How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. Today, Meebo is creating an ad network across partner sites which use its new Community IM service, which ads a Meebo IM bar at the bottom of participating sites.
Visitors to one of the 85 partner sites which have implemented the Community IM product (including Current TV, DailyStrength, Flixster, and Webs.com) can chat with their IM buddies without leaving the sites. Today, Meebo is introducing new ad units which pop up along the bottom left of the browser, beginning with ads for the Toyota Piou and AT&Ts. For the Toyota ad, a little car icon pops up on the left of the Meebo IM bar, away from all of the chat activity on the bottom right. If you click on the car, a larger ad 900X400 pixel rich ad overlay opens up which can show a video or any number of interactive ads. “When they click we do not take them away from the conversation,” says Sternberg. During the whole time people is watching the ads, they can still chat with their friends through the Meebo IM column on the right. → Read More
Twitter has just quietly rolled out a set of changes to its user interface on the “Following” and “Followers” sections of its website. These changes will clearly make it easier to manage who you follow as well as take actions, such as @replying someone or direct messaging them, directly from the page.
There are two new views for looking at these areas. “List” is a compact list of the followers, while “Expanded” offers more details including that user’s last tweet and their real name and location. On the Followers page, there is also a button that allows for one-click following of users who already follow you. → Read More
The secrecy over the PS3 Slim continues to unravel with news that Foxconn have been contracted to manufacture and ship the updated model starting next month. The report from UDN does not explicitly say that the smaller version of the current platform will be sold anytime soon, but it falls in line with what Ars’s Mole leaked over the weekend. However, UDN states that an updated PS3 will be launched in the Spring. Me thinks they’re just referring to the motion control system and not a brand new console revision. → Read More
Dell’s prepped a killer 1080p monitor that should be great for gaming. Well, it should be. The OptX AW2210 is afterall an Alienware product. (read: it’s overpriced, but loaded) [PSGallery=7sc3j0pqwn] → Read More
Back in December last year the UK government announced it would back the creation of a “£1bn venture fund” to invest in startups. At the time it sounded rather far-fetched. However, yesterday it was confirmed that this would indeed be going ahead, along the lines proposed by the NESTA, the National Endowment for Society, Technology and the arts. The fund is broadly aimed at startups, but it’s likely to concentrate around science and technology, since its specifically aiming at “innovative, fast-growth companies” – and these don’t tend to be companies created to sell socks online. Thus, the fund is expected to focus on clean technology, bioscience, digital technology and advanced manufacturing. According to government figures there are 1,093 venture capital backed tech companies in the UK employing more than 40,000 highly skilled workers. That’s relatively small, however venture capital backed companies significantly out perform other companies and and 69% of these venture backed companies introduced entirely new products or services into the market. The UK Innovation Investment Fund, as it’s called – announced by by Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State at the London Stock Exchange yesterday – will invest £150m, to be matched by private sector backers. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested that the fund could be higher, up to £1bn, if enough private investment is forthcoming – I think we can safely say that’s very much up for debate in this current climate. This notional £1 billion figure comes from a 10 year window for the fund. Lord Drayson said £100 million of the £150 million will come from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, with the remainder being put up by the Department of Health and the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The fund will invest on an equal basis in a process known as known as “pari-passu”. The fund will be regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). A government-appointed manager will run this “fund of funds” and – according to the statement – hopes to make its first investment by the end of the year – so they had better get cracking. Part of this initial £150 million will come from £750 million strategic investment fund the government announced in April to provide financial support to high-tech companies. That announcement sparked a wave of debate on TechCrunch Europe, with an open letter from Angel investor Robin Klein and two further responses. Accordingly, → Read More
If you’re sick — SICK! — of all these new Apple fanatics and you want to show them all that you’ve been a diehard fan since the early days, even sticking by the company through Newton and Pippin, then this thumb drive made out of an old Apple keyboard is for you. → Read More
Sanyo Japan today announced the strange, vase-like “eneloop lamp” [press release in English] that can be used both as a regular interior light or as a flashlight (when you pick it up and hold it like one). As a third option, the device also serves as a “healing lamp” once you switch from white to blue lighting.
