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Apple Releases Aperture 3 – Retail Price Is $199, Upgrade Costs $99

2010-02-09T14:06:31+00:00

It’s been almost 2 years to the day when Apple released Aperture 2.0, and this morning the company announced that the third iteration of the photo editing and management software is available. Some of the new features include Faces, Places and Brushes, some of which will be familiar to those using iPhoto ‘09.

With the new version, Apple makes it easier for people to step up from iPhoto to Aperture, while still providing professional photographers with a powerful program for editing and managing their libraries.

Aperture 3 lets people organize large photo libraries using elements like Projects and the new Faces and Places features. Faces, for instance, uses face recognition technology to find and organize photos by the people in them. You can view faces across your entire photo library or view just the faces that appear in selected projects. In a new view, Aperture 3 displays faces that have been detected but haven’t yet been named.

Places lets you explore photos based on the location they were taken, and like in iPhoto, Places automatically reverse geocodes GPS data into locations. In Aperture 3, you can assign locations by dragging-and-dropping photos onto a map or by using location information from GPS enabled cameras, tracking devices or iPhone photos. Aperture 3 also introduces new tools to refine your photos including Brushes for painting image adjustments onto parts of your photo, and Adjustment Presets for applying professional photo effects. New slideshows let you share your work by weaving together photos, audio, text and HD video.

Apple features six pre-designed themes but also lets you choose your own transitions, background, borders and titles, and add your own soundtrack. You can export your slideshows directly to iTunes to take with you on your iPhone or iPod touch. There’s also a social networking element to the new Aperture, as you can publish photographs to online photo sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr, straight from the software client.

The Apple Store is currently still down, but it will be available on there soon, as well as in the company’s own retail stores and Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $199. Existing Aperture users can upgrade for a suggested retail price of $99.

A downloadable 30-day trial version is available here. Aperture 3 runs as a 64-bit application on Mac OS X Snow Leopard on Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

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Flush With $10 Million In Fresh Cash, Yammer Strengthens Executive Team

2010-02-09T14:06:31+00:00

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

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Tiny Speck Gives Birth To Glitch, A New Flash-Based Massively Multiplayer Game

2010-02-09T10:28:31+00:00

Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck’s first project has revealed itself to the world: Glitch.

So what is it? As we suspected, it’s an online game in the vein of Game Neverending, the gaming project that eventually became Flickr (weird, I know). It’s a Flash-based massively multiplayer game that revolves around solving puzzles. While the game itself will be free, there will be some level of in-game purchases. Or as it’s described on the site:

This is not something you’ve seen before. Glitch is a neverending feast of imagination, a celebration of creativity, a labor of love, and a monument to play.

Or, in English:

Glitch is a massively-multiplayer game, playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web. It is currently in development and will launch late in 2010. Private alpha is beginning shortly and a public beta period will begin this summer.

We’re told that the alpha testing will begin in the next week or so. And the there’s an interesting way Tiny Speck is thinking about doing it. “We’re going to try something we made up called ’strobe testing’ where we open the world up to testers for, say, 24 hours during a given week, then wipe it and start again. Some of the tests will be cumulative (so everyone invited to the last round will be in) and some will be fresh batches of people. Since most people who sign up to test give us some basic background info, we can do one strobe with all women, one strobe with all people older than 35, one with all hardcore gamers, one with maximal network density (via facebook connect), etc., and see how different groups of people react and what patterns of play emerge …,” Butterfield tells us.

CNET has more about the genesis of the project, and we’ll be meeting with Butterfield tomorrow for more details. For now, be sure to watch the trippy teaser video on the site.

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Back to the Future: How Apple is Becoming More Like a Carrier Every Day

2010-02-09T10:28:31+00:00

Editor’s note: Is Apple going too far with its restrictions on developers? Alistair Goodman thinks so and explains why in this guest post. He is the CEO of 1020 Placecast, a location-based mobile advertising startup.

Apple’s recent behavior bears an increasing resemblance to carriers with respect to the walled garden they are creating around the iPhone. Restricting applications, restricting the use of location on the device, blocking Flash, and now potentially taking advertising in house—these moves are taken from the carrier’s playbook with the hope of locking out meaningful competition. Ironically, Apple may very well become the barrier to open innovation in mobile in much the same way as carriers have been before the iPhone came along.

