It seems that when it comes to apps for the Palm Pre, one group of users has one hand clapping while the other is outstretched like Oliver saying, "Please, sir, I want some more."
Strategy Analytics, a Massachusetts-based research and consulting firm, asked a dozen mobile-savvy users in San Diego recently about their experiences with the Palm App Catalog. They were asked to spend at least five minutes browsing and to come up with five apps they were interested in.
Unanimously, these users found the store's interface intuitive and easy to navigate but did have some complaints, according to the report.
"While the App Catalog contains desirable and recognizable content, the volume of content overall is lacking," the report found.
At the time of the study, there were fewer than 60 apps in the Palm store. This is one of the challenges of entering a game that's been defined and dominated by other players -- especially when they've trained smart-phone users and wannabes to expect more apps than you can easily scroll through in a day. According to Palm, more than 150,000 apps were downloaded on the first day the Pre was available to consumers.
Most of these testers seemed to gravitate to the familiar: Pandora Radio, Good Food -- Restaurants Near You, AccuWeather, AP News and Craigslist, the report said.
And although they found navigation and search through the store straightforward and understandable, the App Catalog's pricing structure left them a bit baffled, according to the report. Currently, each app displays "$Try me" when listed and when it's selected. The users wondered whether that meant it was a trial or for purchase -- or whether a fee might kick in later.
So far, everything in the App Catalog is a free trial. No prices are currently listed with apps, nor is an expiration date for trial periods.
"Purchase details of content are not clearly defined, leaving users unsure if they are downloading a trial version of the item or the complete version," according to the report.
-- Michelle Maltais
What's your take on the Palm Pre App Catalog and its offerings? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Just after Take-Two Interactive Software this afternoon said it would delay the release of BioShock 2 to its next fiscal year, investors punished the New York publisher's stock, pushing it down more than 12% in after-hours trading.
Take-Two shares plunged $1.12 to $7.86 after gaining 14 cents following its BioShock 2 bombannouncement.
BioShock is a marquee franchise for Take-Two, which also publishes Grand Theft Auto and 2K Sports games. Because Take-Two's fiscal 2010 begins Nov. 1, the announcement leaves open the possibility that BioShock 2 could still make a holiday release date.
The move is bad news for the company's current fiscal year, which ends October 31, but great news for its 2010 fiscal year, said Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design & Research in Carlsbad, Calif.
"I expect them to dominate fiscal 2010," Divnich said. "BioShock 2, Max Payne 3, Red Dead Redemption, Mafia II, additional Grand Theft Auto Downloadable Content (DLC), and the possible launch of Agent should make fiscal 2010 the year of Take-Two. As far as I am concerned, Take-Two is just moving numbers from one financial year to another."
Take-Two also said its sales of older releases, so-called catalog titles, as well as retail orders of new releases, have been soft. With the economy eating into game sales and the delay of BioShock 2, the company forecast lower-than-expected earnings for the remainder of this fiscal year.
Netflix Inc. shares closed at a near 10-week high today as rumors swirled that online commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. was looking to buy the 12-year-old online movie rental company.
Netflix rose $2.12 to $42.19 with a trading volume of 4.2 million, one of the highest in months.
A Bloomberg report quoted an analyst attributing the trading activity to "renewed takeover talk" surrounding Netflix, with Amazon at the center of the conversation.
But other analysts were skeptical.
"Adding another business that would essentially cannibalize from the moves they’re already trying to make just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense," said Steve Weinstein of Pacific Crest Securities.
"Amazon is ramping up digital distribution very quickly," he said. "They’ve obviously done a good job with e-books, and they’re making some progress with music. So I don’t think anyone’s that much farther down the road than they are."
Neither Amazon nor Netflix would comment, saying that they don't respond to rumors and speculation.
Both companies are big players in the online streaming business, where consumers can watch movies through special set-top boxes like those made by TiVo and Roku. Amazon, which charges for each viewing, tends to have newer, more popular films available for download, while Netflix streams a more limited selection of older films to its subscribers.
Netflix has a catalog of over 100,000 movies and television shows available by mail -- its primary delivery mechanism -- but streams only about 12,000 of those shows via its set-top software. Amazon has made at least 40,000 movies available for streaming.
