Computer Support Blog

There are a number of ways to try to make money off the Internet.  However, the study of analytics is becoming a big business for those who want to generate revenue from their websites.  Analytics is a study of both website content and visitor traffic patterns.  The big analytic programs, like Google analytics and Gnip, rely upon vast amounts of data and trends to provide the content providers of websites with the tools they need to monetize their site most effectively.  One of the emerging analytics sites on the Internet is Yieldbot.  The daunting task of creating their analytical tools falls to Soren Macbeth.

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Social networks rise and fall lately with a frequency that is troubling for those who become invested in the new social networks appearing on the Internet.  Each Internet social network tries to appeal to a different niche audience and it is intriguing to see which ones take off and which ones fail to find their market fast enough.  Arguably the hottest new Internet social network is Pinterest and if you haven’t heard of it yet, it begs the question “where have you been?!”  Pinterest has been making quite a lot of news on its own and as a reference – in articles about other up-and-coming Internet social networks – lately.

Pinterest is a budding social network that is most analogous to Twitter combined with StumbleUpon . . . for online photographs.  Let’s untangle that, shall we?  Twitter only allows 140 characters; the whole point of the social network or messaging service is to provide quick blurbs to your followers to give them instantaneous status updates.  They are short, focused and not often all that useful.  In a similar fashion, your Pinterest page – which is imagined as a bulletin board upon which you and your friends “pin” digital images – is likely to become a cluttered, messy space as you and your friends find more images to pin.  The sense of activity and networking is represented by your friends being able to comment on every image you post.

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In the quest to make digital music a viable business endeavor instead of just a cool idea, there have been many businesses and websites that have already come and gone.  While digital music pirating has been a huge issue for most of the services that have failed, rapidly changing hardware has been a serious issue as well.  One quarter, the dominant digital music device is an MP3 player, the next it is a smartphone!  Failure to adapt the digital music service to the new technologies has sunk some of the digital music services distributing digital music files over the Internet.  Spotify is deeply invested in making sure that does not happen.  For that, they have Oskar Stal!

Oskar Stal is the Chief Technology Officer of digital music distributor Spotify.  As Spotify developed as a website, but prepared to take its service international, the company sought a CTO who had extensive experience with mobile operating systems.  Without a CTO who knew the ins and outs of various mobile platforms, Spotify could not take their business to the next level.  Having been employed at mBlox, a company deeply invested in mobile transactions and the technical interactions between mobile platforms, Oskar Stal rose to the top of Spotify’s list of desirable candidates for the position.

Oskar Stal’s resume is more extensive than simply working for mBlox, though spending eight years as the Director of Development in the technical department at that company was the weightiest factor in Spotify hiring him.  Fortunately for Spotify, Stal was exceptionally interested in the position; he was already impressed by how much Spotify had accomplished without someone as experienced at the top of their development branch!

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It can be very tough to break into the social network and online media markets.  Given how YouTube has virtually dominated much of the online media market and how the major Internet social networks continue to develop tools to make it easier to stream videos, share music, and distribute photos, it is a tough time to be a new online service in that niche.  Even so, that has not stopped Demand Media and it is not slowing down Joanne Bradford.

Joanne Bradford is Demand Media’s Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer.  Bradford joined Demand Media after working for Yahoo!, which is one of Demand Media’s biggest business rivals.  It is easy to see why both Yahoo! and Demand Media would want Joanne Bradford; Bradford graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Journalism (Advertising).  Since college, she has trail-blazed with some of the most influential companies in the tech sector and the media world.  She started her ascent up the corporate ladder at publishing giant McGraw-Hill where she served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for BusinessWeek Magazine!

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Given that the television has been available to consumers for almost a century now, it might seem odd to make the statement that there are very few people who “get” television.  As far as the tech sector and Internet businesses who are trying to exploit the classic medium, there are very few people who “get” television.  One need only look at how both Apple and Google have unsuccessfully attempted to market Smart TV products to know that the giants of the Internet simply do not understand how consumers use their televisions.  Ashwin Navin, on the other hand, completely gets the television audience and through his company, Flingo, he is enhancing the television-viewing experience.

Ashwin Navin is the co-founder and CEO of Flingo.  Flingo is virtually reinventing television . . . without trying to change the sloth-like way that most people view television.  While it might seem like a contradiction, Navin’s approach to Smart TV programming has been very different from the approach of his competitors.  Instead of trying to change television entirely, Navin and Flingo are working to enhance television.  Navin created Flingo to easily provide additional content related to television on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices.  As well, Ashwin Navin realized that many people might enjoy seeing their YouTube and other videos on their big, expensive, sophisticated high-definition televisions.  A big initial application of Flingo was linking Internet videos to your television!

