Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.
You had me at: “Do you need a reliable, sexy vehicle to get you to the renaissance fair?” This home-made, surprisingly slick car ad comes from Clark Olson Media, a media company with a clear sense of humor. Clark Olson Media submitted the video as part of a video car review contest for Kelly Blue Book, a car retailer.
We’re not entirely sure if this video actually makes us want to buy a 2000 Corolla, but it certainly makes us want to give Olson a high-five. At this point, he might not need it. The video, released in mid-June, has picked up more than 200,000 views. Maybe it’s the rocking funk music, or the way he keeps saying Corrroooollaaaa, or the way that … no, it’s definitely the way he says “Corolla.”
You know there’s something significant going on when Google creates one of its whimsical “doodles” on its home page, and Halloween is no exception. Watch what happens.
[Spoiler alert] In case you can’t see it where you are, this year (in some countries), there’s a time-lapse video showing some of the most gigantic pumpkins in the world, going through a metamorphosis from blobs of orange to art as night falls.
Here’s how the Googlers describe the making of this kooky video on the official Google blog:
To celebrate Halloween this year, the doodle team wanted to capture that fascinating transformation that takes place when carving a pumpkin. Instead of picking up a few pumpkins from the grocery store, however, we decided to work on six giant pumpkins, specially delivered from nearby Half Moon Bay (some weighing well over 1,000 pounds). What you see is a timelapse video of the approximately eight hours we spent carving in the middle of our Mountain View, Calif. campus.
Watch the video of this Halloween Google doodle — or go to Google.com to experience the doodle for yourself.
Here’s Google’s “making of” video of this year’s doodle:
Each package gets larger with a mouse-over, and a click on it returns search results pertinent to a specific country or the particular items featured in a scene. This one is from December 24, 2010.
At this time of year we like to indulge ourselves with as many delicious chills as we can. To this end we’ve been taking a look at some spooky iPhotography.
We have found 10 creepy iPhone photographs that made the hair stand up on the back of our necks.
Could Siri, the voice-based virtual assistant for every iPhone 4S owner, constitute a threat to Google’s Android operating system?
Absolutely, says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, recognized expert in artificial intelligence, and a Siri board member and investor. Apple, he argues, now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best smartphone platform.
“What Siri has done is changed people’s expectations about what’s possible,” Morgenthaler said in an interview with Mashable. “Apple has crossed a threshold; people now expect that you should be able to expect to speak ordinary English — and be understood. Siri has cracked the code.”
This threshold, from mere speech recognition to natural language input and understanding, is one that Google cannot cross by replicating the technology or making an acquisition. “There’s no company out there they can go buy,” Morgenthaler says.
Google has Voice Actions, a voice search application for Android. So what’s the big difference? It comes down to semantics, Morgenthaler says: “Siri understands what you mean.” She has a far more precise understanding of what you’re saying and the context you’re saying it in, in other words.
Morgenthaler calls Google’s Voice Actions a “capable speech recognition program,” and says it was the state-of-the-art voice-based user interaction program. That was, until Siri, with all her semantic prowess, debuted on iPhone 4S. (Of course, Morgenthaler may well have a financial stake in Siri’s future; the terms of the company’s sale to Apple were never disclosed.)
Currently, Google is making dismissive public pronouncements about Siri: “your phone shouldn’t be your assistant,” Android chief Andy Rubin told the AsiaD Conference. But Morgenthaler believes they’re scrambling to catch up behind the scenes, because Apple won’t stand still with this technology.
Rather, it will use Siri to solidify the strength of its platform and steal advertising dollars away from Google, he argues. “Siri is a platform,” Morgenthaler says. “It’s not just limited to those things that Apple has done at launch.”
At the moment, Siri has a lot of iPhone-centric functions. But Siri the company implemented more than 45 APIs prior to being acquired by Apple — meaning the possibilities of a conversation interface to the web are endless. Back in April 2010, just after the Apple acquisition, Mashable noted Siri’s potential role as a driver in mobile search.
“Apple has the opportunity to outmode the entire Android ecosystem,” Morgenthaler says. Of course, that hinges on Apple making those APIs available to iOS developers, but he believes Apple will do just that: “This will be the differentiating factor in the iOS platform.”
Siri’s threat to Google could reach further than Android. In fact, Siri challenges Google’s entire search empire and shakes it to the foundation, Morgenthaler says.