When Apple announced the addition of a compass to the iPhone 3GS, shortsighted onlookers responded with a yawn. Yay, we can find magnetic north.
But iPhone app developers quickly saw an opportunity, and a new breed of "augmented reality" apps are about to be born.
Holding the phone in front of you, locations are plotted on a live view of the world in relation to where you're standing. The apps combine the phone's key features -- camera, GPS, compass and Internet connectivity -- to create a sort of heads-up display reminiscent of first-person shooter video games.
The first two poised to hit the App Store -- pending Apple's approval, of course -- are Nearest Tube, which plots subway stations in London, and TwittARound, which shows nearby Twitter users.
Nearest Tube overlays information about subway stations, including the stop's name, its distance from your current location and which lines it serves.
The first version of the app, which has already been submitted to Apple, will cost $1.79 per city and will ...
Microsoft today said it will make a free Web-based version of its popular Office suite for the 400 million people who have its Windows Live service. The product, which would include lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, would debut next year and compete with Google's free online Google Docs suite.
Like Saturn eating its young, Microsoft risks cannibalizing its most profitable business in doing so, says Reuters. The Redmond, Wash.-based business software division, which includes Office, made $9.3 billion in profit from $14.3 billion in sales during the first three quarters of its 2009 fiscal year.
The announcement is the latest tit-for-tat in an increasingly intense rivalry between Microsoft and Google. The Mountain View, Calif., search giant last week said it would develop an operating system designed to lure users away from personal computers, Microsoft's home turf, to using applications on the Internet, where Google has a dominant presence.
Dubbed Chrome OS, the software would be made available to the open-source community, which implies that it would, like Android, be free, unlike Microsoft's Windows operating system, which powers more than 90% of the world's computers.
Here's another way that Google and Microsoft compete. Both are in contention for the title of technology's 800-pound gorilla, a designation that entitles the winner to intense regulatory scrutiny, fear and distrust. As tech blogger Anil Dashpointed out, inheriting the mantle means being subjected to the axiom of "Hanlon's Razor" -- once a company dominates its market, mistakes from oversight or stupidity will be attributed to malice.
-- Alex Pham
Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter@AlexPham.
Social networks are partly about broadcasting information to a far-flung audience, and partly about establishing your identity (or the one you'd like to have). Facebook users, for instance, can publicize lists of their friends, their favorite bands, their tastes in movies and their fealty to particular consumer brands. The new site SuperFan distills the experience of social networking down to the public list of affinities, expanded beyond entertainment and products to a wide array of historical figures, places and even ideas.
Created by the team that developed Tickle.com (the source of many an online personality test), SuperFan plans to make money by selling credits that its members can use to control fan pages and targeted advertisements. More interesting to me, though, is how SuperFan functions as an overlay onto YouTube (and, eventually, other online video sites). Most of the items in SuperFan's inventory of user likes and dislikes include links to images and YouTube videos posted by users. In other words, the site acts as a collection of favorites. "We really want this to be driven by the fans," said Rick Marini, the site's founder and chief executive. That's a bit different from social-media sites such as TVLoop and First on Mars, where users' likes and dislikes can help guide others to choice nuggets within the vast amount of content available. SuperFan moves in the other direction, starting from scratch and offering only the material that's drawn a reaction (good or bad) from its members. It also helps users discover content in more indirect ways than other social-media sites. For example, you might track down the members who share your love of death metal or Jonathan Lethem (or both!) to see what movies or TV shows they recommend. My guess is, that's a technique better suited for those with eclectic tastes.
SuperFan will probably have to attract far more users to become a compelling media portal. But Marini seems to believe that the site's main appeal will be the platform it provides for declaiming one's loyalties. "Everything that defines who you are, you can express on the site," he said. It takes more time to do that than some people may want to invest, and the process of suggesting a favorite not already in SuperFan's database is laborious. In fact, the site reviews the new nominees to make sure they might appeal to other users, too. "We want to include those people, those bands" that users suggest, Marini said, "but I don’t want to put in 'I’m a fan of my cat.' That’s not interesting to the community. There is a gray area we have to get through each day on what makes the cut." That strikes me as both arbitrary and not particularly effective at weeding out the things the site really should be concerned about, namely, marketers creating bogus users to pump up their clients.
