Iowa and New Hampshire will have the first official presidential primaries, but MySpace plans to test public sentiment first. On January 1 and 2 MySpace will hold a mock presidential election that "will be open to all MySpace users who reside in the United States, regardless of voting eligibility in the government-run election in November 2008." The result of the mock election as well as ongoing polls will be published on the new MySpace Impact channel. Go there now and you can learn about the candidates and add your favorite candidate as a friend.
Barack Obama is leading the pack today with 152,140 friends. Next is Hillary Clinton with 29,088 friends, then it's John Edwards with 26,184. John McCain with 20,253. How well this tracks with reality remains to be seen.
Another indicator? Google Trends has been successful at predicting American Idol. Will it work for the presidency?
Increasingly people search Google and LinkedIn to get information on potential employees, new people they've met or people they are about to meet. But here's another angle. New search engine YoName "allows you to search across social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster." Type in a name and it links you right to any pages they might have. It's good to remember that what's said online, definitely stays online.
This morning a new airline called Skybus launched. It's offering $10 seats. By noon it had sold 97,000 tickets. It only has flights to and from Columbus, OH for a limited number of cities, including Portsmouth, NH, Oakland, Burbank and Bellingham WA. But still, you can get from Portsmouth to Columbus to Oakland and back for about 60 bucks. It goes without saying that you have to pay a la carte for everything, like checking luggage. Skybus is the first US answer to European airlines like Ryanair which are hugely popular overseas. Can it avoid the typical US union problems, logistical hassles and fuel costs and thrive?
Recently a friend dropped his laptop down a flight of stairs. Worse yet, he had no backup. But let's be honest. Many of us don't. I didn't at the time. But my friend's experience scared me into getting a backup plan. Web Worker Daily runs down some of the best remote backup solutions. One of them is Carbonite, a Boston-based company, which is the one I went with. Why not do yourself a favor and develop a backup plan today. Need further incentive? Imagine re-entering all of the info in your Outlook contact. Ugh.
"There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start."
Reading the web with RSS still isn't easy enough. But following these fairly simple instructions will dramatically improve your online experience.
Don Dodge blogs that while we all play to win, in business "second place is great" and "even third place can be incredibly profitable." Dodge references Geoffrey Moore who says that competition can be broken into three classes - Gorillas, Chimps, and Monkeys - and that all markets shake out this way. "A Gorilla always emerges...and they make the rules. A Chimp (2nd place) and Monkey (3rd place) can do really well too but must play by different rules." The problem? If you're not in the top 3, you "get the crumbs left behind by the leaders." Sometimes you can solve it by refocusing your service or technology on a new problem in a different market. But however you do it, aim to be a gorilla, chimp or monkey or suffer from being irrelevant.
Videoblogger and friend of Dah Filtah, Ravi Jain, has been nominated for a Webby Award for his videoblog DriveTime. DriveTime is a weekly video blog produced during Ravi's daily commute. Yep, that would mean he's driving during it. It's a must-see videoblog. And, yeah, I'm biased. So I'll go right ahead and ask you to vote for Ravi.
May 3-5 will be the eighth year for the invite-only Nantucket Conference. It's an elite, intimate gathering for New England entrepreneurs, techies and investors. Plus it's in Nantucket, which surely has something to do with why it thrives. With VC funding at it's highest since 2001, optimism is in the salty air. Silicon Valley and Boston rank first and second for VC funding nationally and the theme for Nantucket is shaping up to be "East meets West." West coast speakers include co-founder of Adobe, Chuck Geschke (who has a home on Nantucket), Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, and Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone.
Ever been on Second Life? It's pretty random. But one time I went there for a meeting where someone presented something to a group. It wasn't very efficient, but it was intriguing. Now a new development from Second Life moves the site one step closer to being an alternative to video or teleconferences. Second Life has announced that avatars will soon be able to speak with their owner's voice. CEO Philip Rosedale says, "There are a lot of problems with telephony when doing conference calls. You can't tell who's talking if there's more than one person. But in the virtual world, voice solves it." We shall see.
Speaking of ringtones...it's only April and already 72 million ringtones have been purchased in the United States alone. The number comes from Nielsen RingScan, which compiles sales information from the majority of ringtone retailers in the U.S. market. Billboard uses Nielsen RingScan to chart the top ringtones every week.
In a reverse of the current ringtone model, Emotive's new "Push Ringer" let's you push a ringtone of your choice to the receiving phone, so the caller, not the called person, sets the tone. "The chosen ring is transmitted to the recipient's handset and temporarily overrides the phone's pre-set ringer. The ringers can comprise audio, video, animations, avatars or flash files. Closing the loop, if the called person likes the ringtone, the service also enables him or her to instantly buy a copy of the ringtone for his or her own phone." Now this should be fun.
While Blackberry's are great for getting messages, you don't really want to take the time to type messages into them. What you really need is Jott. Sign up with Jott and do voice to text dictation from any mobile phone. Here's how it works. Call Jott's toll free number and simply speak a message to yourself, a group or a person. Jott transcribes your message into text in a few minutes and delivers it by email or text message. It's free, but look for ad-supported or premium ad-free versions to come. As another one of those little ironies in a connected world, Jott doesn't rely only on voice recognition software. Real humans from overseas, um, oversee the transcribing.
Gaia Online calls itself "the world's fastest growing online world hangout for teens.” Last year they had half a million unique visitors monthly. This month? They claim it's two million. What do teens do on Gaia? Create avatars, play games, chat, share artwork. Along the way they earn virtual gold coins that they can use to buy items, clothing, and accessories. Gaia also offers limited edition items. Get lucky enough to acquire one, and later you can auction it off on the Gaian version of eBay. Advertisers are starting to notice. The company claims 300,000 teens log in daily and the length of the average visit? Two hours.
Iowa and New Hampshire will have the first official presidential primaries, but MySpace plans to test public sentiment first. On January 1 and 2 MySpace will hold a mock presidential election that "will be open to all MySpace users who reside in the United States, regardless of voting eligibility in the government-run election in November 2008." The result of the mock election as well as ongoing polls will be published on the new MySpace Impact channel. Go there now and you can learn about the candidates and add your favorite candidate as a friend. 
In a reverse of the current ringtone model, Emotive's new "Push Ringer" let's you push a ringtone of your choice to the receiving phone, so the caller, not the called person, sets the tone. "The chosen ring is transmitted to the recipient's handset and temporarily overrides the phone's pre-set ringer. The ringers can comprise audio, video, animations, avatars or flash files. Closing the loop, if the called person likes the ringtone, the service also enables him or her to instantly buy a copy of the ringtone for his or her own phone." Now this should be fun. 
