At this point, we’re starting to think that Motorola is intentionally (and cruelly) teasing us with its Droid successor. Today we can add to the parade of leaks preceding the Droid 2’s debut in the form of the above hard case, which has just landed in Best Buy’s storerooms. Before you go off on some conspiracy theory comparing this to the iPhone’s Bumper and questioning whether this Droid might need a jacket, you should be aware that Rocketfish does similar paraphernalia for the Droid Incredible, marking this out as an entirely unremarkable run-of-the-mill accessory. Which might be the best news of all, we figure — if the unexciting peripherals are already being shipped, the handset itself shouldn’t be too far behind.

[Thanks, Justin]

Continue reading Droid 2 cases arrive at Best Buy, Droid 2s soon to follow?

Droid 2 cases arrive at Best Buy, Droid 2s soon to follow? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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All this talk about the new Kindle reminded me that I still have some questions about Amazon’s e-reader specifically, and ebooks generally. Why do people persist in comparing the Kindle to the iPad (something I first asked months ago); what is the relationship between hardback book sales and ebook sales (ditto); if e-readers keep getting more accessible, is the end of the paper book nigh? Questions like that.

In the hope of finally getting some answers, I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear‘s Devin Coldewey and interviewed him until he begged for mercy. Video below.

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They’re companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we’ve focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

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I spoke to Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, to find out what its strategy is and what he thinks of Demand Media and other competitors.

How Howcast Works

As the name suggests, Howcast is all about how-to videos. As with other ‘content farm’ companies, Howcast has identified a big opportunity to provide so-called "evergreen" informational content on the Web across hundreds of thousands of categories. The rationale being that people search, mostly on Google, for instructional content. How To Shuck an Oyster, How to Save Water in Your Garden, How to Avoid Dropped Calls on the iPhone 4, and so on.

Howcast is betting that how-to videos will have more relevance to searchers in the near future, than textual how-to articles. And given that YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world, behind only Google, that seems a solid business assumption.

Distribution

Howcast launched in February 2008 and now has nearly 200,000 instructional videos. It streams 25 million videos each month on both its own web site and across a network that includes web portals like AOL and Yahoo, and TV-on-demand sites like Hulu and Dailymotion. Its biggest distribution platform though is YouTube, where it has over 150,000 channel subscribers. Raman said that around 80% of its videos are viewed offsite, with 20% being viewed on Howcast’s web site.

It also has a strong mobile presence, which Raman said was key to Howcast’s future growth. He noted that Howcast has had over 2 million app downloads across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry devices. The Howcast for iPad app alone has been installed by 150,000 iPad users (approximately 5% of global iPad users) and was for a time the number 2 free iPad app in Apple’s App Store.

Raman noted that user engagement is very good on mobile – for example users watch videos on average twice a day and watch two videos per session. Perhaps for this reason, Raman said that the value of users on mobile is much higher than on other platforms.

The Quality Question

In my discussion with Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, the word "quality" came up a number of times.

Every time I talk to ‘content farm’ companies, they insist that the aim is to produce quality content. That’s because the most common criticism of content farms is that they clog up search engines with poor quality content.

In Howcast’s case, the content appears to be professionally produced. It outputs about 400 how-to videos each month, most of which flows through its Emerging Filmmakers Program. Raman said that the program attracts wanna-be filmmakers, who are looking for a place to prove their skills. Howcast pays between $50-$300 per video.

Raman told me that Howcast wants to keep the content bar high. He claimed that Howcast has a much higher ratio of subscribers per video than Demand Media. Howcast is "not necessarily playing the volume game," he added.

Comparison to Demand Media

Who is the top YouTube provider, measured by views? You guessed it, Demand Media. This is because it produces far more video content per month than Howcast (Demand competes directly with Howcast with its property eHow). While Sanjay Raman didn’t have exact figures, he estimated that Demand Media produces about 10 times more videos every month than Howcast. However he implied that this resulted in lower quality videos.

"Demand Media takes tasks and makes them smaller than they need to be," said Raman.

He also claimed that Howcast’s playbacks per video are higher than Demand Media’s. Howcast averages 44-50,000 playbacks per video, he told me, whereas Demand is around 7,000 per video.

Despite Demand Media Threat, Howcast Well Positioned

Many questions about content farms seem to center around whether other companies can compete with Demand Media, which operates on a much larger scale than its competitors. Perhaps the only company capable of stopping Demand’s relentless growth is Google, which is reportedly tweaking its algorithms to better account for quality over quantity.

