Hope you had happy holidays! I'll be back in 2007.

Source: Cool Hunter

It only works in New York City right now, but if you want to split the cab fare, try out Hitchsters. You register and describe your logistics (airport, time, starting location or destination) and then can meet up with someone else going or coming to the same place. You arrange to meet up and split the fare. I like the rules. You figure out a meet up plan with the other person on your own. First one out of the cab pays 60 percent. Can't agree who goes first? "Rock/paper/scissors." Oh, and "you are under no obligation to share a cab with someone that creeps you out."

Source: Ad Age

Are you watching Heroes? My son and I are hooked on it. The series is now on break and will return on January 22 and NBC is planning a big marketing blitz. They're giving away 10,000 t-shirts (not the one at the right...) at the nationally televised Cowboys vs. Eagles game on Christmas day. Why? "Heroes" is the No. 1 new show among 18- to 49-year-olds and the No. 1 non-sports entertainment show among men 18-49...all of whom presumably have always wanted super powers. Well this girl likes it too. What's not to like about "a painter who can draw the future and a cheerleader who can't die?"

Source: Frank Barnako's Media blog

Frank Barnako blogs about some interesting new shows and programming research PBS is planning for next year. Wired is hoping to co-produce a weekly TV show called "Wired Science," but first they are going to go up against two other shows, "Science Investigators" and "22nd Century." Viewers will be able to stream or download the programs via iTunes before they air. Then each show will air on consecutive Wednesdays (beginning Jan. 3 at 8pm EST) and Nielsen will report minute-by-minute ratings. PBS really uses the web to inform its programming and it also has a panel of 4,000 people that give feedback...they start with wisdom and intelligence and then bring in the wisdom of the crowd.

We're lucky to have PBS. We just have to keep remembering to write the checks.

Related:
I also love Current TV
NPR podcasting guilt

Source: Mashable

You might not know what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is, but you probably use it. If it works well, you might not even know you've got it. It's done nothing short of change the way we read the web. So imagine everyone's surprise when news hit that Microsoft has filed for a patent for the technology. RSS has been around for a while and it most certainly was not invented by Microsoft. I like Mashable's level-headed coverage of the story, as I'm sure this will turn in to a full blown blogstorm.

"Microsoft filed the patents way back on June 21, 2005. A few days later, they announced a plan to include RSS support in Windows Vista and Internet Explorer. … To some extent, we can blame Microsoft, but the broken patent system is also at fault: Amazon famously received a patent for "one click shopping" - buying something in one click. Microsoft may be trying to prevent someone else from filing this utterly obvious patent and attempting to sue them, for instance."

Related:
Feeds change everything
Learning to love RSS. Invisibly.
Biz process patent wars
RSS business intelligence
Really Simple Sharing

Source: YouTube via AdFreak

We've covered BlendTec's Will it Blend? series here before. Sure they've blended marbles, golf balls and credit cards. But now it's that other holiday wishlist item...the iPod.

This year I put my iPod on notice because, well, it died. And then there's the short battery life and worries over DRM which have caused me to start buying music on CDs again instead of iTunes. So even though I still love my iPod, there was a part of me that delighted in seeing it reduced to toxic smoke...

The topper? AdFreak says that the blender and the blended iPod are up for bid on eBay. Current high bid is $720.75.

Related:
Love. Hate. iPod.
Liberating iPods in Cambridge
Learn from pirates
Bob Dylan: digital is crap
Putting iPod on notice
My name is Maura and I'm a crap addict
DRM side effects

Source: Bill Tancer's Hitwise blog

Search intelligence firm Hitwise has been tracking the hottest products of the holiday season. One of them is UGGs...those ugly boots that just keep coming back. So if fashionista blogs say UGG Boots are sooooo 2004, why are they selling out? Bill Tancer blogs that the answer is in the search data. Visitors to the UGG website, are mainly females aged 25-44, earning between $60-100K, many from New York and California. It seems parents of tween-aged girls are dutifully buying to fulfill their daughters' wishlists.

