Features:

• Ships with Windows 8 64-bit
• 13.3-inch display running at 2560 x 1440 (221ppi)
• 256GB SSD
• 2GHz Intel Core i7-3537U Processor
• 8GB of RAM
• MSRP: Starts at $1,599, model reviewed costs $1,999

Pros:

• An incredibly high-res display for a Windows laptop
• 2 years of free premium support
• Respectable battery life

Cons:

• No discrete graphics card
• Man, this thing is expensive

Eye Candy Meets Horsepower

Toshiba isn’t exactly known for churning out attractive, high-end notebooks, which is why the company’s new Kirabook is such an oddity. It’s a handsome little thing if you’re into very (and I mean very) understated designs, though I imagine at least a few people will think the Kirabook looks downright dull.

The Kirabook is wedge-shaped like many of its other ultrabook brethren but it’s thankfully very light on branding (save for a small, chrome-esque Toshiba logo slapped on a corner of the Kirabook’s lid), and a finish that comes as a result of the magnesium alloy chassis is nice enough. Sadly, that magnesium frame doesn’t mean the Kirabook is immune to scratches, something I quickly learned after stowing the thing in a checked bag while flying to Austin.

It’s got a respectable spate of ports for an ultraportable too: AC power aside, there are a total of three USB 3.0 ports plus an HDMI out, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader.

If anything, the real eye-catcher here is that sumptuous screen. The Kirabook plays home to a 13.3-inch display running at 2,560 x 1,440 (that makes for a pixel density of 221ppi), and Toshiba likes to crow about it being the highest resolution display available on a Windows notebook. Credit where credit is due, that display is one of the Kirabook’s most notable high points: colors are generally vivid and bright, and the panel seems hardy enough to handle even the most frenzied touch inputs. That’s not to say it’s without its shortcomings though. There’s a bit of light leakage around the edge of the display panel and viewing angles aren’t the greatest — looking at the thing dead-on is pleasant enough, but there’s a bit of color distortion to be seen once you start moving around.

But there’s one big problem when it comes to the display, and it has nothing to do with the panel itself. I won’t belabor the point too much — by now you’ve probably already made up your mind about Microsoft’s divisive OS — but the biggest disappointment is that Windows 8 and the apps that run on it just aren’t completely tuned for these HiDPI screens yet. Cruising through the touch-friendly start screen is a visual pleasure, as is firing up apps like Internet Explorer, Maps, Vimeo, and Netflix since they all thrive on these sorts of displays. Jumping into the desktop is another world entirely, and it’s full of applications and menus that appear blurry and ill-suited for such a neat display. What a bummer.

When it comes to performance, the Kirabook manages to hold its own very nicely. We like running Geekbench around these parts, and on average the Kirabook scored between 7500 and 8000 when it came to running 64-bit benchmarks: very solid numbers, and there wasn’t anything that came up during my day-to-day use that managed to flummox the little guy. That is, except for gaming — the lack of a discrete GPU in a $2000 machine is concerning, and the integrated Intel HD 4000 plus the need to push a crazy number of pixels means that there will be very little Bioshock Infinite running on the Kirabook unless you dramatically crank down the quality.

Speaking of day-to-day use, the Kirabook has more than enough juice to get you through the day. I’ve been toting the 2.9 pound notebook around for the better part of a week, and I’ve consistently been able to camp out in coffee shops and keep the Kirabook going for just over six hours.

There’s little question that the Kirabook is actually a pretty speedy little bugger, but there is a caveat. The downside to all that power is that the tiny fan nestled on the Kirabook’s bum will fire up after even slight provocation, and it’s just loud enough to be grating if you decide to do anything processor-intensive for a while. If you work in environments with plenty of ambient noise it may not be much of a problem, but be warned — those of you who like to work in quiet, zen-like tranquility will probably get pretty miffed.

I haven’t fiddled with many of Toshiba’s older laptop keyboards, but the consensus seems to be that they were largely rubbish. Keyboard snobs may just turn up their noses after a few moments with the Kirabook’s 6 row affair, but despite the fact that the keys feel a bit small I found that using it to peck out posts and emails wasn’t too bad at all after a break-in period. Sad to say, the trackpad was a completely different story.

See, the trackpad occasionally seems to forget what it’s capable of — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to two-finger scroll in Chrome using the trackpad before the Kirabook suddenly stops accepting multi-finger inputs. This may not seem like a big deal to some of you (especially since the Kirabook sports a highly responsive, glass-covered touchscreen) but it’s tremendously frustrating to discover what worked 5 seconds ago doesn’t work any more for no apparent reason.

The elephant in the room here is the price tag that’s attached to this highly portable package — the configuration I’ve been spending time with will set you back a cool $1,999. Toshiba has tried to temper the sticker shock by loading the Kirabook up with full versions of Photoshop Elements and Norton Internet Security (ugh), not to mention two years worth of premium support from a dedicated team of Kirabook specialists all within the United States, but the price differential will probably be enough to make some would-be ultrabook purchasers balk.