What is clear from the announcement to developers last week about plans to deny some apps that deliver location-based advertising is that Apple intends to control the flow of marketing dollars on the iPhone. Less clear are their plans for sharing the wealth with the ecosystem—but if you look closely at acquisitions like Placebase, key hires and patent filings, what emerges is a potentially more ominous view of a company that can only compete in the direct advertising business head-to-head with Google by seizing control of location-based advertising.

Location is now widely understood to be the key to successful mobile advertising because where a consumer is in the physical world and at what the time they are there is such a strong predictor of consumer behavior and intent. “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” says Apple. While they have yet to entirely exclude developers and ad networks from the equation, their broader strategy around location-based programs certainly has the potential to do just that.

Consider the following:

Apple’s acquisition of Placebase was not just about replacing Google Maps (with their Pushpin product). Placebase also is an aggregator of location-based content like neighborhood boundaries, census data and business listings, just like Navteq. These are the initial building blocks of a platform that indicates points-of-interest to a consumer when they are on their iPhone in a specific location. (Apple, like Google, has not yet cracked the problem of “location intelligence” – but this is just a starting point… more on that later in this piece)
Apple’s $275 million acquisition and staffing up at Quattro is a clear signal that they are ramping up mobile advertising sales to go head-to-head with Google. In Europe, for example, Apple has just hired former Microsoft sales manager Theo Theodorou to lead their sales effort, and Todd Tran, previously a senior executive at WPP’s Group M, to be general manager. Integrating Quattro into Apple gives it the ability to target audiences and deliver mobile ads, and provide the analytics to media buyers about the effectiveness of their programs.
Apple has filed (and widely publicized) patent applications in location-based marketing which are clearly designed to stake a claim in the space. Several patents are particularly interesting indicators of their strategic intent. This one, Location-Based Services, is like Google Goggles, which enables visual search based on a picture, and covers a host of location-based use cases such as understanding the proximity of businesses to enable the ability to trigger messages via “…information corresponding to one or more relevant businesses in a vicinity of the determined current geographic location.” A second one covers proximity-based ads, and a third is quite specific, “Graphical User Interface with Location-Specific Interface Elements,” covers the ability to monetize mobile messaging by enabling consumers to make purchases based on promoted items nearby. (Note to both Apple and Google beginning to stake out their ground in the future patent war: you will likely need this patent and others as well which were actually issued years ago.)

So what is missing from Apple’s strategy? Location intelligence —meaning the ability to return content (and advertising) on a consumer’s iPhone that is always correct, and always relevant for where they are and when they are there. As others have noted, just because a phone has a GPS on it that can locate a user does not mean that what is returned to them is meaningful. Location intelligence is the problem of returning relevant information based on place and time. It is actually pretty complex—this is something that both Apple and Google are only discovering as they begin distributing their apps to millions of consumers. And doing it at scale—meaning always returning customized content and advertising to millions of consumers in real time—is an extraordinary challenge because it requires managing location data and content at a level of accuracy that today’s online search algorithms are just beginning to grasp.

Apple’s continued march down the path of the walled garden will become harder and harder as Google’s open Android ecosystem grows and the mobile ecosystem as a whole moves towards the more open Internet-like model. Meanwhile carriers will continue to use SMS to deliver location-based marketing across any open smartphone device or any feature phone. If Apple thinks the carriers are going to lie-down and settle for nothing from a new revenue stream in location-based advertising, they should think long and hard about the implications of this choice. Because as much as they are acting like the new carriers, they don’t actually own any wireless bandwidth or cell towers to carry all that data going to and from their phones.

Photo credit: Flickr/Paul Englefield.

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Apple

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Foursquare Signing Mainstream Partnership Deals Left And Right

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service’s Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they’ve reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.

The service has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find.

While Zagat is an obvious partner thanks to its restaurante recommendations, the entertainment partnership appeal may not be immediately apparent. But as you can see on the Foursquare page for the movie Valentine’s Day, those promoting the movie have added 50 “Romantic Tips” around the cities that the movie takes place in, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston. Any Foursquare user that checks-in at one of these places will unlock a special badge for the movie.

The new HBO show, How To Make It In America, meanwhile, has four special badges that you can unlock: Culture, Living, Cocktails, and Nightlife. Each of these is obtained by visiting venues from the show.