Here's the Hitwise UGG chart:

Take the poll: UGGs: Love 'em or hate 'em?

Related:
Crocs R Us

Source: Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

Don Dodge of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team blogs his predictions for 2007, saying that while YouTube paved the way for consumer video, Cambridge-based BrightCove will do the same for the commercial side of Internet TV/Video. Dodge is also hot on the mobile web. While some call cell phones the third screen (TV > Computer > Phone), Dodge says that's backwards. "The cell phone is the first screen for the younger generation." So he sees mobile search as the next multi billion dollar opportunity. Local companies to watch in that space include Framingham-based uLocate and Boston-based EnPocket.

Source: The Raw Feed

Eerily-named Covert Asset Tracking Systems Ltd. plans to unveil a line of solar powered clothes that can be tracked via GPS (and monitored on the Internet). Made of a waterproof machine washable, fabric, the clothes will sense both movement and "non-movement" and feature flashing LED lights. This sounds perfect for those rugged individuals heading to the summit or the wilderness...or for paranoid parents and their unfortunate offspring.

Related:
Wear this t-shirt and the doctor can tell when you're getting faklempt. Smart sensors inside the fabric that can monitor the wearer’s vital signals such as temperature, heart rate and whether or not they are moving.

Source: Rough Type

Nicholas Carr compares the 2006 top 10 search terms on Google, Yahoo and AOL and makes some entertaining mass generalizations. Google's top search terms are Bebo, MySpace, World Cup, and Metacafe. Yahoo's are Britney Spears, WWE and Shakira. AOL's are Weather, Dictionary and Dogs. Carr concludes: "I think I can suggest the following market segmentation: Google users are dweebs. Yahoo users are horndogs. And AOL users are geezers." I use Google mostly and Yahoo second. AOL not at all. So I guess that makes me a dweeby horndog.

Source: Guy Kawasaki's blog

Airspun makes it possible for bands and songwriters to buy commercial radio airtime, showcasing their music to genre-targeted listeners. It's a simple system. Bands browse radio stations by genre and city and book a sixty-second slot (prices range from $12 to $200). Then they create a sixty-second audio artist showcase. Radio stations download the spot and broadcast it along with an ending message to visit Airspun.com to find the artist, provide feedback or buy the music. Given these stats it could be a lucrative business...10,000 commercial stations in the U.S. X 10 spots/hour X 24 hours = 2.4 million ad spots per day X 365 days/year = 876 million spots/year in the U.S.

Source: USAToday

The results are in for the 2006 USAToday survey of consumer reaction to ads and Windex is the winner. Of the 43 ads USAToday tracked this year, a slapstick spot in which two wisecracking birds trick a human into bumping into his patio door (because it's so clean due to Windex) was rated the most-liked by consumers. People are suckers for simple, funny ads. Make us laugh out loud and we never forget the product.

Source: Salon

Kiva facilitates microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Andrew Leonard says it's like an online dating service but instead of seeking potential partners for romance, you evaluate loan applicants on their business plans and relative plight status. You can look at pictures and read profiles and you can even see who in your town has already made loans to prospective applicants. Leonard says Kiva redraws the world's lines of communication. So go out there and find that loan applicant of your dreams. Leonard muses about the next logical step... "While trolling an online dating site, you discover that one of the criteria by which you are rating prospective mates will be, who do they lend to?"

Source: BusinessWeek

Photo originally uploaded by Shackle-razzle-fut zal-craz via Flickr

Jon Fine observes that there is "no easier way for a rich dude to get his name in the paper than to announce he wants to buy it." It's worked for Jack Welch (Boston Globe), David Geffen et al (LA Times), former AIG Chairman Hank Greenberg (The New York Times) and moguls interested in or buying papers in Baltimore, Philly and beyond. But running the thing isn't so simple. In fact one Wall Streeter cracks, newspapers' newest suitors are billionaires trying to become millionaires. While "captains of industry do need hobbies," newspapers are a tricky business complete with unions and clubby traditions that don't change easily.

