Opera Mini 5 Beta was first introduced about 5 months ago, but owners of Android-based smartphones had to wait until now to get their hands on Opera’s nifty mobile browser.

This version is nearly identical to the Opera Mini 5 Beta for other handsets; biggest improvements are speed dial, tabbed browsing, password management and better optimization for touchscreen phones. Compared to the old Opera Mini 4.2, it’s a world of difference, so if you’re an Opera Mini user, you should definitely try out, even though it’s a beta.

To get Opera Mini 5 Beta, point your mobile browser to m.opera.com/next, you can also search for “Opera Mini” in the Android Market.

Tags: Mobile 2.0, opera mini, web browsers

Google has just released an alternative player for Google Reader that gives those with a penchant for browsing news the ability to do so in an image-heavy, TV-like fashion.

Dubbed Google Reader Play, the new tool is an experimental Google Labs project that presents stories one by one — based on their Recommend Items technology — using enlarged photos and auto-playing videos (in lieu of text) on a black backdrop. Viewers can redefine categories and star, like or share stories, with those behaviors further contributing to what Google displays.

Google Reader Play could be both an entertainment utility for browsing the web and a complement to your Google Reader experience. Actions that you take in Reader or Reader Play are shared between the two products, and the recommendations in Reader Play are personalized based on the people you’re following in Reader.

Google Reader Play is certainly eye-catching, but it’s more pop than it is substance. In fact, given that Google Reader appeals to fairly narrow audience today, we believe the product was intended to up the entertainment factor and introduce Reader-esque features to a much broader set of users.

It’s nice to look at and worth a try; whether or not that’s enough to attract the attention of those outside the web/tech realm remains to be seen. We do, however, think that Google Reader Play on an iPad or actual TV set, say via something like Boxee Box, would be worth watching.

Tags: Google, google reader, google reader play, tv

Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social than ever because they’re being roped into playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars for hours on end. Sitting in their rooms. Alone.

While that may be a part of social networking (a rather large, hugely profitably part), it’s not really social. That’s why location-based networks excite me: they have the potential to bridge social networking with actual social activity. And that’s exactly how Pelago is positioning the latest version of its location-based app, Whrrl 3.

The core idea behind the new iPhone app (which launched in the store today) is that people inspire others to do things. So when you see a friend is out doing something fun, you may want to join them. Or it may entice you to go out and do something else, and hope others see it on Whrrl and join in. It’s the grouping of people with similar interests into “Societies” that is a key to Whrrl 3. For example, a basic society is that each venue in the application has its own set of “regulars.” If you visit the place enough times, you unlock the badge making you a regular, and giving you access to member-level activities, such as recommendations and specials nearby.

One of these societies, launching alongside the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas this week is the Austin Underground which “will provide members with at-your-fingertips access to the hottest parties, events, and other fun things to do at the conference,” according to Whrrl. Over 50 merchants in Austin are participating to provide exclusive offers, apparently. To unlock the membership, you have to check-in at some of the following places: Four Seasons Hotel Austin, Outback Steakhouse, Cool River Cafe, Chuggin’ Monkey, J Black’s, Red Fez and Third Base, and others.

Other key features of Whrrl 3 include Recommendations — you create these (with photos, if you choose), to let others in your social graph (or your society) know fun things to do in an area. Ideas, are recommendations served up to you from societies you’re a part of, your friends, or Whrrl’s algorithms. Fun Facts are shown each time you check-in to a venue, with information about it. And of course, there is a point system (Influence Points) that turn the whole thing into one big game. What’s interesting about Whrrl’s game is that you can get point by inspiring others to do things with the app. Points also allow you to level up in your societies for more special deals.

All of this is an extension of the “footstreams” idea that Whrrl launched last December. That’s where they also first introduced the society idea as well. The key to both of those is about real people doing real things in the real world.  That, in turn, shows what you’re interested in, and allows Whrrl to clump you into these groups with out like-minded people.

So that all sounds great, but will anyone use the app? After all, adoption has been a problem in the past and this isn’t the first time Whrrl is pivoting its product. In fact, they actually did exactly a year ago with Whrrl 2 just before SXSW.

Their main problem is convincing people to use Whrrl instead of the current location-based darlings, Foursquare and Gowalla. That’s going to be difficult because those networks are quickly building up social graphs and once those are established, users are less likely to leave. So Whrrl needs something to differentiate itself, and while their pitch to me is good, it’s an entirely different matter convincing users. And the things that would seem to help differentiate networks like Whrrl actually hurt them sometimes. For example, since location-based services are still new to so many people, it’s best to keep things as simple as possible. But Whrrl is piling on features that, while maybe cool, are likely to confuse new users.

