Within months of launch, Orkut’s user community started to change.
Did you know Google had a social network that predated Google+? Google’s social network was called: Orkut and it launched a few months before Facebook launched as a Harvard-only site.
Continue reading… “Dalton Caldwell: Critical mass vs network effects”
Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek” a few days ago. It is a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records. While this sounds like a good idea, it gave a wealthier, more powerful group a chance to erase older, traditional records that hadn’t been properly codified. One effect of passing laws requiring standardized, digital data is to marginalize all data that can’t be standardized or digitized, and to marginalize the people who don’t control the process of standardization.
Continue reading… “The dark side of open data”
Online buyers in India will spend nearly five times more on travel than on retail purchases in 2012.
India’s ecommerce is rising quickly as consumers turn to the web for products and services, but more than 80% of the country’s online sales come from travel purchases. Online buyers in India spend nearly five times more on leisure and unmanaged business travel than they spend on retail purchases.
Continue reading… “83% of ecommerce in India is from online travel sales”
The more we replace with our phones, the fewer consumer electronics we have to keep updated, and the less cluttered our lives can become.
We can easily get caught up in what’s new in smartphones, from novel applications of near field communication to their potential as detectors of environmental pollutants. But it’s also useful to occasionally look back on what they’ve granted us already. A recent survey in the UK found 4 in 10 smartphone users said their phone was “more important for accessing the Internet than any other device.”
Continue reading… “List of things replaced by smartphones”
Online video will soon dominate your time spent on the web.
Chances are that in the past three years that you have watched an online video. Almost every site on the internet that you visit has a video displayed in some form. Video viewership has skyrocketed and there are no signs of it slowing down.
Continue reading… “Why online videos are the future of marketing”
In the last week, more universities signed on with Coursera.
Free online courses from prestigious universities were a rarity a few months ago. Now, they are the cause for announcements every few weeks, as a field suddenly studded with big-name colleges and competing software platforms evolves with astonishing speed.
Continue reading… “A dozen big-name universities join Coursera to offer free online classes”
Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses.
There is a shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education. Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.
Continue reading… “More colleges taking online education to a new level”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plSAxo3YWdo&hd=1[/youtube]
After more than a decade, PayPal — the coaster of the Internet that has had a downhill ride with the wind at its back pretty much since acquisition — is finally under serious threat.
Continue reading… “3 big reasons Paypal is screwed”
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 2004, when Chris Anderson released “The Long Tail,” the world was suddenly awakened to the potential for niche markets that appeal to an increasingly diverse consumer marketplace.
Continue reading… “Workerless Businesses: An Explosive New Trend”
TV most trusted source of information.
Digital has caused some traditional media to suffer in terms of consumer time and attention—notably, print and radio—TV still takes up the bulk of US adults’ time with media. And Triton Digital research, a digital service provider for online and traditional radio, shows the medium also garners the most trust from consumers.
Continue reading… “Most trusted source of info is still traditional media”
Little Monsters
Does Facebook have a new competition? A Palo Alto-based developer on Monday launched a new social networking website that has investors going “gaga.”
Continue reading… “Lady Gaga launches ‘Little Monsters’ social networking site”
Pinterest is now beating out Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic (not Google organic, of course) according to new data just released by the online sharing service Shareaholic. The study is based on Shareoholic’s network of over 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly.
Continue reading… “Pinterest traffic beats Google referral, Bing, Twitter and StumbleUpon”
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