And the Zagat deal is interesting in that it goes beyond simply offering food and restaurant recommendations. The service plans to have a weekly web video series entitled “Meet The Mayor” in which they interview the Foursquare “mayor” of a restaurant in their guide.

Another deal that Foursquare recently signed was with Harvard.

These types of deals are crucial to Foursquare not only because they point to an eventual money-making opportunity, but also because they give the service a way to fend off attacks from Yelp (which just launched a check-in feature on its own iPhone app), and soon Facebook. Meanwhile, these deals give brands a fun way to interact with the public. It’s advertising, but it’s interactive.

Now Foursquare just has to solve that douchebag problem…

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The Value Of Online Buzz For The Top 20 Brands

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has released a report that calculates the dollar value of the buzz, content, and conversation taking place online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates the volume of mentions and sentiment value regarding a brand, company or person. The algorithm combines this data with website traffic and online news readership figures to determine the purchase-equivalent dollar value of the brand exposure across more than 30 million sources by gauging sentiment, frequency, and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue.

Google topped the rankings, with value of its “buzz” itemized at $669.6 million. Google’s social media reach costs $402 million, with its Twitter reach alone valued at $22.8 million. On the other hand, Apple came in fourth with total buzz reaching $293.2 million; social media buzz valued at $223.7 million; and Twitter reach valued at $5.6 million.

Here’s the list of the top 20 brands according the the value of their “Buzz”. Numbers are measured in thousands. The report is embedded below.

	Company	News Media	Social Media	Twitter	Total
1	Google	$244,593	$402,279	$22,756	$669,629
2	Microsoft	$184,473	$452,006	$12,252	$648,732
3	Sony	$80,574	$207,907	$5,825	$294,308
4	Apple	$63,947	$223,657	$5,632	$293,237
5	Yahoo	$50,324	$236,087	$5,354	$291,766
6	Intel	$93,665	$189,880	$2,139	$285,685
7	Ford	$145,369	$39,082	$1,453	$185,905
8	IBM	$62,683	$85,957	$1,740	$150,381
9	Citigroup	$105,614	$24,961	$749	$131,326
10	HP	$46,249	$67,222	$2,423	$115,896
11	eBay	$50,179	$56,889	$4,672	$115,740
12	Oracle	$43,413	$70,838	$1,435	$115,686
13	McDonalds	$80,579	$32,842	$1,840	$115,263
14	Disney	$67,166	$35,811	$4,411	$107,390
15	Nokia	$28,560	$71,843	$2,369	$102,772
16	GE	$75,452	$24,536	$885	$100,864
17	Dell	$34,491	$43,990	$1,553	$80,035
18	American Express	$56,576	$19,803	$648	$77,028
19	Cisco	$41,579	$25,273	$735	$67,588
20	Blackberry	$22,706	$41,678	$2,038	$66,422

brand –

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul

2010-02-09T07:02:42+00:00

Youth social networking researcher dana boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

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This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Discuss

The Long Tail Of Video Sites Capture Half Of All Viewing Minutes

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since most YouTube videos are so short. But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.

According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers.

The Nos. 2 through 25 sites account for the remaining 22 percent of video minutes. This group includes No. 2 video site Hulu, which just hit 1 billion monthly video streams in December, and fast-rising Netflix (no. 19). Hulu’s 1 billion streams accounted for 5.8 billion minutes of viewing time, up 140 percent from a year before.

For more from comScore’s report, see my earlier post on Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web or download the entire report here.

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blueKiwi Rides the Freemium Wave

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.

Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. Bluekiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.

The blueKiwi dashboard allows the community manager to integrate outside feeds—be they RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook—in order to stay on top of external chatter. The “Notebook” shows anything and everything in the blueKiwi community which involves the user. Any chatter which involves the user is threaded in a Facebook status-esque interface, making it simple for users to stay up-to-date on conversations in which they are directly involved.

To ensure the product is being utilized most efficiently, the product has an automated personal assistant, Alice, programmed to make recommendations to community managers in order to keep them on top of important tasks. If part of an online community seems to be slacking in a certain department, Alice will make recommendations to try and increase efficiency. The homepage of blueKiwi also gives suggestions based on analytics to further this goal.