Each item has a "SuperFan" who controls some elements of its fan page. To become a SuperFan, you have to either claim that spot before anyone else does or spend SuperFan credits to buy your way to the top of the heap. The site awards credits for creating or uploading content, but it also sells them. Those sales will be the site's main revenue stream, Marini said. It also hopes to command higher-than-average rates from advertisers because of its ability to target their pitches. According to Marini, SuperFan can offer advertisers a more complete profile of its users than other social networks "because we know everything you love in life." He added that the company won't share personally identifiable information with advertisers; instead, it will put their pitches in front of users who match the profiles they're interested in. Still, the more accurate the targeting, the more unsettling the practice may be to users. There's also a limit to how narrow advertisers want to make their pitches; at some point, targeting yields an audience that's just too small to be interesting.
Have you noticed some new data points on your Google Maps app? Well, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just hooked up with Google Maps to make it easier for passengers to plan trips using the MTA's buses and trains.
As mentioned on the LA Now blog, the MTA is the latest to add its info to Google's interactive maps. And you can tap into that on your iPhone as well. By tapping the transit icon (the bus in the middle), you can access schedules for the road and rail public transportation options to your destination. It includes the departure times, estimated travel time and price to hitch a ride.
The BlackBerry Google Maps app also offers transit details -- routes, times and distance. The MTA's info wasn't accessible when we tried to call it up with plans for a trip from downtown L.A. to Glendale and one from downtown to Irvine. Foothill Transit directions from L.A. to Claremont came up without issue.
Other transit agencies currently available through Google Maps include Foothill Transit and Metrolink.
A screenshot of an iPhone using the TomTom navigation app, mounted with the TomTom car kit for iPhone. Credit: TomTom Inc.
As a member of the directionally challenged community, I have been much enamored with having a device that knows where I am and where I'm going even when I don't.
Even as other GPS navigation apps have launched -- among them are AT&T’s Navigator (free download, $9.99 monthly) and Sygic’s Mobile Maps ($79.99 for North America) -- many iPhone owners have been atwitter about the advent of a TomTom navigational iPhone app, announced at WWDC in San Francisco on June 8.
I had a chance recently to chat with Tom Murray, vice president of market development at TomTom Inc., about the anticipated app and the company's iPhone car kit. ...
Kid sends a text message to a friend. Credit: andronicusmax via Flickr
When you search for something on Google, the computers that process your questions aren't thinking about what might have motivated the inquiry. Nor are they sharing the bizarre ones with their friends. You punch in a few words and machines spit out a list of related Web pages in less than second.
But as workers for KGB, the people-powered mobile search service, field questions, they find plenty to laugh, worry and wince about.
For those who haven't seen the TV commercials, KGB isn't the Russian spy agency. It's a service that lets you ask questions by sending text messages from your cellphone and returns an answer researched by one of its volunteer laborers called agents (get it?).
Users are charged 99 cents per message, and agents earn 5 cents to 10 cents for every answer they serve up, depending on the amount of fact-finding involved.
People who already own Internet-enabled cellphones might wonder why they would spend a buck when they have Google at the ready. Surprisingly, half of KGB's users have smartphones or cellphones with QWERTY keyboards, according to KGB Chief Executive Bruce Stewart.
"People don't want thousands of links," Stewart said in a phone interview. "They just want the answer." Maybe there is something to Microsoft's "search overload" ad campaign for Bing after all.
But a better question might be: What would motivate these agents to answer our whimsical questions for less than minimum wage?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, top left, and co-founders Larry Page, right, and Sergey Brin in 2004. Credit: Ben Margot / Associated Press.
Sun Valley, Idaho -- In one of his first public discussions since announcing plans to launch the Chrome OS operating system, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said his Mountain View, Calif., company's decision was based on the belief that there "is an opportunity to build an operating system built around the ubiquity and power of the Internet."
Speaking to reporters at the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference along with Google co-founder Larry Page, Schmidt said Chrome OS, which is designed to work with Google's Chrome Web browser, would be faster for consumers because it would boot up almost instantaneously. Page added that the "browser is a great way to do most things" and that Chrome OS will get the computer "out of the way."