Who is it for?

Designers

No. If you’re an artist looking to get some work done, I suspect the blurry, pixelated text and images that result from mixing a hi-res screen and applications that aren’t really ready for it may be enough to get you running for the hills.

On the plus side, Photoshop makes full use of what limited screen real estate the Kirabook affords you and it’s easy enough to get into the swing of things… if you’re willing to squint, that is. Hooking the Kirabook up to an external monitor helps quite a bit, but the sketchy trackpad means you’ll definitely need other peripherals to chip in too.

Founders

No. If you’re a founder looking for a smart way to spend your newly-raised seed funds, you’d probably do well to stay away from the Kirabook. That’s not to say it’s a bad computer, but the crucial bang-for-the-buck factor is notably absent here. The most basic touchscreen-laden Kirabook retails for $1,699, or $100 more than an a higher-end 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. That’s not an insignificant premium to pay when the Kirabook is marred by a few prominent issues. And sure, you can pick out a slightly less expensive version that eschews the touchscreen, but then there’s really no point in Kirabook in the first place.

Programmers

Maybe? 13.3 inches may seem a little cramped for coding, but that multitude of pixels means that you’ve got plenty of real estate for crafting apps and tapping into APIs. Arguably the price tag is still too steep if all you’re looking for is a machine to run Visual Studio, Android Studio, or good ol’ Notepad++, but there’s nothing here that would immediately disqualify the Kirabook from being a coder’s companion.

Bottom Line

You know, for all of the little things Toshiba either got wrong or didn’t execute that well, I still actually really like the Kirabook. The company took a shot on something different, and even though this first iteration isn’t exactly a home run, it has made me rethink the prospect of spending my own money on a Toshiba computer.

Once the Kirabook drops in price (which shouldn’t take long since Intel’s new Haswell chips are barreling down the pipeline), Toshiba’s nifty premium ultrabook may find the success it deserves. For now though, it’s just too pricey and too unpolished for anyone but the biggest Toshiba die-hards to splurge on — here’s hoping that Toshiba manages to firm up the formula when it comes time to whip up the Kirabook 2.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Features:

• Runs Ubuntu out of the box
• 13.3-inch screen
• 256 GB SSD
• Intel Core i7 Processor
• MSRP: $1,549 with rebate

Pros:

• Excellent Ubuntu performance out of the box
• Thin and light
• 12 second boot time

Cons:

• No SD card slot
• Limited software choices
• Graphics card slightly underpowered

Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I’ve reviewed laptops I’ve never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and surprisingly powerful.

Rewind

I’ve been using some form of POSIX-compliant operating system for over a decade but I must admit that I have been remiss in my Ubuntu installations. Whereas I was once a KDE kid with some Gnome leanings, my distro knowledge stopped at about Mandrake and picked up again as Ubuntu began its rise to glory. That said, I was curious to see what Linux looks like these days. In short, it looks great.

The laptop itself is well-made. An aluminum top and pane of Gorilla Glass protects the 13-inch screen and it weighs a little less than 3 pounds. The entire package is self-contained, solid, and quite portable.

The laptop, codenamed Sputnik, is a concerted effort by Dell to make sure everything on the device works well. It includes a number of Dell-specific packages – you can see a list here – but it supports most updates to the OS and attendant software and seamlessly upgraded to the latest version, 13.04, on top of the stock 12.04 Dell provides.

If you haven’t used Linux on a desktop you’ll be surprised at how uneventful it is. Everything “just works,” from the camera to the disk encryption to the update downloads, and there is little of the traditional futzing around with scripts and drivers when attempting to add hardware or fix broken peripherals. As a non-power-user who once wrote a script to re-initialize my audio chip every time I woke my computer from sleep, it was a pleasure to see the XPS 13 boot up without issue and worked quite seamlessly with most devices I tried with it. Arguably, with only two USB ports (one 3.0, one 2.0) and a DisplayPort jack, you’re not going to be adding much to the mix.

The GeekBench score for this particular model hovered at around 5,500, which is solid performance. The MacBook Air, for example, gets about 6,600 on a good day and the Core i7 hits about 7,000 although it can top out at about 10,000 depending on the machine. 5,500, while not ideal, is still solid. The laptop lasted for 7 hours of standard use, about par for the course for a laptop of this size.

Using the laptop was a dream. I was able to set up my environment quite quickly and seamlessly and after a few hours I quickly picked up a workflow that allowed me to write, edit photos, and post from the field. The lack of an SD card was quite disheartening, to be sure, but an external dongle helped me make short work of that issue. I used GIMP to crop and resize photos, Vim to edit my posts and writing, and connected to web-based versions of my favorite cloud services if I needed access to files or social media.