The free version of blueKiwi supports one external community, which can range from customer forums, to channel programs, to developer groups—basically anything where the majority of the users are outside the internal network—but allows unlimited internal groups and external members. Within the community, admins can vary the access privileges of individual members. Internal and External members can see everything which goes on in these groups, or admins can restrict access to only internal members. As conversations continue to grow, admins can change access privileges as well.

blueKiwi was founded in 2006 by Carlos Diaz and Christophe Routhieau. They have raised a total of $12.3 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systemes.

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Video: “Parisian Oops” Mocks Google’s Super Bowl Commercial

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

It actually took longer than I would have expected for someone to come up with a good mocking of Google’s “Parisian Love” commercial that played during the Super Bowl yesterday. But today brings us just that.

The video comes compliments of the Upright Citizens Brigade Beta Team “The Brig.” They’ve named their video “Parisian Oops” and have given it the tagline, “Romance, Consequences, Awkwardness. Search on.”

Update: We’ll embed the video in a bit when it goes up on YouTube (their embed is throwing fits). For now, watch it here. Funny stuff.

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The Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Here’s the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads

Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
Facebook: 330 billion
Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
AOL: 192 billion
Google Sites: 7o billion
eBay: 36 billion
Glam Media: 25 billion
Amazon Sites: 22 billion
United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

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Yahoo!

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When Negotiation Becomes Dishonesty

2010-02-09T07:02:42+00:00

If you've been a geek your whole life then you understand the term "Canadian girlfriend." The Canadian (or sometimes British) love interest is the person you talk about when a member of the opposite sex inquires about your dating status. The story is that you met online, you've formed a solid bond and you'll probably break up with your online girlfriend when a girl in your vicinity decides she likes you. The idea is to drive up the value of your perceived social stock. In the startup world, the same principle is used in "ham and egging."

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As pointed out in a recent blog post by university professor Scott Shane, "ham and egging" was first coined by Columbia's professor Amar Bhide and Harvard Business School's Howard Stevenson. The term refers to the technique of convincing multiple stakeholders that others are working with you despite the fact that you're only in talks. The only problem is that most early partners only want to work with you if other reputable partners have already signed on.

Explains Bhide and Stevenson,"the ultimate ham and egging solution is for the entrepreneur to simultaneously convince each participant that everyone else is on board, or almost on board."

However, when ReadWriteWeb spoke to MobiTV CEO Paul Scanlan about forging deals between telecom and television companies, he suggested a different tact. Although Scanlan found himself caught between partners who were skittish to sign on without the initial validation of others, he decided that rather than ham and egging, he'd build contingency clauses into contracts. Scanlan's contracts stated that all partnerships were contingent on a set number of large-scale partners to launch. While this may not be the ideal method of closing deals, it seems like an ethical alternative to engaging in deals that begin with dishonesty.

Have you ever engaged in ham and egging and if so, was your deal a success?

Discuss

Google Launches Phone Support For The Nexus One, Lowers ETF By $200

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile or HTC depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. It doesn’t come as a total surprise though — last week there were reports of a Google job listing for “Phone Support Program Manager, Android/Nexus One” to be based out of its headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The news was first reported at TMO News, and we’ve gotten a response from a Google spokesperson explaining the company’s logic behind the support number:

By design, we focused initially on providing the best possible customer support through our on-line channel, and our experience in the four weeks since the Nexus One launch enabled us to significantly enhance that on-line support offering. We have been able to address a large majority of customers’ inquiries successfully through on-line support, in combination with phone support from our partners, HTC and T-Mobile. That said, our approach with our new consumer channel is to learn fast and continue to improve, and we have, therefore, also been developing our capabilities to provide a number from Google, 888-48-NEXUS (63987) for live phone support for the Nexus One. Live phone support from Google, combined with an optimized on-line support experience, enables a superior Nexus One customer experience.

In other words, Google probably would have liked to have gotten away with online-only support, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to cut it.

In other news, Google has also announced that the ETF charge for the phone is down to $150 from $350. But that’s still on top of T-Mobile’s $200 fee. The drop may have well been spurred by the ETF inquiry recently launched by the FCC.

Still No Native Comments, But Tumblr Toys With Photo Replies

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn’t have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it’s not the same. And while they still haven’t added comments, tonight they’ve temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies.

While it doesn’t appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they’re going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it’s a photo comment.

To enable it on any post, simply check the box that reads “Let people photo reply” in the Tumblr backend for your blog.

While Tumblr itself doesn’t have a native commenting system, many users choose a third-party commenting option. The Tumblr Staff Blog, for example, uses Disqus.