Still, if Whrrl is able to secure some solid deals around Austin to get people using the app and checking-in, that could certainly get people using it. Of course, Foursquare and Gowalla have their own deals too. Then the problem becomes one I’ve had this past week while testing out all these location apps: fatigue. I can’t possibly check-in with each of these apps each time I move from place to place. The people I’m with have started rolling their eyes at me while I take my 10 minutes to check-in to all the different apps.

I’m not saying there can be only one. But one would sure be nice.

Find Whrrl 3 in the App Store here.

Regular readers will know my love for all things location. In particular, these check-in location-based services fascinate me, mainly because I see them as a bridge between social networks as we’ve known it, and actual social interaction in the real world. Foursquare has been my app of choice over the past year (it launched almost exactly a year ago at SXSW). But the latest version of Gowalla has me thinking about switching sides. At the very least, I’ll be using both at all times now.

Gowalla version 2.0 for the iPhone just hit the App Store today. With it, you’ll notice a few different things. First and foremost, the overall look has been updated from a sort of Army green, to a more subtle light green that is much easier on the eyes. More significantly, the toolbar has been reworked so that now social activity is front and center when you load the app, while your own activity is the last tab. Both of these changes are things I’ve complained about since day one with Gowalla, so they’re certainly welcome. But that’s not why I’m excited for the app. I’m excited because it takes the idea of the check-in and extends it.

Specifically, you can now add pictures and comments to check-ins in Gowalla. This makes for a much richer social experience both using the app and the website (the data goes over there as well). As founder and CEO Josh Williams describes in the video below, there were a lot of people who wanted to talk about the social activity on Gowalla, but previously they had to text message or email their friends to say something like “hey I saw you check-in at the restaurant, want some company?” Now, that type of dialogue can take place all within the app.

Now, others have tried to add additional layers to check-ins in the past. Why I think it works with Gowalla 2.0 is because they keep it simple. The application is extremely handsome (since the beginning, everyone is quick to note how good the designers are working for the team) and intuitive. There are only a few basic things you can do, and all are obvious from the main screen. You can either check-in at a venue, comment on your friends’ check-ins (with the new chat bubble in the stream), look at the spots around you, see trips (pre-planned venue excursions), or look at your own activity.

Previously, with Gowalla, I thought the focus was too much on their virtual items. Those are now tucked away in your Passport (your profile). They’re still important, and will be increasingly so for Gowalla’s revenue model (trading virtual goods for real-world items), but they’re not in your face, confusing users.

All that said, there are two downsides still to the service. First, the social activity stream includes everybody that your friends with. With Foursquare, the people currently in the same city as you are highlighted; Gowalla doesn’t do that. I suspect that will be very annoying to my friends not going to Austin this week for SXSW. Their stream will be a constant reminder that they’re not there — and they likely could care less about my check-ins, since they can’t possibly come and meet me.

The second downside is that Gowalla’s API remains read-only. That means while other services can pull out Gowalla’s data, they can’t put anything back in. That means there will be no Gowalla apps besides the ones they make (at least for now). Williams explained the rationale behind this as Gowalla wants to stay in control of the user experience (a rather Apple-like argument). That makes some sense, since there are all these virtual goods that will be flying around, and it will be hard to make sure every third-party app is implementing them correctly. Also, Gowalla is much more strict about its location-based check-ins then say, Foursquare. They’re so strict, in fact, that it’s been an issue in the past (and in some cases, still is), with people not being able to check-in places they’re actually at because the GPS is wonky. At the same time, this helps a lot with gaming the system, and that will be increasingly important as Gowalla strikes deals with partners based around check-ins.

Listen to Williams talk more about the new app, as well as his thoughts on AT&T’s network, some SXSW specials, rivals, and yes, even the news that Facebook is apparently looking at federating some of Gowalla’s (and Foursquare’s) data for its own location offering. He also notes that with the new release, Gowalla is expanding the idea of checking-in to be more of a bucket of elements now, including images and comments. Interesting. (Sorry in advance that I shot the video vertically on my iPhone — gotta stop doing that.)

You can find Gowalla 2.0 in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

Sure, Opera Mini may (or may not) already be the most popular mobile browser in the world — but why stop there? Following up on the Android release of Opera Mobile 4 just over a year ago, Opera has just launched Opera Mini 5 for Android into public beta.