“Google has made a huge contribution to all of our lives … they’ve made search comprehensive and instantaneous … but the whole paradigm is wrong,” he says. “[People] don’t want a million blue links, they want one correct answer. All the rest is noise that you’d rather have go away.
“Apple has the opportunity to really understand the question that you’re asking, and apply semantic knowledge such that [Siri] will deliver you the right answer, or a small set of highly relevant answers.”
When that happens, Morgenthaler says, all the steps that typically comprise an online search, including the ads served against search results, become completely irrelevant. He believes Apple can and will circumvent this search experience, passing consumers to merchants by way of Siri — and earning a finders fee for doing so. Under this paradigm, Google could be completely forgotten.
In short, forget the search engine — Siri will be an answer engine. She can perform executable actions and change consumer expectations in the process.
“We need to be in the tablet business,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in a conference call with analysts, just after she announced HP would keep its PC business rather than spinning it off.
Even though the company killed off its TouchPad tablet that ran the WebOS software it acquired along with Palm, Whitman didn’t know yet whether WebOS would be used in a future tablet from HP. She said the company would make a decision about WebOS within the next two months.
According to the The Wall Street Journal [paywall link], HP has said it might continue licensing WebOS to other manufacturers, even if it’s not going to be making tablets that run it.
Meanwhile, Whitman says HP will continue to focus its tablet efforts on hardware running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, a tablet-friendly operating system that’s not going to be available for at least a few months. A beta version for Windows 8 is now available — Microsoft hasn’t revealed when the final version will ship — but it’s expected “sometime next year,” according to Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel who spoke with PC World earlier this month.
“We need to be in the tablet business,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in a conference call with analysts, just after she announced HP would keep its PC business rather than spinning it off.
Even though the company killed off its TouchPad tablet that ran the WebOS software it acquired along with Palm, Whitman didn’t know yet whether WebOS would be used in a future tablet from HP. She said the company would make a decision about WebOS within the next two months.
According to the The Wall Street Journal [paywall link], HP has said it might continue licensing WebOS to other manufacturers, even if it’s not going to be making tablets that run it.
Meanwhile, Whitman says HP will continue to focus its tablet efforts on hardware running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, a tablet-friendly operating system that’s not going to be available for at least a few months. A beta version for Windows 8 is now available — Microsoft hasn’t revealed when the final version will ship — but it’s expected “sometime next year,” according to Tom Kilroy, senior vice president and general manager of worldwide sales at Intel who spoke with PC World earlier this month.
Jeff Widman co-founded PageLever to provide better Facebook analytics for marketers. PageLever measures more than 650 million Facebook fans across sites like YouTube and MTV. Jeff has been cited as an expert in Facebook analytics by Mashable, AdAge, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, InsideFacebook, AllFacebook, etc.
I get asked all the time, “How frequently should I post on my Facebook page? When is the best time to post?”
Answer: Post whenever the most recent status update for your page stops showing up in your fans’ News Feeds.
If you post often, you will see an immediate spike in News Feed impressions, but it’s generally not worth the cost in lost fans. When your fans see two status updates from you in their News Feeds, they’ll likely get annoyed, and will consequently unsubscribe or un-fan. There are few exceptions to this rule.
If you post too infrequently, you’re missing out on opportunities to reach your fans. Over the course of a year, a page with 10,000 fans that posts only half as often as they could misses more than 1 million chances to get their content in front of a hyper-targeted Facebook audience. The larger your fan page, the more often you should be posting — without annoying your fans.
The kicker: Each post performs differently. Some posts last ten hours, and some posts last thirty hours.
Calculate the average post lifetime by using the method below, but remember it’s just that — an average. To get really in-depth, figure the average post lifetime for photos vs. articles, or the average lifetime when you post Thursdays at 3 p.m. vs. Saturdays at 10 a.m. However, it’s still just an average; each post is unique, so you can never exactly predict how it will perform.
How do you know when a post stops appearing in your fans’ News Feeds?
The good news is that when you track your posts’ performance, you’ll be able to see, in real-time, when that post drops out of the News Feed. If it flops five hours sooner than you expected, then immediately stick up a new post.
Each status update drops out of different fans’ News Feeds at different times, depending on how long Facebook’s algorithm EdgeRank calculates that particular fan will be interested in that particular status update. Then, the best we can do is look at how each status update performs across all your fans’ News Feeds.