Howcast is hoping that its focus on professional video-making, via its filmmakers program, will lead to high search results. That remains to be seen. One thing that Howcast definitely has going for it is its positioning in the mobile space, which is increasingly where video content is consumed.

Discuss

Ready to climb Mount Fuji and see what the next top Japanese TV will look like? Toshiba has just outed its trio of flag-bearing displays for this fall: the Cell Regza Slim 55XE2 and 46XE2 and the full-bloodied 55X2. Inch-based dimensions are already given in their model names, but you’ll also want to know they offer 240Hz refresh rates, 1,000 nits of brightness, 9,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratios augmented with local backlight dimming, and a 2D-to-3D conversion technology that’ll translate your stale old 2D imagery into bodacious triple dimensionality. You’re also keeping the 3 terabytes of storage and the capability of time-shifting up to eight channels at a time from the older model, though you’re no longer limited to a hard cap of 26 hours per channel. Connectivity is also rich, with options for DLNA and/or up to eight HDDs, while jacking in a Blu-ray recorder will permit you to record straight to the optical media the same way you can do to the Regzas’ own storage. All these goodies won’t come cheap, though, as the flagship 55X2 will retail for a well-rounded million Yen ($11,430) in late October, to be preceded by its Slim siblings with prices of ¥700,000 ($8,000) for the 55-inch and ¥600,000 ($6,858) for the 46-inch earlier that month. Full press release after the break.

Continue reading Toshiba’s latest Cell Regza LCDs are Slim, but don’t go calling them 2D

Toshiba’s latest Cell Regza LCDs are Slim, but don’t go calling them 2D originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe is strengthening its product portfolio with its intention to acquire Swiss firm Day Software, which makes Web content management systems aimed at marketers. Adobe announced an all-cash tender offer for Day’s shares. The purchase price is approximately $240 million.

Many of Adobe’s products, such as Illustrator and Photoshop, are used already to create marketing materials for companies. Moving into Web content management is a natural step since as many of these marketing materials are consumed and distributed online. Day allows marketers to manage digital assets for online marketing campaigns and set up marketing blogs and other social media outreach.

Adobe is clearly looking to grow through acquisitions. Just last September it bought Web advertising analytics giant Omniture for $1.8 billion.

What is the point when a CRM application becomes a collaboration service? And when does a collaboration service become a CRM application?

These are question we ask ourselves when we see the range of services with features that combine these two related application environments.

For instance, PBWorks today unveiled a service with the capability for people to collaborate with customers from that first point of communication all the way through the sale. PBWorks is known as an enterprise collaboration service. But with its new Customer Relationship Edition, PBWorks is now a far more direct competitor with CRM companies like Salesforce.com.

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You could ask the same question about Google Apps Marketplace, which gives Google Apps users the capability to turn an enterprise email environment inside out and use it as a contact management system with collaboration features.

Salesforce.com has developed Force.com into an ecosytem that integrates different applications into Salesforce.com. This in turn changes the definition for the overall Salesforce.com service. It is not a pure CRM environment. It is a hybrid with a focus on CRM.

The Google Enterprise blog today illustrated how deep the integration has become between Google Apps and CRM applications. It divides CRM applications into three categories. The companies listed below link to their vendor pages in Google Apps Marketplace :

• CRM: apps with a focus on internal processes around selling and serving customers. Companies include: Applane CRM; Capsule CRM; TimetoNote and Tactile CRM.
• Social CRM: apps with a focus on collaborative customer conversations via social web sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. Companies include Batchbook; Bantam Live; Gist; Rapportive and Etacts.
• Project-based CRM: apps with a focus on project collaboration before and after the sale. Companies include: Insightly, Solve360 CRM and Smartsheet pipeline.

PBWorks entrance into the CRM market means the company has to focus deeply on providing a core value as it does not have its own application platform. The company seems to be placing that focus on reaching out externally, not to an internal team as is often the case with CRM environments.

That approach represents where the CRM market is heading. Collaboration tools have value but to tie into the customer relationship cycle will give those services the potential to reach deeper into the enterprise. CRM services increasingly use collaboration services to extend the ways that customers can be brought into the communications process.

