a brand, rather than erode it. Let's take a hypothetical example. Imagine that executives at The Gap want to use digital technology to reinforce brand loyalty. They could do this by building a digital product experience that links together: - Brand. The Gap could link up with a media brand, such as Lifetime’s Project Runway, to co-brand a digital experience, perhaps a design contest partnership.
- Simulation. The Gap could choose to offer this Project Runway experience in the form of a game. The brand could leverage a platform such as Xbox Live with Xbox Kinect, empowering a group of friends to compete with one another in a contest to design (for example) its fall fashion wardrobes. But the game would allow consumers to engage in real clothing design (because mass customization is the future of products). Each contestant designs his or her own outfits, based on configurable clothing from Gap.
- Product. Ultimately, Project Runway fans who participate in their own gamified simulation don’t just want a game — they want to receive real clothes. Mass customization would allow Gap and its partners to sell actual clothing tailored to each buyer. Customers could plausibly buy any design that contestants concocted during the game — presumably with a bias toward the winning outfit.
Companies Should Think – And Staff – Differently
Executing on a digital product experience is hard. It requires new partnerships (like Lifetime), new technologies (like mass customization) and new platforms (like Xbox). Yet executives at companies like The Gap should see that a failure to construct those digital product experiences makes them more vulnerable to the declining brand loyalty facing every consumer company today. If there's a single move executives in all industries can make to jump-start their digital product strategy, it's hiring employees who understand digital in a deeper way. “We have an iPad guru" is a common refrain we hear from companies today. It's a start, but the number and richness of computing devices is constantly expanding. Hire talent that can spot the best digital product opportunities across a wide range of devices (game consoles, smartphones, tablets, ereaders, connected TVs, Blu-ray players, etc.). These devices are flooding the market; your product/service needs to as well. See the connection? Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PeterPhoto More About: brand management, Business, contributor, features, Marketing For more Business coverage: 
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Nokia‘s share of the global handset market fell 5% in the third quarter compared to the same period a year ago. However, Nokia still owns the largest portion of the market, having shipped 106.6 million mobile phones — or 27.3% of all mobile phones sent to vendors — in the last quarter, according to estimates from Boston-based research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics. The Finnish manufacturer unveiled a number of new devices in London earlier this week, including two Windows Phone devices and four Symbian smartphones, pictured in the gallery below. According to the same estimates, Samsung shipped 88 million units in the third quarter, compared to 71.4 million units in the period last year. The company is now in possession of 22.6% of the global handset vendor market, up from 20.9% a year ago. LG, ZTE and Apple rounded out the top five with 5.4%, 4.7% and 4.4% of the market, respectively. LG’s share declined by 3% and ZTE’s grew by 0.6%. Apple’s growth was marginal at 0.3%, despite triple-digit sales increases in the Asia-Pacific region. Collectively, 390 million handsets were shipped in Q3 2011, up 14% from the same period in 2010.
Nokia Lumia 800
Click here to view this gallery. More About: apple, LG, Mobile, Nokia, samsung, zte 
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says entrepreneurs can’t be afraid to move fast on enormous opportunities, even when mistakes are made. At the f.ounders conference in Dublin, Hastings openly discussed the controversies that have erupted at Netflix since its decision to raise prices. He explained that like him, many people will make mistakes and have to apologize if the goal is to move fast and seize opportunities. “You have to keep trying,” Hastings told a small audience of prominent startup founders. “You can’t be afraid to make mistakes. Every entrepreneur is about creating change.” Hastings explained the world is moving towards faster Internet connections and mobile devices — pointing out 5 billion people are active mobile phone users — and that Netflix has to be positioned to seize the opportunities these changes represent. That means moving fast, making mistakes and focusing on the digital side of the business, rather than the still-lucrative DVD arm of the company. Hastings hopes that, as more people gain smartphones and broadband connections, they will become Netflix subscribers. It’s important to note Hastings isn’t thinking about Netflix’s growth in terms of months or years, but “the next two decades.” “We have to go country by country and build a subscriber base,” Hastings told the audience. The next step towards Netflix’s international expansion starts early next year with the launch of Netflix in the UK and Ireland. Hastings also told the audience of entrepreneurs that honesty, simplicity and culture are fundamental to building a great business, even at scale. He thinks of his marriage counselor as a CEO mentor because his counselor taught him to “confront dishonesty and superficiality.” This helped him get his marriage and his life back on track and make Netflix a more honest company. Those values were put on public display in 2009, when Netflix released an internal presentation that discussed its philosophy on management and culture. The unusually honest presentation explains that Netflix is a team, not a family, and that the company doesn’t care how many hours its employees are at the office — as long long as they perform.
BONUS: Ireland Rolls Out the Red Carpet for Tech's Elite
Kicking It Off With a Panel
f.ounders, an intimate conference for 150 of the world's most prominent technology and startup founders, kicked off the first night with drinks, appetizers and a panel that included Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Angry Birds co-founder Mikael Hed. Click here to view this gallery. More About: f.ounders, netflix, reed hastings For more Business coverage: 
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The first photos of Motorola’s next big Android 4G LTE release, the Droid4, have surfaced, just one day after the handset manufacturer’s super-thin, super-light, 4G-sporting Motorola Droid Razr went on sale at Verizon. The biggest difference between the Droid Razr and the Droid4 is the slideout QWERTY keyboard. According to Droid Life, which obtained the images, the Droid4 also boasts a 4-inch Super AMOLED Advanced screen, a non-removable battery and two cameras, one of which (presumably an 8-megapixel) is capable of recording 1080p video. The device runs Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread). The dimensions and processor have not yet been identified, although we can expect the former to be thicker than the Droid Razr, and the processor to be at least as good as the 1.2 GHz dual-core processor that the Droid Razr uses.
The Droid4 features a five-row, "illuminated" slideout keyboard. Click here to view this gallery. More About: android, droid4, ice cream sandwich, Motorola 
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The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software and tools for lead generation tools.
 Apart from restaurants, there are few businesses whose fates are linked as closely to online reviews as hotels. That’s why Accorhotels’ move in late 2010 is considered so bold.
Last September, the hotel chain began featuring reviews from TripAdvisor on some of its sites. Since Accorhotels has no control of the TripAdvisor content, it’s a bit like posting every review of your restaurant — not just the favorable ones — in your window. “There’s no question TripAdvisor plays hugely in this space,” says Melissa Parrish, an interactive marketing analyst at Forrester Research who covers the travel industry. “They make or break certain kinds of hotels.” But the hotel chain, which runs Motel 6 and Sofitel among others, was merely acknowledging the obvious: Consumers no longer get all their information about your establishment from your marketing materials. In addition to TripAdvisor, there are blogs and sites like Kayak that aggregate reviews. People thinking of trying out a hotel can also canvas their friends on Facebook or the multitudes on Twitter. Parrish says the savviest players in the segment have figured out a way to control some of that social media chatter by using social media as a sounding board for positive experiences. A few of the noteworthy approaches are outlined below.
Harnessing Social Media Comments
 Carnival benefits from a curious phenomenon specific to the travel industry — “social media bragging.” Jordan Corredera, director and general manager of Carnival Online, says that even people who never go on social media will do so when they’re on vacation, if only to rub their friends’ noses in it. That’s not the only time they go on, though. Many consumers like to hit the site before their trip to psyche themselves up for it. Typical of this sort of interaction is this comment from Carnival fan Jessica Ayala: “I cannot wait until October 29 on the Carnival Dreams.” Carnival’s primary hub for this kind of social media activity is its Facebook Page, which at present has about 1.2 million fans. (For comparison’s sake, Disney Cruise Lines has about 600,000 fans.) Like other brands that run successful Facebook Pages, Carnival asks a lot of open-ended questions about pleasant topics. For instance, a recent status update that asked, “Carnival sails all over the place, but there must be a destination that's your favorite. Which port would you recommend to a friend? Why?” got 479 likes and more than 700 comments. “We’re a very social brand,” says Corredera. “Given the experiential nature of a carnival cruise, the best way to deliver that is through the comments of Carnival customers.” Carnival uses other social media channels, like Twitter and YouTube, of course, but everything goes back to Facebook. The company’s ads are tagged with a plea to visit its Facebook Page and videos that show up on the company’s YouTube channel premiere on Facebook first.
