We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
Next Story: Why display ads are cool again Previous Story: Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence.
Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the upcoming launch this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes.
However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written my thoughts on what The Daily should look like.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
At the very least, Apple should fix the subscription problem in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on.
But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like Flipboard in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos.
More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like The Daily is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds.
If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams.
Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz.
At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story.
Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest.
A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources.
What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today?
bench craft company
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Small Business <b>News</b>: Digital Privacy and Customer Care
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
Next Story: Why display ads are cool again Previous Story: Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence.
Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the upcoming launch this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes.
However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written my thoughts on what The Daily should look like.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
At the very least, Apple should fix the subscription problem in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on.
But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like Flipboard in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos.
More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like The Daily is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds.
If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams.
Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz.
At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story.
Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest.
A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources.
What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today?
bench craft company>
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iLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
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Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
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[reefeed]
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iLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
Fox <b>News</b> focus group in Iowa: President Obama is Muslim | The <b>...</b>
On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small Business <b>News</b>: Digital Privacy and Customer Care
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
We’ve been promised for a while now that our phones will become our personal assistants. Executives from Cambridge, Mass.-based Vlingo sat down with me this week to talk about how they’ve delivered on that promise — and started turning it into real revenue.
It seems like all the big guys are trying to get into this business. The incentive, as a Googler put it when the company launched a similar service last year, is that voice is much more natural than typing as a way to interact with your phone. Apple, meanwhile, showed its interest by acquiring a startup called Siri. And Microsoft included voice commands on Windows Phone 7.
The difference, according to Vlingo’s vice president of business Hadley Harris, is that the startup has built all its basic technology, including speech recognition (something that Siri outsourced) and the “intent engine” that allows the app to translate your words into actions that it understands. Vlingo is working with other companies to integrate a wide range of apps into the system, so that you can use your voice to buy a plane ticket off travel site Kayak or check your updates on Facebook.
Vlingo has been downloaded 7 million times, Harris said. BlackBerry users represent most of those downloads, since that’s the phone that Vlingo focused on first, but iPhone and especially Android are catching up. The company’s strategy is to release new features on Android first, then port them to other phones as resources and technology allow.
The app is free, so Vlingo makes money through advertising and revenue sharing with its partners. Specifically, Harris told me it currently earns $7.74 for every 1,000 Web searches, $49 for every 1,000 local searches, and $24 for every 1,000 “other” monetizable actions, such as a ticket purchase on Kayak. With users performing an average of 30 actions every month, Harris said Vlingo is making about 14 cents per user per month.
That might seem a little low, Harris acknowledged, but the plan is to dramatically increase both the number of users and the number of actions over the next year. Most promisingly, he said Vlingo has made deals with a number of Android handset manufacturers who don’t want to direct all of their usage to Google services. (He said it’s too early to reveal who the manufacturers are.) Not only will that put Vlingo on more phones, it will also make the application more prominent on those phones by turning it into the default app whenever you want to use voice commands.
Next Story: Why display ads are cool again Previous Story: Gamification gets popular, but it’s still finding its feet
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence.
Despite the poor reviews and uninspiring number of downloads, media companies sold millions of dollars worth of advertising last year for their iPad apps because advertisers want to be associated with anything shiny and new. Make no mistake: advertising dollars are driving media companies to embrace the iPad, not readers. The same is true for the upcoming launch this week of News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper, The Daily, but at least it will be built from the ground-up for the iPad. I suspect it will take a while for it to reach its true potential—it’s hard enough to launch a new publication as it is without reinventing the reading experience—but I am curious to see where it goes.
However, I am not holding my breath. I’ve already written my thoughts on what The Daily should look like.
From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things:
- Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web.
- Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A “daily” already sounds too slow.
- Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.
At the very least, Apple should fix the subscription problem in iTunes. Right now, each new issue of a paid magazine or newspaper must be bought separately as an in-app purchase. But subscriptions are not going to save the media companies. In fact, they’d be smarter to give the apps away for free and make more money from the advertisers, who want to reach as many people as possible. The ads should also be worth more because they just look better in an app where they look more like a magazine ad and can take over the whole screen when tapped on.
But making these media apps social and realtime is the key. It should be constantly updated like a blog or Twitter. And it should be social like Flipboard in that it shows me what people I follow are reading and retweeting elsewhere by unpacking their links into full articles, images, and videos.
More so than iPad newspapers, iPad magazines have a real opportunity to break the mold, but they can’t do that if they are just trying to repurpose their print publications. Starting from scratch like The Daily is the right idea. But what magazines are better at than newspapers is really packaging the news, distilling big ideas, and presenting stories in a narrative arc that sticks in readers’ minds.