[top photo via]

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The Richter Scales Debut Animated Video Of “I’ve Got Mail And I’ve Got It Made”

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

We’re big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song ‘I’ve Got Mail and I’ve Got it Made,’ which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it’s about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!

Facebook, Tesla And Solyndra Dominate SecondMarket Transactions In January

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They’ve now released last month’s data as well.

A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech.

36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we’ve heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That’s a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.

The complete report is below, and you can download the pdf here.

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Green Goose: Save Money Using Sensors

2010-02-09T03:14:28+00:00

Green Goose is a new financial management service that launched today, which connects sensor activity to your savings account. At first Green Goose sounded a little gimmicky. Using green Internet-connected eggs, it measures how much energy you expend on your bike or how much water you use in your shower - and transfers amounts from your checking account to your savings account based on the 'savings' you made doing those activities.

What's interesting though is that the savings are calculated based on the actions measured by small battery-powered, wireless sensors. You stick these sensors on your bike, thermostat, showerhead "and even your keychain."

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Green Goose is a web-based service, along with "a very low-cost set of Savings sensors." - these are literally green eggs (see picture to the right). The web site tracks specific actions and behaviors from users - then computes that into dollars saved.

Co-Founder Brian Krejcarek told ReadWriteWeb that's "like a Twitter feed of personal green savings."

Here's how the sensor part works: the sensors communicate with a "Green Gateway" that then sends messages to the web site. The Green Gateway - which is also "egg-like" - has an Ethernet port that connects to your network hub via a router. The bike sensor measures miles ridden. Green Goose also plans to offer sensors for your automobile, shower (hot water), and thermostat (heating and cooling).

In the future, Green Goose might also be able to pull savings data in "from open APIs like that proposed by Google Power Meter for savings earned by using less electricity." It also plans to eventually move beyond energy to capture savings earned from making "other lifestyle decisions."

You can get started today with a "Green Goose Bike Sensor Kit," which retails for $49 plus $10 for postage. The Portland and San Francisco-based company is currently in talks with the BTA (Bicycle Transportation Alliance) in Portland and they're already installed "in a number of coffee shops."

As well as consumers, the service is targeting employers with a "a unique sustainable savings benefit" offering for their staff. One of the features for employers is managing and auditing details for the IRS bike commute tax credit.

Green Goose is currently in pre-production and running beta trials. Right now it's offering 100 Savings Kits for bicycle owners.

Eventually this type of connection, between sensors and mainstream services like banking, will be commonplace and probably won't need to rely on gimmicks such as green eggs. But for now, Green Goose seems like a cute, interesting Internet of Things service for green conscious early adopters to try out.

Discuss

Must-have features for Twitter-killing

2010-02-09T07:12:01+00:00

In October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we’ll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn’t seem to be trying to solve them.

Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here’s a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don’t have on my list. It’s always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.

So here’s the list of must-have features:

1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night’s SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter’s installed base is, it won’t matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter.

2. Enclosures. Can you imagine if you couldn’t enclose a picture or an MP3 with an email message? Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture?

3. Open architecture metadata. Let developers throw any data onto a status message, giving it a name and a type, and let everyone else sort it out. It would result in an explosion of creativity.

4. Relationships with hardware vendors. I still want a one-click Twitter camera. If I can’t have it from Twitter, I’ll take it from Google.

5. No 140-character limit. I debated this one with myself. At first I compromised and said okay let’s have a 250-character limit, or a 500-character limit. But I really don’t want a limit. If I want to write short status messages, no problemmo. We’ve already made the cultural transition. We know how to do it. But sometimes a thought just can’t be expressed in 140 characters. No one is wise enough to know what the limit is, so let’s just not have one.

6. No URL-shorteners. I’ve explained this so many times. They’re stupid and ugly and they hurt the web. I like it when developers take the time to craft their URLs so they make sense to users. That’s all the shortening we really need and all we should have.

Those are some of my wish-list items. It seems likely Google will offer #1 and #2. Very unlikely they’ll do #3 (they don’t trust developers any more than Apple does). Probably not #4, though it would be easy to get some people from Kodak and Sony to come on stage with them. #5 would take a teeny bit of guts. It’s a perfect way to throw some serious confusion at Twitter. I’d recommend going all the way, but if they can’t go to 500-characters. Get some editors and authors on stage to say how nice it would be. Because they’re making a commitment to their own URL-shortener it seems unlikely they would outlaw them on their status network, but one can hope.