An International Approach
 Not surprisingly, many brands in the travel category have footprints all over the world. Since many areas around the world lag in social media adoption, global travel brands can circumvent that challenge. Four Seasons’ approach has been to establish a social media presence for all its far-flung locales. For instance, there is a primary Twitter feed for Four Seasons’ global brand, but the brand’s Twitter page includes a URL that lays out dozens of feeds from around the world. Creating that kind of presence isn’t easy, says Felicia Yukich, manager of social media marketing. “It means training people in Cairo how to tweet and teaching people in Bangkok how to post something on Facebook,” she says. All that work pays off in the sense that it provides armchair travelers with a quick portal into exotic Four Seasons outposts. For example, are you curious what the Four Seasons in Beirut is like? The Twitter feed for that hotel includes a stream of photos, including the one above.
Embracing Users’ Comments
Customer reviews are a cornerstone of online retail sites like Amazon, but travel brands have been more hesitant to embrace online reviews. There’s nothing nefarious about this — who hasn’t been dissuaded from staying at a hotel or B&B because of one stinging review that, for all you know, could have been written by the proprietor’s chief competitor? Why do bad reviews carry more weight for a travel brand? Think about it: If you order a product and it doesn’t live up to the hype, you can always send it back. But book the weekend at the wrong hotel and you’ve ruined a one-time experience. Why take the chance on a place that’s been reviewed badly, even if most of the reviews are good? Nevertheless, Dennis Schaal, North America editor for travel news publication Tnooz, says many hotels have accepted the reality that users are going to check out TripAdvisor, and seeing a TripAdvisor widget on a hotel website is no longer unusual. Schaal says the inclusion of the widget demonstrates confidence. “If you’re a lousy hotel, chances are you wouldn’t want to put your reviews on there,” he says. Seasoned travelers know that reviews on the site should be taken with a grain of salt anyway, he says. “Some of the reviews are fake, but if you disregard the over-the-top favorable ones and the really bad ones and look in the middle, you should get a good idea.”
Series supported by HubSpot
 The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software and tools for lead generation tools. More About: Digital Marketing Series, features, mashable, Social Media, social media marketing, travel For more Business coverage: 
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Despite the alleged intentions of its board, as well as rumored interest from Google and Microsoft, among others, momentum for a potential acquisition of Yahoo has stalled. But why? The company’s sale has been thwarted by its “lack of strategy” and “restrictive confidentiality agreement,” unnamed sources told Reuters. Yahoo’s board is reportedly divided about whether the company should be sold as a whole, in pieces or not at all. On the buyer side, a nondisclosure agreement attached to financial documents Yahoo began circulating two weeks ago has delayed, and in some cases fully prevented, potential buyers from grouping together to make a bid. Among those still interested in Yahoo, according to Reuters’s sources: Google, Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba (which already has a 40% stake), Russian investment firm DST Global, and a handful of private U.S. investment firms, including Silver Lake, TPG Capital, Bain Capital, Blackstone, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Providence Equity Partners, Hellman & Friedman and Carlyle Group. Image courtesy of Flickr, eirikref More About: AliBaba, Google, microsoft, Yahoo For more Business coverage: 
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Kicking It Off With a Panel
f.ounders, an intimate conference for 150 of the world's most prominent technology and startup founders, kicked off the first night with drinks, appetizers and a panel that included Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Angry Birds co-founder Mikael Hed. Click here to view this gallery. Ireland is pulling out all the stops, including a presidential visit, an orchestra and Bono, for a handful of the world’s technology elite. One-hundred and fifty of the world’s most prominent and successful startup founders and technology executives have gathered in Dublin for the second annual f.ounders conference. The event is a four-day intensive dive into funding, management and the future of tech — the issues that affect startup founders. Thursday was the first day of the event. It kicked off with a pub crawl through Dublin, and ended in the massive library of Trinity College, where the founders were served dinner (hosted by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström) and entertained by the student orchestra. U2 frontman Bono also made an appearance at dinner, where he took photos with the conference attendees. Later this week, the attendees will be welcomed to Ireland by outgoing President Mary McAleese (the last event she will host at the official residence before leaving office) and eat dinner at the Dublin Castle. Check out some of the photos we collected from the first night of the conference. More About: bono, dublin, europe, f.ounders, ireland, Tech For more Business coverage: 
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Welcome to this morning’s edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world. We're keeping our eyes on three particular stories of interest today. HP to Stay in PC and Tablet Businesses On a conference call with analysts Thursday, newly minted HP CEO Meg Whitman said that the company now plans to keep its PC business rather than spinning it off. She also said the company would continue to compete in the tablet market. Apple’s Asia-Pacific Sales Up 174% Apple's net sales in the Asia-Pacific region have risen to $14.3 billion in 2011, up 174% from the same period a year ago. Samsung Galaxy Nexus Coming to Europe Nov. 17 The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone to run Google's next-generation Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich, is arriving in Europe on Nov. 17. Further News - Microsoft has announced a Windows Phone event for press in New York City Nov. 7.
- The sale of Yahoo has been thwarted by the company’s lack of strategy and restrictive confidentiality agreements, anonymous sources have told Reuters.
- Redbox is raising the prices of DVD rentals from $1 per day to $1.20, effective October 31.
- Kobo Vox, a $199, seven-inch ereader designed to compete against Amazon’s Kindle Fire, goes on sale Friday.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, DNY59 More About: apple, first to know series, HP, samsung 
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Apple’s net sales in the Asia-Pacific region have risen to $14.3 billion in 2011, up 174% from the same period a year ago. The Asia-Pacific market now accounts for 21% of Apple’s net sales, compared to 13% in 2010 and 7% in 2009, the company disclosed in a 10-K filing uncovered by AllThingsD. Much of that growth has come from Greater China, a region that includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted in the company’s fiscal 2011 earnings call a week and a half ago. China accounted for just 2% of sales in fiscal 2009, and 12% in fiscal 2011, he said. “I’ve never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class that aspire to buy products that Apple makes,” he observed at the time. Sales in Greater China were driven primarily by “strong demand” for the iPhone 4 and carrier expansion, as well as strong sales of the iPad. Mac sales were up, too, the filing indicated. Sales in Japan were also strong, despite the earthquakes and tsunami that rattled the northeast coast of the country this past March. Net sales were up 37% to $1.5 billion year-over-year, although the country represented a smaller portion of Apple’s overall net sales — 5% compared to 6% a year ago. Net sales were up 56% to $13.8 billion in the Americas, making up 35% of the company’s total net sales for 2011, while Europe accounted for 28% at $9.1 billion, up 49% from 2010. Image courtesy of 37prime More About: apple, asia pacific, china, trending For more Business coverage: 
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The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone to run Google’s next-generation Android OS, Ice Cream Sandwich, is arriving in Europe on Nov. 17. The news comes via a tweet from Samsung’s official mobile account. A pre-order page has also appeared on amazon.co.uk, which lists the device for £549.99 (€627, $885). Subsidized versions will be made available on Vodafone, 02 and 3UK with a two-year contract in the UK. The Galaxy Nexus, which was announced at a joint event with Google in Hong Kong a week and a half ago, has a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 4.65-inch super AMOLED display, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera capable of shooting 1080p video and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The device is slated for November release in the U.S., Canada and Asia as well. More About: android, galaxy nexus, ice cream sandwich, samsung, samsung galaxy nexus, trending For more Mobile coverage: 
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If you’re seeking a job in social media, we’d like to help out. For starters, Mashable‘s Job Lists gather all our resource lists, how-tos and expert guides to help you get hired. In particular, you might want to see our articles, How to Leverage Social Media for Career Success and How to Find a Job on Twitter. But we’d like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable‘s job boards are a place for socially savvy companies to find people like you. This week and every week, Mashable features its coveted job board listings for a variety of positions on the web, social media space and beyond. Have a look at what's good and new on our job boards:
Mashable Job Postings
Community Intern (Fall 2011) at Mashable in New York, NY.
Community Intern (Winter 2012) at Mashable in New York, NY.
Editorial Intern (Fall 2011) at Mashable in New York, NY.
Editorial Intern (Winter 2012) at Mashable in New York, NY.
Tech Reporter at Mashable in San Francisco, CA.
Tech Reporter at Mashable in New York, NY.