The jump from version 4 to version 5 is pretty huge, introducing a handful of features that Opera says “makes your mobile browsing experience as close as it can be to your desktop experience.”

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Last week, an App Store error got the latest version of Foursquare for the iPhone into a few users hands a little bit early.

That hiccup resulted in the app briefly disappearing from the App Store before finally returning early yesterday. Now the newly designed version of the app is in the App Store and available for everyone to check out.

Foursquare 1.7 features a new design, faster checkins and shouts, plus an easy way to view your checkin history. The app also features pull-to-refresh, a la Tweetie 2 for the iPhone. The app is a lot more responsive in our tests and the new interface is a big enhancement.

This is a nice improvement from the old release and a fitting first-birthday gift of sorts as the app is arriving just before SXSW 2010 — where the app made its first big splash last year — begins.

What do you think of the new Foursquare app? Let us know!

Tags: foursquare, foursquare iphone, iphone apps

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Scordit

Quick Pitch: A social site where you share the stuff you’ve bought or want to get, and win prizes by doing it!

Genius Idea: It’s nice to share your new purchases or “scores” with friends or to let people know what stuff you really want to score in the future. Likewise, it’s fun to see what your friends are scoring or adding to their wishlists. Scordit handles both tasks, plus integrates with Facebook and Twitter, making sharing and wishlisting easy.

Similar services to Scordit exist — we covered one called Hollrr last month — but Scordit is a little bit different in that you can browse or search for items (and it can poll places like Amazon.com for images or product names) you both have and items you want.

Scordit also issues users points for doing certain tasks — like adding scores or wishes to your profile, inviting a friend to the service, or discussing products you already have. Each point gets you a chance to win a $50 Amazon Gift Card each week and towards a bigger prize each month. The prize this month, for example is an iPad.

In the future Scordit will also let you earn coupons and discounts on items in your wishlist, based on the points you a have earned.

We like that Scordit supports account creation with both Twitter and Facebook and that you can selectively tweet or share your scores or wishes on those services.

Like Hollrr, we do wish that there was a bookmarklet that could make adding items to your scores or wishes even faster. These sorts of sharing sites have a lot of potential but being accessible from outside the main app is something we really want to see.

How do you share your scores with friends? Let us know!

Disclosure: Scordit is founded by Shane Snow, who has contributed to Mashable.

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: getglue, hollrr, product sharing, scordit

Mark Zuckerberg has long signaled that the future of Facebook will be off Facebook.com.  His social network will take a big step toward that future at a developers conference in April.

That's when, according to a WSJ report, Facebook plans to launch a tool set for Web developers who want to make their off-Facebook Web sites look and work more like on-Facebook "pages."

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Mark Zuckerberg's Early Misdeeds Gain Mainstream Media Attention
• What It's Like To Work With Mark Zuckerberg
• What Is It Like Working At Facebook?

When it comes to tech conferences, the first thing most people think about is the parties.

They might think about networking opportunities or learning experiences, but all too often, these are brushed off as mutual admiration societies and redundant, unoriginal chatter. I've heard every critique imaginable about some of the best-known tech conferences

- but are there still valid reasons for shelling out a thousand dollars or more to spend a few days "partying" with your peers?

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The greatest thing I've ever gotten out of conferences is friendship - mutually beneficial, educational friendship. And the greatest task a conference organizer can hope to accomplish - swag, parties and panels be damned - is getting the right people into the same set of rooms so those friendships can be formed.

Aside from the pure serendipity of meeting new people (or meeting online friends in real life), I have found that the main benefits of conferences are those I create for myself.

In other words, when I have complained that the content was boring, I am to be blamed for not seeking out content that was interesting or, in a single-track show, for not participating in the conversation and helping to make it more interesting for me and my fellow attendees. When we say that a given show is good for nothing but parties, well, that's a pretty good sign that partying is more of a priority for us than gaining real value. If we say a conference is populated by "the same old douchebags," as one person recently said to me, then perhaps we're not taking the time to socialize and network outside our zone of comfort and familiarity.

To be blunt, bad attendees make bad conferences. An engaged, interesting and curious person can go to the exact same show and, in most cases, can derive huge benefits from it though a little effort and a lot of great attitude. There's no show too big, too small, too boring for that person to not be able to learn something from it.

