A new AP-AOL survey on how Americans use instant messaging reveals a giant gap. Baby boomers could care less if IM exists but teens can't live without it.
48 percent of teens use IM, that's more than twice the percentage of adults who use it.
Three-fourths of adults who do use IM still communicate with e-mail more often. Almost three-fourths of teens send IMs more than e-mail.
More than 50 percent of teens that IM send more than 25 per day and one in five send more than 100. Whereas 75 percent of adults send fewer than 25 instant messages a day.
But here's where teens have a real advantage over us adults that grew up without computers (*gasp!*), let alone IM. "About a fifth of teen IM users have used IM to ask for or accept a date. Almost that many, 16 percent, have used it to break up with someone."
I've posted before about Europe's increasingly popular, excessively frill-free, and nearly free airline RyanAir. Shel Israel blogs that because it's possible to go from Point A to Point B - say London to Dublin - for $30 including taxes , markets are opening up that previously didn't exist. First there's the marketplace on the plane itself which sells its captive audience all sorts of stuff, including lottery tickets. Then there's the fact that people can bop down to London and hook up with friends just for the day and fly home. Now that's social networking.
Hmmm...what if JetBlue offered a "JetBlueMart" option like RyanAir - fly to NYC for $20 and do some holiday shopping on the plane...hit The City to finish shopping and fly home in time to enjoy a glass of Wine 2.0 in front of the fire.
Tangentially related:
My husband commutes to New York and commented that the city is full of Europeans who come over just to shop because our prices are so much lower than theirs that it still offsets the cost of the plane fare.
Ever feel like ditching your job to make fine wines? Well the custom luxury winemaking community of Crushpad lets you do it without the giving-it-all-up part. Let's say you have a thing for $100 per bottle pinot noirs. The Crushpad team searches out the grapes that, with hard work, will turn into your ideal wine. With a 1 barrel minimum, you can drop about $6,000 and keep it all for yourself or you can split it with friends or search crushnet.com for people with the same hankering. From there you get as involved as you want in tending the vines, or you just wait a few years for the shipment, in the end paying just 40 to 50 percent of what you'd pay at retail. With Crushpad "the middlemen get, well, corked."
Not sure if you want to move, but want someone to make you an offer you can't refuse? Zillow is launching Make Me Move, a service that lets home owners list info about their houses so that gutsy buyers can try to make a deal. TechCrunch says Zillow knows everyone has a price. Zillow says it's just a twist on the traditional 'For Sale' sign. Make Me Move is free and now so are listings for all home owners and realtors. Zillow wants to be the site for real estate and claims 3.2 million users and 70 million listings in November.
PaidContent notes that the music industry is taking a brief break from their usual practice - and giving customers what they want, namely MP3s that aren't locked up with digital rights management (DRM). EMI's BlueNote gave Yahoo’s music store an exclusive to sell singles by Nora Jones and Christian rockers Relient K, thinking their fans are more likely to buy the whole album even if they get a free song. "The record companies have to do something to kick-start online sales. Nielsen SoundScan reports that the sales at Apple’s iTunes store, which are locked in by DRM, are flat this year."
Digg became a tech news destination because it lets users decide what's newsworthy by offering up stories they like and voting on their favorites. Well human nature has reared its ugly head. Enter the fake Diggers - dubious marketers that plant stories, pay people to promote items, and otherwise try to manipulate rankings on Digg so they can drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business. Digg is working hard to fix the problem, but until it's solved the credibility of such sites will be in question.
Here's your daily dose of urban slang. Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP Group, the world’s largest ad buyer, says his team describes working with Google as working with a "frienemy." Yep that would be a friend who's also an enemy or an enemy who is also a friend. (Just watch "Mean Girls" if you need step-by-step instructions on frieneminess.) "On the friendly side, they want to work with our top 50 clients," he said. "(But) they’ve hired people to make ads." Ad agencies still aren't buying the "Do no evil" thing.
The Peanut Butter Manifesto foreshadowed yesterday's big re-org at Yahoo! that breaks the company into three groups - Audience, Advertisers & Publishers and Technology. Charlene Li says that the Audience group will make or break Yahoo!'s strategy. "In the end, the race is not to be the best search engine technology-wise, or to have the most advertisers. It's about being relevant to your audience, no matter where they go or what they do."
She also noted a credible mission statement in Yahoo!'s press release - "to connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world's knowledge," putting people at the center of Yahoo!'s strategy. Li says, "Compare this to Google's mission "to organize the world's information" and you get an idea of each company's battle plan."