You’ll actually see a slowdown in new impressions, clicks, likes and comments as a post starts dropping out of News Feeds. The following graphs show cumulative numbers, so when the graph flattens, the post has dropped out of News Feeds.
Each of these metrics has pros and cons.
1. Impressions per-post: Impressions per-post is a single aggregate count of how many times a particular status update has been viewed. Facebook updates this number as more and more people view the post; however, it often won’t update for several hours at a time when Facebook’s computers are calculating for millions of posts across millions of fan pages. On the bright side, when it works, it’s great — you can literally watch as your post gets viewed by fans.
2. Comments per-post: All the comments on any status update are time-stamped, so you can measure on a minute-by-minute basis exactly when a fan saw the status update. Unfortunately, most status updates receive so few comments that there aren’t enough data points to determine whether your fans are choosing not to comment or simply aren’t seeing the post in their News Feeds.
3. Likes per-post: In general, this is the most accurate way to see when your status update starts dropping out of News Feeds. Facebook updates the post’s like count in near real time, so it’s more reliable than the post impression count. And because posts tend to get more likes than comments, the data presents an accurate picture of how long a post stayed in News Feeds. On the other hand, likes aren’t time-stamped, so you have to check the like count regularly to see when new likes are added.
So how do I actually measure?
Post a status update. Every hour, record the number of impressions, likes and comments. Figure out when the rate of new impressions or likes slows down.
Try recording all the raw data in Excel, then graph the data just like you see above. Visually estimate the post lifetime based on when the graph flattens out.
After you calculate the post lifetime for 10-20 posts, you’ll start to generate an average post lifetime unique to your fan page.
What’s the average post lifetime?
I don’t know.
However, I surveyed 20 posts across five fan pages that had 2 million+ fans, and calculated an average post lifetime of 22 hours, 51 minutes. Theoretically, this implies most fan pages shouldn’t post more than once a day.
I strongly recommend keeping track of your posts in real-time because post lifetimes vary widely, even across the same fan page. In my sample of twenty posts, the shortest post lasted only 10 hours, while the longest post lasted a full 50 hours!
If you weren’t tracking those posts, you would have been invisible in the News Feed for 13 hours when the post flopped at the 10-hour mark. Similarly, you could have delayed your next post when the high-performing post showed no sign of slowing down.
Lastly, feel free to experiment and break the rules.
You won’t know if your fans respond better to a different posting strategy until you try it. Use these analytics to augment your intelligence, not replace it.
Nokia Lumia 800, the company’s flagship Windows Phone device, has been officially launched at the Nokia World conference in London today.
However, I had a chance to spend a little bit of time with the Lumia 800 prior to the launch. Not enough time to write a review–I can’t speak to the call quality or battery life — but I can say that it felt great in my hand, had a gorgeous screen and a truly winning form factor.
If any company matches Apple when it comes to industrial design for their mobile phones, it’s Nokia. Nokia might not have the same panache or flair for crafting beautiful looking devices, but the company certainly thinks about every little detail.
I’ve been told that Nokia really goes the extra mile when it comes to crafting its handsets. The polycarbonate shells for phones aren’t simply sprayed with paint on the exterior. The whole of the material is dyed so that if scratched, the phone maintains its color. Nokia even tests various lotions creams against the materials it uses to make sure that the exterior of its devices won’t stain.
This precision and attention to detail was made clear in a recent video showing off how the N9 is made. The N9, Nokia’s first and last MeeGo phone, was unveiled in June. Although doomed from the start because of Nokia’s decision to partner with Microsoft and focus on creating Windows Phone devices, the device is beautiful.
Fortunately, all of that hard work and engineering hasn’t gone to waste. The new Lumia 800 takes the N9 design, adds a dedicated camera button and replaces MeeGo with Mango (Windows Phone 7.5).
The Feel
The first thing that struck me about the Lumia 800 was how it felt in my hand. It was light, yet it didn’t feel insubstantial. It seemed to weigh less than my iPhone, but unlike some other devices, it didn’t feel of lesser quality.
Likewise, the shape of the device was very well thought out. The sides of the device are curved, but the top and bottom taper and become flat.
The screen, which I’ll discuss in more detail below, is curved to the design but done so in such a way that it looks and feels as if it is all one single piece of material.