Mashable Job Board Listings
Product Manager at Savings.com in Los Angeles, CA.
Community Manager at Sony Corporation of America in New York, NY.
PHP Engineer at Empire Avenue in San Francisco, CA.
Manager, Digital Marketing at Disney Theatrical Group in New York, NY.
Social Media Manager at Grubhub in Chicago, IL.
Audible Technology Meet & greet at Audible.com in Newark, NJ.
Senior Manager, PR – Interactive Entertainment (Wii) at GolinHarris in Los Angeles, CA.
Internet Task Manager at C-4 Analytics in Saugus, MA.
Marketing Account Manager at C-4 Analytics in Saugus, MA.
Online Marketing Strategist at PETA in Los Angeles, CA.
Project Manager, Mobile at Leading Media Company in New York, NY.
Social Media Marketing Specialist at BizziBiz in Scottsdale, AZ.
IT Hosted Operations Engineer @ Atlassian, makers of JIRA at Atlassian in San Francisco, CA.
Video Producer (Flexible; East Coast strongly preferred) at Teach For America in New York, New York.
Digital Marketing Programmer Analyst at The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, VA.
Director, Communications and Social Media at FOX Sports South in Atlanta, GA.
Coordinator, Social Media at Music Choice in New York, NY.
Big-Data Analytics Engineer at Atlassian in San Francisco, CA.
Content Manager at sweetgreen in Washinton, D.C.
Marketing Systems Administrator at Atlassian in San Francisco, CA.
Editor / Producer – NBC Olympics.com Affiliate content at NBC Universal in Stamford, CT.
Campaign Analyst at Acquinity Interactive in Deerfield Beach, FL.
Software Developer in Test at Synacor in Buffalo, NY.
Senior Mobile Developer at Synacor in Buffalo, NY.
West Coast Sales Director at LiveWorld in San Jose, CA.
Senior Web Developer at Innovative Funded Start-Up in Chicago, IL.
Digital Strategy Planner at Imagination (client – General Mills) in Chicago, IL.
Developer Advocate at Atlassian, creators of JIRA & Confluence in San Francisco, CA.
Java Developer at Atlassian, creators of JIRA & Confluence in San Francisco, CA.
Assistant Professor, Digital Media/Integrated Communication at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.
Support Engineer – Dev Tools at Atlassian, creators of JIRA & Confluence in San Francisco, CA.
Digital Media Strategist at M Booth in New York, NY.
Web Developer at Atlassian, creators of JIRA & Confluence in San Francisco, CA.
Social Media Strategist at Creative Marketing Partners in Miami, FL.
Digital Media Sales at Social Reality in Beverly Hills, CA.
Marketing Specialist/Interactive Marketing Specialist at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, VA.
Community Manager at Advance Digital in Jersey City, NJ.
Online Communications Manager at The World Bank in Washington, D.C.
Web Graphic Designer at Pinnacle Promotions in Norcross, GA.
Digital Marketer at Qualifacts Systems, Inc. in Nashville, TN.
Client Account Manager at C-4 Analytics in Saugus, MA.
Marketing Manager at Rodale in New York, NY.
Platform Executive at BBC Worldwide in London, United Kingdom.
Web Developer at Creative Marketing Partners in Miami, FL.
Community Manager at Digital Brand Architects in New York, NY.
Lead Product Manager, Solutions at Synacor in Buffalo, NY.
Mashable‘s Job Board has a variety of web 2.0, application development, business development and social networking job opportunities available. Check them out here. 
Got a job posting to share with our readers? Post a job to Mashable today ($99 for a 30 day listing) and get it highlighted every week on Mashable.com (in addition to exposure all day every day in the Mashable marketplace). Image courtesy of iStockphoto, YinYang More About: COMMUNICATIONS, design, jobs, List, Social Media For more Business coverage: 
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Running 26.2 miles is grueling work, but ASCIS is hoping to make the upcoming New York Marathon on Nov. 6 just a little bit easier — with the help of RFID chips. Marathoners who sign up for ASICS’s “Support Your Marathoner” will activate an RFID tag they can attach to their shoes. That tag, given to all marathoners, will then trigger messages of love and support specific to each of the runners on an LED screen as they run past it. There will be three screens in total placed at miles nine, 12 and 22. Support Your Marathoner actually started at last year’s marathon, but ASCIS has added networks such as Facebook to collect support messages, videos and images. Even if runners can’t stop and watch the screens during the marathon, each runner will have access to their personalized gallery of messages, videos and pictures to keep after the race. Any runner can register for the program and any person can leave a message for any runner thanks to the website’s search function. The program currently has received more than 2,750 support messages since it began in mid-October. Messages of support are certainly not a new concept, but the use of RFID chips brings it into the digital era. It’s nice to think of haggard marathoners getting a needed boost of love at mile 22, thanks to a tiny piece of tech. Is Support Your Marathoner a taste of things to come? Will you leave a message of support or, if you’re a runner, do you want to receive one? More About: rfid, Social Media, technology 
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The 3-year-old Klout has already become the industry standard for measuring social media reach and influence, but the company no longer has that market to itself. The Sarasota, Fla.-based PROskore is testing the waters for a sort of Klout for professionals, though PROskore CEO Bill Jula would likely recoil at the comparison. Jula says that the main difference between PROskore and Klout is that his company takes into account more than just social media. That is one component of a PROSkore, but others include your background and your engagement on PROSkore’s network. The hope is that recruiters and businesspeople will look at your PROskore as a quick measure of your networking prowess and your skill at your chosen profession. Jula says, however, that scores — measured on a one to 100 scale — should be taken in context. “Someone could live in a remote city and 20 would be pretty good,” he says, referring to the PROskore. Jula says that for people in big cities “anything above a 50 or 60 is doing pretty well.” But how does PROskore get those numbers? Partially by filling in details about their business and profession, but PROskore also culls data from Twitter, Facebook, Klout and LinkedIn, though the score is weighted to give the latter more influence. Jula evolved PROskore from Fast Pitch!, a network for small businesspeople that had been around for five years. Eyeing an opportunity, he rejiggered the site to provide rankings and launched it earlier this month. Garth Holsinger, VP of global sales and business development at Klout, says he’s not worried about the competition. “I”m actually kind of intrigued,” he told Mashable, “there are copycats out there, but we consider ourselves the standard.” Holsinger says Klout has eight Ph.Ds working on the company’s scoring and he considers Klout to be in a good position “as long as the science is sound.” 
BONUS: What Klout’s New Topic Pages Look Like
Klout released a new feature last week that lets users gain insights on top content influencers as well as users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics. To populate a user’s Topic Pages (see screenshots below), Klout analyzes the user’s content created across the 11 networks it calculates.
Clickable Topics on Your Dashboard
On your Klout dashboard, you can click on a topic to open its Topic Page. Click here to view this gallery. More About: klout, PROskore 
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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.  Name: Know Your Twitter Followers
Quick Pitch: Know Your Twitter Followers takes Twitter one step further. Genius Idea: Providing a demographic analysis of your Twitter followers.
Do you ever wonder who your Twitter followers are? Are the majority male or female, models or comedians, interested in flying planes or listening to Taylor Swift? Whether you have millions or hundreds of followers, now you can obtain a full analysis that allows you to find out who they really are. Schmap, the social website that introduced the first real-time city guides covering more than 400 million locations worldwide, this morning launched “Know Your Twitter Followers,” an automated freemium service that allows any individual, company or brand immediate access to acquire a demographic analysis of their Twitter followers. “If you are an individual Twitter user, you are naturally curious to know who is following you and where they are,” said Paul Hallett, CEO for Schmap. “Know Your Twitter Followers fills the void for audience measurement in social media and provides a breakdown of your followers so that you can understand how to target your audience.” Schmap, which has raised $3 million in funding, demonstrated the new insightful service by generating follower profiles for a range of Twitter’s top celebrities, including Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Sheen, Sarah Palin, Justin Bieber, Tiger Woods and Donald Trump. Schmap’s analysis revealed the following entertaining facts about our favorite celebrities: - Charlie Sheen’s followers are iPhone users, tweet a lot and like to party.
- Sarah Palin’s followers are religious married parents who like reading books.
- Donald Trump’s followers are fitness fanatics.