I usually don’t subscribe to the idea that new products aimed at the user base of an established product are “killers” — but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a product as ripe for killing as Twitter. (Lotus 1-2-3 was probably the last great example.)

The hubris of Twitter is the assumption that the product is unassailable because of the features they leave out. Sooner or later one of their competitors is going to test that theory, and I’m pretty sure it’ll prove incorrect. And where they include horrendous features that a competitor might leave out (I’m thinking of URL-shortening) they don’t seem to feel any pressure to take it out. Yet almost every user would enjoy a Twitter with real full URLs that didn’t take up any of the 140-character space. Hard to imagine anyone objecting.

OTOH, Google is a big clunky Microsoft-like company with strategy taxes, and they don’t trust the web or developers, or each other, and their internal politics drive most of the decisions they make. To compete with Twitter is an easy sell inside Google, but to actually have the will to be cut-throat about it, that’s another thing. It’ll probably have to pay homage to Google Wave (remember that?) and therefore will have some elements that are completely incomprehensible. Twitter likely won’t get killed, because Google’s product will likely fall far-short of what’s needed to get us all to think they can be trusted.

The usual disclaimers apply. This is all tea-leave-reading, I have no actual information, and I’m usually way wrong with these prognostications, but it’s still good to share the thought process.

[Update- No]1080p Streaming Coming To Netflix – DVDs Are Over

2010-02-09T07:12:01+00:00

Update – NetFlix claims that the update in its roadmap was wrong. 1080p streaming will not be coming this year. However, closed captioning and 5.1 surround sound are a go.

Like a fine scotch, Netflix just keeps getting better with age. The company will rolling out 1080p streaming this year for its army of subscribers.

The company is moving away from DVDs as quickly and strongly as possible, attempting to get out of the saddle of a dying horse. The CEO of Netflix has expressed pessimism with physical formats, a bold move for a company that was built on shipping DVDs at light speed.

The company will also be addressing a long time gripe among its customers, the 1080p streaming will support 5.1 surround sound. Many users through time were annoyed when some streams, labeled HD, did not have surround sound.

There is no firm date set for this feature roll out, but expect it to consume bandwidth like an oil well fire.

According to CNet, to connection speed needed to stream 720P is around 5mpbs. Given that 1080p contains around twice the data, much faster connections will be needed to handle the new resolution.

Netflix is pushing the curve, making it so that in a few more years, you will never have to wait to see the movie that you want to see.

Where is Entrepreneurship Really Taught?

2010-02-09T03:14:28+00:00

Between Y Combinator's Startup School, the influx of seed fund incubators, the list of legendary mentors and investors and the dotcom bust's school of hard knocks, is there really any reason to go to grad school? At ReadWriteWeb we're supportive of lifelong learning and universities that coach entrepreneurs, but a recent post by Venture Hacks founder Naval Ravikant has us wondering, "What is the value in grad school?"

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Ravikant suggests that incubators and accelerators like YCombinator and Techstars are the new grad school.

He writes, "In some ways, it's better," and that unlike business schools, YCombinator pays entrepreneurs, which allows founders to be their own boss and encourages original work.

In addition to Ravikant's points, the fact that every incubator participant is connected to advisors through a financial agreement means the group may be motivated to maintain their network and share contacts. Nevertheless, before dismissing the idea of grad school altogether, it's good to remember many of the top entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley are MIT, Harvard and CalTech grads (including some of the Venture Hacks team). Perhaps the argument here is not so much about incubators over traditional institutions, but in the value of good mentors that have a stake in your success and do not rest on the laurels of a tenured position.

As a startup entrepreneur, what is the best lesson you've ever been taught and who taught it to you?

Photo Credit: Duncan Hull

Discuss

What's Next For Geolocation? Apps, Apps, Apps

2010-02-09T03:14:28+00:00

Geolocation social networks are set to be in 2010 what microblogging was in 2008 - the next big thing. Currently the space is being dominated by Foursquare, with others like Gowalla, MyTown and Loopt trailing in its wake.

While Gowalla has secured a large amount of funding, some $8.5 million, and My Town claims more check-ins than the other services, Foursquare is happily ticking along on the seed money provided by its founders (after they sold their original effort, Dodgeball, to Google), and creating a community of developers who are eager to build secondary applications. There are two reasons Foursquare is gaining so much ground over its competitors.