The best part about the XPS 13 Developers Edition, however, is Dell’s own support offerings. It’s clear that releasing an Ubuntu into the wild without good support would be suicide for the product. To that end, the company is offering one year of “ProSupport” that includes round-the-clock North American tech support and next-day on-site servicing. While Dell Hell is still a fresh memory in my mind, at least, this offering is more in line with corporate support than end-user Windows management.

Who is it for?

Designers

No. Unless you’re a GIMP master, this probably isn’t the laptop for you. To be fair it’s surprisingly thin and light but it has no SD card slot, making it a hard sell for the designers among you. Working solely on the web? Sure, you could feasibly get away with doing a little CSS or HTML on this thing, but you’re probably better served with a laptop running more photo-editing applications.

Writers will also be a little put off by the lack of native support for some of their tools. However, if you’re a markdown/plain text editor kind of person, this laptop connected with a revision control system could be a winner. It obviously depends on your workflow and, although I was able to pick it up fairly quickly, Ubuntu might not be the place to look for absolute ease-of-use.

Founders

Yes. To paraphrase Justin Timberlake, a laptop isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? An Ubuntu laptop. While you may annoy most of your co-workers with your insistence on running LibreOffice, this laptop is more than enough to run a few spreadsheets on and, in addition, build a business with. Seamless connectivity to most cloud services is a large benefit and thanks to Dell’s CloudLauncher app you can quickly and easily spin up nodes with a few keystrokes. Best of all, you’re not going to be another me-too entrepreneur with a MacBook Air and a dream (and you don’t have to use Windows 8), which is a great feeling

Programmers

Yes. This is a more-than-capable programmer’s machine and all of the care Dell put into this laptop really helps it shine as a developer’s device. For example, Dell has added Profile Tool, a method for “cloning” a workspace between laptops. This allows you to manage dependencies, preferred system tools, and tool chains. An Ars reviewer notes that these Profiles could become a way to “share” setups between programmers as well as a method to see how programming “superstars” have set up their machines. In short, Dell wants to make it clear that they care about developers with this device.

Bottom Line

It doesn’t get much cooler than the XPS 13 – and that’s high praise coming from an unreformed Apple addict. While I’m not sure this would become my everyday carry laptop, I could definitely see it replacing a similarly outfitted Windows machine and, if I ever felt the need to go full Doctorow when it comes to encryption, open software, and paranoia, this is the device I’d choose.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Finally we have an app that ends the age-old debate about whether or not the earth is getting warmer. The Just Science app has collated all the data from the last two centuries to determine the earth’s surface temperature. Developed by Novim, a research group from UC Santa Barbara, the Just Science app just won $40,000 from the American Clean Skies Foundation for improving our scientific knowledge about the world. As Novim Executive Director Michael Ditmore told me, the free Just Science app is the result of 18 months’ work in which his research team went all the way back to the year 1800 for data about the earth’s temperature.

So what’s the truth about global warming, I asked Ditmore. The earth is getting warmer, he confirmed, by around six tenth of a degree in the last 50 years. “Not spectacular, but significant,” Michael Ditmore reports on the findings of an app which, in my mind at least, is both spectacular and significant.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s Sundar Pichai spoke to Wired in an interview published today ahead of Google I/O this week, describing what it’s like to be taking the helm of both Android and Chrome going into the annual conference. Pichai took over for Andy Rubin, who stepped out of his role heading up Android back in March.

These days, he says not much has changed around his thinking about Chrome and Android, but he did have some statements about the open nature of Android that rang more sincere than most statements from Google execs on that aspect of the business, which is usually referred to as an impossibly good thing.

Open Is Great, But…

Pichai reiterated the company’s general love for the “open” nature of Android, but he also brought up the very real ways in which it limits Google’s ability to provide a consistent and recognizable experience to all users of its mobile OS.

“Here’s the challenge: without changing the open nature of Android, how do we help improve the whole world’s end-user experience?” Pichai told Wired when asked about the biggest challenge facing Android. “For all your users, no matter where they are, or what phone or tablet they are buying or what tablet they are buying.”

It was a theme that Pichai came back to again and again, when discussing how Facebook Home has changed the OS experience at a basic level and what Google felt about that. He said that Facebook Home is “exciting,” while disagreeing diplomatically with it from a central philosophical standpoint, explaining that he believes people aren’t at the center of the experience in his mind. Once again in relation to Facebook Home, Pichai talked about the challenges of providing a universal experience to users.

“We want to be a very, very open platform, but we want a way by which end users are getting a good experience overall,” he said in the interview. “We have to figure out a way to rationalize things, and do it so that it makes sense for users and developers. There’s always a balance there.”

Finally, Pichai talked about the different issue of forking Android entirely, and discussed how Google feels about that.

“In general, we at Google would love everyone to work on one version of Android, because I think it benefits everyone better,” he told Wired. “But this is not the kind of stuff we’re trying to prevent.”