- Twitter users who keep pets are fans of Wolf Blitzer but are not fans of Tiger Woods.
- Firefox users follow Bill Gates.
Shmap also generated a full analysis of Mashable’s approximately 2.5 million Twitter followers. It found that Mashable has Twitter followers across the globe, but also that the majority of followers are female, are in sales/marketing professions and are interested in technology and music. “If users are using Twitter for fun, they will gain an understanding of who is reading their tweets,” said Hallett. “If they are using it for business, they can gain valuable insight into their audience that they can use commercially to produce content and services to their followers.”  Sample Analysis For @Starbucks Twitter Followers Know Your Twitter Followers is the only web service that allows Twitter users to generate a complete analysis of their followers. Some sites like Twittercounter.com only provide statistics on your Twitter usage, and other sites like Twitterfollower.com and twiends.com help you obtain more followers. If you’re interested in finding out who your Twitter followers are, here are the details: the free summary analysis generates a breakdown of followers by gender, marital status, profession, likes and interests, and location by country and U.S. state. The price for the full analysis depends on the number of followers and category of users – ranging from: $39.95 to $149.95 for most corporations/brands; and $4.95 to $24.95 for most individuals, charities and local merchants. Image courtesy of Flickr, Shawn Campbell
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
 The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today. More About: bizspark, Know Your Twitter Followers, Schmap, Twitter For more Business coverage: 
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If you have a crowd of people collaborating with large files synchronized by Dropbox, you might be interested in this new offering from the online file synchronization service, called Dropbox for Teams. It works the same way as the regular Dropbox service, where if you put files into a Dropbox folder on one computer, they immediately begin to synch up on all the other computers where you have the Dropbox application installed. It’s great for backing up files, collaborating, version control — and you can do some cool tricks with it, too. The difference is, this $795-per-year Dropbox for Teams service gives five users shared use of a terabyte of storage. If you have more than five users, get the boss to chip in an additional $125 per year for each, and each one of those users gets 200 more gigabytes of space. Even though it seems quite expensive at $795 a year, there’s an important distinction here. A conventional Dropbox account is free if you’re not going to use more than 2 GB, but if you’re sharing large files as much we do here at Mashable (such as HD video production clips), you’ll be needing a whole lot more than that. The problem is, each person needs a Dropbox account that’s big enough to accommodate all the files you’ll be synchronizing among your team. So if I have, say, a “Pro 50″ Dropbox account that can accommodate 50 GB (that costs $99/year or $9.99 per month), that’s not going to do me much good to collaborate with my pals if all of them can only accommodate 2 GB. Beyond that, Dropbox for Teams solves that problem of who pays for all of this by using centralized billing, making it easy to pass the bill over to the boss. And the IT suits can manage everything from one centralized dashboard, controlling who shares what with whom. They like it like that. Another nice kicker is the free unlimited version history, a feature that lets you bring files back from the dead — that one’s saved our bacon quite a few times. What’s the downside? Well, if you’re worried about putting your business’s sensitive files in the cloud, Dropbox is probably not for you. And, last summer a Dropbox bug briefly exposed user accounts, making it so bad guys could have possibly broken into your private data without needing a password. Even though it affected less than 1% of users and only lasted 5 minutes, such breaches are disconcerting. Keeping that in mind, if you collaborate with large files, this veritable cornfield of extra space might be a good investment. [Dropbox for Teams, via CNET] More About: backup, Dropbox, Dropbox for Teams, synchronization 
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Guy Nirpaz is the CEO and co-founder of Totango, which analyzes user actions on SaaS applications, providing sales teams invaluable information in qualifying prospects and prioritizing people to contact who are most likely to buy (or renew). Customer engagement is key for software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses. Correct interpretation of consumer actions is the basis for running a successful SaaS business. However, determining what your users choose to do in your application can be difficult. Below are three tips to improve customer engagement for SaaS companies.
1. Understand and Track User Actions
To increase customer engagement, you first need to understand what engages them and how. In an SaaS environment, this means understanding the actions they take on your application, and the nature by which they use it. Define an engagement score by combining key metrics, such as the time they spend using the solution, the frequency in which they visit and the core actions they perform. Interaction with your support and marketing material is also a factor in measuring customer engagement. That way, you can improve and replicate across your customer base.
2. Deliver Their Needs
The same tools that help you measure and understand customer behavior should help you draw conclusions about the actions needed to improve. - Do the new features add value or complexity?
- Is the new design helping to convert more trials, but causing friction for existing customers?
- Do tutorials and guides help new users, or do users continue to become lost?
- Are users from the basic plan engaged enough that they are "pushing through" to the premium packages?
3. Evolve Your Service
It's easy to fall into the trap of treating your customers as unknown, faceless people. After all, chances are no one in your organization has ever met them. A SaaS company must develop tools that will help its service measure customer behavior. These tools must be capable of answering key strategic and tactical questions to help evolve the product portfolio to engage current and future customers in deeper and richer ways. - Have the users tried the service more than once?
- How much time are users investing in your service?
- Which features have they used?
- Do they fully understand the value proposition of your offering?
Customer engagement can help answer some tough product and marketing questions. The key is to determine which parts of your product different users utilize, and to target users directly for primary market research. After all, if you provide an online destination that people want to visit, you will increase brand awareness, drive people to your service and end up engaging your customers all over again. Image courtesy of Flickr, Kaptain Kobold More About: Business, contributor, customer engagement, features, SaaS 
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The Guardian unveiled a Twitter-based search bot Thursday. Users can search for content on The Guardian‘s website by tweeting a question or keyword(s) to @GuardianTagBot. The bot will immediately tweet back a link to a search results page on guardian.co.uk. For example, users could tweet, “@GuardianTagBot latest Occupy Wall Street news?” to pull up related stories in reverse chronological order (pictured below). Essentially, it’s a faster way to get the news you’re looking for (on The Guardian, at least) from Twitter. In an introductory post, Nina Lovelace, content development manager at the Guardian Group, warned users that TagBot was a search tool, and that it would struggle with personal queries such as “Will you marry me?” “It’s not Siri,” she wrote.  More About: Media, the guardian, Twitter For more Business coverage: 
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“We need to be in the tablet business,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in a conference call with analysts, just after she announced HP would keep its PC business rather than spinning it off. Even though the company killed off its TouchPad tablet that ran the webOS software it acquired along with Palm, Whitman didn’t know yet whether webOS would be used in a future tablet from HP. She said the company would make a decision about webOS within the next two months. According to the The Wall Street Journal [paywall link], HP has said it might continue licensing webOS to other manufacturers, even if it’s not going to be making tablets that run it. Meanwhile, Whitman says HP will continue to focus its tablet efforts on hardware running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, a tablet-friendly operating system that’s not going to be available for at least a few months. A developer preview version for Windows 8 is now available for download — Microsoft hasn’t revealed when the final version will ship — but it’s expected “sometime next year,” according to Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel who spoke with PC World earlier this month. More About: HP, meg whitman, Tablet, webOS 
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The #occupywallstreet movement didn’t spring up out of nowhere. It was very deliberately conceived by the creators of a title you may have seen on the newsstand: Adbusters. As digital marketing agency iCrossing recently outlined, the movement started with a tweet from Adbusters on July 4. 
After that, the Vancouver-based Adbusters continued to tweet about #occupywallstreet, but received almost no mainstream media coverage. All that changed on Sept. 17, when crowds showed up at New York City’s Zuccotti Park and stayed there for weeks. Despite the lack of press attention leading up to the event, Kalle Lasn, the co-founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, expected #occupywallstreet to be huge, though the fact that it has taken off in other cities has surprised him. Lasn and Adbusters were previously behind another social movement, Buy Nothing Day, on Black Friday in the U.S., but that was nowhere near as big. Lasn’s next move is a “Robin Hood March” set for Oct. 29 in France coinciding with the G20 meeting. The objective this time is a 1% “Robin Hood” tax on all financial transactions with proceeds going to the poor. Lasn spoke with Mashable about both movements and how Adbusters has used social media to foment dissent.
