iPhone + Webkit + Digg = Mobile Digging Done Right

Webkit browsers, which the iphone uses will now be able to digg while mobile.

Delta Tang Bravo has more details on their blog:

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We just launched a special version of Digg today intended to be browsed on an iPhone. It’s available at digg.com/iphone but you’ve got to either be on an iPhone, in Webkit, or possibly on a Webkit-enabled device like some of the fancy Nokia phones.

It’s really fun to be developing for the iPhone. First off, it’s a welcome change to be developing for a single rendering engine… and a decent one at that. Plus, you’ve got the run of all of Webkit’s features, including advanced pseudo-selectors, text-overflow ellipsis, and simple rounded corners in CSS. While I do enjoy making bulletproof designs in my normal web design, there’s also some freedom in not having to consider text-resizing, extreme page resizing (you need to support 2 dimensions), and other hurdles when you’re developing for the iPhone. Of course, we’re still following standards pretty strictly, but not having to cope with the lowest common denominator (or even any rendering discrepancy) certainly makes things interesting — and fun!

Even more fun is developing specifically for the user input quirks of the iPhone. When your primary input device is a honkin’ fat finger, it changes the way you think about links and buttons. Everything’s got to be bigger… way bigger. The yellow digg box and Digg It button are about twice as large on the iPhone as on the normal website. I also made the clickable area of the Digg It button even larger than the button itself so if you click on the edge of it, you’ll still get a press. You also have to make sure buttons aren’t too close together so that you don’t mash one when you intend to hit the other.

Joe (the Digg dev who coded the project) and I started from Joe Hewitt’s excellent proof of concept and then adapted the javascript and the rest of the code. We’re using jQuery (thanks to the jQuery team for their assistance) to render the sliding effects to mimic a ‘real’ iPhone application’s functionality.

Joe and I threw this together over the weekend with Kevin’s help storyboarding it. Good times were had. I’m really looking forward to messing around more with developing specifically for the iPhone. Fun fun fun. Can you tell I think it’s fun?

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that page loading takes a long time on an iPhone. Actually sending and receiving a request over At&T’s slow network (when you’re not on wifi) is especially slow. So, we’re actually doing one larger load to bring in both the story list and the contents of the stories. Then you’ve only got one request (and we made sure it wasn’t huge) and you can browse the 10 stories on the page without loading again.

Update 2: Also see Joe’s write-up on some of the technical aspects of the Digg iPhone version
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Digg HD-DVD Decryption Code Meltdown

Tuesday night Digg is being flooded people digging stories that tell the Decrypt keycode for all HD-DVDs that are currently in production. Basically, this is the key that you need to copy HD DVDs. The even bigger piece of the story is that Digg has said they will ban your account if you Digg the story. So what does a group of thousands of Geeky-Diggers do? — Submit Digg upon digg about the Decreypt. Currently the top 10 stories range in number of Diggs from 6,500 - 4,000 and they are all about the HD DVD code decrypt.

Mobile Wallet Development is Expanding

There’s a really good article at the Washington Post regarding the banding together of several different telecom companies to build a mobile wallet application.

Consumers will be able to use a phone as a wallet or as an access card simply by waving it over a wireless reader — and in some cases punching a PIN number into the phone — similar to how travelers in Tokyo and London access public transport.
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“After several fragmented initiatives, the mobile phone industry is now uniting around a single approach to enabling the mobile phone to be used, instead of cash or plastic credit card, at point of sale,” said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association, the global trade association for cell phone operators.

Venture Capital Activity: Technorati Buys Personal Bee, Akami Buys Red Swoosh, LinkedIN, Y Combinator

Technorati Buys Personal Bee

Technorati said Wednesday that it has acquired Berkeley-based Personal Bee, an online service which allows people to create their own personal sites using RSS feeds. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ted Shelton, founder of Personal Bee, will join Technorati as its VP of Business Development.

Akamai Buys Red Swoosh
Akamai Technologies said today that it is acquiring San Mateo-based Red Swoosh, a developer of client side technology for media distribution, in a deal worth $15M. Akamai said it purchased Red Swoosh in an all-stock merger transaction, and that it will use the acquisition to augment its services. Akamai said that Red Swoosh will be integrated into its existing engineering team in California.

LinkedIn Claims 10M Users
Palo Alto-based LinkedIn, the online social networking web site focused on business professionals, said today that it has reached 10 million users for the site. The company said that it is currently growing at the rate of over 130,000 members a week. LinkedIn provides social networking tools targeted at business users, and has received funding from Sequoia Capital, Grelock, Bessemer Venture Partners, and the European Founders Fund.

Y Combinator is Breaking VC Ground!

The Mercury News has a good description of how Y Combinator works:

Here’s how it works: twice a year, Y Combinator invites “hackers,” or programmers, to fill out an online application, outlining who they are and a business idea. One winning batch of teams is funded in winter and the other in summer. With Y Combinator’s help, each becomes a real company - one that is expected to create its product within three months. The amount of money Y Combinator gives each group - $5,000, plus an additional $5,000 per founder - is a pittance for what it asks in return, which is, on average, a 6 percent stake in their start-up. That money has to really stretch. Beyond their living and working expenses, it must also cover relocation costs, as the winter winners must relocate to the Bay Area and the summer winners to the Boston area.