Related:
It's the news, not the paper
Online news sites up
Newspaper free fall?

Source: Infectious Greed blog

Originally uploaded by wasta via Flickr

Paul Kedrovsky blogs about this weekend's New York Times piece highlighting the trend of VCs asking their kids and (younger) receptionists for investment advice. Kedrovsky says the real story is that "venture investing has become consumer-centric, young consumers in particular, and VCs are a) not young, and b) among the least representative consumers you'll ever meet." That's why VCs and many companies have no choice to do a reality check with kids, "because left to their own devices they'd be investing in VR Rubiks Cubes and Duke Nukem clones."

Source: Marketing Profs Daily Fix

Ann Handley reprints a great Tom Peters interview of Build-A-Bear Workshop Founder and CEO Maxine Clark. Handley says that not only is Build-A-Bear a big hit with kids and families (all the kids in my world love it too) but it's become one of those companies, like Starbucks, Disney and Apple that is frequently studied for it's marketing success and customer loyalty. One of Clark's inspirations for founding the company? This advice from May Companies Chairman Stanley Goodman: "Retailing is entertainment and the store is a stage. When customers have fun, they spend more money." Which, Clark says, is one reason malls will never be replaced by the internet.

Source: TIME, Lost Remote

This year TIME names you the person of the year, in recognition of the fact that individuals, empowered by the likes of YouTube, blogs, MySpace, MoveOn, you name it - are utterly "changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy." OK, well, very grandiose. I personally enjoyed reading Lost Remote's Steve Safran's response entitled "The Wussification of TIME magazine's person of the year." The award is "in keeping with [TIME's] disturbing recent trend of making safe, largely uninspired choices that are no longer in line with the original mission of the honorific "Person of the Year. Seriously - what could be safer than giving it to all of us?"

What's Google Earth really up to?
Illustration by James F. Kraus

Never lose the remote?
Brand as mythology
Blueberry solar
Google's solar trees
Stressed-out parents
Like a Rolling Space

Source: The Next Net blog

Originally uploaded by Carlos Noboro via Flickr

Recently I covered a piece by PaidContent that reported that "Nielsen SoundScan reports that the sales at Apple’s iTunes store, which are locked in by DRM, are flat this year." Then earlier this week Forrester claimed iTunes sales were collapsing. Not so fast, says Apple. Apple is denying that any of this is true, and comScore is now saying that iTunes sales in the first three quarters of 2006 were up 84 percent.

Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 says that "iTunes sales appear healthy, fueled by sales of new iPods. However, once that growth slows, Apple will need to do a better job of selling more songs to existing iPod owners." Schonfeld says he himself is reluctant to buy songs from iTunes because of the DRM limits.

As for me, I find myself wanting to just buy the CD and upload the songs to my iPod. That way I keep my options open down the line by having a DRM-free copy of the songs on the CD. Bill Gates feels the same way.

I got some great responses from skeptical Biz Filter readers contesting my statement that I was a convert for the supposed immune system booster, Airborne...

David Wallace writes:

"I'm glad you're sold on Airborne (and so are the Summit Partners) but crediting it for NOT getting a cold is like buying the stock of an airbag maker after managing to drive a car without getting in an accident. Or the canard about carrying an umbrella to ensure it won't rain.

I got a sample at the airport during the promotion you saw. But after reading the Ad Age item my skeptical, former business reporter view is this: a sample and coupon promotion during the busy season will tee up the company nicely for sale or additional investment. I'd point you toward Cold-Eeze, a Philadelphia-area maker of zinc lozenges that was a shooting star in cold-and-flu season a few years back, but with no proof of preventing or curing symptoms.