This is possibly the most frank anyone at Google has been about how the company views these tangential efforts. Google accepts them, because that’s the nature of the open approach it took when it started out with Android, an approach that helped it win over carriers and OEMs looking to do more than just provide an interchangeable vehicle for another company’s software and services. But Google is also frustrated by them, in that they splinter its efforts, ultimately resulting in Android fragmentation.

Google And Samsung = Microsoft And Intel

On the subject of the supposed Samsung/Google rift that many in the media suspect may be developing, Pichai echoed the company line and said that Google isn’t concerned about Samsung’s prominence in the overall Android ecosystem. He basically said that Samsung has been instrumental in helping push the technology forward for both companies.

Samsung’s relationship with Google is like that of other “long stable structures” found throughout the industry, Pichai said, pointing specifically to the relationship between Intel and Microsoft. Microsoft and HP would be another key example of a long-prosperous combination that never destabilized because of one party craving too much influence over the other. One could argue that the Android ecosystem is a different beat, with Samsung having much more power than any one partner that Microsoft ever had, but that’s hard to quantify.

Google I/O May Be Light On New Stuff

Pichai also seemed keen to take the wind out of people’s sails regarding what’s coming up at Google I/O, which takes place this week Tuesday through Friday in San Francisco. He said that the event will be very much developer focused, especially since it’s not timed around any major product announcements.

“It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system,” he said to Wired. “Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.”

Rumors suggest we might see an updated Nexus 7 and possibly a Nexus 4 with new features like LTE connectivity, but those could be considered minor enough.

Chrome And Android

The biggest takeaway from Pichai’s talk with Wired was that he clearly loves both of his children equally. He resisted multiple attempts by Levy to pit the two against one another, and to point one as unnecessary in the face of the other. Pichai didn’t seem like a man running two horses with the intent of picking the winning one late in the game; Chrome and Android both came off as equally worthy pursuits that Google intends to continue for different but equally valid purposes. That could be why we’re hearing that Android-powered notebooks are on the way, as well as Chrome-powered tablets.

It’ll be interesting to see if Pichai gives both equal billing at the Google I/O keynote, too, which takes place at 9 AM PT on Tuesday morning. We’ll be there covering the action, so tune in to see how it shakes out.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adobe believes its future lies in digital distribution and subscriptions – and it’s about to bet the company on this. As Adobe announced at its Max conference in Los Angeles today, it’s about to put all of its resources into developing its tools for Creative Cloud.

Adobe introduced Creative Cloud, its subscription service for getting all of its tools for designers, photographers, videographers, web developers and audio professionals, just over a year ago. Going forward, Scott Morris, the head of Adobe’s Creative cloud and creative suite team told me last week, this will be the only way to get access to its tools. The company will continue to sell CS6 for the time being, but it’s not clear for how long. The New Creative Cloud apps will be available June 17.

Most Max attendees probably expected Adobe to reveal Creative Suite 7 today. Instead, the Creative Suite name is actually going away in favor of Creative Cloud, which won’t have traditional version numbers anymore. For Adobe, of course, this also means the company is now making the move to a new business model, where the focus will be squarely on subscriptions and not on selling boxed software, licenses and upgrades anymore.

Since it introduced the service last year, Adobe added more than half a million paying Creative Cloud subscribers and two million users who subscribe to its free services. As Adobe’s David Wadhwani noted in today’s keynote, there is no doubt in his mind that Creative Suite is the right direction for the company.

As Scott Morris told me, the company was surprised by the success of Creative Cloud and decided that instead of trying to keep working different versions of apps like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and PremierePro – one for Creative Cloud, which gets continuous upgrades, and one for the next version of the Creative Suite – it made more sense to just focus on using the Creative Cloud as a distribution mechanism for its tools.

Producing these different versions was a distraction, and this move, Morris told me, will “give Adobe the ability to focus” and make life easier for its engineers. This change, he believes, will allow the company to be more innovative and deliver new features to its customers faster than before.

The company has no plans to release any new versions of Creative Suite going forward, but Adobe will ensure that every CS6 application will run on the next version of OS X and Windows. It will also provide the usual bug fixes and security patches, but it won’t add any new features to the tools.

This is obviously a bit of a risky step for Adobe, something Morris acknowledged in our discussion. Most users, he noted, probably expected Adobe to make an announcement like this in the coming years – the fact that it’s coming today, however, will likely be a bit of a shock. What makes him and the rest of the Adobe team believe that this will work, he told me, is that virtually everybody who has subscribed to Creative Cloud loves it. It even gets a higher rating in Adobe’s online store than Photoshop, “which is virtually unheard of,” as Morris told me.

Morris also acknowledged that there will be customers who just can’t switch to Creative Cloud and for the most part, that’s because of the online components like the Behance community and cloud storage features. Government agencies, for example, will not want to use this (or aren’t allowed to), schools won’t want their students to publish their work publicly to Behance and some enterprise customers, too, will not want to deal with these features. For them, Adobe has created special licenses and version of the Creative Cloud that still use the online distribution mechanism, but that won’t include that features that these customers will object to.

