Dry Spell? Try the Internet Kissing Machine!

A Japanese lab has created a device that may let let you "French kiss" someone over the Internet. And by "kiss," we mean waggle your tongue on a plastic straw, thereby making another plastic straw waggle remotely on someone else's tongue. Hot, huh?


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Google Launching Social Search In 19 New Languages

Google announced they have begun their international rollout of Google Social Search, which launched in October 2009. Social Search is being pushed out to 19 new languages over the upcoming days and weeks. Google promises even more languages in the near future. 


Google said, “with these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information from the people who matter to you.” In January 2010, Google pushed social search live for many, after a beta release in late 2009. Since then, Google has continued to integrate social signals into the product to make it more relevant and useful for users. 


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Google Goes Big For Financial Comparison Shopping, Launches “Google Advisor”

Google has rolled up its tools for consumers seeking side-by-side comparisons of financial products, launching “Google Advisor,” a one-stop-shop for consumers looking for mortgages, credit cards, checking and savings accounts, and certificates of deposit. 


For marketers, it’s an opportunity to gather leads, and Advisor seems to be aimed at stepping up the volume of those leads. Advisor has its own destination site, at google.com/advisor, which lays out the various financial products that can be compared. 


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Google Correlate: A New Way To Research Keyword Popularity & Trends

Example: Red Bull

With Google Correlate, you can upload data charted over either time or space and Google will look for matching patterns in search volumes. If you don’t have data of your own to upload, you can simply specify search terms, and Google will calculate the trending pattern and show matching patterns. 


As Google notes in their documentation, this is sort of the opposite of Google Trends: Google Correlate is like Google Trends in reverse. With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a data series of activity (over time or in each US state). With Google Correlate, you enter a data series (the target) and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern


See more at http://searchengineland.com/google-correlate-more-search-data-to-mine-78560?utm_source=sel&utm_medium=home&utm_campaign=flip and http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/mining-patterns-in-search-data-with.html

Facebook lets you tag brands in pictures

Starting today, people have the ability to tag Pages in their photos on Facebook in the same way they can tag their friends. Photo tagging for Facebook Pages enables people to share richer stories with friends about the things they interact with in the real-world, such as businesses, brands, celebrities, and musicians.

A Page can be tagged anywhere that someone can view a photo in the photo viewer. These photos will appear on the Photos tab on the Page, and not on the Wall. In addition, a Page can be tagged by anyone on Facebook, not just people who have Liked your Page.

See more at https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-pages/feature-launch-photo-tagging-for-pages/10150168953654822

But there are lots of potential problems, and a moderation nightmare

What Facebook doesn't seem to have considered is that this whole commercial feature relies on the goodwill of the Facebook community to do the linking work, almost Wikipedia-style. Sure, in Facebook's ideal world, every Coke can in every photo will get "tagged" to Coca-Cola's page.

But isn't it likely that sooner or later users will find the tagging feature a fun little game, where Coke cans are tagged to Pepsi's page?

A far larger corporate relations problem for Facebook will be when users tag, say, photos of retailer Target to, say, Vote Yes on Prop 8's page. Or, how about PETA tagging images of slaughtered chickens to KFC's page or any one of a number of brands to the Boycott Scott Walker Contributors page?

See more at http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2011/05/12/The-Hidden-Backfire-For-New-Facebook-Brand-Tag-Feature.aspx

Microsoft buys Skype

“The deal will see Microsoft pay $8.5bn (£5.2bn) for Skype, making it Microsoft's largest acquisition.

Luxembourg-based Skype has 663 million global users. In August last year it announced plans for a share flotation, but this was subsequently put on hold.

Internet auction house eBay bought Skype for $2.6bn in 2006, before selling 70% of it in 2009 for $2bn.

So what's in it for Microsoft?

For starters, the firm gets well over 600 million users who make Skype the world's largest phone company for international voice calls.

More importantly, Microsoft buys into a lot of potential.

Marry Skype's software with the Xbox Kinect and an HD television set, and Microsoft can make a powerful argument for getting into millions of living rooms.

Think beyond teleconferencing for the whole family: there's one-on-one training, home schooling, even patient care delivered remotely and in vision.”

See more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13343600

Hands on with Google Music beta

“Maybe those licenses were more important than Google thought. Because two days into our test of Google Music Beta, we're not even close to uploading our collection into the sky. In fact, on a test set of about 5,500 songs, we've only been able to upload about 1,000 - after two days!  The backstory, of course, is that Google can't do any scan-and-matching without the proper licensing, but that is creating a major upfront hassle.

So why not just be patient, and let the collection upload in the background?  After all, downloads of large discographies and movies are also time-consuming (in the other direction), and most simply go about their business while waiting.  

And, many fans will simply ride it out, and wait for days (or even a week) to finish the process.  But this is more than just an annoyance: it may also represent a major opportunity for Apple and other competitors willing to endure licensing headaches. 

Anyway, on the collection that is uploaded, the fruits are pretty juicy.  Access has been incredibly simple across a second computer (at a different location) and an Android handheld.  The former through a Chrome browser and the latter through a customized Android app.”

See more at http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/051211betaslow

Nearly 25% of all phones sold in Q1 2011 were smartphones

“Worldwide mobile communication device sales to end users totaled 427.8 million units in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 19 percent from the first quarter of 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphones continued to outpace the rest of the market, and a newly competitive mid-tier smartphone market will drive smartphones into mass adoption and accelerate this trend.

“Smartphones accounted for 23.6 percent of overall sales in the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 85 percent year-on-year,” said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This share could have been even higher, but manufacturers announced a number of high-profile devices during the first quarter of 2011 that would not ship until the second quarter of 2011. We believe some consumers delayed their purchases to wait for these models.””

See more at http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1689814