Neil Patel wrote an interesting short piece on Search Engine Land in which he gives a few pointers for creating a successful FaceBook application. Even though FaceBook offers an API for easy integration on other sites, ironically the thing that will make or break your new idea is not so tied to the technical side of things. I’ll show the short list of pointers Neil gave in his post:

• target your audience
• think viral
• provide value
• simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
• keep an objective in mind

The list can probably be longer, for example I’d add check for already existing projects. I wouldn’t be surprised that someone already beat you to it. It happened to me many times. It’s just something we have to live with in the world of instant living. Luckily, sometimes it’s enough to simply add a cool little new feature, overlooked by others, that uses a previously untapped functionality of an API.

Check out Neil’s post for a more detailed explanation.

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Yahoo and ComScore conducted a study on behavior of visitors who had been exposed to online advertising and found that pre-shoppers (people who research products and services online prior to purchasing) have a tendency to purchase more in stores after having conducted research online. On average, these highly engaged pre-shoppers tend to spend about 41% more in-store than consumers that had not been exposed to online advertising.

Although recent research cites 89 percent* of consumers shop for information about products online, less than 7 percent** of retail sales actually take place online…

This means retailers have a prime opportunity to engage this audience of ‘pre-shoppers’ through online advertising to capture incremental sales in-store.

Amy Vener, Senior Director of Retail Category at Yahoo!

Here are some key insights from the study:

• Consumers exposed to online advertising are more engaged: Consumers exposed to display and/or search advertising viewed an average of six more pages during the period in which they were researching compared to those not exposed to advertising.
• Almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising take place in-store:
  Consumers exposed to online advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one dollar spent online.
• Integrated search and display campaigns have maximum impact:Combined search and display ad campaigns resulted in deeper engagement for consumers exposed to those ads, leading to increased sales.

The study was conducted from April 2006 to January 2007 and involved more that 175000 comScore panelists.

It seems retail companies have something to look forward to. The Internet is becoming a great resource for qualified leads for retailers, and such a drastic difference (+41%!) when comparing regular consumers to pre-shoppers should justify an increase in online marketing spending. Even if the actual difference for your operation turns out to be smaller that found in this study, if properly leveraged, is still a very good improvement for your retail operation.

Read the whole story here.

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iPhone has certainly spawned a tsunami of content and services. I’ve just come across a blog post about a book called iPhone: The Missing Manual , by author David Pogue (otherwise known as NY Times writer and author of the Missing Manual series), on IntoiPhone.com . That got me interested, since I’ve been following all the hype created over iPhone, so I went over to Amazon and did a simple search in the books section on iPhone. Here’s just a shorter list of all the titles I got (ordered by Amazon’s relevance filter):

iPhone: The Missing Manual

The Rough Guide to the iPhone (Rough Guide Reference)

iPhone Fully Loaded

My iPhone: Learn how to use and customize your iPhone to make it uniquely your own

Like I said this is only a very short list. There are dozens of books on iPhone available.

Pretty impressive, regarding the fact the device only just came out on the market. Not even all the device’s capabilities have been discovered completely, especially with recent posts about the iPhone’s hidden module list. I wonder if any of the above books mention things like this, given that they were probably prepared for publishing weeks, maybe even months ago.

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Over at Search Engine Roundtable, an interseting post by rustybrick, giving us another way to query Google for supplemental results. I tried it for some sites I know had supplemental results, and the rough number of those results, and it seems to work alright. A commenter on SE Roundtable said the command doesn’t return accurate results, but from what I’ve seen the results pretty much match my prior tests. So, here you go:

site:http://[sitename.com]/&

Another thing though, I tried to put different meta characters after the last slash and none worked (returned no results match), except for * (asterisk). This one gives a list of pages in the index, but not all the pages from a site, because when I tried without the asterisk, I got the actual total number of pages I expected. I’ll test further and see what comes up on this.

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Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry is developing a plan for a joint effort of 10 Japanese car manufacturers, some of which have already begun working on their own, to develop an operating system for automotive electronics. European car manufacturers are also working on a similar project already. The ministry will commission the task to JasPar - Japan Automotive Software Platform Architecture - a joint venture of automakers and auto-parts makers and, electronics firms, including Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Honda R&D Co., Denso Corp. and Toshiba Corp.

