Naked Newsletter
Our internal newsletter is now external for all to read! Here goes:
» In US: Online retail spend projected to double in 6 years, reaching $316 billion by 2010. Industry observers report online sales increase about 25% annually.
» In Japan: It’s all about the mobile phones!
1) Engagement in virtual worlds via mobiles is on the rise. E.g.– Chipuya Town: users create avatars to walk around/interact with virtual replicate of the real world (in this case, Tokyo’s Shibuya shopping district).
2) Mobile phone novels (called keitai shousetsu) have become a publishing phenomenon that’s turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major interests and making their authors a small fortune in the process. Apparently, 50% of top selling books are written on mobile phones.
» In Russia: Moscow-headquartered SUP acquired the blogging platform LiveJournal from Six Apart. LiveJournal dominates blogging culture in Russia and has13.8 million unique visitors worldwide, generating 475 million page views.
» In France: French Internet company Hi-Media, operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, acquired Fotolog for $90 million. Fotolog has 13 million users and 3.9 billion page views a month (which just trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr).
» Worldwide: Research shows there is one mobile connection for every two people on the planet (!!!). Currently, 3.3 billion mobile phone lines are in use. *Note: many people (e.g. Blackberry users) have two or more lines, so this data does not mean that half the world’s population own mobiles!
» Facebook backs down (slightly) on its advertising plans, after more than 50,000 members signed a petition objecting to the new ad program. The resulting change: it would not send messages about users’ internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.
» Data on Facebook members by market & gender can be found here.
» RockYou now has #1 most used application on Facebook. The application, called Super Wall, recently overtook Slide’s FunWall.
» Attempting to drive home its ‘simplicity’ message, Philips is helping customers at Mall of America find their cars with text messaging. Shoppers can text to a 5-digit # on Philips-branded signs, and they’ll receive a text back with exact location of their vehicle.
» Google launches My Location, a new beta technology that uses cell tower identification to provide approximate location info (which means phones without GPS can use it!).
» Greenpeace launches a ‘guide to green electronics’ that includes a scorecard of major electronics companies: which companies are doing the most to remove toxic chemicals from their products and which companies have good recycling programs for their products.
» Swedish design group FRONT has developed a method to materialize free hand sketches. Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and turned into 3D digital files, which are then materialized through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture. Click here for demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zP1em1dg5k. (Do it. So worth watching).
» Extremely popular t-shirt website, Threadless.com, opened a real shop in Chicago.
» Boston-based CarbonRally applies gaming and social networking concepts to environmental activism. It offers a series of carbon-reducing challenges, such as not drinking bottled water, dumping shopping bags and leaving your car at home, etc. Users compete against others to become the most carbon friendly participant (and it’s apparently a big hit at Google’s offices in Boston and Pittsburgh.)
» Florida-based startup, Divorce360, launches to walk you through that statistically inevitable breakup. Since the average person spends up to $15,000 in the months leading up to and after a divorce, Divorce360 provides tips and helps you manage your finances.
» Texas-based startup Insightory aims to be the Wikipedia for management knowledge. Collaboration and networking tools will be available in 2008. Meanwhile, Insightory is holding a contest for the best management-related documents uploaded to site (prizes range from $100 to $3000).
» Yahoo and Adobe team up to offer contextual advertising in PDF documents. How it works: users upload PDFs to Yahoo’s ad network, then Yahoo hosts the document and serves up contextual advertising, in a panel, on the right side of the doc’s content.
» NASDAQ stock exchange has launched a new internet-only index, called: (drum roll please) — the NASDAQ Internet Index. It will track performance of internet companies across full spectrum of online activities (ecommerce companies, ISP’s, search engines, web hosting, web design firms, etc). It’ll also benchmark performance of companies by sector, giving a quick representation of where stocks are heading.
» Paypal launched the Paypal Storefront Widget, offering a seamless e-commerce platform for people to sell things. Anyone can embed a store widget on a website and settings can be changed to “sold out” or “sorry we’re closed” from the central control panel. Sounds like fun!