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This is a guest post by Simon Salt, the founder and CEO of IncSlingers. He is a writer and blogger whose work has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Chris Brogan's Dad-O-Matic.com, American Marketing Association News and the Austin Realtor. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal on social media and is a recognized national speaker on that topic as well.

Firstly, it is available on all phone platforms. While this is also true of Loopt, the game play element of Foursquare makes it more attractive to many users. Secondly, it took the very sensible step of opening its API early on. This has generated a wave of new secondary applications.

In addition to this, it set up a developer community forum and is extremely active there, providing support, information and assistance to developers that are creating these secondary apps. Just as with Twitter, it is not just the service itself that will create demand, but the applications that run from that service.

There are hundreds of applications that run on the Twitter API now (most of which are listed at oneforty.com). It is very likely that by the end of 2010 we will see similar numbers of applications for Foursquare, and, should Gowalla and the rest open their APIs, for those services too.

The reason geolocation social networking is so popular is quite simply its ease of use. Arrive at a destination, be that your work, the gym, a coffee shop or even the grocery store, fire up the application on your phone, "check-in", and get points, badges and even increased status in the game for doing so.

As with Twitter, early adopters are the ones using the sites the most at the moment, but the services are rapidly spreading beyond the hard core. Unlike micro-blogging, you need no talent to be entertaining, informative or stylish - you simply check-in as you go about your day. You attract "friends" by doing this, or by connecting with people you already know, either online or in real life.

The Next Step: User- and Location-Focused

As with so many other early-stage social network platforms, extending the service with secondary applications is what makes the service truly useful.

At present, the secondary applications that are being developed fall into two main categories: user-focused and location-focused. A good example of a user-focused app is wheredoyougo. This service provides a heat map visual of all of a user's check-ins. Another, foursqpic allows users to upload pictures as part of the Foursquare Venue Tips section, supplementing simple text tips with visuals as well. These are great apps and certainly add to the fun and extend the functionality of the service. However, the real gains are coming in the location-focused apps. So far, the most developed of these is placewidget, which allows owners of a location to promote, via a website widget, the "Mayor" of their location on their website. Until now, any real marketing revolving around Foursquare was offline, and had to be location-specific. By bringing the ability to market both their involvement in the Foursquare community and promote a loyal customer, this widget gives a lot more power to businesses looking to leverage this type of social networking.

Foursquare recently announced it had signed two deals with media outlets. The first is an agreement with Metro, Canada's number one free daily newspaper, to have content for venues provided by the newspaper. The second is with Bravo TV, which will include Bravo Celebrity Tips and Bravo-branded badges for over 500 locations. A game is great, but a content-rich social network is something a lot more valuable.

Photo credit: Agata Urbaniak Discuss

Microsoft Declares The Windows 7 Battery Bug A Feature

2010-02-09T07:12:01+00:00

All those pesky Windows 7 battery issues? Nothing to fret about says Microsoft, Windows 7 is operating as it should be.

The battery warnings that are cropping up among upgraders to Windows 7 are in fact correctly labeled, says Microsoft. The company has stated that the reason that the batteries are being flagged for replacement is that they are not performing up to specification. Simple enough.

Not performing well, and you should around to perhaps “consider replacing your battery,” as the warning in Windows 7 goes. Please note that the warnings for battery replacement are new to Windows 7.

This is why people who upgrade from an earlier flavor of Windows have been consued when the errors appeared.

Sure to the point, Microsoft notes that most systems that are throwing the error seem to be older than 1.5 years, suggesting that indeed the reasons for the warning (use) might be sound.

More from the Microsoft blog post on the matter: “We have seen no reproducible reports of this notification on new hardware or newly purchased PCs. While we’ve seen the reports of new PCs receiving this notification, in all cases we have established that the battery was in a degraded state.”

There it is folks, Windows 7 is just so sharp on the ball, that even when we think it’s wrong it’s right. Odd day in tech when Microsoft was more reliable than we could have expected.

Of course, it might be fair to lodge a complain that the warnings are alarmist, but that would be a different discussion.

