Will the Microsoft Courier be the equal to iPad (or better)?
In addition to serving as an e-reader, the Courier will have a camera for snapping photos and a headphone jack for media playback. Clearly, though, the Courier is meant to be used as a notepad and journal. It will have a built-in calendar, contacts organizer and to-do list, but its real value lies in its ability to clip, organize, and annotate information. There will also be a dedicated Web site for sharing your journals and allowing others to collaborate on them.Pricing and release date are still not known, but if Microsoft can keep costs down, the Courier could spell trouble for a certain tablet device to be released in April." (via switched.com)
You can find videos of the new Courier interface at Engadget and you can (of course) also find info on Gizmodo (and several other places).
Now the big question is: Should I buy the iPad or the Courier... or both?
Worth checking out: Live Labs Pivot
Are you hungry for more Pivot info (you should be) - have a look here (only works if you got Silverlight installed, sorry)
If you want to try Pivot yourself you can find it here
Curious about who Gary Flake is? Well on his own small site it seems like he's the "Darth Vader of the Internets" but he's also more formally the founder & director of Microsoft Live Labs with a pretty impressive background (maybe I'm just easy to impress). Find Gary's CV here and judge for yourself.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart takes a look at Chatroulette
After trying Chatroulette myself twice I have to say that there's too many nude guys (of all ages) for my taste... actually even one nude guy is one too many for me - call me old fashioned if you have to. I guess the sexy women don't use Chatroulette much... or maybe they just nexted me before I could see them...
Role Of Social Media - Planning for 2010
The State of The Internet
Redux: The Hottest Video from Your Social Graph
Silentale - unifying your online communication
I guess most of you haven't heard about the service Silentale - yet. My guess would be that it's because the service is still in beta and invite only. Fortunately I can do something about both these issues as I'm now going to tell you about Silentale and as I've got 20 invites to share!
Personally I've got accounts at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail and Hotmail. On each of these platforms I also got a number of contacts and a number of these contacts I'm even connected to through all these channels. This gives me a quite fragmented online life as each platform is totally disconnected from the others. One unified overview of all my written communication and my contacts would really make the online life a lot easier in many ways. This is where Silentale comes into play...
Silentale consolidates your contacts and conversations from multiple platforms, including webmails and social networks. It even stores it all in the Cloud and make you able to access it anytime, anywhere. Let's take a quick look at the features in Silentale:
The Connectors
The Connectors allow you to tell Silentale which address books, emails or social networks you want to monitor and archive. You simply select a service and provide your account details for all your messages, attachments and contacts to appear within Silentale.
The Timeline
The Timeline displays the complete history of all your messages, whatever their source or format, ranked in chronological order. It's like having a huge unified inbox across all my emails and social networks. With each message, the Timeline displays the date, the subject, the sender, the recipients and a small icon that indicates the format, e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can click on the relevant links to access the full message, the contact profile or attachments.
The People Book
The People Book displays a unified and exhaustive view of all the people you have been in touch with, whether they come from your address books, social networks or just because you were once involved in the same digital conversation. When I write unified you have to understand that it really does mean unified - Silentale matches my contacts across platforms and gives me a perfect overview of each of my contacts with data gathered from each of the platforms I've connected to Silentale - wauw!
The Conversation
If you want to follow all your conversations with one person, just click on the selected contact either in the People Book or the Timeline, or enter a name in the Search Box, and you will get the complete thread of your messages with that person, across all media.
The Search
The Search is a really cool way to get an overview of something. You just type your search words and Silentale shows you all your email, messages from social networks, contacts etc. matching the search in one unified view. This gives a very fast and efficient overview of your online communication. This is in my opinion one of the really strong features in Silentale and most likely the one feature that will actually make me use Silentale in my daily online life.