Now, if you'll excuse me I gotta grab a tissue. . ."

Chris Dagdigian writes:

"Saw your mention of the 'Airborne' giveaway at JetBlue in Boston.

I was wondering if you also saw what I've seen (now 2 weeks in a row) in Terminal C ...

There are people in "airborne" T-shirts walking around the airport giving away free samples. I did not think this was anything exceptional until I was standing in the screening line waiting for my turn at the X-ray machine. The airborne people skipped ahead of everyone in line, flashed some cheezy laminated "badge" and jumped the queue in the same way that pilots and crew do.

I don't mind them passing through security, it was also nice to see them putting all their stuff through the Xray so it is not as if they bypassed anything. I must admit though that I was pretty bothered to basically see what amounted to promo/sales people jumping ahead of people with flights to catch -- people doing promo work should wait in line like the rest of us common folk.

Thanks for letting me vent on a trivial subject. I also Googled airborne and via ConsumerReports found out that its pretty much nothing but a massive amount of Vitamin C -- there are some concerns that the dosage may be a bit too high and there are certainly no proven reports out there that it actually works."

David Rosenblum writes:

"About Airborne you said that "I downed it. I didn't get sick. So I'm a convert". I hope that that was a joke that was not clearly identified as a joke. If that is the case please stop reading now.

If not, read on.

The apparent great sales of Airborne must be from irrational customers who did the same thing as you. I did not take Airborne on a Jetblue flight to Oakland a few weeks ago. I did not get sick. Actually, I am sure that most people on the plane did not take Airborne and did not get sick. If good controlled studies show that Airborne helps, then I will take it (or a competitor if there is a cheaper one).

I know you are not Consumer Reports, but having endorsed Airborne, you owe it to your readers to report future news about the effectiveness of Airborne, good or bad, to your readers."

Here's my $.02:

Airborne is a great example of how markets work. If people see promise in an unproven idea, especially one that addresses a big problem...people will jump on it. Then later as the product or company becomes tested and more mature, the market adjusts. The market will decide. I wouldn't say I'm an Airborne believer. I'm just like many other people...I'm giving it a shot. Why not - it's not a huge investment. For now, Airborne is riding public sentiment and likely, the placebo effect.

As for keeping tabs on future Airborne news, consider this your Airborne news desk.

As for Airborne marketers skipping Logan security...a cure for that would be nice. If terrorists were ever to smuggle tainted Airborne onto U.S. flights, it would, um, give new meaning to guerilla marketing.

P.S.
Thanks everyone for writing. I wish I had comments on Dah Filtah because without them, I end up replying late and asynchronously.

Source: Jeff Foster, Symmetric Technologies

Jeff Foster of Symmetric Technologies in Newton writes to point readers of Da Filtah to their project One Billion Bulbs. The project's worthy goal is to get large numbers of people to try a few compact fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs by highlighting the cost savings, energy savings and reduced greenhouse gas emissions that these small changes can bring about. The site is great, allowing people to calculate their cost savings and track the progress nationwide. Changing over to CFL bulbs is one of those things that I keep meaning to do. I think I'll make it my New Year's resolution. How about you?

Thanks Jeff!

Source: BoingBoing

Last March we talked about how scientists at Boston University were developing neural implants for sharks that made it possible to turn them into remote-controlled underwater spies. What? You don't remember that? Anyway, here's that update you've been waiting for:

Boston University marine biologist Jelle Atema has made great progress, so much so that the military has since made the research classified, and it is now run out of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. But now Atema is seeking funding to continue his work, this time for civilian applications...such as "tracking fish populations, changes in ocean temperatures, or chemical spills."

Why do I have a feeling this will end up as the next toy for the uber-rich for Christmas?

Here's the video.