Schmidt said that Page and Sergey Brin, Google's other co-founder, had been pushing to create an operating system for six years. "Previous attempts on the Web have had various problems.... They haven't been zippy enough," Schmidt said. "We think the technology is now there."
As for working with computer makers such as Dell, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard, Schmidt declined to identify individual companies but said "everybody we have talked to is very excited about the plan.... Hopefully later this year we will see some announcements."
Although Chrome OS is clearly a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Schmidt declined to discuss whether Google's operating system is designed to compete with the Redmond, Wash., software giant.
Asked whether Google's ambitions may raise eyebrows with federal regulators, Schmidt answered that his company is "pro-consumer."
Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chief development officer of Arista Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud computing company. Credit: Alex Pham / Los Angeles Times.
Google made waves in the tech world this week when it announced plans to release an operating system that would encourage wider use of something called cloud computing.
Although most have never heard of cloud computing, many do it every day. By uploading photos to Facebook, sending messages via Gmail or playing Club Penguin online, users are accessing programs and software files that live far away in cavernous, climate-controlled rooms containing thousands of computers.
To help explain this shift in the way we use computers, we turned to Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and chief development officer for Arista Networks, a Silicon Valley startup that supplies networking equipment used to build these massive arrays of cloud computers.
As it turns out, Bechtolsheim was also one of the first people to invest in Google back in 1998, when the company was just two Stanford geeks with a laptop. His $100,000 investment in the company started by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, along with several other shrewd calls, turned the Birkenstock-wearing engineer into a billionaire.
We spoke to the 53-year-old serial entrepreneur recently about cloud computing, his investment philosophy and his latest venture, Arista Networks. An edited version of the conversation is below.
Q: What do you make of the potential for cloud computing, both as a market and a technology?
Bechtolsheim: It is a surprising evolution in the history of computing. Every application can now shift to the Web. You can access any application remotely. My startup does the networking plumbing for this. IDC has estimated that by 2012 the market for cloud computing infrastructure will grow to $42 billion, up from $16 billion in 2008. It’s the fastest-growing slice of the spending on information technology. Right now, it’s small sliver of the overall pie. Most of the spending is for the applications. But it’s a growing slice of the pie.
Q: What are some uses of cloud computing?
Bechtolsheim: Hollywood uses high-performance clusters to ...
The chase is over. After Emulex rejected Broadcom's $912 million offer, its suitor today called off the hostile buyout effort.
Broadcom Chief Executive Scott McGregor, who only two weeks ago sweetened his bid 20% from $764 million, said his Irvine network equipment company will now pursue "other value-creating alternatives." The company said it would not renew its offer when the offer expires July 14.
The announcement ends a contentious process marked by lawsuits lobbed by both Orange County companies. Broadcom initially had sued to invalidate an Emulex poison pill designed to ward off hostile takeovers. Emulex, based in Costa Mesa, countered with a lawsuit charging that the antics of former Broadcom chief executive Henry Nicholas made the company untrustworthy.
Nicholas, who is no longer involved in Irvine company he founded, is awaiting criminal prosecution on two federal indictments, one on a stock backdating charge and another alleging he had supplied narcotics to acquaintances.
-- Alex Pham
Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter@AlexPham.
How high were the webcasting royalties set by a federal copyright board more than two years ago? So high that the bacon-saving discountannounced Tuesday for "pureplay" webcasters will still require large ones to pay at least25% of their revenues to SoundExchange, the agency that represents labels and performing artists. Techdirt's Mike Masnick also notes that the deal calls for a minimum annual fee of $25,000-- not exactly chump change. Nevertheless, webcaster Kurt Hansonhailed the agreement, saying that the rates imposed by the Copyright Royalty Board "would almost certainly have been a death warrant -- they were the [equivalent] of 70%, 100%, or even more of some webcasters’ total revenues."
Those percentages seem outrageous, but consider this: The royalty set by the CRB for 2009 amounted to 2.7 cents per listener per hour of music streamed. The fact that such a fee would amount to 70% or more of a webcaster's income shows how little these companies have been able to generate from advertisers. The picture has actually worsened for webcasters this year as advertisers cut their spending online and off, strengthening the companies' argument for a discount.