The Missing Features
Though Silentale really is a very promising new service I still miss a number of things:
- Text messages (SMS). I guess that around 20% of the written communication I get is as text messages so I really would love to have those in my Silentale overview as well. Laurent from Silentale has hinted that this will come in short term and on the Silentale site you find several places where they already mention SMS.
- Support for mobile devices. I got this great mobile device called an iPhone so I would really love to see a Silentale app on it too.
- Calendar support. All my appointments are in my Google Calendar so why not include those in the Silentale overview? They would fit perfectly in the timeline as well as in the People Book and I would be able to look up a person and see when we met, what we've communicated about and on which social networks I'm connected to the person. We already got the what (messages) and where (social networks, email addresses) so please also give us the when (calendar).
- Filter the Timeline. For now I can see all my communication in the Timeline but I'm not able to split up the communication by Connector - for example filter out the Twitter messages etc.
- Faster updates. For now the Silentale service only updates once an hour (with a few glitches) and it's in my opinion not fast enough in these busy times. I could live with once every 5 minutes or something but once an hour?
The Conclusion
Silentale is a very promising service - remember that it's still in a closed beta so things might not work 100% and it might not yet have all the features we could dream about. The Silentale crew is working hard on adding new features and the support is amongst the fastest I've yet encountered. Get these people hired at my cable company please! I try many new online services but I really think that this one is one of the ones that I will keep using.
How to get an invite
The friendly people at Silentale granted me 20 invites to hand out. If you'd like one of those please make a comment here - even "Please give me a Silentale invite" will do but I would love to see some "real" comments too :-)
Gartner: Key CRM Predictions for 2010
As I'm not a Gartner customer and their reports are insanely expensive I had to find out about the Gartner key CRM predictions for 2010 over at MarketingPros - thanks for this posting!
As social networks become even more important for reaching customers, by the end of 2010 Facebook will be the No. 1 social networking site in all but 25 countries and will attain a total membership of 600 million (including inactive accounts and a small number of users with multiple accounts), according to Gartner.
However, Facebook will not be the No. 1 social network in Brazil, Russia, India, China, or Japan.
Meanwhile, customer relationship management (CRM) will remain high on the business agenda in 2010 as the single most logical way to differentiate the business, according to Gartner.
Below, other Gartner predictions for CRM in 2010 and beyond.
Social Media
- Marketers and customer service management will need to switch focus from the large number of social networks to the three or four that will dominate specific languages.
- By the end of 2010, more than 80% of market growth in social applications will center around a business case for improving external customer relationships, rather than improving internal collaboration.
- Among social projects evaluated by Gartner, those with a clear and direct mutual purpose (benefits for both company and customer) are the most like to show measurable results. Social application vendors that make a business case for social media, including with hard metrics and specific outcomes, will see double- or triple-digit growth in 2010.
Digital Marketing
- By the end of 2011, more than 90% of Fortune 1000 marketing campaigns will include online marketing, up from 50% in 2009.
- As a result of precise attribution metrics for campaigns, marketers will gain a 10-20% savings in marketing communications.
- Online marketing will enable faster testing and campaign refinement, and help avoid the continued waste of funding a failed campaign, while engaging in more-thorough campaign testing prior to launch.
General Marketing
- Through 2010, marketing budgets will remain flat in more than 90% of companies, despite a return to growth.
- Marketing organizations will need to automate operational processes and learn how to leverage technology to measure areas previously left unmeasured, enabling them to do more for less and articulate business value.
- Marketing resource management (MRM) will become a top priority for marketing organizations, and enterprise marketing management (EMM) will take on new meaning as a vehicle for strategic planning, collaboration and measurement.
About the data: Findings are from two Gartner reports, including Predicts 2010: CRM Marketing Is Building Demand on a Limited Budget and Predicts 2010: Customer Service Meets Social CRM.
Thoughts about the (near) future for social media in events
About Me
Lars VarmingI'm a liberalist, technologist, early adopter, proponent of humor, gadget geek and am in general in love with cool digital stuff.
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