Source: Inc.com

New research shows that by not adapting to the needs of working parents, U.S. employers might be losing as much as $300 billion a year in lost productivity. One in 20 working parents surveyed are severely stressed by concerns over after school care, stress that proves toxic to employee attitudes, work performance, and well-being. It's not just working moms. The problem cuts across gender, racial, and ethnic lines. More than 75 percent of respondents said greater flexibility to arrive at work later or leave earlier, or take half-days when necessary, significantly cuts down on stress. As our kids would say, "No duh!"

The holidays are the worst for stress. Let's all just take a deep breath.

Source: PSFK

In a new twist on making you want to empty your pockets even more, Whole Foods has now expanded into "wellbeing" services by testing a spa in its new Dallas store. The 4,500-square foot spa is housed above the main floor and offers private massages and treatments. Massage chairs on the balcony overlooking the main grocery floor provide a range of five- and 10-minute pick-me-ups and you can also snack from the spa menu. I'll take a gallon of organic, some artisan bread, some sushi grade tuna and a aromatherapy massage...there's a reason some people call it Whole Paycheck.

Source: Ars Technica

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a staff opinion letter aimed at putting a damper on "stealth marketing." The practice, where marketers pay people to use or pitch products in public settings or on fake blogs - known as "flogs" - without disclosing the fact that they are being paid to do so, falls afoul of the FTC's "Endorsement Guidelines." Plenty of companies practice this but SONY is the current one being flogged for flogging.

SONY stealthily launched alliwantforxmasisapsp.com - or so they thought - until consumers and watchdog groups became clued in by the faked hip hop slang and other suspicious things about the site. Buzz marketing may be hot, but the FTC has sent a strong message - 'fess up to who you are, or suffer the (considerable) consumer backlash and potentially a nasty FTC investigation.

You'd think SONY would have learned from their "stealth" digital rights management escapade last year, where hidden anti-piracy code on their CDs exposed consumers' hard drives to cyber attack. But at least they did 'fess up quickly this time:

Source: Wired

Parking lots are a wasteland so why not put them to good use? Google is "joining other companies in planting groves of pole-mounted solar panels between the rows of Saabs and SUVs, generating clean power and providing a little shade at the same time." Google's Mountain View parking lot will create enough energy to meet 30 percent of the complex's power demands. Parking lot solar trees are easier to install than rooftop panels and cost less, plus they're a very visible statement about a company's commitment to renewable energy. This may be my favorite solar story of the 2006.

Related:
Blueberry solar
Nano-solar energy
Solar coffee

Source: The Blogging Times

Over the past few days The Blogging Times has noted that MySpace is being used by mainstreamers to source talent. First, agents are utilizing MySpace to cast an upcoming New York musical, "Spring Awakening." (Luckily they were looking to cast an unpolished singer, so they found plenty.) But even more significantly, Rolling Stone is asking its readers to help them choose the Top 25 Best Bands on MySpace.

Source: USA Today

Italian scientists have developed a new type of solar panel that does not use silicon. Instead it uses the pigment of blueberries. Yep. That would be the actual berry. Research is revealing that organic semiconductors could dramatically reduce the production cost of the solar panels, which is one of the main drawbacks of solar as an alternative energy source. Experiments continue that combine organic and inorganic materials with the hope that they can hit the efficiency rates of standard silicon panels.

Photo originally uploaded by lisaendavy via Flickr

Related:
Nano-solar energy
Solar coffee

Source: Guardian

If brands can be mythic, then when the subject is food , the mythological heroes are celebrity chefs. In the US, Rachel Ray is the leading goddess, not for culinary excellence, but for putting us in touch with that part of ourselves that craves time to cook with and for the people we care about. In the UK the mythic hero is apparently celebrity chef Nigella Lawson. The Guardian is reporting that sales of goose fat have rocketed since the product was championed by Lawson as the essential Christmas cooking ingredient. Tesco says its sales have doubled. When you inspire people to go out and buy goose fat, you've clearly got mythic powers.

