http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/04/29/99designs-raises-35-million-crowdsourced-graphic-design
The 26 staff crowdsource graphic design website, 99designs, has raised $35 million in it’s first round of funding. This has been backed by angel investors who also back eBay, Survey Monkey, Flickr and Squarespace.

http://www.getelastic.com/shopping-cart-urgency/
Ways to improve and reduce the abandonment rate on ecommerce websites during the checkout phase. A good post by Get Elastic to show what tricks certain websites have used to improve conversions

http://www.adnews.com.au/news/groupon-gobbles-first-australian-rival
Groupon buys it’s first Australian rival – crowdmass. The Melbourne based company was attractive to Groupon simply because of their talent. Looks like Groupon wants to start with the small players first to tackle the bigger later. The crowdmass website now links to stardeals.com.au

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20058652-48.html
Rolls Royce released an App on the iPhone and iPad to customize various features of their flagship model – the Phantom. It’s colour palate allows you to select from 44,000 colours, however it says that you can take a picture of any surface and make you own unique colour. The point of this? I’m not sure.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Yesterday, Lamar Advertising rolled out a billboard that read “Follow Ashton Kutcher” with a link underneath to Ashton’s profile page.

This was put on 1,133 digital billboards within hours of request. This is to be running for a hours even after Oprah Winfrey plugs her new Twitter account on her talk show.

The time is 10:20am Sydney, Australia.

The above image is the error message I get as I try to login on Twitter. It attempts to go to twitter.com/sessions but says that The page doesn’t exists.

Upgrades?

Microsoft new search product, codenamed: Kumo

Let’s face it, Live Search hasn’t really done well in the grand scheme of online search compared to Google and Yahoo.

So the Microsoft guys have decided to test their new product. Codenamed: Kumo, Microsoft has asked their employees to test the new system internally. In fact, the changed their internal DNS to redirect live.com to the new product.

Take a look at some of the screenshots from Kara Swisher’s blog -

http://kara.allthingsd.com/files/2009/03/downloadedfile.gif

http://kara.allthingsd.com/files/2009/03/downloadedfile-1.gif

http://kara.allthingsd.com/files/2009/03/downloadedfile-2.gif

You can see that Microsoft intends to show your search results in various categories and media types all in the one page first. If you search for a particular product, you can link directly to reviews, specs, manuals and so on. If you’re searching for a music artist, you again see images, links, lyrics, videos et al.

Different? Well sort of, but the question is how many of us will change the norm in the way we search? If I wanted the video for an artist, I would put the keyword video in it. If I wanted lyrics, I would do the same. It’s only a matter of tweaking my search query to get what I specifically want.

The time and cost involved to build Live.com, hiring more engineers to maintain and build new search products sounds pretty high – maybe it’s cheaper to buy Yahoo!?

Oh well, I can only but wish them the best of luck.

Here it the internal memo from Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President of Research & Development for Microsoft’s Online Division.

From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 4:18 PM
To: Microsoft–All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Announcement: Internal Search Test Experience

The Search team needs you. We’ve been working hard to improve our search service and want to share the progress we are making with you. We are launching a new test program called kumo.com for employees to try and provide feedback. Kumo.com exists only inside the corporate network, and in order to get enough feedback we will be redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the test site in the coming days. Kumo is the codename we have chosen for the internal test.

In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes. These and many other learnings suggest that customers often don’t find what they need from search today.

We believe we can provide a better and more useful search experience that helps you not just search but accomplish tasks. During the test, features will vary by country, but you’ll see results organized in a way that saves you more time. An explorer pane on the left side of results pages will give you access to tools that help you with your tasks. Other features like single session history and hover preview help accomplish more in search sessions.

Your Next Search…

To get started, visit kumo.com or click one of the samples below to see how it’s possible to find the right results more easily:

· Audi S8
· Taylor Swift
. Bose Lifestyle 48

You can also set your search defaults to test site using the instructions here.