Q&A With Kalle Lasn, Co-Founder of Adbusters
Was this movement created by social media? I wouldn't quite put it that way. I think that social media played a critical part, but I think it was triggered, it was catalyzed, sparked by creativity, but also people coming up with magical hashtags and posters and above all, having the geopolitical savvy to realize that the moment was right on September 17. It all started with a tweet in July, right? It started off with a poster in the middle of Adbusters magazine and #occupywallstreet with the hashtag on our cover and then it started off when the Twitter feed started going crazy with that hashtag. Then of course after that it began to have a life of its own. Are you surprised at how big it's gotten? I wasn't surprised that it created a big havoc in New York because we knew this [was an] invitation to occupy the iconic center of global capitalism, Wall Street. I knew that was a very provocative move and if we could get a few thousand people out there that this would be an incredible moment. But when it started to spread to Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and now it's creeping across the border to Canada, then I just sat there in front of my TV set in wonder. I thought it was a bit surprising because you don't see these kinds of protests in the U.S. very often. Well, don't forget you have the Tea Party. I mean, on the left we haven't had it that much, but the Tea Party has been a powerful movement with a lot of passion. Their ideas are by and large wrong, but they had a lot of passion going for them and the passion was very similar to our movement because there was a feeling … that there was something fundamentally wrong with the United States of America right now and a bit of stimulus here and a jobs program there doesn't make a hoot of difference. What's really needed is a tinkering with the processes of how America works. I kind of feel like I'm in the same boat as the Tea Party guys. Yeah, I was going to ask if what you're doing is the left's version of the Tea Party. Would you agree? Well, I wouldn't say that because at this moment there are a lot of people walking across the lines. I know a lot of die-hard lefties who have seen some wisdom in right-wing ideas and I know some righty types who have suddenly picked up Adbusters or something and say "You guys have a point." I think we're living in an age where people are crossing the lines. If there's going to be a rejuvenation of American decline, if there's going to be a changing of that kind of corruption at the heart of American democracy, then it will have to be some sort of unified movement of people. And who cares if you're left or right — they just want to have fundamental change. The name of your publication is Adbusters. What does #occupywallstreet have to do with advertising? Nothing really, but I think there is kind of a link between the “Buy Nothing Day” and what we're doing now. This is a hard point to get across, but when you look at what's wrong with the First World and why is America in decline and why everyone is so unhappy and down in the dumps … it really comes down to a rampant consumerism coupled with rampant debt and a society that's just grown soft and fat. Like so many people in America are fat and can't pay off their credit card and so many people are living lousy lives. So at the very heart of the problem of American decline is culture. It's like a rotten apple. It's rotten at the core. So I think there's a really powerful link between Adbusters and #occupywallstreet. More About: #occupywallstreet, Adbusters, Kalle Lasn 
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Kobo Vox, a competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire, will go on sale Friday. We got our hands on the seven-inch ereader tablet, and here are our first impressions. LIke the Kindle Fire, the Kobo Vox will retail for a relatively low price of $199 and does not come with 3G, a camera or an external microphone. But Vox’s approach to the affordable tablet — which costs $300 less than the cheapest iPad 2 — differs from Amazon’s in that it sticks closer to the traditional tablet script. Vox runs Android. And it looks like it runs Android. While the Kindle Fire’s Android interface looks like a bookshelf, Vox’s has the familiar app-icon layout. The home screen highlights books that have been read most recently, but when you swipe to other screens you might confuse Vox with any other Android tablet. Borders-backed Kobo doesn’t vend non-book content like Amazon does, so the apps that come loaded on the device to provide media such as periodicals and music are from third parties. Newsstand apps Zinio and PressReader provide access to newspapers and magazines. Rdio provides the tunes. In regard to hardware, Vox has three distinctions among other tablets: It is slightly lighter than most (14.2 ounces vs. Kindle Fire’s 14.6), allows you to add digital storage with an SD card, and its screen uses a different type of anti-reflective tech. While most screens have an anti-reflective coating, says Welch, Vox’s screen has anti-reflective properties baked in. It’s the same material used for screens in airplane cockpits, and it should make the device easier to read outdoors. But, as usual, Kobo’s biggest departures from other ereading devices are in its software. One of these departures is that Kobo allows readers to take their content away from Kobo readers and apps. “When you buy your first Kindle, you are marrying Jeff Bezos,” says Kobo General Manager Matt Welch. The other departure has been a focus on social reading. In December 2010, Kobo became the first major ebook vendor to introduce a social reading app, Reading Life. The app adds statistics and badges to ebooks. On Vox, Kobo takes the “social reading” concept a step further with a product it announced at F8 called Pulse. While Reading Life's social features were largely contained within a separate dashboard of the Kobo app, Kobo Pulse inserts them right into books' pages. On each page of an ebook, there's a button ("a pulse") that glows stronger when there is a lot of social activity on the page. Tapping it pulls up a bar that shows how many of Kobo's 5 million users are reading and discussing the book, how many have liked it, and how many comments the page has. Dragging it upward pulls up a dashboard that keeps track of the conversation happening throughout the book, displays reader reviews and recommends new books. The feature will soon be available as part of the Kobo apps on iPhone and iPad. As far as I can tell, the Kobo Vox‘s biggest feat — and if it isn’t planning to get into the business of selling other types of media, Kobo’s motive behind it — is to make its social reading features accessible on a tablet device that is more affordable than an iPad.
Kobo Vox Hands On
The Kobo Vox comes in four colors: Hot Pink, Lime Green, Ice Blue, Jet Black. It has a 7-inch screen and weighs 14.2 ounces, and stores 8GB of data. Its storage can be expanded with a 32GB micro SD card. Click here to view this gallery. More About: amazon, android, kindle fire, kobo, Vox 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Let's hear it for Captain Obvious! HP and its new leader Meg Whitman finally figured out what we knew all along — that ripping the PC business out of HP is akin to ripping a beating heart out of a jogger while she's running the Boston Marathon. The erstwhile gubernatorial candidate saw the mess former HP CEO Leo Apotheker had made of things, and reversed course. This is a win for HP, a win for its PC division, a win for HP's millions of desktop and laptop customers and good news for the market, as a key player stays in the game. Too bad HP may still lose — and in a big way — in the long run. HP will do well to continue making and selling PCs well into the next decade. It will be a strong, vibrant business, not just here in the U.S., but globally, for the better part of two decades. Still, I do expect the industry to change. And while I think there will always be a need for desktops and laptops as our workhorse systems, it's clear that the future lies with smartphones and tablets. HP, for the moment, no longer has a tablet play (the phone play went with WebOS, too: goodbye, Pre!). Whitman cannot do an about face and revive the WebOS business. The company reportedly laid off hundreds of WebOS employees; perhaps all of them. Jon Rubenstein, who came to HP with the Palm acquisition and was running the WebOS program, has been pushed into a marginal position in the Personal Systems Group (the one HP was considering spinning off until now). The company may still know how to build WebOS TouchPad devices. But it no longer has a unique platform to run on them. And going back to component manufacturers who have already been burned once by HP is probably impossible. It took years of missteps for HP to find its way in the tablet space. The company tried introducing a Windows 7 tablet, the HP Slate, which was smothered even more completely than the TouchPad. The Slate never actually made it to consumers’ hands — just businesses, which seemed largely uninterested. The TouchPad was HP's last great hope for mobile relevance. Now it must rely more heavily than ever on its systems business. The good news is that this will work for years, even decades. There is one possibility, and it goes like this: HP takes the TouchPad design, updates it, and pays its partners a lot of money to get back on board. But this time the model is married to Windows 8 (Editor’s Note: HP has now committed to Windows 8 for its upcoming tablets). Microsoft is desperate for a manufacturer to produce a tablet based on the upcoming version of Windows. It would likely throw in all kinds of incentives to make it even more attractive for HP. That would give us a little deja vu, since HP was Microsoft's big tablet partner for Windows 7 tablets. However, there are a couple of critical differences: Windows 7 was never designed to run on ARM devices. Windows 8 is. And the Metro interface could be a real winner on the TouchPad's 10.1-inch touchscreen interface. If Whitman ignores this advice and throws all HP's eggs back into the PC basket, she will surely have only won this battle, but lost the long-term tablet war. Update: In a conference call, HP CEO Meg Whitman emphasized that HP intends to stay in the tablet business using Windows 8, but still hasn’t made a decision about what will happen with HP’s WebOS. More About: HP, meg whitman, Opinion, pc, Rubenstein, Touchpad, webOS For more Business coverage: 