To make the transition easier for current users, Adobe will allow everybody who currently owns a license to CS3 and up to subscribe to Creative Cloud for $29.95 per month for limited time. It will also offer similar price reductions to users who just bought stand-alone products like Photoshop.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A little disconnection goes a long way.

In the tangled web of digital social networks that we weave one thing is increasingly absent: a sense of mystery.

We are so wrapped up in our digital social graphs there’s rarely room for gaps. Our networks offer the promise of being entangled with ever more connections — reaching out to grasp the hands of friends’ friends (and so on to the edge of the digital universe) – reminding us how few degrees of separation there are between citizens of the wired world.

Networks turn strangers into quasi-acquaintances before we’ve ever met them IRL. Based on the digital recreations our networks generate, we may decide we never need to meet such and such a person. A social snub online doesn’t have to involve any socialising at all.

Add in the various knowledge graphs we constantly tap into — Internet search skewed to be social, networked mobile apps & services, the low and high level chatter of our connections as we track and trace their activity online – from what they watch and listen to, to who they talk to, where they go, what they see — and the sum of our networked knowledge starts to feel all seeing, all knowing.

Context is being pushed at us faster than we can escape it. Ignoring the minority of intentionally gated personal data, our digital networks are ripping off the masks of the many, leaving only the Anonymous few fighting for the right to remain unknown. We triage email, triangulate individuals.

Sidestepping the issue of privacy – which is a whole other (highly polarised) debate — where’s the fun in knowing everything before truly knowing anything? More importantly, what happens when we’re not engaging our creative faculties half so much because the mind isn’t being asked to fill in all those blanks? The ellipses are being overwritten.

It’s no longer about making mental leaps to join dots. The challenge now is about piecing together the endless jumble of data that’s being pushed at us. Instead of dreamers, we’re policemen sifting through a bottomless box of evidence.

Of course it’s churlish to complain about the interconnectedness afforded by networks and digital devices. Go back a handful of generations and the entire plot of a novel could hinge on whether someone received a paper letter slipped under a door at the right moment in time. That plot is no longer possible for those of us who have chosen to be wired in.

We don’t have to wait to get news. We’re unlikely to miss a message once it’s fired at us from the myriad channels now open for communication unless we’re deliberately trying to. Our problem is filtering the signals we’re receiving. Tuning out the noise so we can hear the stuff that’s relevant, important, valuable.

That’s the quotidian challenge. The philosophical and emotional challenge is that we’ve replaced life’s little mysteries with a barrage of sound and fury. That may not sound very important – and perhaps it’s not. But in my view it does leave a gap that developers could think about tapping into.

What’s mystery for? It fires the imagination, as well as working our logical, critical, analytical faculties (which are still getting a good workout online). If boredom is good for creativity – and there’s been lots written on the need to give the mind downtime to come up with great ideas — it follows that mystery oils the wheels of imagination.

An app I wrote about in March does just this: Rando is an anti-social photo sharing app. You take a photo and share it to a random stranger. It doesn’t tell you who gets it. In return you get a photo back – shared by another random stranger, with nothing to tell you who sent it beyond a general location which is revealed when you tap on the photo to turn it over.  There are no social networking tie-ins. You can’t post the photo straight to Facebook or Twitter. It’s deliberately disconnected.

Rando offers little glimpses into other worlds. Stripped of almost all their context, they are fascinatingly rich, replete with mystery – in a way that the photos your friends post to Facebook can never be. That’s not to say those photos don’t have any value or aren’t important — they do, and they are. But they just engage a different part of our minds.

In the same way that falling without distraction into a good book entices the mind’s creative faculties – really invites us to fall down our own mental rabbit hole like Alice tumbling into Wonderland — Rando’s randomness is a pocket-lighter for the imagination.

I find myself continually firing it up, just to see what it sparks.  And looking back through the photos I’ve received, trying to imagine a context for them, trying to figure out who sent that image, and why, and what they were trying to say.

The creativity flows both ways too. Creating a photo to send in this app means gifting a small piece of your world to a stranger. And when you start to see your world through the eyes of an unknown person, you see details afresh. Find mystery in dusty, overlooked corners. Kindle things and thoughts laid dormant.

A little disconnection goes a long way. Think on it.

[Original Alice in Wonderland illustration by John Tenniel, now in the public domain]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

So a guy is into you – whether you are a person or a brand – and then he isn’t. What’s going on?

Solomon Asch (1907-1996), one of the pioneers of social psychology ran some ground-breaking experiments into why men change their mind, and it’s very relevant to social media, and it’s all about conforming to group norms.

So on the back of insights last week from Kurt Lewin on the potential of discovery in unlocking the commercial potential of social media, today let’s turn to Polish psychologist Professor Solomon Asch.