Facebook Buy Passed up and Mozilla’s COOP Launch: I bet you Missed these Important Marketing Developments Today

Facebook was a goldmine – and Yahoo passed on it!

Co-written by analyst Mark May, an analyst report that covers consumer Internet, references Facebook’s most recent traffic numbers (about 1.5 billion pages/day) and says social networking could one of the most important growth areas of the Internet over the next five years.

By referencing Facebook’s doubling in growth, the reports also implies Facebook may be worth twice what it was last year, suggesting the business may have a $3 billion value to a buyer based on last year’s supposed $1.6B Yahoo “offer.”

Was Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman ready to sell? – Maybe, should Yahoo have wined and dined him until he was willing to sell. YES.

Mozilla released a new product called the COOP – which is social networking for your browser.

Check out Mozilla’s Coop!

Iminent Brings Video-add-ons to Instant Messaging

Iminent, startup based in France provides video-add-on applications for instant messaging systems. Do you remember the old days of IRC or ICQ? Well, imagine those on steroids! Iminent has secured nearly $4 million from French-Italian investment group 360 Partners, AC reports. Iminent’s video system, which is currently in beta test mode, allows users to make short videos and attach them to IM when chatting. IMer’s can use “emovids,” which is a short animation that is intended to serve the same function as an emoticon. The company’s website says that the application is free, though it offer any other details about how it is to be marketed.

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Kontrib Offers a Digg Alternative for Non-English Speakers

One thing that Digg lacks is foreign involvement due to the interface being in purely English. Kontribb offers the solution!

To submit and vote on articles at Kontrib, you first register. After you submit an article, Kontrib’s linguistic machines immediately translate articles into supported languages. These are Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, with more to come later. Kontrib is slick because it translates both the article summary hosted at Kontrib’s site, and the original article linked to. Comments are also translated.

Until now, language translation has remained clumsy. There are text translation sites such as BabelFish, or Google’s language tool. The coming Worldwide Lexicon Project promises to help bloggers translate their sites by mobilizing interested readers. Human volunteers will translate sites with higher quality, argues Brian McConnell, the project’s leader, and they’ll translate into any language. Though, we’d argue that human efforts will vary in quality.

What is FaceBook up to?

Recent traffic statistics at social networking site Facebook are impressive and we’re wondering if there’s a wider story here.

Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month — statistics that haven’t been released until now. That’s a huge jump.
Read more over at VentureBeat

So How Did you Learn SEO?
Here’s part of Rand Fishkin’s Story about SEOmoz:

“In 2001, the company that would become SEOmoz (at the time just Gillian, Matt & myself) began taking on some e-commerce development projects. Previously, we had designed static websites in Flash & HTML and done some consulting in usability, but with the addition of Matt to the team, we were ready to take on some beefier projects. We designed and developed several sites for clients and”

Rand over at SEOmoz would like to know how you got your start!

ZoomInfo - The HeadHunter’s Best Friend Expands

ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free. More about Zoominfo at Search Engine Land

DeepFish Mobile Browser Launches by MSFT

This is a pretty cool little toy that Microsoft has released, under the name Deepfish. This project is compiled with different technology from companies like Sea Dragon and the imaging is managed by the company Photosynth. Both of these are companies that have highly specialized technology for the mobile browsing market.

This is a free little browser being offered and you wont have to wait for it to be sent through your carrier, you can get it now.

From the Microsoft labs:

Deepfish is a lightweight client application that leverages a powerful server side technology for delivery of content such as web pages to a Windows Mobile device. Content is displayed in a familiar desktop format that requires no additional work by the content or site author.

Deepfish provides:
• A familiar look and feel of web pages on mobile as seen on desktop.
• Bandwidth optimized rendering for faster content delivery.
• Address bar web navigation.
• Intuitive zooming, panning and cue map for quick navigation and browsing.
• Support for simple link navigation and form submission.

Ultra-Mobile PCs: The Next Step

Have you ever heard of OQO?

This small company was started way back in 2000 in San Francisco, and they were the first to load a full Microsoft Operating system onto a handheld device.

The Guinness World Records cites the OQO’s first commercial version of their handheld product as the smallest, fully loaded computer.

Cool Stuff!

OQO is still around today and pushing forward with their goal of ultra-mobile PC platforms, one that the recently released the second generation of. Demand for these type of PCs is still low and really unknown, but its an emerging market that will surely need a sector leader. OQO is definitely up to the challenge!

These ultra-mobile PCs are smaller than laptops and even tinnier than tablet computers that many computer makers are currently pushing as a mobile solution. The difference is that these small and moble PCs are smaller than laptops and more powerful than your mobile phone.

They also include a wide range of nifty features. The Asus R2H, for instance, features a 7-in. touch screen, fingerprint scanner, 1.3-megapixel camera, and embedded GPS, all on a machine that weighs just 1.8 lb. Samsung’s NP-Q1 includes built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, and a flash-based memory drive. Sony and Samsung each outfitted their most recent ultra-mobile PCs with a flash-memory drive which lets programs boot and run faster, while conserving battery life.