If the numbers were so stark, why did it take a virtual eternity for webcasters and the music industry to agree on a model that seems sustainable? I'd blame four things:
Will a $60 price drop make more book lovers shelve their hardcovers for a digital display? Amazon hopes the answer is yes.
The Seattle-based online retail giant dropped the price today on its Kindle 2 e-reader to $299 from its recent price of $359. This new pricetag is a $100 drop from when Amazon introduced the original Kindle reader in 2007, when it gained a minor a cult following. Kindle 2, the second and current incarnation released six months ago in February, is about the width of a pencil and weighs about 10 ounces. It has enough memory to store more than 1,500 books. In addition, this version includes a somewhat controversial text-to-audio feature, plays MP3s music files and could hop onto the Internet over a 3G wireless connection, which is offered through an arrangement with Sprint.
Readers can wirelessly download books to the device and subscribe for a monthly fee to blogs, magazines and newspapers (including the Los Angeles Times) that will automatically download.
In May, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, a large-screen version targeting newspaper and magazine readers.
Amazon spokeswoman Cinthia Portugal told the Associated Press that the price cut, a classic electronics marketing strategy, is not simply a short-term promotion. "We've been able to increase the volume of Kindles we're manufacturing and decrease the cost of doing so," she said.
Amazon has not released figures on how many devices have sold or the revenue generated by sales of electronic books to the Kindle.
However, ThinkEquity analyst Ed Weller called the move smart business for a company that started out serving readers. "They are serving the most important component of their consumer franchise by enhancing that connection and facilitating future sales," he said.
Taking direct aim at Microsoft's dominance in personal computers, Google last night announced plans to launch an operating system that would compete with Windows and be available to consumers in the second half of 2010.
Dubbed Google Chrome OS, the operating system is designed to work with the company's Chrome Web browser, launched nine months ago and downloaded by 30 million users. Google said the software will be optimized for small, lightweight laptop computers called netbooks, a fast-selling category of inexpensive machines that sell for as little as $250 and are used primarily to surf the Web and check e-mail.
In a blog post announcing the product, Google's vice president of product management, Sundar Pichai, and its engineering director, Linus Upson, said:
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
Google did not say whether it would charge for the software, but references that it would work with the open-source community of developers suggest that the company may make it freely available. Microsoft, on the other hand, charges about $200 for each copy of its Windows Vista operating system.
"The release of an operating system is just another part of Google's strategy to more rapidly and cheaply spread access to the Internet via a multitude of different devices -- desktops, netbooks, mobile phones, set top boxes, etc.," Ben Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, wrote in a note this morning to investors.
Schachter said Google wants to eventually lure businesses away from Microsoft's Windows operating system towards so-called cloud computing, in which businesses can use lightweight computers to access applications and data that are managed via large data centers and served over the Web.
"Longer term, Google hopes a free operating system may encourage more small and medium-sized businesses to move towards an enterprise software solution in the 'cloud' and away from Microsoft," Schachter said.
ZeniMax Media raised $105 million to acquire id Software, according to a document filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Id Software, which created the Doom and Quake game franchises, stunned the game industry two weeks ago when it announced its acquisition by ZeniMax, which publishes the Elder Scrolls series of role-playing games developed by its Bethesda Softworks studio. The sale surprised many because id Software, based in Mesquite, Texas, had rebuffed numerous buyout offers over the years, preferring to maintain its independence.
Because both companies were privately held, neither was obligated to divulge the price.
The filing with the SEC suggests that the price may have been $105 million. That's what ZeniMax issued in the form of a "convertible note," so called because the holder of that bond can convert it into either cash or shares in the issuing company. It's unclear from the filing if ZeniMax used the entire amount to pay for id or whether the deal called for additional payment.
ZeniMax and id Software declined to comment on the filing.
ZeniMax, based in Rockville, Md., has deep pockets backing the company. In 2007 it snagged a $300-million investment from Providence Equity Partners, and its board of directors include retired baseball player Cal Ripken Jr., CBS Corp. President Leslie Moonves and Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who in May announced his entry into the video game business.
Updated 6:42 pm to reflect the companies' denial for comment.