Asch, with a PhD from Columbia University who worked at Swarthorne, MIT, Harvard and Penn, was famous for asking men to take a simple visual test; view pairs of cards, one showing three straight lines, and the other a single line – and identify which line on the first cards matched the length of the line on the second cards. Unlike similar visual tests, like those run by fellow psychologist Muzafer Sherif, the correct answers to Asch’s test were self-evident and blatantly clear. In 720 trials, only three mistakes were made. But then Asch re-ran the tests, this time putting 123 male test subjects into groups of 6-8 before asking them to identify matching lines. This time 75% of test subjects gave the wrong answer!

Why? Because Asch had manipulated the test, putting ‘stooges’ (‘confederates’) into the groups who were instructed to publicly give the same wrong answer before the real test subjects gave theirs. Either doubting their own judgement, or not wanting to be seen as wrong, test subjects conformed to the fake group view nearly a third of the time (32%).

So men, it would appear, change their minds to conform with a group majority or unanimity. But what was particularly interesting about Asch tests is that that some men, about one in four (24%) appear to be immune from the psychological pressure to conform, and that for most men the pressure to conform evaporates once there is dissent voice in the group. Men are influenced by group pressure when there is group unanimity, or at least a sizeable majority. Break the unanimity, then you break the pressure.

The commercial – and indeed political – implications for social media are clear; first think of people in terms of groups, not individuals – identify groups where conformity is already high and use social media to sell products that build on that conformity. Or, if conformity is standing in the way of selling what you have to sell, use social media to show a wide divergence of existing opinion and behaviour – and you’ll break the pressure to conform and open up the possibility of making the sale.

Oh and if you want to get your guy back, break the unanimity of dissent that exists about you among his friends.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Rendezvous is an upcoming mobile application built at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon by San Francisco developer Taran Gill and designer Mehtab Bajawa. The app intends to connect you with others nearby who share your interests, as based on Facebook profile data. But while other mobile apps, including those in the recently trendy “ambient location” space often do the same, the difference with Rendezvous is that it keeps track of your location history, too. That way, you can scroll back to see who you met and when, as well as perhaps discover other missed connections.

The mobile app was built using the Facebook API alongside the NewAer API for location data. And also unlike other location apps, Rendezvous doesn’t use GPS data – which means it won’t kill your smartphone’s battery. (Hooray!) Instead, Rendezvous will be able to tell if users are connected to the same Wi-Fi router or cell tower in order to determine their proximity to each other.

Though the build created this weekend focused on using Facebook data, Gill explains that the app will be developed further after the event wraps to include other APIs and data sources, in order to do things like connecting users’ Pandora’s playlists, for example. Users may be able to manually enter in data, too. (E.g. “what’s on my mind right now”). Friending functionality is also on the way, and that could be really interesting, since it could tell you others places you and your new friend had both visited together in the past, unknowingly.

“It’s a lot of data that nobody has ever collected before,” says Gill. He adds that didn’t know that he would be working on when he arrived at Disrupt this weekend, but wanted to start a new project. In San Francisco, he had been working on a cloud storage startup for many months, but acknowledges that space is now dominated by major players like Google. Meanwhile, co-creator Bajawa recently left his job in the finance industry to begin working on startups and tech.

For those who attend a lot of hackathons like this one and other networking events, an app like this could come in handy to help you not only find people you would want to know, but also help you remember who you met at a later date.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, said that his “top priority” for 2013 is bring brand advertising online in a big way.

I interviewed Mohan as part of the preparation for our panel at Disrupt NY next week, where we’ll discuss the ad landscape with Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s product director for ads, and Kevin Weil, Twitter’s senior director of revenue products. During our Q&A covered Google’s relationship with brand marketers, mobile and multi-screen advertising, and today’s announcement that Google’s Active View metric, which measures whether an ad was actually viewed (not just served) has been accredited by the Media Rating Council.

TechCrunch: So, how do you plan to get all those brand advertising dollars online?

Neal Mohan: Yes, brand advertising is really a big area of focus for us. From my perspective, it’s certainly my top priority for the year. The reason for it is, as I said to you before, a lot of digital media across all of these different channels whether it’s display, search, etc., has been very much about performance advertising to date.

And brand marketing, measured in terms of television, is really a $200 billion opportunity that the digital part of the universe hasn’t cracked. I would say that the challenge has been that we haven’t really had the technology to do that in the past. So in terms of really cracking that nut on behalf of our advertisers and agency partners, we’re focused on the handful of things:

First, making sure that we give the right canvas to our advertisers for them to be able to tell a story. And what that means is doubling down on formats like video. The TrueView format, which is the skippable ad format, now represents something like 75 percent of the ads on YouTube. TrueView is a format that kind of aligns all of the parties’ interests — advertisers don’t have to pay if the users aren’t interested, users can skip the ad if it’s a boring ad.