Your Feedback is Critical

As employees, you are some of our most informed users and our toughest critics, and we highly value your input and feedback to help us build a better service. You have been an important voice in our efforts, and the feedback you’ve sent us since the company meeting has been amazing.

When you visit kumo.com, at the bottom right corner of the each page you’ll see a feedback badge. We ask that each time you use the test site, click the feedback badge and take a moment to answer four quick and simple questions. Feel free to reach out to give us extra feedback directly on our blog and by mailing sfeed. For answers to common questions make sure to see our FAQ.

We are committed to rapid innovation and improvement. Please give the test site a try, rate the results and let us know what you think.

Satya

YouTube, now owned by Google, still dominates the US Online Web Video market. I am basing these figures on the US simply because, we here in Australia, don’t have access to all video content (for example Hulu’s TV Shows)

Figures show that the US audience have been very keen to take up on Hulu’s Web TV site, but it has had a slow growth in comparison to other sites. Overall the US market share for online videos, grew 13% in December 2008. 

comScore have provided the results in the below image, and it has grouped up Google & YouTube together (Google Sites) – and this joint venture has in total served up 5.9 billion videos in the US (assume most of that is from YouTube).

Hulu, jointly owned by News Corp and NBC, ranks in at 7th and has served up 241 million videos. In comparison to previous stats, comScore states that Hulu has had a 6% growth in videos being served – however it’s market share slipped from 1.8% to now 1.7%. However, it’s unique visitors grew 24.6 million (+ 9.4%)

So, numbers aside, what does this all mean? Well, Hulu’s viewers are still watching the longest videos compared to any site in the below results. I believe, they even have a better revenue source in selling it’s premium videos, compared to what Google is doing with YouTube. 

I wish I could see revenue growth for these sites during the two comparison periods. I think Hulu has nudged Google as little, and that probably explains why YouTube has started new initiative to add on more premium content by signing up with Hollywood Talent Agency – William Morris Agency. I believe Hulu has a lot more to show.

http://www.hulu.com

But could this be temporary? Twitter got a lot of attention from the Hudson River plane crash – boosting not only it’s brand, but traffic as well. Further, it has got more attention from the recent Presidential Inauguration and I’m sure many such events where media will refer to Twitter’s user status.

So with all this traffic – it’s no wonder that Twitter displaces Digg. However, does that mean that Twitter makes more cash? Well, not really.

Digg has ads and they earn revenue from that, however Twitter on the other hand isn’t ad-supported but instead plans to have premium services. Like a premium account, or paying for a valid verification as a celebrity or corporate member. Hence, Twitter will not be dependent on traffic count, but instead measure itself by growth of user registration.

Now, if you look at the graph below issued by Hitwise on a comparison between Digg and Twitter – you see that there is an increasing volume to the point that Twitter has caught up.

However, I figure that the traffic for Twitter mostly represents new users. This is on my assumption that most existing users use third party apps or mobiles to update their twitter status. Hence, that being so, we see a potential growth of Twitter’s user base. Therefore, I assume that the user-sign up graph would be in a very similar pattern to it’s increasing web traffic.

Question is – how many of those will pay for a premium account? I can’t see Twitter putting ads anytime soon – and if so, revenue from that could be minimal if most users are using various other ad-free means to update their status.

Is this yet another product like Google Talk that Google will carry on supporting even though it’s market share is peanuts?

Chrome to take over IE – bunch of bollocks! Chrome has lost market share week on week – and the above graph shows it’s heading down south.

Web Browser is something that people get attached to – it’s not easy to convert someone, especially this late in the market when you have IE, Firefox, Opera and others fighting for market share.

Personally I use IE and Opera, but prefer IE. Sure IE is a bit buggy and it has had its flaws, but I don’t think we would have heard of that many in the press, if it wasn’t for the fact that majority of the world use it.

Graph from Marketshare