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In a move that no doubt caused a lot of consternation after rival Netflix‘s experience doing the same, Redbox has decided to raise the price of its DVD rentals. The increase, which goes into effect Oct. 31, is only from $1 per day to $1.20. Prices for Blu-ray rentals and game rentals will stay at $1.50 and $2, respectively. “This marks the first price increase for a Redbox standard-definition DVD rental in eight years,” Paul Davis, CEO of Coinstar said in a press release. Davis went on to blame increased operating expenses, including recent increases in debit card interchange fees. Redbox has posted more than $1 billion in sales so far this year. However, some of the money will likely go towards Redbox’s first national brand advertising campaign, according to Advertising Age. A Redbox rep, however, says plans for such a campaign have not been announced. Though the price increase was slight, it was enough to send parent company Coinstar’s stock down 11% in after-hours trading. One likely reason is the recent memory of Netflix’s disastrous experience with a 60% price increase that went into effect in September and has contributed to the company’s fall from grace. At least one analyst believed the move had benefited Redbox, as consumers canceled their Netflix accounts and sought out Redbox as an alternative. What do you think? Will this increase influence your viewing habits at all? Let us know in the comments. More About: Coinstar, DVDs, netflix, redbox For more Business coverage: 
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Google has added its perspective — with a search-data-based popularity contest — to the comparisons between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. The data rules in favor of Occupy Wall Street. Users searched for the nascent movement more than the Tea Party for the first time in the United States on Sept. 24, according to Google’s politics blog. Search traffic for the term “Occupy Wall Street” has remained higher ever since. Vermont, Oregon and New York are the biggest searchers of Occupy Wall Street. Tea Party search traffic peaks every April during tax season. Because Occupy Wall Street has gotten a good deal of media attention throughout the past several weeks, it seems unfair to compare its search traffic to the Tea Party’s search traffic from only September and October. But Google notes that, even when each movement’s historical peak amount of search traffic is compared, Occupy Wall Street still has the slightly higher number of searches. The search giant also analyzed recent media coverage of each movement to determine whether its comparison was fair. Between Oct. 7 and last week, the volume of news stories about Occupy Wall Street was only slightly higher than the volume of news stories about the Tea Party.  Occupy Wall Street seems to be legitimately more popular as a search topic than the Tea Party. So what does that mean? Essentially, more people are typing that search term into search engines. It’s dangerous to deduce anything else. Whether or not the two movements are even comparable is also debatable. Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and other Tea Party leaders have argued that Occupy Wall Street “is no tea party.” And U.S.-based researcher for Cage Prisoners Ayesha Kazmi in a Guardian editorial wrote that “posing the various Occupy movements as an alternative to the Tea Party is a media oversimplification to fit the current movements within an easily comprehensible narrative.” Veteran Democratic Party pollster Douglas Schoen, reports the Wall Street Journal, had a researcher ask those who are physically occupying Wall Street about the comparison. The firm found that 35% of them have “goals to influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP.”  Images courtesy NM Incite and Think Progress More About: Google, Occupy Wall Street, tea party 
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Television is broken. I know it. You know it. Steve Jobs knew it. I have a pretty state-of-the-art 2011 Sony LED TV, complete with Hulu Plus, Netflix and YouTube apps. Yet it still usually takes me about a dozen clicks on a button-rich remote to get to what I want to watch. By the time you actually load up the latest Daily Show, your dinner is getting cold and your drink is getting warm. Wouldn’t it be so much better if you could simply tell your TV what you wanted to see, when to pause or when to turn the volume down? The remote could stay hidden down the back of the couch for good. You could ask for a specific show or YouTube clip, or just be wonderfully lazy and say something like “play me a new sitcom.” SEE ALSO: Siri, Seriously: 10 Ways We’re Really Using Apple’s Voice Assistant [POLL]
Near the end of the mammoth Steve Jobs biography, there’s a tantalizing mention of the former Apple CEO working on the problem of the TV interface toward the end of his days. “I’ve finally cracked it!” Jobs said, but we never find out what “it” is. Now, if a New York Times report is to be believed, “it” is voice-activated TV — using Siri, the cutting-edge, intelligent agent baked into the iPhone 4S. The Times‘ Nick Bilton has spent a year snooping around the story that Apple is working on launching its own TV set — the screen itself, rather than just the Apple TV box. His first conclusion: the Apple TV set is coming, it’s just a question of when (Bilton’s best guess: early 2013). His second conclusion: Siri is going to be the main interface. Whether that means you’ll have to own an iOS device in order to control the TV, or whether the TV will have an ambient microphone good enough to pick up voice commands, still remains to be seen. We’d guess the latter. Apple does like to give you reasons to buy more Apple products, but there are no instances in which you’re forced into buying one to manipulate another. The company will want to avoid being ridiculed for requiring a $200-plus remote. SEE ALSO: Steve Jobs, Human Being: 10 Quirky Details From the Bestselling Biography
Besides, anyone who’s had a FaceTime chat on an iPad 2 knows how far Apple microphone technology has come. It picks up sound with astonishing clarity, good enough that it will likely work from across your TV room. But then how would you pull up the Siri interface on the screen in the first place? By calling her name, perhaps? Or will Apple provide a remote after all, with a single button that calls up Siri? Both sound like elegant Jobsian solutions. But if it’s all the same to Apple, we’d rather not have another gadget that can get lost down the back of the couch, even if it is a clicker with one button.
BONUS: Siri Politely Answers 10 Absurd Questions [PICS]
The classic question
Click here to view this gallery. More About: apple, Apple TV, siri 
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Hewlett-Packard will keep making PCs rather than spinning off its consumer computer division, the company announced Thursday. HP surprised the tech world in August, when then-CEO Leo Apotheker announced he was killing the company’s webOS tablet, the TouchPad, and “considering” spinning off the PC division. HP is one of the world’s leading PC manufacturers, but the growth of its consumer division has slowed in recent years. Apotheker intended to take HP in the direction of his former company, SAP, by providing more business services — even though that currently constitutes a tiny percentage of the company’s sales. Apotheker’s decision was widely jeered by customers and analysts; he was also thought to have overspent in paying $10 billion for business software maker Autonomy. A month later, in a board coup, Apotheker was replaced by former eBay CEO and failed California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. It was HP’s third CEO switch in the span of one year. In her first press conference as CEO, Whitman said she was still exploring the sale of the PC division. But the chorus of voices calling on her to keep it has only grown louder. Two weeks ago, Michael Dell weighed in with three reasons why HP shouldn’t shrink from the PC market. While it may be maturing, he said, 500 million PCs are still expected to be sold in the next two years. Indeed, while HP dithered over the PC division decision, the company actually gained market share against top rivals Lenovo and Dell. SEE ALSO: The PC: Old, Unsexy and Still King of The World Ultimately, the company decided the PC division is “right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” Whitman said in a statement. Mark Budgell, HP's PR manager of social media strategy, chimed in with a hearty endorsement. In a blog post, Budgell described a comprehensive, company-wide decision process: “Thousands of hours were spent understanding how extracting the PC business would impact everything from supply chain to product development and brand image,” he writes. “Our leadership teams were locked in boardrooms late into many evenings. You could tell from the tired-but-determined look on their faces, and their coffee consumption, that no one was taking it lightly.” Here’s the official HP press release in full: HP today announced that it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company. "HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It's clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees," said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. "HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger." The strategic review involved subject matter experts from across the businesses and functions. The data-driven evaluation revealed the depth of the integration that has occurred across key operations such as supply chain, IT and procurement. It also detailed the significant extent to which PSG contributes to HP's solutions portfolio and overall brand value. Finally, it also showed that the cost to recreate these in a standalone company outweighed any benefits of separation. The outcome of this exercise reaffirms HP's model and the value for its customers and shareholders. PSG is a key component of HP's strategy to deliver higher value, lasting relationships with consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers. The HP board of directors is confident that PSG can drive profitable growth as part of the larger entity and accelerate solutions from other parts of HP's business. PSG has a history of innovation and technological leadership as well as an established record of industry-leading profitability. It is the No. 1 manufacturer of personal computers in the world with revenues totaling $40.7 billion for fiscal year 2010. "As part of HP, PSG will continue to give customers and partners the advantages of product innovation and global scale across the industry's broadest portfolio of PCs, workstations and more," said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. "We intend to make the leading PC business in the world even better."