If I were creating an iPad mag it wouldn’t look like a magazine at all. It would look more like a media app, and there wouldn’t be any subscription or even distinct issues. New content would appear every time you opened it up, just like when you visit TechCrunch or launch Flipboard or the Pulse News Reader. In order to make it addictive, it would have to be realtime. But it would also be more selective than simply reading everything that anyone links to in your Twitter or Facebook streams.
Instead, it would present readers with a continuum from original articles and videos to curated streams by topic. The curated streams would combine Tweets from the staff writers and editors with those of other journalists, entrepreneurs, and experts for any given topic or section. These streams would be unpacked Flipboard-style into a magazine-like layout, but with more filters to show trending stories and highlight the ones which are getting the most buzz.
At the same time, there would be a view showing only the articles from that publication. And there would be other ways to navigate the app than just a reverse-chronological stream of the latest posts. In addition to the hourly drumbeat of breaking news and analysis, there would be longer narratives. These would not necessarily be 10,000-word articles (although those could be part of it), but rather taking readers through a series of experiences to tell a story.
Maybe you start with an article, followed by a video interview with the subject, an interactive infographic, and then wrap up with a selected Tweet stream about the topic. At every point, the reader would be led by the hand from one experience to another, coming away with a fuller understanding of the topic. Supplemental images and data should always be at her fingertips. And, of course, the reader could dive right in by commenting, Tweeting, sharing, taking opinion polls and all the rest.
A digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a PDF viewer. It needs to take advantage of technology to tell better stories. These include both presentation technologies (immersive panoramic photos, interactive charts) and data-sifting technologies to filter the news from outside sources.
What do you want to see in a media app that you are not getting today?
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bench craft company
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Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
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Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
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iLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
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On Sean Hannity's program Monday night, pollster Frank Luntz hosted a focus group of Iowa Republican caucus-goers, gauging their reaction of President Barack Obama's Sunday afternoon interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. ...
Small Business <b>News</b>: Digital Privacy and Customer Care
Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
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Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video) | iLounge <b>News</b>
iLounge news discussing the Verizon iPhone 4 antenna problems persist (video). Find more iPhone news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.
Fox <b>News</b> focus group in Iowa: President Obama is Muslim | The <b>...</b>
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Small business is all about customer care. So how to you feel about new proposed legislation that is designed to prevent online clients from tracking customer.
bench craft company
1-Motivation- In most cases this is a top reason why people do not accomplish anything. If you're not properly motivated then nothing will get done. One also needs the right motivation. How many debt collectors or repo's can you face before taking drastic action to improve the quality of your life? Now if someone was holding a gun to your face and said "I let you live if you create a website that produces revenue" may get you started but it is not the best motivation factor. To actually produce money online you have to be motivated by something that allows you to stay in the game and work through times of boredom and the necessary but mundane tasks like writing out emails for your auto responder.
2 The Plan- We can definitely achieve making money online with the right game plan or business plan. Some people that are not achieving desired revenue from online activities should look at creating a plan of action, which will outline the various aspects to your business. Include everything from product or service to how you will contact potential buyers. Having a plan will help guide you and keep you on track when working online. Plus it will help you gage what activities will allow for growth and which activities should be put aside due to non-production.
3. Product or service- One way to make money is to get behind a product that you believe in. If you are not producing any income from marketing online perhaps getting involved in a service or selling a product that you have a passion for would help. How many times have you bought an item or used a service because the message you saw or heard created a strong desire inside of you. This passion of a service or product will benefit you to sell to others. It is also easier to talk or create written material because you have such a strong belief in what you are marketing.
4. Education- In order to achieve any kind of continued success when you work online or want to make money online then you should educate yourself. From new email auto responders to marketing techniques to finding ways to streamline business processes. Continual education will help you stay on top of the trends that are ripe with profit as well as help you teach others.
5. No Money- Sure, we all see and hear about those who do not have money that succeed however this is simply not true. It may not take the same amount of money to run a brick and mortar business but you will need money for hosting, auto responders, PPC campaigns and other recurring costs. You may be able to get away with needing $500 -$1000 dollars per month until your efforts are producing money to cover these costs (with the eventuality of profit). You may be able to get started for as little as $100 dollars which would give you the ability for a simple web page for sales and an auto responder, who knows if done right you may turn a quick profit.
6 Targeted Traffic- It is important to have a steady stream of people hitting your website in order for you to make money online. By targeting the service or product toward the people that are looking or would best need the service or product will greatly increase profitability. Promo articles posted on specific directories, web 2.0 networking and connecting via message boards with people are great ways to find targeted traffic. Writing articles will allow for backlinks to you web pages, web 2.0 will allow you to network quite easily and free and message boards are a great way to connect to individuals that are potentially looking for your product or service.
There are other reasons that you are not making money online, but for those that are looking to generate extra money to a full time income from online activities then these 6 reason are important to work on.
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