Toluu

Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

I'm a blogger who writes about, videos, and photographs the tech industry

Ballmer’s big momentJanuary 2

Steve Jobs won’t be center stage this week. Chuq von Rospach, who used to work at Apple, wraps up what that means from an inside-the-Apple sphere.

But there’s another first coming up next week: it’ll be the first CES without Bill Gates on stage.

It is Steve Ballmer’s big moment. The lights will be all on him thanks to Steve Jobs’ decision to not show up on stage.

Now, look at the enterprise videos I’ve been doing this week (I just did another one with Jive Software’s CMO this morning). Do you sense it? This is Steve Ballmer’s big moment. Everyone in the industry is gunning for Microsoft. It’s Ballmer’s big moment to tell them all to “stay off our lawn.”

What must he do?

1. Introduce Windows 7 to us and make it seem a LOT cooler than Vista. Not a hard job, for sure, but he needs to nail it. This is job #1 for him this year.
2. Assure its partners that people will buy computers and its mobile phones in 2009. Next week I’ll be walking around with executives from Best Buy to find out if what Steve said resonated. BestBuy and other retailers are feeling tons of pain right now due to the economic downturn. Can Ballmer offer them any hope?
3. Demonstrate how Microsoft is pushing into new markets. It’s rumored to be b

JPG’s dead. Why your advertising-funded business could be next…January 2

JPG Magazine is dead. That’s a bummer because, as TechCrunch wrote this morning, it was a radical idea in publishing: one that used crowd-sourced data to serve the magazine’s readers.

There were a few problems here:

1. They never got a large enough following to make a business viable. That’s because book stores are going away and the ones that are left are not willing to increase the shelf space to magazines. Tim O’Reilly talked about this in the interview I did with him a couple weeks back for FastCompanyTV. To make it in media you’ve gotta be where there’s increasing shelf space. Today what’s increasing? Newspapers? Nope. Magazines? Nope. iPhone apps? Yes! Facebook apps? Yes!
2. Photography is a tough place to make money off of advertising. Look at Flickr itself. Why haven’t you seen many ads there? Because advertisers haven’t figured out how to sell stuff by putting their messages next to photography. If they can’t figure that out online there’s no way they’ll figure that out in a magazine.
3. The web overwhelmed the model. Flickr has a really cool page called “most interesting over past seven days.” Look at it. I’ll wait. Now, why woul

Twitter warning: your account data is being soldJanuary 1

You iknow the spammer? Twply? Well, it’s worse than it seems. They now have your user name and password and are looking to sell your data to the highest bidder.

Twitter needs a real third-party authentication system and it needs it now. Thanks to Mark Trapp and other friendfeeders for bringing this to my attention.

   Tagged: data, privacy, Twitter   

Twitter spam, effective or idiotic?January 1

This morning the replies kept crossing my screen. They look like this:

Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!

Aaarrrrrggggghhhhh.

To me this marks this company forever that it’s a spammer. I will never try this tool just because of this. It is why I am increasingly finding myself unwilling to put my twitter address and password into a new tool. They can use that access to hurt you and your reputation.

But, on the other hand, this is brilliant. It is spreading so fast that in the three minutes it took to bang out this post 30 more people loaded this tool and handed over their names and passwords.

Effective and viral. Expect more of this marketing in the future.

Me? It is cluttering up my screen. I need a new kind of filter now.

Aaarrrrrggggggghhhhhh!

UPDATE: Mathew Ingram says that it sent the message even though he thought he turned it off. We are also discussing this on friendfeed.

   Tagged: spam, Twitter   

20 ways to being a bigger friendfeed monster than Guy KawasakiDecember 28 2008

Guy Kawasaki is on friendfeed but you can be a lot better at it than he is.

Just watch this video where I show you the 20 key features of friendfeed and how to use them to be an aggregating social media monster!

Oh, and how do I know you can beat Guy? Because he has no likes and only has made four comments on friendfeed total. I know Guy and he will start using friendfeed by mid-year 2009 because he’ll start seeing the power then (he got on Twitter late, too, which he admitted to me in an interview we did with him). You have a chance to get into it before Guy learns all the tricks and becomes an unmatchable friendfeeding monster.

Sorry it’s a little blurry, I was using my flipcam. Maybe we’ll do this with our good cameras later in the week.

Here’s the list of 20 things we cover:

1. Why friendfeed?
2. Get inbound content with the aggregator.
3. Get inbound content via friends.
4. How friend-of-a-friend feature brings more inbound content.
5. Using the everyone tab to get more inbound content.
6. Using rooms to find inbound content.
7. Using “best of” feature to find more inbound content.
8. Using the “me” and “home” pages.
9. Using lists to do fr