Related:
Brand as mythology
Rachel Ray: brand goddess
Hatred of Rachel Ray can be a powerful uniting force

Tangentially related:
Tesco: the next Brit invasion
Lean retail

Source: Seth Godin's blog

Myths are those stories through which we project and imagine ourselves, deriving what's important and connecting us spiritually with ideas. So are brands mythic? Seth Godin says Google and Starbucks have more mythic qualities than Random House and Maxwell House. Why? Each has a story (as opposed to a pile of facts) that promises a heroic outcome. Hey, I feel like a hero every time I drink a double half caf extra dry cappuccino. Don't you? Seth says mythic brand qualities are hard to explain, difficult to bottle, and probably worth pursuing.

Photo originally uploaded by paullew via Flickr

Related:
Brand is good
How many Easy Buttons have been sold?
Rachel Ray: brand goddess

Source: Slate

Sirius and XM Radio may be re-enacting a drama seen time and again by American business pioneers. Great ideas get funded - big time - a few key competitors emerge and bidding wars erupt. In the absence of XM, Sirius wouldn't have been forced to pay so much for Mel Karmazin, Howard Stern, and college basketball. In the absence of Sirius, XM wouldn't have been forced to pay so much for Oprah and NASCAR. They can't even set their own price as they compete there too. Subscribers are growing, but slower than each company hoped, and they're being forced to spend more to acquire each subscriber...a combination that is "stock market poison."

"Even well funded companies have limited life spans... at the end of the third quarter, in which it lost $154 million on operations, Sirius had $352 million in cash and $1 billion in debt. At the end of the third quarter, in which it lost $60 million on operations, XM had $285 million in cash."

Source: New York Times

Patrick J. McGovern, chairman of Boston-based IDG, began personally distributing cash bonuses to each IDG employee in the US last week. He's made it a tradition since he started the company in 1964 with 16 employees in Newton. It takes weeks rather than hours now that he has to visit 15 offices from Boston to San Francisco, but he says he gets as much out of it as his employees do. "I ask them for new ideas and suggestions for us to continue to grow and improve." One of the many ideas obtained this way? The first ever Macworld Conference and Expo in 1985.

Source: Life Hacks

Attach special tags to things you lose often - your car keys, the TV remote, telephone handsets - and Loc8tor will follow the signal and lead you right to it. The product is a combination of radio-frequency emitting tags and a cellphone-sized signal decoder. The company says you can even use it to track and find pets and kids. Attach a tag to a child, and then set a safety zone. If the child strays beyond a specified distance, the Loc8tor sounds an alarm. You know what the problem is, right? Lose your Loc8tor, you're out of luck.

Still, it's a great gadget. Check out more gadgets at the Holiday Gift Guide.

Source: ZDNet Between the Lines blog

Google Earth has just incorporated information from Wikipedia, Panoramio and the Google Earth Community making it possible for you to fly all around the world, stop off anywhere and see what people have said about the place. Larry Dignan observes that it's now not much of a stretch to add more local information and Google Checkout. That could make it the world's yellow pages, encyclopedia and mall all rolled into one. Dignam muses, "Just a few possiblities. Something tells me Google is far from finished with Google Earth." Indeed.

Related:
Google Earth
Google Mars
Maps go encyclopedic
Google SketchUp is the new Legos
Earth by Microsoft

Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?
Illustration: James F. Kraus

LinkedIn or left out
Make Me Move
Power plant fuel
Online music sales flat
Rigging Digg
Google as frienemy

Source: USA Today

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."

Related:
Where the teens are
AOL Ch-ch-ch-changes

Source: Naked Conversations blog

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.

Related:
Free is the new discount
The economics of airline boarding
More fun, more success

Source: Fortune

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."

Related:
Wine as a spending indicator
Women who love wine and the men winemakers market to
The blogger's wine
Wi-fi wine glasses

Source: TechCrunch

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.