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Not too long ago, Apple and Adobe (the software company that publishes Flash and Photoshop software) were in conflict because Apple’s iOS would not run Adobe programs. This failure of functionality was be design, though; Adobe and Apple’s Quicktime video formats have long been in conflict and Apple hoped to force programmers and websites to use their coding as opposed to Adobe’s. So, for some time, you could not play most YouTube videos on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. But then, Apple and Adobe settled their differences and now Adobe is writing programs specifically for the iOS operating system. One of the first truly meaningful Adobe programs to be recoded for iOS functioning is Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad.

As one of its flagship software programs, Photoshop is a big moneymaker for Adobe. Adobe Photoshop Touch is the pared-down program for mobile computing devices; already there is an Android-based Photoshop Touch that has made Photoshop tools available to the wealth of Android customers. Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad allows Apple iOS users using an iPad to create, alter, and publish images based on Adobe programming. This gives visual artists and photographers a huge opportunity to continue their art. No longer do Apple Computer fans have to choose between their preferred mobile computing device and the opportunity to become more proficient at their visual art.

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The idea of play is an ancient one, so it is a pretty ambitious goal to reinvent the wheel on toys.  In fact, given the billions of dollars that are spent each year producing, developing, transporting and marketing toys, the idea of trying to completely reinvent the marketplace is an audacious one.  When the casual concept for such an idea turns into a viable business unexpectedly, sometimes the innovators themselves are surprised.  That is exactly what happened with Outfit 7 and Samo Login.

Samo Login is the Founder and CEO of Outfit 7, a Slovenian mobile app company.  Outfit 7 is best known for the Talking Tom application, an animated cat that you upload to your smartphone.  The cat repeats phrases you say to it and interacts in a limited digital environment.  Samo Login’s concept for the figure was to create a toy for mobile phone users.  With more than two hundred million Talking Tom apps downloaded, Samo Login’s concept seems to have truly taken off!

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Even as the recession in the United States persists, there are still some fields that are still employing highly-educated individuals.  In the tech sector, one of the most coveted and competitive positions for new graduates is the position of software engineer.  The online data storage company, Dropbox, continues to hire software engineers.  Just what are they looking for?  You have to be as smart, versatile and fun as Tina Wen!

Tina Wen is a software engineer at Dropbox and a recent graduate of MIT.  With her B.S. and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft quickly hired Tina Wen.  Intrigued by her thesis on bandwidth-sensitive oblivious routing, Microsoft put Wen on the team that developed Microsoft Outlook for Mac.  If you have Microsoft’s Office for Mac 2011 edition, you have some of Wen’s software!  Working as a software developer engineer was a nice step up for Wen at Microsoft; she had a summer internship there working on script tests for Microsoft TV the summer before she finished her Master’s.

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The popularity of Glee has made the music term “mash-up” a household phrase.  In case, however, you aren’t into that trend, a mash-up is when a music producer combines two songs that are not inherently alike, but share a similar characteristic either musically or thematically.  In the entertainment and corporate worlds, mergers often act like mash-ups and they have been occurring with increasing frequency over the last decade.  One of the most peculiar mergers came when Disney purchased Marvel Entertainment in 2009.  Marvel Entertainment is the parent company that oversees Marvel Comics, Marvel Studios and Marvel Digital Enterprises.  Since the buyout, Disney has been making a lot of money off Marvel, especially through summer blockbuster films like Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The First Avenger.

But fans of Marvel Entertainment’s projects have been waiting for something substantive and new to come out of the Disney buyout for years.  Marvel Studios, for example, had all subsequent projects through this summer’s The Avengers in pre-production when Disney bought Marvel Entertainment.  Finally, the results are evident and Avengers Alliance embodies just what the buyout might mean for Marvel fans.  Avengers Alliance is a new video game for Facebook produced by Playdom.

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One of the dangers in starting a new social networking platform is that users will not flock to it simply because they do not understand what the network offers.  While that is primarily an issue for a marketing department, each new social network needs a hook, an angle unique from the other social networks that delivers something new to the Internet.  For that, new social networks need a decent Chief Product Officer, who helps determine what the Internet site actually offers to users and programmers who want to develop applications on their network.  As a relative newcomer to the social networking market, Klout has Chris Makarsky.

Chris Makarsky took a winding road to get to Klout and his career path was a somewhat uncommon one for a man who has risen to be Chief Product Officer of an Internet company.  While studying Economics and Psychology at the University of Virginia, Makarsky took an internship working for the Federal Trade Commission.  After getting his two B.S. degrees, he took a year off from school and went to work for Musictoday.  While working for the ticket vendor Musictoday, Chris Makarsky was intrigued by management techniques and after a year, he returned to the University of Virginia to begin his Master’s work.  In 2007, Chris Makarsky graduated with a Master’s of Science in Management of IT.  Armed with that degree, he was immediately hired by Yahoo! as a product manager.

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