What do you think? Have you ever been to a truly, in-and-of-itself bad conference? Would a shift in your own focus have helped? How would you characterize the best conferences of your career to date? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

Discuss

Earlier this year, Google landed a “landmark” deal with Global Cricket Ventures, the licensing partner to the Indian Premier League (IPL), which would give them the so rights to live stream cricket matches from the IPL on YouTube. This is a huge deal because the streaming of the 2010 IPL season (which starts on Friday and lasts for 45 days) is the first time a large-scale global sporting event will be streamed; with the reach expected to be at least a half-a-billion viewers. Now of of India’s largest gaming companies, Indiagames, has bought the official gaming rights to the IPL tournament to deliver games around the Indian cricket tournament.

Indiagames will be launching a series of web and mobile apps throughout the next 45 days. The first app, called IPL Indiagames T20 Fever, is an online game that uses Facebook Connect to allow users to create cricket teams consisting of both Facebook friends and IPL professional cricketers. The game will also include micro-transaction support, allowing users to users to virtually buy IPL players to improve their chances of becoming the IPL Champion.

A second, not yet released online game, called ‘IPL Indiagames 140Cricket’ will be based on a “Cricket Manager” concept and will target Twitter and Facebook users to construct and manage teams. The gaming company will also be rolling out a Facebook game as well. Indiagames partnered with Facebook to develop all three of the games.

While the IPL tournament will be streaming on YouTube, the fact that the official game will have a presence on Facebook will certainly draw Indian cricket fans to the social network. This should help give Facebook an edge over rival social network Orkut in India.

Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today.

Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways.

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We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark)

Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report:

Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics.

Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots.

Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010, even a year and a half after it launched.

We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web (our coverage) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move.

A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages.

Take that, semantic web doubters.

We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Discuss

Social media boasts its own unique set of celebrities, people who have scored fame (or infamy) by craftily sharing the mundane and occasionally details of their life. The Frisky highlights ten folks who scored fame by tweeting:

iJustine

iJustine is one of a scary group of girls who is gorgeous and also into all those things boys nerd out about when they’re together. (See: Olivia Munn). Justine Ezarik is a vlogger (video blogger), most famous for her video “300-page iPhone bill.” She also has over 1,137,000 followers, so I guess she’s won the internet?

Sockington

Sockington, Jason Scott’s cat, is known by some as “the most famous cat on Twitter.” With over 1,529,000 followers, Sockington tweets about all the things a cat might be thinking and his owner sells t-shirts on his website and is trying to score a book deal. Yeah, get in line, tuna breath!

Jason Sweeney aka @sween

Jason Sweeney is the most elusive of internet celebrities; he’s big on Tumblr. Though Tumblr never really caught on like the other social networking sites, Tumblr people are very serious about it, often only interacting with other Tumblr people. Jason’s also a web designer and developer. Jason’s Tumblr is called “I Am Your Canadian Boyfriend” and he’s amassed some 1,213,000 followers on Twitter.

Full list at The Frisky.

All the top Twitter tidbits.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Twitter is a part of my everyday life, as it probably is yours. I am often tweeting at home, while I’m working. Many times there is a laundry basket full of clothes next to me and my son’s shoes scattered on the floor right inside the door. I always have papers all over my desk that should be placed neatly in the file cabinet, but somehow that always falls to the bottom of the priority list.

When I saw this short little film recently released with the cutest Twitter birds ever flying in and out of socks in a laundry room with a file cabinet, I could instantly relate and I fell in love with it. There is only one problem, I don’t know if the creators of this film intended it to be a Twitter movie. It seems so obvious to me, but I can’t seem to find a Twitter reference anywhere.

One thing is for sure, when Pleix Piu and Warm and Fuzzy created this film, they wanted us to smile and to be playful for one minute during your day. According to http://www.gangfilms.com, Pleix is a community of digital artists (graphic designers, 3D artists, and musicians) based in Paris. Warm & Fuzzy, Inc. was founded by Edward Grann in 2007 and is an internationally based production company with offices In Paris, Berlin and NY.

This production company definitely lived up to its name, because this film is warm and fuzzy for sure.

Découverte de cet élégant court-métrage “The Light of Life” dirigé par le japonais Daihei Shibata, membre du studio de design Wow basé à Tokyo. Un mélange de plans réels et de post-production sous Cinema 4D. Le tout sur une musique de Debbusy - “Clair de lune”.

Previously on Fubiz

• Penguins in Heaven
• Nokta Animation
• TheHead Animation

Et si Apple revoyait ses Mac Pro et le faisait pas plus tard que mardi prochain ? Telle est l'idée, soufflée par des bonnes sources, de ZDNet. Précisément, Apple pourrait intégrer dans ses Mac Pro des processeurs Core i7-980X, gravés en 32 nm et embarquant pas moins de 6 cœurs. Ces...