This will be a very interesting market to follow!

Bebo Launches Music Download Service and Bebo Mobile

Finally it’s here, Bebo Mobile was entangled in negotiations with carrier O2, and apparently those deals have fallen through and on Wednesday Bebo will announce that it has partnered with Orange to offer a version on cellphones.

Due to the site’s popularity in the UK, Bebo Mobile will go live there this summer, with expansion to other markets later in 2007. The feature set is vaguely similar to MySpace Mobile: you can edit your Bebo profile, update your blog and add friends from your phone. Presumably you’ll also be able to access Bebo Mail, the internal messaging feature.

In addition to the mobile service, Bebo is also launching a direct competing service to myspace music. Called Bebo Bands. You will be able to sell your songs, if you are a band, through a small widget that can be placed on any site and is built by 7digital.

The inclusion of the widget in Bebo will be huge for them, adding sales from Bebo’s 450,000 registered bands, and enabling them to sell to Bebo’s supposed 31 million users. Bebo Bands will be able to create a Starter indiestore account, which will allow them to sell four tracks, or a Pro account, which supports 20 tracks.

MobilePlay’s eXpress it!

MobilePlay - Another CTIA announcement. MobilePlay, which puts blogs and news sites on your phone, has launched eXpress It!, a mobile social network. Users make “mini sites” to share with others. This is one very cool site! I’m going to sign up for an account tonight.

ZenZui Launches and makes mobile Internet more personal

Microsoft on Tuesday said it was launching a new company, ZenZui Inc., to market and develop technology designed to help people use cellphones and other mobile devices. The software lets people navigate functions and features in cellphones and other information devices more easily, Zenzui says. The new mobile browser will let people zoom in and out or pan across a grid of 36 customizable objects or “tiles” that are constantly being updated. People can navigate around the six-by-six tile zooming user interface, or “Zoomspace,” to quickly find and share the content that is relevant to them, Microsoft said. For example, a person might select feeds from a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, a local transit schedule, a weather forecast and news from CBC in their tile selections. They could display all four tiles on the screen at the same time for summary information like the current temperature or a headline, zoom in on one for more detailed information like a full picture or news story, or zoom out to switch to a different set of tile clusters.

The company will use technology patented by Microsoft in its software. ZenZui plans to support the content available through the tiles with context-relevant ads. It is expected to be available this week on devices that use Windows Mobile, with versions for other platforms to come, RCR Wireless News reported, citing John SanGiovanni, ZenZui cofounder and vice-president of products and services. The startup has secured $12 million US in venture financing from Oak Investment Partners and Hunt Ventures with the aid of Microsoft IP Ventures, which manages licensing of technology from the software firm’s research division. The company’s chief executive is Eric Hertz, who was previously chief operating officer at mobile communications company Western Wireless Corp. Tom Huseby of Seapoint Ventures — an Oak partner — will serve as chairman of the board.

Companies developing tiles and content for ZenZui’s trial phase include travel planning site Kayak.com, interactive marketing company OTOlabs, traffic information service Traffic.com and web design firm Avenue A | Razorfish.

Qualcomm + Ultra Mobile Broadband = Happy Customers

Qualcomm is stepping up to the plate of mobile technology with the release of 2 new mobile broadband models that support the 3GPP2 Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) standard. The Cell Site Modem CSM8900 and the Mobile Data Modem MDM8900 will make use of multiple-input, multiple-output antenna technologies to boost mobile broadband capabilities.

These are still in the design stages and will be approved in June, once that occurs, these wireless modems will boast 40 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. The chips for the new qualcomm ultra mobile broadband models will be available in early 2008.

AT&T Offering Mobile Banking

Today the Wireless division of AT&T announced that they will be working with BankcorpSoith,Regions Financial, SunTrust Banks, and Wachovia to provide a secure mobile banking platform and service to its subscribers.

Once the service launches, users will be able to pay bills, and manage their accounts from an embedded application on their phone. The software will be provided by Firethorn and will be pre-loaded into mobile phones as early as the second half of 2007. The free service will be offered as a trial test that will last a year. The service may be offered on a more large scale once the test completes, this will coincide with a massive AT&T Mobile banking campaign later this year that is planned.

Is Neil Patel Proving the 10% / 90% rule?

Neil Patel challenged Jason Calacanis have had a little bet going on lately to see if SEO is really a useful strategy or if it’s just a bunch of Bull.

Whitehat is the name of this game, and Neil showed Calacanis that by making a few changes he was able to increase his traffic by 21%. Oh and by the way, only 10% of the changes that Neil recommended have been implemented. Is this the 10%/90% rule in action? If you make 10% of recommended changes and they are the changes that are big enough to make an impact, will you see 90% of the value right off the bat?

This really makes me think about time management for an SEO – Do you have to spend numerous hours collecting links and digging through content or even building content for that matter to receive the full, or almost full benefit? — Or can you implement just a few Key SEO techniques and receive a huge amount of value by focusing on what you do well, and outsourcing the time consuming aspects?

Take a look at the results, What do you think?