More About: HP, Leo Apotheker, meg whitman, PCs For more Business coverage: 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Peter VanRysdam is the CMO of web design company 352 Media Group and the author of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World. Connect with him on Twitter @Peter352. Lost in all the announcements about Timeline and frictionless experiences at Facebook's F8 conference in September was a change to the Open Graph that had developers salivating. Instead of being restricted to simply "liking" a page or post, Facebook announced you could "verb any noun." That means you can "watch" a movie, "cook" a recipe or "hike" a trail. Developers can dictate those terms, creating custom user experiences for their sites. However there is one caveat. Many developers saw this as the green light to create a "dislike" button on Facebook, a much debated add-on that millions of users are petitioning for via various Facebook groups. However, those hopes are quickly dashed during the Open Graph development process, when developers who typed "dislike" received this message:  Other words like "loathe" and "doesn't like" aren't on the blocked list, leading you to infer "dislike" was specifically excluded, presumably along with a laundry list of profanities. But why would Facebook block what at least a vocal minority are clamoring for? And the better question is, should they? SEE ALSO: How to Time Your Facebook Posts to Reach the Most Fans I used to be a supporter of adding the "dislike" button right next to "like." Many blogs and sites like YouTube employ a "thumbs up/down" graphic alongside every video or comment. However in learning more about the issue and the potential ramifications, I've been convinced otherwise. For Facebook, it comes down to money. The site has built a platform that is without a doubt the most targeted marketing tool for brands of all sizes. Where else can you target potential customers down to their specific interests, age, sex and zip code? Sure, dissatisfied users can post negative comments on a brand's page, but that company has complete control to moderate and address those issues. A "dislike" button has entirely different implications. Rather than encouraging people to "like" its own page, a company could promote the link to "dislike" its competition. There is nothing illegal about this type of hostile environment, but it is not business friendly. Remember that advertisers are the ones funding your beloved social network. The arguments in favor of a "dislike" button are reasonable enough; however, they don't outweigh the potentially disastrous negatives. Users understandably don't feel comfortable "liking" a status update about a friend's dog being put to sleep, but they may want to click a "dislike" button in order to be alerted of other comments on that post. The easy solution is to simply comment on the post with your condolences. If you're concerned enough to want to stay in the loop, you should be concerned enough to post your sympathies. Consider the flip side, with people able to "dislike" your wedding photos or the announcement of your new nephew. Granted, as my mother would say, those people aren't your real friends, but the opportunity for cyber-bullying is a far bigger concern than the need to subscribe to posts. While I'm against a Facebook sanctioned "dislike" button on every post for the reasons above, I don't agree that developers should be prohibited from making their own. I could see a group like PETA creating an app on its page that lets you dislike the concept of clubbing of baby seals, much like a petition. But they shouldn’t be able to elicit people to dislike a specific company. Users have a variety of other ways to express their concerns with those they disagree with. There are legitimate uses for a "dislike" button, but putting them on every page is unnecessary — and it's asking for trouble. Facebook knows better than to bite the hand that feeds it, and as an advertiser on the platform, I have to agree. What do you think? Should there be a button on every page? Should developers be allowed to create one, or should Facebook continue on its current path? More About: contributor, dislike button, Facebook, features, Open Graph, Opinion, Social Media 
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Google has been busy (and a little scary) today. It's unveiled a host of new Google+ features, including enhanced photo-editing tools, a new What's Hot area and a viral visualization for posts. Plus, Google is finally making its upstart social network Google+ available to Google Apps users. Photo editing in Google+ is not new, but the Creative Kit, which adds a wide range of pre-made and fairly powerful photo-editing filters is. Google also used the opportunity to add a special set of Halloween filters. The search giant snuck out the news this morning by letting some of its execs and a select group of celebrities Halloween-ize their own profile pictures prior to the announcement. These limited edition effects are now available to all Google+ members as part of the Creative Kit. I gave them a test-drive and found them intuitive and fun to use. They do not auto-transform your photos into scary Halloween surprises, but offer enough pre-sets and controls, like Draculan Dermis and Vampire Eyes, to help you apply some pretty entertaining effects to some of the 3.4 billion photos Google+ members have already reportedly posted on the service. Eagle-eyed users will recognize controls from Picnik, Google's stand-alone online photo-editing service. My guess is it's all Picnik’s photo-editing engine underneath. Check out the gallery to see what I did with Google's Halloween photo filters. Google also unveiled "What's Hot," a new area that appears just below your new posts in Google+ and a new menu item on the right side of the interface. I had to sign in and out to finally see the "Hot stuff." The feature's designed to help Google+ users weed through the "billions" of posts added to the service each day. Google promised that What's Hot "isn't just the same old faces, we do our best to provide a variety of posts." Fair enough, but we did notice posts from Google+ heavyweights and industry notables Mike Elgan, Chris Brogan and Google's own Natalie Villalobos. The third item on Google's list is Ripples, a new post visualization tool that should help Google+ users understand how posts spread among their contacts and beyond. Sadly, this feature may be rolling out slowly because I couldn't get it working on my Google+ account.
Accessing Creative Kit
You access Google+'s Creative Kit by selecting a photo from your photo albums and then choosing Edit. Creative Kit is a selection under there. Click here to view this gallery. More About: Google, photo editing, picnik 
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The Tech Innovators Series is supported by Lenovo. Lenovo does not just manufacture technology. They make Do machines — super-powered creation engines designed to help the people who do, do more, do better, do in brand new ways.
 I’m from Los Angeles, went to college in Philadelphia, grad school in Chicago and now live in New York — there is no one place to find my complete and comprehensive medical history. And I’m not alone — on average, an individual has 19 different doctors over the course of his life.
When patients see new doctors, they often spend a chunk of the appointment explaining their ailments and medical history is. They may even have bloodwork done, even if they had it done recently at a different doctor’s office. If the system was digitized and all the information was in one convenient place, doctors visits would be quicker and less redundant. That “convenient place” is the cloud. More than $20 billion has been earmarked under President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, a.k.a. the stimulus bill) for the transition to electronic health records. San Francisco-based Practice Fusion has taken 120,000 health care professionals digital, storing 22 million medical records in the cloud, accessible anywhere there’s an Internet connection. By digitizing medical history, physicians can eradicate inefficiencies and medical errors. Practice Fusion was founded in 2005 by Ryan Howard, whose background is more in SaaS-based technologies than health care. Mashable spoke with Howard to learn more about the importance and the future of electronic medical records.
The Beginnings
Howard arrived in the Bay Area during the dot com gold rush, and worked his way up from tech support to software installation for Brown & Toland, a large physician group in the area. It was there that he saw “bad technology” in the doctor’s office. “The doctors didn't want to use it, and the software was a pain in the ass. It was all incredibly complex and difficult,” says Howard. “It was through that experience that I realized the massive disconnect between the free, web-based technology, like Google, that revolutionized the consumer market, and what was going on in the health care sector.” So he founded Practice Fusion in 2005 and launched the free electronic medical record service in 2007. Free is the operative word — at the time, Howard says, the average EMR system cost $50,000 per doctor each year. "Paper is dangerous and inefficient, it doesn't belong in health care any longer.” Howard says nearly 200,000 people die each year from preventable medical errors, which could be mitigated if doctors go digital. “Paper is dangerous and inefficient, it doesn't belong in health care any longer,” he says. “Our mission is to enable doctors to save lives by making patient information available anytime, anywhere.”
Benefits for Patients
 If Howard and other EMR companies get their way, you’ll have one health record from birth to death, with all of the necessary details in one secure and HIPAA-compliant place. Patients would get more access to their records, and thus, more control over their health. With access to a patient portal, users could view medical and immunization history, make appointments and see physician’s updates in real time. Doctors and patients would be equipped with the knowledge and power to reduce medical errors and duplication of services, which is a waste of both time and money for doctors and patients. Doctor visits would be smoother and more comprehensive, and doctors won’t have to worry about patients not reporting medical events — like a trip to the ER or a visit to a specialist — because a record of that information will exist in one place, offering a complete picture of the patient’s health.