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

Since the announcement went live yesterday about the Google Marketplace, we've had a number of companies come to us about how its applications will fit with the service.

We'll do a fuller look at these companies this week but for some immediate perspective we decided to take a look at Zoho, a service that competes with Google Apps. So it is it interesting that the company joined Google Apps Marketplace in its launch.

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Buy why would Zoho offer its applications to integrate with Google? Yes, the companies compete. But Raju Vegesna of Zoho says that it is far more important to complement Google Apps. Over the past few years the company has worked to make it simple for Zoho customers to use its services in tandem with Google Apps. Zoho offers Google Sign-in, Google Apps Sign-in and recently it integrated with Google Docs.

Vegesna gave us three reasons why Zoho decided to be part of the launch. His perspectives should provide some insights about the symbiotic relationship Google Apps Marketplace will foster.

Extending The Relationship

For many developers, integrating with Google Apps represents a significant business opportunity. Google announced at its launch that it passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend.

Vegesna:

"First, we have 50% more apps than Google, especially on the business side (CRM, Project Management, Web Conferencing etc). This means, these additional apps can really complement Google Apps. Google has over 20 million users on G Apps and our Business apps can be sold to those customers. "

Google Dominates The Landscape

To play in this era, you have to play with Google. They dominate as much as any company has in the past 30 years. The domination in large part is now solidified by its investment in its cloud infrastructure.

Vegesna:

"Second, we understand that this is going to be a Google dominated eco-system (IBM dominated Mainframe era, Microsoft dominated PC era and Google will dominate the web era) and we wanted to be an important player in this web era. We talked more about this here and here."

A Platform Built On Email, Not CRM

Yesterday, we touched on why the marketplace makes sense for companies standardized on Google Apps. With all the contacts in one place, people can add applications to fine tune Google Apps. Does a company start with the same foundation if the platform is built on CRM?

Vegesna:

"Third, when someone builds a platform, email is a great app to build the platform around, rather than CRM (which salesforce did). We think it'll be a good and succesful platform for online apps which will move the web app momentum forward and we want to be a key player (the same way Adobe was a key player in PC era)."

For more about the Zoho integration:

Discuss

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company's shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month - devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs - are "better than netbooks."

On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company's sentiments that "Flash is a CPU hog" and including support for the technology in Apple's mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.

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However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog? Yes, in some cases. But, surprisingly, not all the time. In fact, sometimes HTML5 actually performed worse.

Testing Flash and HTML5

Jan Ozer is an expert in video encoding technologies, has worked in digital video since 1990 and is the author of 13 books related to the subject. Recently, he put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two technologies against each other on both the Mac and PC and in different web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

The results of the tests in their entirety are published here on StreamingLearningCenter.com. The summary in a nutshell? Flash isn't always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.

Some of the highlights of Ozer's findings are below, broken up into both Mac and Windows test results.

Mac Tests

• With Safari, HTML5 was the most efficient and consumed less CPU than Flash using only 12.39% CPU. With Flash 10.0, CPU utilization was at 37.41% and with Flash 10.1, it dropped to 32.07%
• With Google Chrome, Flash and HTML5 were both equally inefficient (both are around 50%)
• With Firefox, Flash was only slightly less efficient than in Safari, but better than in Chrome

Windows Tests

• Safari wouldn't play HTML5 videos, so there was no way to test that. However, Flash 10.0 used 23.22% CPU but Flash 10.1 only used 7.43% CPU
• Google Chrome was more efficient on Windows than Mac. Playback with Flash Player 10.0 was about 24% more efficient than HTML5, while Flash Player 10.1 was 58% more efficient than HTML5.
• On Firefox, Flash 10.1 dropped CPU utilization to 6% from 22% in Flash 10.0
• In IE8, Flash 10.0 used 22.41% CPU and Flash 10.1 used 14.62% CPU

Hardware Acceleration Key to Flash Performance

In analyzing the results of the tests, Ozer determined that the key to better Flash performance was dependent upon whether or not it could access hardware acceleration. This feature, launched in Flash 10.1, allows the plugin to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on some computers to decode video. Depending on the video card and drivers, (NVIDIA, AMD/ATI and Intel offer products that support this), the video decoding process in Flash 10.1 can now work for all video playback, not just full-screen playback as was available in Flash 10.0.