The Screen
The pixel density may not match what Apple is offering in the iPhone 4/4S, but the screen that Nokia is using for the Lumia 800 is a thing of beauty.
Using Nokia’s own version of Super AMOLED Plus, the blacks were black, the colors vibrant and text a joy to read.
Beyond that, the feel of the screen itself was smooth and responsive. The curve of the glass fit so nicely with the fit of the phone that it just felt right in a way that the curved glass of the Nexus S just didn’t feel right to me.
Camera
I didn’t have a chance to use the camera other than to load up the software — but the Carl Zeiss optics have a good track record in past Nokia phones.
Nokia has always put lots of efforts into its camera optics and if the Lumia 800 is as good as the N9, users are in for a treat.
As a Windows Phone
When I got to handle the Lumia 800, I did so alongside a number of other Windows Phone devices. Some of these have been announced and some are still prototypes. With Windows Phone, Microsoft has given manufacturers a minimum set of requirements that must be matched.
Phone makers, at their own discretion, can tweak things like the size of the screen, the power of the camera and the speed of the processor. I think this is a smart approach because it ensures that each phone will maintain a minimum set of requirements, but still lets phone makers switch things up to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market.
Despite seeing a lot of nice looking phones from all ends of the market, the Lumia 800 was clearly the best looking, best-feeling and most-promising phone of the bunch.
To Microsoft’s credit, on the software side, it seemed just as quick and responsive as any other phone running Mango. Microsoft is still in the early stages with Windows Phone. The full push to Mango took place earlier this month and users are giving it solid marks.
Having spent some time with Windows Phone on and off over the past year, I like the OS. I’ll be blunt, I’m an iOS user and I don’t see that changing any time in the near future. Having said that, I’ve long-maintained that Windows Phone would be my second choice for a mobile OS. That was before the release of Mango and before the Lumia 800. The time I’ve spent with Mango in the last few weeks has impressed me.
Microsoft is doing some interesting stuff with voice search that is similar to what Apple is doing with Siri. The Microsoft voice recognition isn’t as good, as the types of functions and activities that can be controlled with search aren’t as well defined. Still, it’s clear Microsoft is thinking about approaching navigation, discovery and mobile search in new and unique ways.
Microsoft has done something really special on the software side that allows users to pin certain functions of an application — like just the voice reminder function of Evernote — to a home screen. In short, the software that Microsoft has been building is great. What the company has needed, however, is flagship hardware.
As nice as some of the other Windows Phones are — and they are nice — nothing before the Lumia 800 really stood out against the smartphone competition. That’s changed.
Bringing Out the Big Guns
The Lumia 800 may be the best thing to happen to Windows Phone, not because it’s a great looking phone — but because it has the type of design that might make more users consider Windows Phone as a platform.
That’s what the original Droid did for Android. It gave Android a brand name and in the U.S., a flagship device that could go toe-to-toe with the iPhone. It didn’t matter if a user ultimately ended up buying an HTC or Samsung Android device, the Motorola Droid was what conceptualized and sold the Android OS experience to millions of users.
Microsoft and Nokia are both betting that the Lumia 800 does the same thing. For Nokia, this is Waterloo and it’s time to stand and deliver. At least in my limited time with the device, it’s delivered. This is a phone that has the goods and the OS — Windows Phone 7.5 — is worthy of its beauty.
Now we wait to see how the public at large responds.
Few events can boast headliners like Tim Cook, Norah Jones, Jonathan Ive, Al Gore and Coldplay. But Apple‘s campus-wide celebration of the life of Steve Jobs last Wednesday was hardly an ordinary event. The entire Cupertino-based company was crammed into its outdoor amphitheater; Apple stores shut around the world as retail employees watched live.
The Apple family is a fairly insular one, and outsiders were not admitted to this moving tribute to its fallen leader. On Monday, however, the company began streaming a replay of the event online. You can watch it here, and we highly recommend it: 84 minutes of memories, catharsis and great music. But if you’re pressed for time, peruse our slideshow of some of the event’s best quotes and performances.
Steve Remembered
Giant black and white photographs of Jobs were draped around the campus amphitheater.
60 Minutes‘s interview with Walter Isaacson, the authorized biographer of Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, aired on CBS News around the U.S. at 7 p.m. local time Sunday evening.