-- Alex Pham and Ben Fritz
Follow or random thoughts on games, entertainment and technology on Twitter@AlexPhamand @BenFritz.
Musicians want to be heard. Actors need to be watched. Writers like to be read. And what better way to get an audience than to make these works free? But artists also need to eat. How to reconcile?
Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" and Wired magazine's editor in chief, says the two are not mutually exclusive. He's also putting his money where his mouth is. The 47-year-old Berkeley writer is giving away his latest book, titled "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" and published by Hyperion Books.
More precisely, he's letting people read the entire book free till Aug. 10 on Scribd, a site that lets authors set their own price for digital copies of their works. The book's title aside, the giveaway is not as radical as it seems. In fact, it's perfectly rational, Anderson said in an interview.
"The book is about making money from free," he said. "I felt it was important to walk the talk."
For one thing, his book is free for only a month, after which readers will have to buy it (the hardback version retails for $17.99 on Amazon.com). Secondly, it can't be downloaded on Scribd; readers have to read the free version online. This fits with the "freemium" model -- give away the basic version to build your initial audience, then sell them premium features, such as the ability to download the book or having a physical copy.
A host of well known online services follow this model, including ...
Michael Betts once owned a photography studio, but for the past couple of years he's made a business out of distributing images rather than taking them. Today his Toronto-based company, DigiSphere, offers the latest iteration of Fotoglif, a site that provides bloggers and other Web publishers free images taken by the same professional shooters who supply news agencies around the world. Previously, Fotoglif compensated the agencies for the shots that were published online; now it will cut bloggers in on the action too.
What's interesting here is how Fotoglif confronts a problem common to copyright holders online. Just as it's relatively easy to find and copy media online, it's brain-dead simple for Web publishers to grab photos from around the Net and slap them onto their sites. Sure, there are companies such as Attributor that crawl the Web to search for unauthorized uses of copyrighted material, helping the owners of the material to identify infringers. But the scale of the infringing is vast, and it's not clear how much return a copyright holder might get from a big investment in enforcement.
Instead of trying to track and stop infringers, Fotoglif's strategy is to offer online publishers something better than free ...
Scams have arrived on Twitter. Credit: waltercolor via Flickr.
The hot spot for online scam artists has moved again -- from e-mail and Google to Twitter, according to the Better Business Bureau.
Websites, e-mails and tweets have been popping up since late spring promising to help job seekers make hundreds of dollars a day, simply by tweeting from home.
But here’s the hitch: Customers first have to sign up for a “free” trial for an informational CD or training packet and submit their credit card information to pay a minor shipping fee.
Most people don’t notice the provision, nestled deep in a mass of terms and conditions, that the trial period begins when the customer places the order and includes the time spent shipping the product. What happens next, according to the bureau, is that customers don't cancel their membership in time and end up shelling out $50, even $100 or more, every month.
Unfortunately, high unemployment caused by a rough economy makes people especially vulnerable to such schemes. For more, see this article in Tuesday's L.A. Times.
At Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale. Credit: Franco Folini via Flickr.
Yahoo says it will roll out a new feature tomorrow afternoon that automatically detects when users of its search engine are gathering research on a particular topic and saves their results in one place.
Called Search Pad, the feature is supposed to solve a problem that many researchers on the Web have -- how to keep track of those bits of information they dig up from multiple websites. Say you're planning a vacation to Hawaii and you're looking up car rentals, hotel reviews and flight information. Yahoo says its search engine will recognize what you're doing, save the search results on a single notepad, let you write notes on those sites and allow you to share your research results with friends.
Search analysts who have seen and used the feature say it's useful but not a game changer for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which is struggling to compete with Google for search advertising. In May, Yahoo's market share for Internet searches was 20%, second place behind Google, which claimed a 65% share, according to ComScore.
"For existing Yahoo users, it can be valuable," said Greg Sterling, an analyst in Oakland who reviewed the feature in February when in rolled out in beta to selected users. "But I don’t think it will dramatically increase their market share."
Depending on the model, your device features either a hard drive or flash drive that allows you to read and write files to it just like an external drive.
Augmented Reality can be used for a lot ...
Augmented reality is much more than a GP...
Seems like a cool service if youre on-th...