That’s the first big area of focus as it relates to brands. The other that I would call out in terms of formats — we’re not just stopping at video. How do we actually make other types of creatives rich and interactive. You may have run across something called a Lightbox format, which combines the best of customizable creativity with true scale. And it starts off in an starts off in a standard 300-by-250 display space. If the user hovers over the ad for a few seconds, it expands into a canvas that gives the advertiser 100 percent share of voice in that space. The advertiser doesn’t pay until the user has engaged and expanded that ad — this notion of a cost-per-engage model is definitely something that we’re reinvested very heavily.

The third thing that I would hit on is, there’s obviously this buzzword that it’s the year of mobile. But given where the traffic is shifting, if your’e building for mobile, you’re really building for today. What you need to build for is multi-screen. As consumers, we don’t live on mobile or desktop, we truly live seamlessly across all of these screens. So we’ve made all types of formats and inventory available seamlessly on our exchange.

And then the final thing that I’ll hit on — which I think the most important thing — is measurement. That’s a big area of focus for us. You may have heard me say that I think a full third of all campaigns will be measured with something beyond the impression or click.

Our announcement is that our Active View format has been accredited by the MRC. The idea there is that instead of managing our campaigns in terms of impressions or clicks, we manage in terms of viewable impressions.

TC: Why is that certification significant?

Mohan: The most important thing is that it’s something that can now be applied as a standard for the industry. For all of our measurement efforts, our belief is that anything that we do is not something that Google can do on its own. We’re working hand-in-hand with the IAB in terms of defining what the standards of viewability are, we’re helping define those standards. Now that we have the MRC stamp of approval, it’s something they can start to transact media on. It’s not a technology that sits outside the tools and the platforms that they use today. It’s built-in natively as a first class citizen.

If you’re an advertiser, now that it’s an accredited by the MRC, you can negotiate a deal with the publisher. Similarly, if you’re a publisher, you can sell viewable impressions for perhaps a higher price than you see in the rest of ecosystem.

TC: How does this apply outside of Google?

Mohan: We’re building this into our entire DoubleClick suite, and there are many publishers who are using it outside of just buying on Google. To the extent that DoubleClick is the operating system for the industry above-and-beyond just Google, we’re building natively into that stack.

TC: Your comments suggest that when it comes to bringing brand dollars online, regular banner ads aren’t enough.

Mohan: I think the question around banners versus beyond banners is kind of beside the point. At the end of the day, the way that the creative shows up is the last step in the entire process. There’s all kinds of things that brands think about beforehand, which is, ‘How do I reach the right audience? How do I give that audience interactive that’s relevant for them? How do I incorporate user choice?’

Whether you can do that in a banner is, in my mind, not the main question that brands are asking themselves. But if the question is, is a static banner going to be the thing that works for brands, my answer there is that of course they’re going to want opportunities to expand out of that real estate.

TC: What do you think about native advertising?

Mohan: I think that it’s something that’s interesting, something that should be part of this overall story. I don’t think it’s something that’s different or isolated form something I just talked about

Whether it’s something that starts from a banner, something that’s a sponsored story within a more native environment, brands want to connect with the audience and measure the efficacy of their campaigns. Native advertising, as it’s described today to me, feels like another flavor of what I just described.

TC: If you’re right and we’re finally going to start seeing that big brand advertising transition, how quickly do you think the shift will happen?

Mohan: The conversation so far has been extremely positive. Brand themselves have been the ones that tell us that you need to address these pieces. The adoption stats around things like TrueView, the adoption of engagement ads, those types of things, is pretty profound. From a brand standpoint, I think 98 percent of the top 100 brands are working with us in one of these different areas

I think that if you were to ask me where we are, if this was a baseball game, I would say it’s like the first or second pitch of the first inning. I’ve been with the display business since the very early days.

It’s going to happen a lot faster than people think. From a Google standpoint, we’re excited to work with our publishers and agency partners to crack it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The juggernaut that is search advertising grew so popular and lucrative because it offered businesses the ability to reach and persuade people with true purchase intent. But now keyword targeting is available on Twitter and Facebook, which could loosen Google’s stranglehold on ads that convince us what to buy.

Demand Generation Vs Fulfillment

A solid model for understanding web advertising is the purchase-intent funnel. At the wide top of the funnel is demand generation — raising awareness about a product and engendering the brand to the consumer. Demand generation is more about ad views and changing your perceptions than clicks and driving immediate action. Imagine banner ads for Coca-Cola, Facebook sidebar ads for a movie coming to theaters next month, or a Twitter Promoted Tweet about Clorox bleach. They’re designed to keep those brands stuck in your mind so you pay them later, and they’re targeted based on your demographic and interests.