Benefits for Health Care Professionals
 Sure, the digitization of medical records sounds like a dream for doctors, whose offices can be overrun by charts, but such a big transition is usually accompanied by massive fees. Because of the stimulus bill, doctors who digitize (and have a sizable pool of Medicare or Medicaid patients in the practice) are eligible for HITECH reimbursement funds from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), ranging from $44,000 to $64,000, which covers the cost of switching to EMR and training staff. New York-based nurse practitioner Denis Tarrant (pictured above) performs many a house call, always with an iPad in tow for charting and note-taking. Because of his digital practice, he’s eligible for $64,000 in Medicaid reimbursement through CMS. But beyond the incentives, a digital doctor’s office just runs more smoothly. Lynn McCallum, a doctor in Redding, CA, says having the technology in her exam rooms hasn’t had an adverse effect on her bedside manner and makes her practice more efficient: “I have a laptop on a small desk on rollers in each exam room. I review meds and chart on the patient as I sit in front of them. This way I can chart on my laptop and still maintain eye contact with my patient. If a referral for a consultation with a specialist is required, or a referral for an imaging study, I send a message to the MA on Practice Fusion, right in front of the patient. Often the entire note is completed before we leave the room. This minimizes my charting time at the end of the day.”
The “message” McCallum referred to is a feature called Chart Share, which enables a doctor to share a patient chart with X-ray, mammogram, MRI or other medical tests with any specialist in the U.S. in real-time for free, with bank-level encryption. That information provides context for the specialist and ensures that the patient’s appointment with him will address the necessary issues faster, without having to go through the preliminary and tedious medical history questionnaire. Use of the site — including training, licensing and setup — is free both for health professionals and consumers. The site makes money by selling ad space to pharma companies, but these ads are not seen on the consumer-facing side of Practice Fusion. One might argue it’s unethical to market drugs on a site like this, but the ads’ audience is a group of well-educated physicians and can be interpreted as more of a learning tool than a selling tool. And it’s a less invasive and less costly (though perhaps less effective) approach to pharmaceutical marketing than the current standard — sending reps to doctors’ offices with lunch so the rep can get a few minutes of doctor facetime to discuss a new drug on the market.
The Public Health Benefits of Data
Electronic medical records make practicing medicine easier for the doctor and more transparent for the patient, but digitizing records also has promising implications for public health. Already, useful data has been mined — don’t worry, it’s unidentifiable — from the medical histories of the 22 million Practice Fusion patients to ascertain big picture trends in medicine. Analysis of Practice Fusion data found that the availability of farmers’ markets and fruit consumption is associated with lower body mass index (above). Other useful medical insights already mined from Practice Fusion data includes top diagnoses in primary care, the most commonly prescribed medications and reported side effects for various drugs. With more EMRs in the cloud, there is even more potential to uncover medical trends and information. EMR could greatly assist the CDC in seeing and containing outbreaks of diseases by providing health data and patient trends by age group or geography. Real-time medical information in the cloud can be parsed to quickly identify health trends and target areas with peculiar symptoms or diseases, and the information in these digital records could mitigate the effects of pandemics like H1N1.
The Future of EMR
“The future of EMR is similar to the trajectory of all technology: It's getting cheaper, easier, faster, better,” says Howard. With support of the government and the promise of hassle-free medical visits and improved public health statistics, electronic medical records are bound to become mainstream. Does your physician use electronic medical records? Would you like him or her to? What are your concerns? Let us know in the comments below.
Series Supported by Lenovo
The Tech Innovators Series is supported by Lenovo. Lenovo makes machines specifically for the innovators. The creators. The people who move the world forward. Machines like the Lenovo ThinkPad and IdeaPad, meticulously engineered with visibly smart second-generation Intel® CoreTM processors to help the people who do, do what’s never been done. Image courtesy of Flickr, Practice Fusion Images courtesy iStockphoto, VisualField, and Flickr, Practice Fusion More About: features, healthcare, mashable, Tech Innovators Series 
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Google has announced a host of new features for Google+, including the ability to use Google+ from a Google Apps account. When Google made Google+ available to all users earlier this fall, people who use Google Apps for work or personal use were left out in the cold. This was frustrating for many users, who, like me, use Google Apps to control the email account on their own domain name. Domain administrators can manually turn on Google+ for an organization now and users who have chosen to automatically enable new services will get access in the next few days. Google detailed the change on the Google Enterprise Blog.
Manually Enabling Google+ Access
Because of how Google Apps work, only users who have administrator access can enable or disable access for their users. If you are the only person who has access to your Google Apps account, you can manually turn on support now. To turn on support, an administrator needs to login to the Google Apps dashboard.  Once logged in, go to the “Organization & users” section and click on the “Services” tab. Scroll down until you see “Google+” and then you can toggle the service on or off. Administrators can enable Google+ for all users in an organization or for select users. Once access is enabled, users need to sign up at the regular Google+ page.
Caveats and Potential Headaches
Google acknowledges that many users with Google Apps accounts have already started using Google+ with a personal account. For those users, the company says it is working on a migration tool to carry over Circles and to connect and redirect users who already follow you. Google says the migration tool will be available in a few weeks. This is great news for many users, but we should note that at this time, it appears as if the migration is one-way only. That is, you can only bring your personal Google+ information to a new Google Apps account and not the other way around. SEE ALSO: Google+: The Complete Guide This will be fine for most users — but some might prefer the ability to link Google Apps usage the other way. For instance, I would prefer the option to just “link” my Google Apps account to my existing Google+ account. That way, when I get email invites to Google+ at my personal address, I can just accept the request on my existing account. Likewise, someone who is searching for me based on an email address can find my current account, rather than me having to create and migrate over a new profile. Still, even with these caveats in place, we’re glad that Google is allowing Google Apps users to sign up for Google+. Will you sign up for Google+ under a Google Apps account, or migrate your existing account to a domain you use at work or at home? Let us know.
Google+ Logo
This is the Google+ logo. Click here to view this gallery. More About: Google, google apps 
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Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.
Bizarre campaign videos seem to be the rage this year. First, we had Herman Cain chief of staff Mark Block’s “Now is the time for action!” head-scratcher (see below) and now the suddenly ubiquitous MC Hammer is stepping up for apple butter and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee. Hammer donated his "2 Legit 2 Quit" tune to Lee, and the Lee campaign got endorsements from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, YouTube product manager Hunter Walk and Google VP of location and local services Marissa Mayer, who dances during her role in the video. Portal A Interactive created the ad. Other notables appearing include former 49ers safety Ronnie Lott, Will.i.am and Giants pitcher Brian Wilson, who offers the best pitch for Lee: “Let’s be honest, folks. If your last name is Lee, you’re kinda sweet.”
For equal time, here’s opponent Dennis Herrera’s non star-studded video.
More About: ads, Politics, San Francisco-San Jose, viral-video-of-the-day 
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Okay, so maybe Mac and PC people have their differences — a lot of them. But, the same can’t be said about Android and iPhone users. Or can it? New analysis from mobile data management startup Onavo, shared exclusively with Mashable, sheds some light on the differences between iPhone and Android users, at least when it comes to their mobile social networking behaviors. Onavo analyzed data from a representative sample of more than 100,000 mobile owners, and looked at more than 40 terabytes of anonymized mobile data over a 30-day period. The startup discovered some interesting tidbits. The typical iPhone owner, for instance, can’t get enough of Facebook. In fact, 90% of iPhone-toting folks use the social app over mobile networks, and Facebook usage happens to account for 10% of all the mobile data iPhone users consume on their pocket-friendly Apple devices. The Android user is a bit less enamored with Facebook, albeit still “in like” with the social network — 63% of Android owners use Facebook, and Facebook still accounts for 5% of all mobile data on Android. “The social networking activity on mobile clearly differs according to which mobile you have,” Onavo CEO Guy Rosen tells Mashable. “Facebook, the overall winner no matter what phone you have, is significantly more popular on iPhones in terms of both number of users and amount of usage. And while Google+ has made some big moves on Android devices with more than one in three Androiders is on Google+, fewer than 1-in-10 iPhone users are there.” In case you’re wondering, the usage percentages in the infographic below show what percentage of iPhone and Android populations use the social apps over mobile networks, and the mobile data usage ratios represent the average MB per user, per app, per month.
More About: infographic, Onavo, Social Media For more Mobile coverage: 
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