According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X, the latter because Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. Adobe goes on to say "The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."

Here's what this all means in layman's terms: Apple isn't allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load. Adobe is waiting and watching to see if they do, but, as Ozer says "the ball is in Apple's court."

Will Apple budge? At this point, it's unlikely. In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it's simply not an efficient technology...and that's true for now, considering how it's set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?

So while Flash's "CPU hogging" may be a contributing factor in Apple's decision to not support the technology on their mobile devices, that's probably not the only reason behind the block.

Thank you to Dan Rayburn, who pointed us to Jan Ozer's article.

Discuss

With the iPad hitting pre-order in two days and shipping in April, it's important to think about when and why to buy the iPad. Based on our understanding of the product lifecycle and expected moves by Apple's competitors, we foresee big changes in the ultraportable landscape with the ultraportable/netbook as we now know it mutating - or branching - into a new species of media oriented Win7 and Android devices. Here's what we can expect. April 3, 2010 - Big launch. Light crowds at the Apple Store. This isn't huge-huge. It's medium-huge and I don't think you're going to see an army of the pasty arriving at your local shop clamoring for iPads. This is Apple's wait and see product, although I don't doubt between 3-5 million won't wait and see in 2010. May-June 2010 - Chinese knock-offs will flood the market and we'll see a nice collection of weird, mutated slates hitting the more esoteric sites. Nothing major and no big sellers. Summer 2010 - Dell and HP release their devices. Dell's is called the Mini 5 AKA the Streak and HP's as of yet unamed. These guys will wait until the waters have been fully tested before they move with their devices.

No surprise here: Sony just officially announced the PlayStation Move motion controller at GDC 2010, calling it the "next generation of motion gaming" because it's so precise -- latency is about the same as the DualShock 3. As expected, it uses the PlayStation Eye camera to track the controller, and Sony says it becomes an "extension of your body." The plan is not only to engage casual gamers, but to use the precision of the controller to create "new experiences for core gamers" -- many of the demo videos we saw involved using a controller video in each hand, and there were quote a few demos of action / RPG games. We also saw a demo of Move Party, which uses the camera to do augmented reality gaming and video chat. The demos are pretty impressive -- Sony's not kidding when it says the Move is incredibly precise. There's also going to be a secondary "subcontroller" with an an analog stick for shooters -- you can play all the way through SOCOM4 with just the Move and the sub-controller. (Yes, it's just like the Wii Nunchuk, only wireless.)

You'll be able to get Move in three ways: in a bundle with a PS3, standalone, and in a starter kit targeted at "under $100" with the PS Eye, a controller, and a game. That's all the pricing info we have right now, but it certainly sounds aggressive -- Sony says they're treating this like a major console launch, so expect to see this everywhere when it launches around the holidays. Video after the break.

Check out our hands-on right here!

Gallery: PlayStation Move announcement

Continue reading PlayStation Move motion controller launched at GDC, starter kit to be under $100 with game

PlayStation Move motion controller launched at GDC, starter kit to be under $100 with game originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You really have to suck a whole lot of Lego Star Wars minifigs to do what this girl is doing: Identify the characters by putting them inside your mouth. Somehow, I find all this strangely arousing. [Youtube via Boing Boing] More »

Google Reader Play est une nouvelle manière de lire vos flux RSS sur Google Reader.

“Dans Google Reader Play, les éléments sont présentés un à un et chaque élément est affiché en plein écran. Après avoir lu un article, cliquez simplement sur la flèche à côté pour passer à la suivante.” explique Google.

Une fonctionnalité qui peut être intéressante, c’est le fait que les images et vidéos sont automatiquement agrandies afin de coller parfaitement à la taille de votre écran.

En revanche, les éléments affichés sur Google Reader Play, de base, ne sont pas vos flux mais les éléments des listes de partages. Suivant vos appréciations (favoris, partage et autres) Google améliorera les recommandations.

Vous pouvez accéder au service à l’adresse suivante : http://www.google.com/reader/play

Pour afficher vos abonnements dans Google Reader Play, passez par ici : http://www.google.com/reader/play/#stream

[Via Google Reader Blog]

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Article original écrit Yoann Chatelard et publié sur Vendeesign © , le 11/03/2010. | Lien direct vers cet article | Déjà 3 commentaires | Ajouter à del.icio.us | © Blog édité par le Groupe Média Vendeesign - 2006-2009
Tags: Google, Google Reader, Google Reader Play

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