So, does the CRM and collaboration combination point to Social CRM as the natural outcome for where the market is heading? The Google Apps Marketplace and Force.com ecosystems point to that possibility as does the news from companies like PBWorks.

Discuss

The Wireless Power Consortium took a big step forward this past week with the confirmation that its precocious Qi interoperability standard has been finalized. Composed of three documents setting out the interface, performance and compliance requirements, the new dictum has set itself the not inconsiderable challenge of making wireless charging universal, so that any Qi-approved phone can soak up juice from any Qi-verified base station, dock or omnitool. This first spec is limited to devices requiring no more than 5 Watts, an appropriately humble early goal, though cauldrons are already bubbling with ideas for laptops and the like. We just hope the impressive list of big time companies on the Consortium will succeed in taking Qi into the mainstream — who here hasn’t dreamt of their phone being compatible with the Touchstone?

[Thanks, MrStringTheorist]

Qi wireless power standard finalized, universal contactless chargers look closer to reality than ever originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look at me. Now look at the kitchen wall. Now look at me again. I’m on a horse. Look again? Look at the iPad on the wall!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to present to you the Wallee, a thingamabob for your iPad that lets you attach it to your wall. That’s right: you’ve just made your own 10-inch Apple TV.

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I spent much of the week at OSCON, which served in part as a very visual reminder for something that is always on the back of my mind: the absence of women in tech. While women make up 25% of those who work in the tech industry, they comprise only 1% of those in open source. And wandering around the halls of the Portland Convention Center with thousands of men and a handful of women, I was both frustrated and depressed by the statistic and its reality.

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Doubly frustrating, I think, isn’t just that there weren’t a lot of women there; it’s that I really do wonder if many of the men even notice. Oh sure, when it comes to handing out the party invitations in the exhibit hall. Then they see you. But I am not so sure if lots of men necessarily see or feel women’s absence. I’m not sure everyone recognizes the appalling lack of diversity, or if they do, that they even care.

Well, of course people care. Lots of people care. Lots of people are working hard to address the issue and to better support girls and women in technology (NCWIT, Astia, Women 2.0, for example). The OSCON conference organizers did do an awesome job of recruiting women speakers and panelists. I think that’s a key step in making women feel as though their voices are recognized and contributions valued — making women feel like the (open source) technology community is something they want to be a part of.

And then there are lots of people, who when you question why there aren’t more women in tech, respond by unleashing the “hatorade.”

Point out that the tech industry may be exclusionary, and you will hear an old and stale argument (or, you’re hear name-calling. Or both): the tech industry is a meritocracy. Anyone can succeed if they have the brains, the skills, and the drive. There are no obstacles to anyone’s participation or success in the field, barring they have the skills, smarts, and drive. No women coders? No women founders? You women must not want it bad enough.

Design programs to help foster girls in computing, help support women entrepreneurs, help retain women in IT and you are called sexist, your programs “affirmative action” (something, I take it, that’s a “bad thing.”) You are accused of re-inscribing the very exclusions and divisions you are trying to combat.

The hostility of some of the responses, I’d argue, belies any argument that the tech industry is truly open and egalitarian.

Someone tweeted and several people retweeted — all with the OSCON hashtag — the following: “At Ruby conferences they put porn in the slides, this is a Scala conference so we have math.” It was a just a passing remark, and yes, I get it. It was just a joke. Ha ha ha. But it’s the sort of joke you don’t make in “mixed company,” I’d wager, and it reveals that plenty of folks still don’t see tech events as such.

Image credit: eljustino

Discuss

As much as some would like to envision a world entirely bereft of disk-based media, with Blu-ray being the medium’s swan song, that ain’t happening. Sony’s already looking to the future, and in cahoots with Tohoku University, it has developed a blue-violet laser capable of 100 watt output. That’s reportedly more than 100 times the “world’s highest output values for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers.” In the press release, the company said its tested using such technology for next-generation, large-capacity optical disc-storage, and while that doesn’t say too much at face value, the Examiner reports (by way of various Japanese news outlets) that it equates to 20 times the storage of current Blu-ray disks,or about 1TB of data. Don’t worry, we’re sure all those 4K 3D films will still find a way to justify a “barebones” release dearth of features before magically making room for a second (and even third) Special Edition in time for respective holiday seasons.

Sony, Tohoku University develop blue-violet laser with 100 watt output, eyeing 1TB optical disk future? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 02:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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