Glassdoor is a crowd sourcing play that promises to turn the salary survey industry on it’s head. Founded by Expedia veterans, the premise is pretty simple. Tell me what you make, and I’ll tell you what I make. We discuss whether any of us would you use it; whether our companies might use it; and would we trust it? Consensus… not likely.
Apologies for the quality of the sound. We’ve been having
On the call: Dan York, Dameon Welch-Abernathy, Wilhelm Wimmreuter, Jeanette Fisher, Jeb Brilliant, Greg Manto, James BOdy, Phil Wolff and Frank Abrams.
The most exciting location tool I’ve seen in a long long time was the simple tower triangulation that was done in iPhone 1.0. Why? Because it was fast enough. Yes, it wasn’t accurate. But it was fast enough to instantly show me the location of the nearest starbucks, for example. GPS just isn’t that fast. Moreover, I don’t need 3m of precision to find a coffee shop and I don’t have the patience to wait a minute or more for the GPS fix.
So here’s a modest proposal. Why not progressively render location? Give me the near instantaneous cell tower fix when I start a location consuming app. Then, while I’m using the application, acquire the satellite fixes in the background and present me with better precision data if I want it.
GPS is perfect for navigation. But if you just want an instantaneous locate, it’s probably overkill for many applications.
Palringo makes it’s debut in North America today. It’s a cross platform multi-headed IM client for mobile devices that supports all of the popular IM services available. Plus it has a nifty voice chat feature that sounds a lot like the very popular push-t0-talk feature available on some networks. Palringo is available for Windows Mobile, Symbian and java-based handsets at www.palringo.com. it will soon be available on iPhone and Blackberry as well.
Multi-headed IM has long been controversial in the PC world where ownership of the customer has been viewed as a right by the IM cloud owners. As a result, many people run multiple clients. The situation is starting to proliferate to the mobile world, where (for example) I have run GTalk, Blackberry Messenger, and various other clients on my Blackberry. In the constrained mobile world, though, this is a disaster in waiting. Multiple background clients mean increased CPU cycles consumed affecting performance, battery and bandwidth consumption.
Palringo has the right idea, given the intransigence of the big IM cloud operators. If they can get the carriers and handset manufacturers on their side, they’ll have a decent business moving forward.
One of the pieces of commentary on the iPhone 3G launch has been around Apple’s seemingly limitless ability to generate press coverage. So, how effective are they? Yesterday Google released a new version of Google Trends, the tool for measuring search engine and news references for specific terms. Google Trends has high potential as a tool in the PR kit bag.
This graph shows references to iPhone beginning in late 2006, along with the specific news events that drove those references. Notice the steady climb in search volume over time, despite the fact that news references have been pretty constant.
When plotted against BlackBerry as a search term, it’s easy to see how iPhone dominates both the news coverage and the search engine interest. One can see how, despite steady growth in interest in Blackberry, iPhone emerged as the dominant search term by late 2007.
Google Trends also provides the ability for you to drill down into specific geographies, cities and languages, which tells a slightly different story. Here you can see that iPhone is very strong outside the US, but in a head to head battle with BlackBerry in the US. This suggests that Apple’s choice to quickly deliver on 70 carriers this year is a very smart move indeed.
My assessment? Google trends can be a useful tool for getting a quick proxy on consumer sentiment and news coverage. However, it can also be incredibly misleading if search terms aren’t chosen with care. For example, I plotted this chart showing iPhone vs Blackberry vs Nokia, which shows Nokia absolutely dominating search engine volume. But Nokia makes such a vast array of products and the search term is so general that it’s impossible to derive a meaningful comparison with this tool.
Multi-headed IM has long been controversial in the PC world where ownership of the customer has been viewed as a right by the IM cloud owners. As a result, many people run multiple clients. The situation is starting to proliferate to the mobile world, where (for example) I have run GTalk, Blackberry Messenger, and various other clients on my Blackberry. In the constrained mobile world, though, this is a disaster in waiting. Multiple background clients mean increased CPU cycles consumed affecting performance, battery and bandwidth consumption.