The segment appeared two-and-a-half weeks after Jobs’s passing, and less than 24 hours before Isaacson’s biography hits bookshelves. Excerpts of the biography, which contains information derived from interviews with more than 100 individuals among his acquaintance, as well as some 40 interviews with Jobs himself, have already appeared at many media outlets.
Below, we’ve identified some highlights from the transcript of Sunday evening’s segment. A video clip sent to press earlier this week is also embedded at the bottom of this post.
Highlights
Jobs invited Isaacson to write his biography seven years ago. Isaacson thought the request “presumptuous and premature, since Jobs was still a young man.” What Isaacson didn’t know at the time was that Jobs was about to undergo surgery for pancreatic cancer.
Isaacson describes Jobs as “petulant” and “brittle.” “He could be very, very mean to people at times. Whether it was to a waitress in a restaurant, or to a guy who had stayed up all night coding. … And you’d say, ‘Why did you do that? Why weren’t you nicer?’ And he’d say, ‘I really want to be with people who demand perfection. And this is who I am,” recalls Isaacson.
Isaacson attributes much of Jobs’s personality and drive to a few key moments in his childhood. Isaacson tells one anecdote involving the construction of a fence with his adoptive father Paul. “And [Paul] said, ‘You got to make the back of the fence that nobody will see just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.’”
Jobs was also influenced by the Bay Area, and not just the Hewlett-Packard offices located nearby, but also its counter-culture spirit. “He was sort of a hippie-ish rebel kid, loved listening to Dylan music, dropped acid, but also he loved electronics,” Isaacson describes. He says that when Jobs worked at game-maker Atari they had to put him on the night shift because he walked around barefoot and never bathed, and so employees didn’t want to work with him.
Jobs took a seven-month leave from Atari to travel through India. His encounters there and with Zen Buddhism “really informed his design sense,” says Isaacson. “That notion that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication [came from that trip].”
When Jobs returned, he began making a primitive computer for hobbyists in the garage of his parents with Steve Wozniak, Apple’s other founder. They started with $1,300. By the time Jobs was 25 Apple was worth “maybe 50 million dollars,” Jobs said in a taped recording with Isaacson. “I knew I never had to worry about money again.”
Jobs also had a natural disregard for authority, and felt that normal rules didn’t apply to him, Isaacson explains. One manifestation of that principle was visible in a Mercedes sports coupe he owned, which he refused to put a license plate on.
Isaacson says Jobs’s house in Palo Alto is completely unremarkable. “[It's] a house on a normal street with a normal sidewalk. No big winding driveway. No big security fences,” Isaacson says. He recalls that Jobs said he “did not want to live that nutso lavish lifestyle that so many people do when they get rich.”
Steve Jobs did meet his biological father, who once ran a restaurant in Silicon Valley. But Steve never revealed to his father who he was. “I was in that restaurant once or twice and I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria,” Jobs said on tape. “And it was most certainly [my father]. And I shook his hand and he shook my hand. And that’s all.”
Jobs’s cancer was discovered accidentally while he was being checked for kidney stones in 2004. A cat scan revealed a malignant tumor in his pancreas. Jobs delayed the operation for its removal for nine months while he tried a number of natural remedies first. By the time it was operated on, the cancer had spread to tissues around the pancreas. Isaacson says he believes Jobs regretted the delay.
Through 2008, Jobs continued to receive secret cancer treatment even though he was telling everyone he had been cured. The cancer had spread to his liver by this time.
In the last two-and-a-half years of his life, Jobs no longer wanted to go out or travel, but wanted to focus on the products he was building at Apple: namely, the iPhone and iPad. “I think he would’ve loved to have conquered television [as well],” says Isaacson. “He would love to make an easy-to-use television set… But he started focusing on his family again as well. And it was a painful brutal struggle. And he would talk, often to me about the pain.”
Jobs occasionally brought up the subject of death in their last meetings. “I saw my life as an arc and that it would end and compared to that nothing mattered,” Jobs said in a taped interview. “You’re born alone, you’re going to die alone. And does anything else really matter? I mean what is it exactly is it that you have to lose Steve? You know? There’s nothing.”
Jobs also said he began believing in the existence of God “a bit more.” “Maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on,” Jobs said on tape. He paused before he continued, “Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”
Video Clip
In the clip below, Isaacson discusses Jobs’s decision to put off the cancer surgery that might have saved his life.
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