At the narrow bottom of the funnel is demand fulfillment — convincing someone ready to make a purchase of what specifically they should buy. These ads typically seek a click through to a purchase page or sign-up form. Imagine searching for “Buy camera” on Google and seeing sponsored results for Best Buy’s website and specific Canon camera models that you can click through to purchase. Or searching “San Francisco lawyer” and seeing ads for specific local firms you could click through to book an appointment. They’re designed to attract the final click before you purchase, but to do that they need to know you’re actually in the mood to buy something. Since they directly inspire purchases and are more easily tied to return on investment, these ads can command high prices.

Until recently, Facebook and Twitter were stuck in the demand generation part of the funnel. With all their biographical and interest data, they were good for brand and institutional advertising but not at delivering dollars directly into advertisers’ hands. Google has long ruled demand fulfillment with its AdWords product that lets advertisers compete in auctions to show their ads to people who’ve searched for specific keywords that demonstrate purchase intent. But those dividing lines are rapidly blurring, and it could shift the axis of power in online advertising.

Mining The Bottom Of The Funnel

Twitter and Facebook are now aggressively trying to drill down the funnel into demand fulfillment, and they have the data they need to succeed. They might not have traditional web search engine queries, but they have plenty of internal searches and a near infinite amount of chatter.

Intentful Tweets

Twitter last week announced the launch of keyword advertising, which lets businesses target ads to people who recently tweeted or engaged with tweets containing certain keywords. Tweet about a band and you might see ads for an upcoming concert by them. Retweet someone saying they haven’t been to the dentist in forever, and you might see ads for nearby dentists.

Searching for and tweeting a word are two very different things, but Twitter keyword ads are certainly much closer to purchase intent than targeting based on who you follow. And with some savvy multi-keyword targeting, for example “[Product name]” and “want”, businesses could deduce purchase intent out of 140 characters.

Social Invading From All Sides

Facebook meanwhile currently offers “search typeahead ads”. When you search for a specific Facebook Page or app, businesses can set up ads to to show their own Pages or apps above or just below the organic results. If you’re searching for “Candy Crush Saga”, you almost surely want to play a puzzle game. Search typeahead ads for other puzzle games at the moment could be very effective. Gadgets, games, professional services and more brands can all take advantage of this signal of purchase intent.

And that’s just the beginning for Facebook. Last week it revealed its first ads within its new Graph Search feature. For now, these ads can’t be targeted by keywords, just the standard biographical targeting. But it’s very likely that keyword targeting is on the way.

Along with creating big advertising opportunities for online conversion businesses, they could be with local businesses. Facebook is making a big push right now to challenge Yelp as the place you find a business’ address, open hours, photos, reviews, and recommendations. Just yesterday Facebook redesigned its mobile Pages for businesses to highlight this info. That shift in focus means people looking for Facebook business Pages aren’t just trying to see their news feed updates. They’re trying to find out how to get there because they want their service right now — aka purchase intent.

Now imagine if you query Facebook’s Nearby local business browser or Graph Search for nearby Italian restaurants. Graph Search keyword ads could let an Italian restaurant show up more prominently in results, even if Facebook’s quality and relevance algorithms didn’t peg it as the best.

Then there’s Facebook Exchange. These are real-time bid, cookie-retargeted ads based on what websites you’ve visited. For example, you might see an FBX ad for a flight to Hawaii you looked at but didn’t pull the trigger on. While retargeting is in a whole different category than search keyword ads, they have the same ability to reach people who are deciding where to spend their money. And in the past, Facebook has tested sidebar ads related to the keywords you post in status updates. Facebook is trying everything it can to get to the juicy bottom of the funnel.

Fragmented Budgets

Many businesses keep essentially separate ad budgets for search, display, and retargeting. Until recently, Twitter and Facebook were only tapping the display budgets. But now they’re smashing open the other piggy banks. Businesses aren’t likely to suddenly expand the total amount of the spend on online advertising, even as the market steadily grows. Instead they experiment a bit at first with some spend borrowed from what’s usually devoted to Google, and if the ads work, they’ll cleave that Google budget and divvy it up among the newfound channels.

That is not what Google wants.

Search ad money is what funds its moonshots and sustains its enormous engineering staff for free products like Chrome. Despite Google’s legacy, Twitter and Facebook have formulated advantages. Twitter’s relatively un-ad-cluttered interface keeps people’s guards down which likely contributes to the reportedly high click-through rates on its ads. And Facebook has the might of the social graph to throw in the ring. Sticking the face of a friend who Likes Canon cameras on an ad for Canon cameras shown when you search for “Cameras” or “Nikon” could persuade you to click the ad, when on Google you’d ignore it. Plus there’s Amazon. The traffic to the ecommerce leader comes with implicit purchase intent, and whose shopping history data helps it target ads on-site as well as in its burgeoning off-site and mobile app ad network.

Now, Google is still the heavyweight of purchase-intent web ads. That’s not going to change overnight. But the Lilliputians have finally developed the technology to drag down the search giant’s revenues and claim some of those ad dollars for their own.

[Image Credits: Bryce Durbin for TechCrunch, John Swift / Inyamuakut / WebBooks]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch