ImpactWatch Blog

Soluto, which bills itself as “anti-frustration software,” beat out 19 other start-ups to win the $50k prize at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Conference this week. This was especially timely for me since I’ve had two incidents this week where Microsoft’s Diagnostic tool popped up to inform me that Office “seems to be crashing a lot.”

Yes, I’d noticed that as well. After letting MS do a checkup on my machine, I was disappointed both times that it had no suggestions as to what the problem might be. I agreed to let MS upload the data from my desktop, to be added to its database of information from other users that it has failed to help.

Soluto seems to use the same steps as MS’s diagnostics – first checking the programs that are using CPU and memory capacity, then compiling this data from a community of users, to draw conclusions about when and why the system is slowed or stalled. Beta invites are currently delayed due to the influx of interest from TC Disrupt. When it’s open, I would love to see if Soluto can achieve results where MS’s own tools come up blank.

One of the coolest features is that Soluto will be making its aggregate data public. The software makers who are responsible for these technological bottlenecks will be able to see which experiences users find most frustrating. I’m personally interested in how the tool will attribute these issues. Will user error be a category? Can the tool determine when Johnny is storing 5,000 mp3s or when Susie hasn’t run defrag in 3 years?

In all honesty, I know exactly why my computer slows and shuts down programs. I’m a personal computer’s worst nightmare. I have 10 programs and 30 browser tabs open. I’m downloading, uploading, switching between programs and banging on the keyboard like Rick Allen.* I should be using a workstation, not a laptop. I’m sure there are a lot of “power users” out there who are biting off more data than their specs can chew, and I wonder if/how this will be represented in Soluto’s “PC Genome” database of frustrations.

Anyway, it sounds cool and maybe it can help my mother-in-law figure out “what that little spinning rainbow thing means” on her Mac.

Here are the 19 startups that didn’t take the prize but that are worth checking out (they did beat out a few hundred other entrants). Descriptions via TechCrunch:

• Audioo: The Audioo platform allows users to auto-stream, publicly share, and store voicemails from handsets and services including Google Voice.

• Appbistro: Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages.

• Art.sy: Art.sy is the destination to discover and share original fine art online.

• Betterment: Betterment is intended to be a replacement for your savings account, allowing you to invest in two portfolios.

• ChompOn: ChompOn allows any business to run its own social flash sales.

• Compass Labs: Compass Labs is a social e-commerce ad network for Twitter.

• Fluidinfo: FluidInfo is a Wikipedia of databases – a shared online always-writable cloud database.

• Geotoko: Geotoko is a promotional campaign management platform for geo location based services.

• Keenkong: Keenkong is a social media monitoring engine that extracts why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and then segments messages accordingly.

• Live Matrix: Live Matrix is a guide to video events and streams taking place on the web.

• Movieclips.com: Movieclips.com is an online database of movie clips.

• NoiseToys: NoiseToys is a software company uses games and competition to encourage users to share and discover music.

• Off & Away: Off & Away is an online travel site that offers exceptional travel experiences in fun and unique ways.

• Publish2: Publish2 allows newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print.

• Textingly: Textingly provides a texting address, a web management console and apis for businesses to create immediate, two-way dialog with their customers.

• Tickreel: Tickreel is a web filter that makes the web less of a black box and significantly improves how users consume the web.

• UJAM: UJAM is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends.

• VideoGenie: VideoGenie allows companies to customer-source video testimonials.

• WeReward: WeReward is a mobile incentive platform that rewards consumers for check-ins or performing tasks.

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*I’ve been working one-handed to rest my wrist. More on that next week.

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-Image: Soluto.

I discovered (AKA fell in love with) Vimeo about a year ago (despite the site existing months before YouTube).  Like many other casual Internet users, I didn’t know that something existed for uploaded videos more than YouTube and perhaps ZShare.  Like other video sites, Vimeo allows users to sign up for an account and upload videos for online storing, viewing, and sharing.

In 2007, Vimeo became the first video sharing site to support HD video, allowing regular users to upload one HD movie per week.  In 2008, Vimeo went through more changes, the biggest of which occurred in July 2008 when Vimeo announced that they would no longer allow gaming videos on the site due to their lengthy nature which resulted in longer wait times for user uploads.  Vimeo has already differentiated itself by allowing only videos created by the user and disallowing anything commercial or that could be considered pornographic.

The main way Vimeo differs from other sites comes down to attitude.  As Martin Paling said, Vimeo “doesn’t suffer from some of the idiots [on YouTube]”.  Vimeo’s main goal is to foster a community of filmmakers who can critique and discover videos.  Below is an incredible time-lapse video that I found while exploring the Staff Picks section.

The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Some other advantages of Vimeo include support for MOD files, unlimited movie length, HD support, and a very clean look to the site.  A very thorough comparison of most of the available current video sharing sites can be found here.  Vimeo goes the Twitter-design route be making the interface clean and bright with large buttons and menus.  A user would be hard pressed to get confused with the navigation.  I also generally prefer the way that stats like likes, comments, and other metrics are displayed.  Check out this example screenshot.

Should you switch over to Vimeo?  The answer depends on what you want to do with online movies.  If you want them to be seen by more people and they’re mostly unedited videos of you and your friends, I’d stick with YouTube.  But if you are editing things that can be considered “films” in some way, shape, or form, go with Vimeo.  In short, YouTube is the popular little brother with the high-paying job, but Vimeo is the older art school bro whose parents secretly prefer at Thanksgiving.

comScore says ‘yes’!  In a recent press release, the company released information and data about holiday e-spending in an attempt to show that social media and online purchasing is on the rise.  Earth-shattering news? No.  But interesting nonetheless.

Below is a chart of the various social media channels that respondents to their survey claimed they had used when gift researching this year.

I find it interesting that user reviews influenced purchases more than expert reviews.  Consumers obviously value recommendations from others, but the expertise level of the source doesn’t matter quite as much.  Also, don’t the numbers for Twitter seem kinda…low?  I would have expected the amount of those following a company and those influenced by a friend’s tweet to be at least a combined 10%.

The release also contains a graph showing the amount of online purchases by week leading up to New Year’s Day.  The recession doesn’t seem to be affecting online holiday shopping for 2009, although this may be due to consumers hoping that the Internet will provide them with better deals than stores.  The week beginning with Cyber Monday (November 30th) sees a huge jump in online spending, although as this Focus article explains, Cyber Monday is never the biggest online shopping day of the year.  It typically begins about a week or two later, though still on a Monday.

I absolutely love movies; I probably go see every single one that comes out in theaters (and yes, that includes such gems as Stepfather).  I was excited to see a Twitter application come out that proposed the idea that it could tally a movie review total from tweets.  It’s called TwitCritics.

We already have plenty of websites and blogs dedicated to movie reviews, so why use this?  Well, I like to think that most Twitter users would immediately tweet about whether or not they liked a movie they just saw.  Think of this not so much a review summary, but a ‘first impression’ summary.  The system searches for tweets that include a movie title, and then assigns a tonality based on the content of the tweet.  A handy ‘mistake’ button is present under each individual tweet to ensure that users can report a faulty rating.

Does it work?  Not completely.  Its success is on a movie-by-movie basis.  Some films that have unique names such as The Men Who Stare at Goats and the tweets for that film are easily recognizable.  Other films such as Fame suffer the issue of having a common word for its title.

Most of the tweets were not actually about the movie but were still rated in the system and part of the film’s overall tonality.  Often, tweets about an actual film were still not rated correctly.  A prime example is below:

Currently, the system doesn’t seem to account for popular acronyms for longer movie titles (such as TMWSAG).

The website is still in its infancy with the Beta only about a month old.  Hopefully, they will find a way to work some of the kinks out.  It doesn’t really subsist as a standalone product, but I could easily see something like this incorporated into a more robust site like Rotten Tomatoes.

Cross posted from The Bivings Report

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

Believe it or not, the 2k+ year old Vatican doesn’t shy away from new trends in technology. The Holy See’s website was developed 14 years ago and impresses both for its meticulous organization and for its incorporation of multimedia elements.

But this year the Vatican has lapped even some major corporations in its implementation of new technologies, especially social media, to communicate with its constituents.

Pope2You

Last week, the Vatican launched a new site called Pope2You which serves as a communications portal – featuring links to the Pope’s Facebook and iPhone apps, the Vatican on YouTube and Wikicath, a small quasi-wiki outlining the key points of the Pope’s message on World Communications Day. The site received almost half a million visits in the first day.

Facebook

Sadly, you won’t be friending the Pontiff anytime soon – the Vatican eschewed the classic Facebook profile and fanpage in favor of a custom application on what the Vatican calls ” the most important social network of the world.”

“The Pope meets you on Facebook” allows you to send the text of Pope Benedict’s Message for the 43rd World Day of Communications and a selection of 21 electronic postcards to your Facebook friends.

Although limited in features, the application garnered 10k uses in first day.

YouTube

Vatican Radio was launched in 1931 and the Vatican Television Center in 1983 (though they had been televising events for nearly 50 years). A few months ago, the video clips from these services were used to create a YouTube channel.

With 208 videos currently available, the Vatican aims to present the Church’s position on major issues through providing coverage of the Pope’s news conferences, speeches and other Vatican-related events.

Fr. Lombardi, the director of Vatican media, said in a press conference that the channel will offer a number of interactivity options: the possibility of sharing videos with friends, receiving new videos via i-google and a chance to send comments to the Vatican press office.

iPhone App

H2Onews, in collaboration with the Vatican Television Center and Vatican Radio, is offering a Papal video news service for iPhone and iPod Touch.

The application offers updates on the travels and speeches of Benedict XVI, as well as on key international ecclesiastical events by optimizing videos from the Vatican’s YouTube channel.

Each video is accompanied by a transcript and the application offers feeds in eight languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Chinese.

Reasons to Reach Out

Rev. Claudio Celli, president of the pontifical council for social communications, told the press conference that it had been suggested that the Pope was “lowering” himself by appearing on YouTube. Celli’s response: “The Pope doesn’t lower himself by going on Google. It’s a question of having a strategic vision. This is a first small step towards becoming a church that enters into dialogue with today’s world.”

Even an institution as rooted in tradition as the Vatican can see the opportunity to use social media to:

-Increase and engage its audience
-Disseminate information and control brand identity
-Keep up with new communications and technology developments

But so far, the Holy See is using these outlets as broadcast-only. While an understandable start, considering not only the volume of information that such a large fan base could generate but also the controversy that surrounds some of the Church’s positions, there is a definite opportunity for the Vatican to use social media as a conversational tool.

What else do you think the Vatican could do to engage people online? Should they allow user feedback through commenting? Forums? Twitter?

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Well not me, but Save Chuck! That’s the call to action that fans of the NBC television show Chuck are promoting on the Internet. With Jay Leno taking up five hours of prime time this fall there isn’t much room for shows that are on the ratings bubble. NBC announced their lineup of new fall shows on Monday but didn’t say which shows were going to be canceled.

Enter the Internet.

There’s a SaveChuck Twitter account. There are at least nine Facebook groups trying to save the show from being canceled, with the largest group boasting a membership of 18,014 currently and an online petition with 11992 signatures. Interestingly, the online campaigning is working in concert with offline campaigns as well. One effort encouraged Chuck fans to go to Subway, one of the shows biggest sponsors, and buy a footlong and put in a comment card asking for the show to be saved. Folks from TheWB.com drove around L.A. in Nerd Herd cars, if you spotted one and sent a tweet to @thewbdocom with the #savechuck and #chuck hashtags you had a chance to win prizes. The candy maker WONKA even sent Nerds candy to NBC execs as well.

Another idea that is just plain awesome was to donate to the American Heart Association in the name of Chuck Bartowski, the star character of the show, and acknowledge Ben Silverman, an NBC executive in the donation. In just three days there are almost $4,000 in donations. Have a Heart – Renew Chuck!

There seems to be a lot of momentum, show actors Zach Levi and Josh Gomez were even on CNN yesterday to talk about the shows renewal possibilities. Hopefully that momentum will carry over into increased viewership in the fall as well.

Save Chuck campaigns on CNN

Earlier this week Facebook announced the general availability of an Open Stream API allowing developers to incorporate user’s activity stream into their applications. For instance, I use Tweedeck to keep track of all the people I’m following on Twitter, and now one of the columns I can display shows the activity stream of my friends and I on Facebook. I can see it all in the same interface. Another example is the third-party Facebook application Newsfeed RSS. Once I added that application and gave it access to my activity stream, it output a RSS feed link that I can use to pull that information into any feed reader I want. Not only could I keep track in my reader now, but it would be archiving that feed so I can go back and find status updates in the past.

This is a big step forward in convenience, and it seems that a lot of people in the blogosphere are talking about how great it is for you to be able to access your activity stream, and all the activity streams of the people who trust you as friends on Facebook.

But that brings up a big question. What about that trust?

I’ve always though it was kind of weird that if a friend of yours is tagged in a photo, not only can you see that photo, but you can see the whole album, even if the person who posted it isn’t a friend of yours. Newsfeed RSS pretty much makes that possible with your entire activity stream.

RSS output allows you to not only read it in your RSS feed reader, but theoretically you could publish that feed anywhere. I could set up a public website showing all of my and my friends updates, viewable by anyone without them ever having to log in to Facebook or have any of my friends approve of it.

In the past Facebook has always been considered a “walled garden” of information in which they could control the walls. While it would be socially unacceptable to broadcast all of my friends updates, and surely against the Faceook Terms of Service, they sure have made it a lot easier to technically do it.

This is going to get messy.

Tomorrow, Facebook will radically shift its gatekeeping policies and allow for Twitter-like access to its data stream. The immediate effects: Facebook support in Twitter apps, a social networking giant declaring the need for connectivity, and a flood of Facebook apps, remixes, mashups, thawed and reheated in the morning.

The huge implications for Twitter aside, it’s also a significant step towards real-time interconnectivity. What’s in the right now — the derivative — definitely seems to be the way things are progressing. A good indicator could be the largest player in social networking blatantly declaring through action, “I will give you all of my data. Right now.”

I am quite sure that other services and networks will morph towards this trend (many already have), and soon the different “genres” of services will all congeal into desktop or mobile based mega apps, supporting dozens of communications services, from e-mail to messaging to Facebook to the next big thing. You can quote me on that. It’s coming.

This is of course a logical move for Facebook, and analysts have seen it coming — avoid the costs of developing various interfaces, but still grow out the user base garnered by third-party developers.

Will Facebook be able to get past its reputation as a more personal experience and dip into Twitter’s celebrity, news, debate, and networking share of the market? Nobody can say for sure, but I suspect it has more than a fighting chance to become a huge participant. Considering the figures for Facebook’s growth demographics, Zuckerberg and his associates have surveyed a nice set of trends by which to gauge their investment.

Over the coming weeks, more details and trends will materialize and the races will commence — I’ve already got my tickets.

Last week was an interesting week to be monitoring social media. There were several examples of consumers’ feedback running rampant on the social web and companies scrambling to keep up. Here are the big ones.

• Amazon.com delisted thousands of books from general search results, including many gay and lesbian themed books, prompting accusations of sudden policy change against such topics.
• Employees of Domino’s Pizza posted a video on YouTube of them defiling food while making it.
• Time Warner Cable revealed the details of its metered internet usage plans being tested in four major cities.
• Ashton Kutcher and CNN were involved in a challenge to be the first to reach 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. Only it turns out CNN didn’t even operate the CNNBrk Twitter account that was in the race.

All of these events created a massive amount of social media buzz, and the companies involved varied in their responses.

Amazon apologized and basically said the problem was “a glitch” but since then seems to be hoping that the buzz will go away leaving all of those who were outraged without much satisfaction.

Domino’s created a YouTube video response and set up a Twitter account of their own to answer any questions people might have showing that while they might not have been ready for something like this, they can certainly roll with the punches and respond appropriately.

Time Warner Cable backed off and has delayed plans to implement metered billing, presumably to polish up their PR and marketing machine before giving it another go. We’ll have to wait and see what the final outcome is.

CNN embraced the idea of the race to 1,000,000 followers while behind the scenes they hired James Cox, the owner of the CNNBrk account, as a consultant to run it for them. This well-played maneuver was a great way to make the best of the situation and let the hype about the race overshadow the possible branding nightmare.

The speed at which these story lines unfolded illustrates just how important it is to be monitoring your brand. But that’s only going to give you a fighting chance. The way you address the concerns of your consumers is going to mean the success or demise of your reputation in the long run.