New research shows that nearly half of private companies that receive venture capital funding were started by entrepreneurs born outside the United States. While legal immigrants represent about 8.7 percent of the population, an estimated 47 percent of private venture-backed firms in the U.S. were founded by immigrants and of those, 87 percent of those businesses are technology related. More than two-thirds of immigrant entrepreneurs say that current immigration policies deter immigrants from starting companies here and make it difficult for all companies to be competitive.
Frank Barnako says there's an online boomlet of new businesses that talk about stocks. He mentions DealBreaker which calls itself a Wall Street tabloid, UndertheCounter.net and WallStrip.com among others. And while some of these sites blog on "whose getting paid, laid, hired, and fired," WallStrip is not what you think it might be. Think Rocketboom meets Wall Street. Entertaining, cheeky and unique, it covers one topic or company per day. Try it out.
Erin Teeling at the Bivings Report says that while they and others are critical of newspaper/magazine websites, not all of them stink. And then she names The Boston Globe as one doing it right:
Best Blog Network: The Boston Globe has an enormous network of journalist and citizen blogs that cover a wide variety of topics. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you live in the Boston area.
What's a virtual world got to do with ecology? Electricity. Linden Lab consumes an enormous amount of electricity on their 4,000 servers that support 10,000-15,000 avatars at a time...and they're just getting started. Nicholas Carr ran some numbers. He says an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. That's lower than the average human being in the US who uses about 7,702 kWh a year. "But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do." As if we weren't enough of a plague upon the earth...now our avatars are out there hoovering up more energy. Carr says that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. "They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints."
LinkedIn is becoming the network for busy people aged 25-65, the time when, co-founder Reid Hoffman says "people are most valuable, when they are out changing the world." Membership is growing exponentially and the company is profitable and on track to hit $100 million in revenue by 2008. How? Beyond ads, recruiters and corporate members pay big money to access the whole network. Let's face it. By the time you hit your 30s, you don't need a lot of new friends - you need contacts. Forget MySpace. Increasingly, if you're not LinkedIn, you're left out.
Bruce Nussbaum believes that Wal-Mart's low-price strategy has hit a wall. The company posted the smallest December sales gain since 2000 and its monthly performance in November was the worst in 10 years. Meanwhile Target who competes not just on price, but on design and innovation, is doing much better. Even Saturday Night Live is lampooning Wal-Mart's price cutting model.
No. Way.
Way.
It's a Chinese rollercoaster supermarket. Miss something as you go by and you have to start over again. This is my idea of what grocery shopping is like in HELL.
Cambridge-based GreenFuel Technologies reports that they have successfully recycled the carbon dioxide (CO2) from the stack gases of a power plant of its partner, Arizona Public Service Co., into transportation grade clean, renewable biofuel. The company uses algae bioreactor technology to convert the CO2. That's a first. Get this to work and power plants reduce their CO2 without retooling and create revenue from selling fuel.
A new AP-AOL survey on how Americans use instant messaging reveals a giant gap. Baby boomers could care less if IM exists but teens can't live without it. 
Ever feel like ditching your job to make fine wines? Well the custom luxury winemaking community of 
PaidContent notes that the music industry is taking a brief break from their usual practice - and giving customers what they want, namely MP3s that aren't locked up with digital rights management (DRM). EMI's BlueNote gave Yahoo’s music store an exclusive to sell singles by Nora Jones and Christian rockers Relient K, thinking their fans are more likely to buy the whole album even if they get a free song. "The record companies have to do something to kick-start online sales. Nielsen SoundScan reports that the sales at Apple’s iTunes store, which are locked in by DRM, are flat this year."
Digg became a tech news destination because it lets users decide what's newsworthy by offering up stories they like and voting on their favorites. Well human nature has reared its ugly head. Enter the fake Diggers - dubious marketers that plant stories, pay people to promote items, and otherwise try to manipulate rankings on Digg so they can drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business. Digg is working hard to fix the problem, but until it's solved the credibility of such sites will be in question.
LinkedIn is becoming the network for busy people aged 25-65, the time when, co-founder Reid Hoffman says "people are most valuable, when they are out changing the world." Membership is growing exponentially and the company is profitable and on track to hit $100 million in revenue by 2008. How? Beyond ads, recruiters and corporate members pay big money to access the whole network. Let's face it. By the time you hit your 30s, you don't need a lot of new friends - you need contacts. Forget MySpace. Increasingly, if you're not LinkedIn, you're left out.