The eneloop lamp can be charged wirelessly by putting it on its charging stand. Sanyo says two eneloop AA batteries are enough to power the futuristic device for 6 hours in flashlight mode, up to 45 hours in white light mode and up to 16 hours in blue light mode. → Read More
Sports fanatics can get even more ensconced with the goings-on of their local teams with a “Game Time Schedule Watch” that displays season schedules and beeps when games start. Of course, if you’re a big enough fan to think this watch is a good idea then you probably already know when your team is playing. → Read More
Gamers of a certain age will remember the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality. It was a little mark placed on official Nintendo products in the NES/SNES era (well, that’s when it mattered) that let buyers know that, yes, this product has been blessed by Nintendo. It will not harm you, your cat or your NES. Fast-forward several years and now Sony has gotten into the business of slapping their logo on officially licensed gear with the “Official Licensed Product” gimmick. → Read More
Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.
The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat. As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room.You can try out the gadget for yourself here. → Read More
Since its inception, one of the biggest problems with Digg has been that users often submit the same content over and over again. This makes it harder for cool content to become popular because some users digg one submitted story, while some digg another. Today, Digg is releasing “several major updates” to its duplicate (known as a “dupe”) detection system.
The solution sounds fairly intensive. “To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs. Our R&D team came up with a solution that identifies these types of duplicates by using a document similarity algorithm,” Digg’s Director of Product Chris Howard writes in a blog post. He goes on to say that there will be a follow-up more technical post to explain a bit more about how this actually works, but says that it has proven to be a reliable system so far. → Read More
An arcade on wheels? Now THAT is a good idea. Don’t get too excited, though, as these are basically glorified console setups, not old-school arcade machines. This isn’t about us, though, this is about the children. And the children think Ms. Pac-Man is boring. Ergo, no stand-up arcade machines. → Read More
Let’s face it: there are a lot of crappy games available for the iPhone. Even 99 cents — as cheap as that is — is more than I’m willing to pay for most games, since I’m unlikely to get even a dollar’s worth of enjoyment from them. Not so with Freeverse’s Flick Fishing. This 99 cent game offers a lot for that very small price tag. In addition to great graphics, excellent sounds, and decent gameplay, you can purchase expansion content in-game. And there are a variety of clever multiplayer aspects built in, too. → Read More
Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.
In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon. → Read More
As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.
While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of events apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget: → Read More
Think back to the autumn of 2006, right before the big PS3 launch. Expecting someone to pay five-hundred-and-ninety-nine-U.S.-dollars was (rightly) considered ludicrous, but the ability to play the entire PS2 library on the system somewhat lessened the blow. But then Sony removed the Emotion Engine chip from the PS3, thus rendering it unable to play PS2 games. (More recent models, like the one found in the Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle, used a just-sorta-okay software emulation method to grant partial PS2 backwards compatibility.) All that may well change if Sony goes ahead and executes the idea found in this recently unearthed patent. → Read More
FriendFeed now lets you individualize your account with six new designer themes. When you select a theme, your FriendFeed account will always include your theme, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they have chosen.
FriendFeed says that it plans to allow users to customize themes down the line as well as give users the ability to create an entirely new theme. Twitter and Gmail also let you add themes and designs to your homepages but some of FriendFeed’s themes have a nicer design, in my opinion. On the other hand, Gmail has a good amount of variety when it comes to choosing a theme. The advantage to Twitter’s themes is that you are able to choose multiple designs in different colors. → Read More
It seems Japanese papercraft art isn’t limited to Origami or Pellermodels but also has something in store for us gadget fans. Case in point: The Paper Speaker [JP], announced yesterday by Tokyo-based Princeton for use with your PC (or any device sporting a USB port). → Read More
Not much to say about this DIY transformer except that it’s pretty darn cool. It can transform from a car, walk, and even right itself if it falls. It could use some cool styling – maybe they could stick it into a Yugo body or something – but it’s still much better than anything I ever made in school. → Read More
Don’t pull it until you’re leaving the aircraft. Is it just me or are they all cracking up through this whole thing or is just their bright, happy smiles and, erm, chests? → Read More