Related:
Zillow goes wiki
Realtors get the Zillows
A local realtor and Biz Filter reader takes issue with Zillow
Zillow banks $25 million
Zillow has competition
Bird's eye view on Zillow

Source: PaidContent

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."

Related:
Liberating iPods in Cambridge
Learn from pirates
Power to the musicians
Music stock exchange
Bob Dylan: digital is crap
Putting iPod on notice
My name is Maura and I'm a crap addict

Source: CNET

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.

Related:
Wired snaps up Reddit
Will Newscorp dig Digg?
The unimportance of Digg
Digg moving map
Digg the slanket
Digg going deep

Source: Lost Remote

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.

Source: Charlene Li's blog

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."

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel blogged the announcement as well as putting out a press release. Paid Content thinks this is Semel's last chance before facing an exit.

Related:
The peanut butter leak
Yahoo deal or no deal?
Yahoo! Current Note: Yahoo and Current have since gone their separate ways.
New and improved Yahoo
Home values for your whole neighborhood
Don't underestimate Yahoo
Yahoo to Google: We're bigger than you

Source: Inc.com

Photo by Me

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.

Source: Frank Barnako's Media blog

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.

Source: Bivings Report

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.

Nice! As for me, I read Brainiac, Dishing, Reiss' Pieces among others.

Source: RoughType

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."

Source: Business 2.0

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.

Source: Nussbaum on Design

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.

Related:
Wal-Mart's reputation crisis
Upscale Wal-Mart?
The Wal-Mart Effect
Wal-Mart marks up standardsThe 'Small-Mart' movement

Source: The Raw Feed

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.

Source: Mass High Tech

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.

Find your inner Borat
Illustration: James F. Kraus

Third place wins
Power baby naming
Providence founders
Canary in the bubble?
BodyPod
Real millionaire

Source: Michael Zimmer's blog

Michael Zimmer blogs about the slimy, albeit inevitable emergence of a site that automates faking your online persona. Fake Your Space, is a service that for just 99 cents per month will provide users of MySpace and Facebook fake "hot" friends with custom messages. In their own words:

"FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend. It doesn’t stop there however. Maybe you want to appear as if you have a Model for a lover. FakeYourSpace can make this happen! The possibilities are endless. You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? No problem. Have one of our Models personally flirt with you on your comment wall."

Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe about blog plagiarism, where people copy, often verbatim, someone's personal blog...as if that person's life is really theirs. So yeah...sad, but true - there's a market out there for this kind of thing.

Here's another one - the fake cell phone call service.

Source: TechDirt

Here's another glimpse into how traditional TV thinking is changing in a post-YouTube world. NBC Universal chief digital officer George Kliavkoff recently mused at a conference that perhaps the company will webcast Friday night rehearsals of Saturday Night Live. TechDirt says that "depending on your view of the current state of SNL, it could easily be more entertaining than the show itself." I like it. But I'd just do outtakes - nice YouTube length clips.

Source: Greg, The Roombud Crew's Dad

Those local whiz kids who invented the RoomBud, costumes for your Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, write to announce they have "sold a RoomBud in every state in the good ole US of A." Tyler, Niles, Isabelle, and Griffin's Dad reports that it's a big day for the kids today. "They're interviewing someone from Tyler's high school as their first employee (outside of mom, dad, and the grandparents)."

Why not support these young entrepreneurs and do a little holiday shopping for that Roomba owner in your life?

Related:
Roombuds on a roll
Roombuds come alive

Source: Mass High Tech

Cambridge-based car sharing service Zipcar has just closed on $25 million in funding, putting the total capital raised by the company at $45 million. The company plans to expand in existing markets and also head off to London. Here's some real green stats...40 percent of Zipcar members decide against purchasing a car or sell their car and their overall car usage is reduced by as much as 50 percent. The company claims each Zipcar replaces over 20 privately owned vehicles.

On to London, mate