Enrichment Depot – Profiting on the Net

As far as I know, no one has ever set up an online social network as effectively a co-op before, and as you’d expect, Zurker’s set-up isn’t quite that simple. As Zurker’s About page explains, Every Zurker user becomes a co-owner (future shareholder) of Zurker. As Zurker hasn’t had an IPO or anything of that nature yet, users earn vShares. A vShare is a stake in Zurker; it’s the unit of equity the company is allotting to members during the alpha and beta testing phases. They aren’t actually stock. vShares can be thought of as agreements between the owners of a startup about the size of thei…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials

Tags: Network, Percent, Social, Zurker

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world—even 35,000 feet above the ground. Read how one engineering director tried Google App Engine for the first time to build an Android app—now used by nearly half a million people—during a 12-hour plane ride to Japan. -Ed.

A 12-hour plane flight may seem daunting to some, but I look at it as uninterrupted time to do what I love—code new products. My bi-monthly trips from London to Tokyo and California are how I spend my 20 percent time—what I consider my “license to innovate.” It was on a flight to Tokyo that I first built what became Chrome to Phone, an Android app and Chrome extension that allows you to instantly send content—like a webpage, map or YouTube video—from your Chrome browser to your Android device.

As an engineering director, I spend the bulk of my time managing software engineers and various projects. As a result, there’s not a lot of time to just sit at my desk and code, and it’s possible for my technical skills to become rusty. So on one of my frequent cross-continent trips, I decided to take the opportunity—and time—to brush up on my engineering skills by exploring device-to-device interaction, an area that has a lot of potential in our increasingly connected world. I’d never written a Chrome extension or used App Engine, a platform that allows developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google’s own applications and services. But rather than sleeping or reading a book, I spent my flight figuring it out. And somewhere over Belgium on my way to Japan, I had a working prototype of Chrome to Phone.

A few days later, on my trip back to London, I emailed my prototype to Andy Rubin and Linus Upson, who lead the Android and Chrome engineering teams. Before my plane even landed, they’d both given the product their blessing. With a little help from a developer in Mountain View and a user interface designer back in London, we tidied things up and ultimately launched the open source code for Chrome to Phone at Google I/O just two months later.

As an engineering director, I don’t always have the time to get deeply involved in every aspect of a product launch. Chrome to Phone gave me a unique opportunity to be actively involved at the grassroots of product development at Google—from concept to launch—working directly with the legal, internationalization and consumer operations teams. With few restrictions on how I spent my time, I was able to build a prototype and launch it quickly, adding more features based on user feedback. Today, more than 475,000 people use the extension, and that number is still growing.

When you’re leaving your house to go out, you take your phone, keys and wallet. I don’t think it will be long before you just take your phone—it will contain everything that you need—and that’s our motivation to explore device-to-device interaction. In order to get there, we have engineers here in the U.K. and around the world examining the mobile space, both in their full-time roles and as 20 percent projects. There isn’t only one solution, so by encouraging engineers to work on new projects, we hope that ideas will come from all over the world—whether from a Google office or even 35,000 feet above one.

Posted by Dave Burke, Engineering Director, Android

The Official Google Blog

Tags: clouds, coding, Percent, spent, Time

Everybody spends money for online content, or so you would think if you read the Pew Internet study just released. The report claims that 65 percent of internet users have paid for online content – which may be true but it is also misleading. The title is so misleading in fact, that I would bet money the title gets tweeted and misinterpreted by news outlets, bloggers, and online curators.

A huge tweet rate and coverage could mean that it’s a good title, but what’s really going on? If you read deeper, that’s 65 percent that have ever paid for content. With that in mind, I guess the number may very well be correct for internet users in the US. That means if you have ever paid for:

1. digital music online
2. software
3. apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
4. digital games
5. digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
6. videos, movies, or TV shows
7. ringtones
8. digital photos
9. members?only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
10. e?books
11. podcasts
12. tools or materials to use in video or computer games
13. “cheats or codes” to help them in video games
14. access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
15. adult content

then you would be included. If you look at that list, it also includes buying physical content from online stores (2 and 12), if you ever bought ringtones for your phone (7), and even if you subscribe to physical goods services such as Comcast cable, Netflix, and your local delivered newspaper (5 and 6).

Skeptics should read the report to see how the questions were asked, especially for 5 and 6, since the questions suggest that if you have receive online content services as part of your paid newspaper, cable, or movie delivery service, you should check “yes” that you have purchased online content.

For example, my local newpaper, The San Jose Mercury News offers an e-edition. It’s terribly cumbersome, you can’t bookmark it, and links from their email into the e-edition do not link to anything related to article. Yet according to the survey used in the report, since my paper subscription includes the free online edition, I should check “yes” indicating I paid for online content. Similarly, my Netflix 4 disc plan includes free streaming. Even if I didn’t use streaming, I should check “yes” since it’s offered with my mail-in service.

In spite of its flaws, the study does have some valuable nuggets:

• Typical user pays about per month for online content
• Only 18 percent of users ever paid for news (not a good sign for paywalls)

If you come away with anything, the key points I see is that the online budget is low, around /month for all content combined. Just to be clear – if only /month is spent, that would include subscriptions, micropayments, or iTunes-style aggregated purchases. Many people, like myself, tried news subscription or per-article purchases and are no longer willing pay for it, so the 18 percent number is artificially high and should not be used to build any business plans.

In all fairness, Pew has to straddle the line between getting as much detail as possible from a lot of very specific questions and minimizing survey fatigue. The more detailed question, the fewer answers they are likely to receive. The methodology does not state if respondents were paid, so if the feedback was free, shorter, more vague question are to be expected.

I don’t blame Pew for the vague or over-inclusive questions, and I do appreciate these surveys as a public service that also helps product managers and marketers. I mostly worry that a typical “Joe Reader” will not go deep enough and misuse the information or misinterpret it to justify some news paywall, content purchasing scheme, or unbalanced news story.

ReveNews

Tags: Damn, Lies, Online, Percent, Purchase, Statistics