A prototype should be completed in 2009 and then marketed in the next 5 to 10 years.

Basically, all electronically induced processes on a car are controlled by a central computer, which is run by a built-in operating system. Functions controlled by the car operating system include breaking, airbag control, combustible mixture control, fuel injection, but also specific functions especially on more sophisticated luxury cars.

Bosch, the leading parts manufacturer in Europe, has introduced OSEK, which is basically an automotive version of the Windows operating system. OSEK hold about 70% of the world automotive operating system market share.

Europeans are already working on a new advanced and improved version of the car OS, expected to be released in 2008.

via: Yomiuri Shinbun

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This is interesting … a car almost entirely made of wood. Biomass has always been an interesting material, and is used more and more in various industries as an environmentally friendlier material. Let’s not forget wood is still a very good building material because of its wide range of capabilities, depending on the kind of wood, as well as construction type (used for building buildings but has been used in the past for building airplanes and other mechanisms).

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I’ve just come across a post discussing FaceBook fatigue. The author, Om Malik of GigaOm.com, poses some questions regarding for instance the ever growing amount of time people spend on managing their FaceBook relationships, and also mentions some security issues surrounding FaceBook, as well as other social networks. His post has generated numerous interesting comments from people who have different opinions about the issue. A new term has been coined FaceBook bankruptcy, or [whatever] bankruptcy, meaning experiencing fatigue to the point of simply stopping the use of a service. Jason Calacanis also talks about his FaceBook bankruptcy.

I personally only started using FaceBook maybe two months ago, but haven’t had any problems with it yet. Maybe because I strictly use it for contacts with people I already know (friends and family abroad). I guess when I start getting invitations in larger numbers, I may experience something similar to what Om is talking about. How about you? What are your experiences using FaceBook?

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Mertz is an advanced robot, forged at MIT labs, that can interact with humans based on visual and audio stimuli. Although impressive as a technological advancement, these robots are still far from a level of interaction depicted in SF books and movies such as Star Wars or I, Robot. Anyway, a very interesting development in the field of robotics. Definitely makes you think about the near future, when I wouldn’t be surprised to actually chit-chat with a robot waiter or cab driver. Or how about Rachel (from Blade Runner). Now, that level of advancement is what we should aim for

Photo by Stephen Lewis

Read the whole story on NY Times. Also, check out the video on YouTube.

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First of all - Pownce? Yes, a new social networking site, only you can’t get in. Well, not unless someone invites you, for now. They say it’s because of scalability:

At least to start, we’re keeping some control over registration so that we can scale the system under control. Scaling? It basically means that if a ton of people joined all at once at the beginning our site might slow down to a crawl. That would suck for everyone. So, as we get confident with the performance of the site, we’ll begin letting more and more people in.

So, there. For now, users can send messages, links, files, and events. More to come in the near future, so they promise. The interface is customizable, so everyone can make Pownce their own. There is a desktop application which uses Adobe AIR technology, to enable Pownce users to get latest data from the site straight to their desktop. The people at Powncy have announced they plan to offer a Powncy public API library for integration in third party software. This might be interesting, especially since Facebook and other similar projects have successfully been integrated in other applications. Powncy looks promising. If tha API proves to be useful, a lot of interesting projects may find their way to life.

Oh yeah, you can drop your email address over there and wait to be contacted when the network reopens for new subscribers. So, check out Powncy!

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MediaWhiz, the Text Link Ads partner company, has just bought AuctionAds, the recently started and very promising project by Jeremy Schoemaker and Dave Dellanave. The company has only been active for about four months, and has already amassed a large number of publishers, about 20k. There have been recent reports that AuctionAds has been outperforming AdSense on numerous sites, which sounds very promising. Jeremy Schoemaker and Dave Dellanave will however not remain with AuctionAds. I can’t wait for the next idea these guys bring to reality. Anyway, we now have two alternatives for paid link advertising under one roof. Will this synergy produce a good result? What do you think?

via: LinkBuildingBlog.com

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