I must admit that texting is not my favorite activity.  It's something that I rarely do.  In fact, when friends send me text messages that require a response, I typically call them back hoping that the they get the tacit hint.  However, Amazon may change my druthers.

The Associated Press reports today about Amazon's text message shopping feature, which launched late yesterday.  Now people can send a text to 262966 (which spells "Amazon" on the telephone keypad) with the description, UPC, or ISBN of an item.  Amazon will see if it has the item and send back two items at a time.  The texter can request more items or buy the item by texting back.

That's pretty spiffy and useful.  Who would've thought that text messaging would serve as a viable comparison shopping tool?  Since I like to use Amazon, this might coax me to text more. 

However, one thing that I do have to consider is the occasional impulse buy.  Do I really need that toothbrush shaped Pez dispenser?

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of a growing annual convention that is held in Monterey, California.  The Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference covers a wide range of topics, from science to the arts, and nearly everything in between.  My fraternity brother, Chris, recently made me aware of this conference, which has been conducted since 1984.

There is an annual membership fee of $6000, however, this fee not only covers attendance to the events, but also attendance for other special gatherings and DVDs of the presentations.  Since not everyone can afford to be this enlightened, the official website was created in response, providing the highlights and best speeches from the conference.

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A little over a year ago I wrote a post that guessed which emerging technologies would have an impact on the 2008 election cycle. I figured I’d take a quick look back and grade my predictions, as well as list a few new technologies that have emerged since I last covered this ground.

Here are the grades I would give my predictions (original post is here for background):

(1) Ning (Niche Social Networks)

I’d give myself a C on this one. Many of the major Presidential candidates launched niche social networks on their campaign sites, hoping to encourage connections among volunteers. However, none of these niche networks really got that much traction except for Barack Obama’s. And no campaign used the specific service I recommended, Ning (which I think is still worth trying). Ron Paul supporters took the novel approach of trying to turn the entire Internet into a niche social network about Ron Paul, which is another thing entirely. I think there is still something to the idea of niche social networks around campaigns, but most of the action has been taking place on the more established networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

(2) Mozes (Broadcast Text Messaging)

I’d go with a B for this one. The Obama campaign launched a quite aggressive text messaging effort where users are encouraged to text the message “Hope” to 62262 to subscribe to text alerts alerts. Other campaigns have experimented with similar programs. The Obama campaign program works pretty much the exact same way as I described in my post, but no one is using Mozes specifically. It is also really hard to measure the impact of these programs without getting access to subscriber figures.

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In 2002 and 2006, we conducted studies that analyzed the features of the campaign websites of folks running for federal office. Our 2002 findings are available here and our 2006 study can be found here.

We are in the planning phases of a 2008 study and are trying to figure out what criteria to check for when reviewing the campaign websites. Below is a list of the criteria we looked at in 2006:

• En Español: Does the website provide a Spanish version?
• News: Does the website provide news and press releases?
• Bio: Does the website provide a biography of the candidate?
• Contacts: Does the website provide adequate contact information?
• Donations: Does the website provide the ability to make donations online?
• Fundraising Campaigns: Does the website provide the ability for voters to organize their own fundraising campaigns?
• Volunteer Forms: Does the website provide a volunteer sign-up form?
• Team Tools: Does the website provide the ability for volunteers to organize and track activity?
• House Parties: Does the website help volunteers set up house parties?
• Downloads: Does the website provide downloadable fliers, web stickers, or other campaign materials?
• Blogs: Does the website offer a blog?
• Podcasts: Does the website offer podcasts?
• Multimedia: Does the website offer audio or video files?
• RSS: Does the website offer an RSS feed?

I think in 2008 we’ll need to look at whether the campaign’s have presences on social networking sites and if they have social networking components on their own sites. We might also need to look at the use of widgets and wikis. We are still very much in the brainstorming phase.

What criteria do you think we should add?

I'm attending the Politics Online Conference today and tomorrow, and there was an interesting discussion during the opening session titled "Pervasive Politics" that Joe Mansour blogged about at TechRepublican.com. The session focused on how we as individuals will be bombarded with political information everywhere we go — not just online or through traditional media.  Think about political ads on your cell phone… (more…)

In mid-November I wrote a post featuring nine technology predictions for late 2007 and early 2008. Some of those were quite forward-looking (up to 6 months). Some were not. Below I go over the predictions I made whose time has already come and gone.

1. The ASUS Eee laptop is going to sell like hotcakes over the holiday season and other manufacturers will soon follow suit in creating light, barebones, home-use laptops. Predicted for mid-January.
This prediction, while it wasn’t particularly hard to make, actually came true. As a result, other manufacturers are tripping over themselves to try to get a piece of the sub-notebook market. Just check out a search for “eee” on Gizmodo…
Right on!

2. RIM will release a 3G Blackberry and the Curve will prove to have been a huge success. Predicted for mid-February.
The Pearl is now 3G on Sprint, likely with others to follow soon and the Curve has been a massive hit for RIM.
Right on!

3. The Wii will outsell all other game consoles, but the number of game sales per owner will be significantly lower than on other platforms. Predicted for mid-February.
Yay! Another prediction come true, kind of …
Just on.

4. Google will embrace OpenID and it will finally take off. Predicted for mid-February.
This hasn’t happened But who’s to say it won’t in the future? I think it might in the next 3 months so I’m going to extend this prediction a little longer…
Wrong.

5. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps will start collaborating and the price of Bu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be sub-$20. Predicted for mid-May.
This prediction looked 6 months forward from the date of the original post, but we may as well write it off as HD-DVD is now officially dead, which I inferred would happen earlier in the year (no crystal ball was that necessary for that one after Warner stopped supporting HD-DVD).
Wrong.

So, discounting Google and OpenID and my generous extension of my own prediction deadline by 3 months, 3 out 4, as Meatloaf might say, ain’t bad. More updates in another 3 months…

Linux-based GUIs

I bought an ASUS EEE sub-notebook a couple of months ago. In fact I’m writing this on the EEE, connected to a 19 inch monitor and a regular keyboard. The interface is suprisingly simple and functional and I did not need to know anything about Linux to get started. It’s a custom-made interface for the EEE built using parts of a full-fledged Linux interface and applications. Here are some screenshots to give you an idea:

I don’t miss Windows at all. Really. Granted, I just use the machine for web browsing, email and document and spreadsheet editing, but I would have never guessed I would be saying it was a good enough substitute to Windows for me.

Adobe Air

In other news, Adobe has just launched a cross-OS application development platform called Air. I honestly haven’t done a lot of research into it, but essentially it allows developers to easily, quickly, and cheaply create internet-rich desktop applications that will run on any OS, including Macs and Linux.

Alternatives to Windows

If Adobe Air really takes off, the applications created with it will work on any OS, allowing users to easily migrate to a new OS (say, from Windows to Linux) without sacrificing their use of applications they’ve come to know and love.I think it can now truly be said that with the emergence of these kinds of accessible technologies that true alternatives to using Windows are just a stone’s throw away.

Version 6 of the open source Content Management System, Drupal, was released last week. We are really excited about this release, as we specialize in Drupal and have been playing with the beta releases of this version for many months now. Version 6 represents a significant step forward for Drupal. You can see a breakdown of all the new features here.

Since The Bivings Group builds a lot of websites that feature multiple languages, we are particularly excited by advances in Drupal’s language support. In previous versions of Drupal, to run websites in multiple languages you pretty much had to hack into the Drupal code and make it work using duct tape. It wasn’t pretty. Drupal 6 is the first release to natively handle multiple languages. The new release allows for:

• On the fly creation of multiple versions of the site in different language, including custom URLs.
• The ability for site visitors to set language preferences themselves, so they can control what language the site is in when visiting.
• Support for both left to right and right to left languages out of the box.
• Most importantly, the ability to manage pieces of content in multiple languages.

This last point is particularly important. Below is a quick breakdown of how this works with screenshots taking from a video demo by birdmanx35.

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The Future of Web Apps Conference will be held on the East coast for this first time ever this year, hitting the beaches of sunny Miami February 28th. It’ll be interesting to follow the developments that emerge from this year’s event. Speakers and participants are slated to discuss everything from startups to social networks.

Also on the agenda is a “Launch a web app in 40 minutes” feature, which will be led by a moderated panel of some of the smartest web developers.  You can vote for what kind of application the panel will attempt to assemble through TechCrunch.

Wordpress and Google will be represented among the 14 speakers confirmed thus far. Various workshops will also be available for those in attendance, including a “Making Money From Your App” session.

The Future of Web Apps Conference comes to a close March first.

<Cross post from our ImpactWatch blog> 

Most people want to boil the success or failure of a website down to two easy-to-digest statistics. How many people came to my site? How many pages did those folks look at? Take those two numbers. Draw a line over time. If they go up, we’re doing good. If they go down, we’re not.

As the web has gotten bigger, these broad eyeball-based metrics have become less and less useful. Sure, eyeballs are still extremely relevant for websites that are selling online advertising. But for most websites, the total number of visitors really isn’t that important except in giving you very broad strokes. More important is whether your website is reaching its target audience.

Let me give you a couple of examples from our own blog, The Bivings Report.

(1) A while back this article of ours made it on to the homepage of the social news site, Digg. For those of you not familiar, this means we got thousands of visitors coming to our site all at once (this phenomenon is actually called the Slashdot Effect). To this day that is still the day we got the most visitors to our blog.

But to what end? As you’ll see, being on Digg didn’t lead to some great discussion in the comments on our site. In looking at usage patterns before and after being on Digg, we didn’t see a long term bump in users or RSS subscribers. Basically, being on Digg was (1) a nice ego boost for us and (2) a fun way to run an ad hoc stress test on our servers. Beyond that, it really didn’t accomplish much.

(2) Similarly, we wrote an off-point blog post a while back on HD-DVD vs Bluray. Based on our site stats, I’d a lot of people are researching which to buy as hundreds of people are visiting our blog each day after finding our article on Google. Like with Digg, this traffic is doing us very little good. We’re not a consumer electronics blog and the people coming from Google on that particular search aren’t being converted from visitors into readers.

If you boil our bottom line for this blog down to a line chart showing visitors over time, these two events make us look great. Our trend line is going up. Hurray. But in both these cases, the people we attracted aren’t really interested in what we write about on our blog and aren’t members of our target audience.

The overall traffic numbers don’t really tell us whether our blog has been truly effective or not. To know that, you’ve got to look a lot deeper than visitors and page views.

uTest is preparing to launch its pilot program for community-based software testing. Tester hopefuls can sign up now to be included in the first round of application testing. Tester profiles will include information on the tester’s education, experience, specialization, and available hardware.

Software vendors can use these criteria to hand-pick testers or release their product for the community to review. Companies pay only for unique, verified bugs which begs the question of how testers will avoid working out a bug only to find another tester has beat them to the report. Vendors who participate in the pilot will have those projects tested at 75% off uTest’s standard rates.

uTest has been putting its money where its mouth is by paying testers who report bugs in its own registration process. I made it halfway through the sign-up only to find that I could not complete the forms. Sadly, someone has already submitted the bug so I neither completed registration nor got paid for finding the error.

A social networking component of the system allows testers to rate each other’s performance, influencing the price-per-bug that testers can command and effectively allowing competitors to determine each other’s value.

This seems like a pretty clever application of crowd-sourcing, but the company’s site leaves many questions about implementation unanswered. How will vendors verify the resumés provided by the network of testers? Will testers spend valuable time testing applications only to find that others have already claimed the prize? How will honesty in the performance rating system be guaranteed? How do I finish my registration so that I can get paid?

Read more on uTest’s blog.

These are probably the hottest electronic gift items for the 2007 holidays. We've got a little bit of everything in here. Personally I'm waiting for the 3G version of the iPhone so that's not on my list. So instead I asked for an ASUS EEE and got it early! I'd review it but there's so much written about it already I won't bother. Suffice to say that it's tiny and light and fine for basic computer usage.

What? The item you lust after most is not in our poll? Feel free to complain in the comments area!

[Poll=16]

I became aware of the term tumblelog around a year ago and have been running across examples of tumblelogs with greater and greater frequency lately. According to Wikipedia, a tumblelog “is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” This site has a list of examples.

After circling around the concept for awhile, I set up a test tumblelog for myself using the Tumblr service. Here are my impressions of tumblelogging generally and Tumblr specifically:

Things I Like

(1) The interface is dead simple and slick. As you’ll see from the screenshot below, all you do is click on the content type you want to post and your off.

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I thought I'd kickstart the end-of-year-prediction-writing season with my own wacky technology predictions for the next 6 months.
 
1. The ASUS Eee laptop is going to sell like hotcakes over the holiday season and other manufacturers will soon follow suit in creating light, barebones, home-use laptops.
Its 2 pounds of weight, small form factor, integrated camera, wifi, few moving parts (read: it's durable), decent battery life, and $400 price tag all spell good news for Asus's home-use ultraportable. It's not a Windows PC, instead it provides users with a suite of basic browsing, messaging and productivity applications over a dumbed-down version of Linux. The word on the street is the preinstalled install is fantastic, although you can install XP on it if you want to. Reviews have been very positive. I think I'll be picking one of these up. (2 months)
 
2. Apple will announce a digital camera with integrated video recording and wifi, and seamless YouTube video upload functionality.
Now before you call me crazy, remember that Apple is now a consumer electronics company. What does everyone want and not have? A way to effortlessly get their videos from their digital camera immediately up on the web. Apple's recent collaboration with Google on the iPhone underscores a relationship that I think will continue. (6 months)
 
3. RIM will release a 3G Blackberry and the Curve will prove to have been a huge success.
This will help Blackberry sales in Europe where 3G has more widespread use and availability than in the US. I also predict that Blackberry's balance sheet will show that the Curve has been a huge success. (3 months)
 
4. PS3 will outsell the XBox360 in the US.
Granted, this has already happened in Europe and, of course, Japan, but here in the US the PS3 has finally found its sweetspot — a lower price and a great new advertising campaign. With every firmware update the platform also keeps getting better and better (read about the recent decision to add local and network play of DivX files - this is huge), and Sony's take on a SecondLife-like virtual meeting place for gamers, Home, promises big time. Couple all that with a slew of games from exclusive franchises coming out in the next 6 months and you've finally got a winner. (5 months)
 
5. The Wii will outsell all other game consoles, but the number of game sales per owner will be significantly lower than on other platforms.
Why? Demographics: the Wii is a disruptive platform that has successfully found a new market of gamers. Still, many of those users are not hardcore gamers and do not spend as much time on the Wii as other players on other systems. Those users will be content with a handful of decent games to play on social occasions. (3 months)
 
6. 24 inch widescreen monitors will hit the mainstream and soon thereafter will become the norm.
Quick on the heels of 22 inch monitors, the price of 24 inch LCD monitors will come down below $300 and people will begin to look at this monitor size as the size of choice. (5 months)
 
7. Cellular providers will start to offer cell-phone Internet plans with VOIP.
It's like what happened to the music business with mp3s — there is just so much pressure on them to open their services up to VOIP that it's simply inevitable. The first provider to cave in will be Sprint. (4 months)
 
8. Google will embrace OpenID and it will finally take off.
For those not in the know, OpenID is an open effort to create a multiplatform sign-in solution for users. That means create an account in one place and use it on many sites. Sounds great to me. Todd wrote about it a while back too. Google is looking to regain some of the goodwill it's lost over the last year. Much like its involvement in creating an app platform with OpenSocial , it will embrace OpenID in the same way. Unlike OpenSocial though, OpenID already has a small following (if you call AOL, LiveJournal, Technorati, Wordpress and Vox small). Google will resist the Microsoft-like urge to copy the OpenID idea and pull together a competing platform and will instead join, support and improve on OpenID. (3 months)
 
9. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps will start collaborating and the price of Bu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be sub-$20.
Blu-Ray definitely had the edge, but with el-cheapo HD-DVD players available over the holiday season and Paramount's exclusive HD-DVD deal, HD-DVD will still remain very much alive. This will force both camps to consider working together. In the end, this is the only thing that really makes sense. Sony's CEO made comments recently that allude to this being more than just a possibility. As far as media prices go, you can currently get a Blu-Ray movie on Amazon for about $24. For some reason Best Buy et al are still selling these at $30 or more. I'm thinking $18.99 is the sweet spot and that we'll hit that in the not too distant future. (6 months)
 
There you have it, my wacky predictions for the coming first part of the year. What do you think?

Disclaimer: these predictions are based purely on my hunches and accumulation of publicly available knowledge, not on insider information or any other type of institutional knowledge. Full disclosure: RIM is an ImpactWatch client.