Winter Weather Storm Watch Gets Streamlined On New Accuweather Site

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

With the East Coast and Midwest awaiting a monster snowstorm, popular weather forecasting site Accuweather, is rolling out a timely relaunch of its site. The site, which provides up-to-date local information on weather in the U.S., is launching a beta version of the site that includes a complete redesign and a few extra user-friendly features. The new version of the Accuweather is still in private beta but will be publicly launched to the public on February 15.

On the content side, the general theme for the new version of the site is “weather for your life,” with specialized and interactive weather forecasts for Weather and Health, Weather and Travel, Weather and Home and Garden, Weather and Outdoor Activity in your area. The health-related weather interest sections include Arthritis Pain Forecasts, Asthma Forecasts, Common Cold Forecasts, Flu Forecasts, Pollen Level Forecasts and more

In terms of everyday weather forecasts, the new site features hour-by-hour, 15-day forecasts, and next month forecasts. The site also has upgraded its multimedia offerings, with detailed videos fro meteorologists and a wide range of weather maps – including radar, satellite, severe weather, forecast maps, and more. The site will be adding 600 weather-related videos every day, with local video forecasts for over 100 U.S. cities.

The layout and design of the site itself is a lot cleaner and less cluttered. The older version of the site was a virtual mash-up of information, content and advertisements. The new version has larger numbers and text, is more spaced, and is all-together more friendly on the eyes. And I’m sure Accuweather is getting better feedback from advertisers on the layout, as the streamlined version is more complimentary to serving ads on the site.

In comparison to competitor and rival Weather.com, Accuweather’s site wins the contest in my opinion, with a nice balance of content and easy-to-use web features. According to Compete, Accuweather site saw 8 million unique visitors in December whereas Weather.com saw 33.5 million unique visitors in December. While Weather.com received more traffic, Accuweather’s forecasts are syndicated to over 175,000 media sites. And with the new redesign, Accuweather could become a more attractive destination for weather forecasts.

Apple Surveying iPhone Developers’ Happiness With The App Store

2010-02-08T22:14:37+00:00

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.

The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.

Examples of questions asked include:

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the Application submission process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the application review process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with the length of time it takes to get updates available on the App Store.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Sometime around the first of the year, Apple made some changes to the App Store approval process that drastically sped things up for many developers. In fact, a number of developers noted that approval process wait time went from two weeks (or worse) to just a couple of days in some situations. There have also been reports of improved communication from the app review team.

It seems likely that Apple staffed up its app review team and also provided them with better training and instructions over the past few months. Still, if the App Store continues to grow at its blistering pace, it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get bogged down again. So during this time of relative peace, it’s smart for Apple to survey its developers to fine tune the system.

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VMware Partner Exchange 2010: What happens in Vegas Comes to your Enterprise

2010-02-09T03:14:28+00:00

If you're releasing products integrated into the VMware ecosystem, you're likely enjoying enjoying the Las Vegas Strip this week. VMware Partner Exchange 2010 kicked off at the Mandalay Bay hotel today, and it is the place to learn about the current state of affairs and how to quantify tangible benefits of virtualization for partners and customers.

We've found that the virtualization layer is becoming a key place to launch enterprise products. All of this momentum is being translated in how to more effectively sell virtualization into the enterprise - and VMware isn't holding back in building the relationships to sell into the channel.

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So, we ask, is the virtual layer the new platform for delivering value to the enterprise? If so, what tangible benefits are being offered today?

First an analysis of the momentum. According to this release from VMware , despite the down economy there has been 60% increase in participants this week from counties all around the world. What happens when we crunch the language in that release? We find that "partners", "exchange", "customers", "network", "cloud", and "desktop" are the most important subjects.

Using those ideas, let's condense that statement into our own words: Virtualization partners are exchanging information on how to win customers by leveraging the network and cloud to reach the desktop.

At the partner exchange, there are early previews of next-generation products and programs as well as in-depth technical training. The conference agenda is packed with sessions including practical training and a host of supported discussions from over 50 sponsors, including HP, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Netapp and EMC.

Looking through the sessions, several things stand out. First, networking and storage are merging together. Second, security is catching up - quickly - to support and define how virtualization and cloud applications are deployed and managed for business-critical applications. VMware is being baked into partner go-to-market strategies and product releases. There is more partner surface area and more angles for sales. All of this bodes well for virtualization.

Are VMware partners building an ecosystem that makes you want to move faster with your deployment of business-critical applications? What is missing?

Discuss