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Mozilla, Samsung collaborating on the browser of the future

April 4th, 2013

TechHive

Experimental engine for next Web coming to Android, ARM processors

SAN FRANCISCO  - Mozilla can see the future of web browsing, and it lies in multi-core computing. Today’s quad-core processors will be quaint compared to the massive CPUs of the future, which are expected to contain 16, 32 or more cores.

With that in mind, the maker of Firefox announced Wednesday that it’s teaming up with Samsung to create a next-generation browser that will be built from scratch and will be based on a new engine, Servo, as well as use a new programming language, Rust.

“Mozilla’s mission is about advancing the web as a platform for all,” Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich wrote in The Mozilla Blog Wednesday.

“[W]e’re supporting this mission by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser,” he wrote. “We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures.”

Continue reading… 

Categories: Digital Media News, Tech Business & Marketing News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

YouTube joins Facebook in the 1 billion users club

March 25th, 2013

TechHive
Thanks to the generation of Americans, age 18 to 34, who watch YouTube on multiple devices and enjoys video creation and sharing.
TechHive

SAN FRANCISCO – The Internet’s obsession with cats has finally reached a tipping point. Late Wednesday, YouTube announced that it has more than 1 billion unique users every month. That puts YouTube in the same club as Facebook, which surpassed 1 billion monthly users last October.

YouTube has long been the most popular video site beginning in the days when it was mostly user-contributed videos and premium video sites—such as Hulu—had yet to appear. These days, YouTube is the go-to site for movie trailers, music videos, the occasional pirated TV episode, as well as cats fighting printers and skidding across linoleum floors.

The Google-owned site attributed its large growth to Generation C, a term coined by metrics firm Nielsen to describe American aged 18 and 34. “Born sometime between the launch of the VCR and the commercialization of the Internet, Americans 18-34 are redefining media consumption with their unique embrace of all things digital,” Nielsen said in an early 2012 study. On YouTube, Gen C are the folks watching YouTube videos across multiple device types including smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Not coincidentally, this crowd also happens to be big on video creation, sharing, and curation of favorite YouTube clips.

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Categories: Social Media Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

TechHive Fuels Up on Car Tech Coverage through Partnership with Edmunds.com

March 22nd, 2013

News release


The consumer tech site, from the publisher of PCWorld and Macworld, forges a partnership with car-shopping resource Edmunds.com to expand car tech coverage

SAN FRANCISCO – TechHive, the newest consumer tech media brand from IDG, has struck a partnership with popular car-shopping resource Edmunds.com to expand its car tech coverage and help its audience find their automotive sweet spot.

“Automakers realize that today’s drivers want cars that work well with their personal technology,” notes Jason Snell, SVP, Editorial Director for IDG Consumer & SMB, the division that manages TechHive. “As important as smartphones, tablets, and always-on Internet connections have become to all of us, it’s become far more important for our cars to fit into our digital lives.”

With the unique, collaborative editorial partnership, Edmunds.com will bring their auto tech expertise directly to TechHive’s audience to help them get the most out of their devices. TechHive editors will bring their consumer tech expertise to the Edmunds.com audience of car shoppers to help them make the best tech choices. Content produced together will appear on both TechHive.com and Edmunds.com as it’s created, with the first feature length story, Best Tech-Friendly Cars of 2013, slated for this spring.

 For the full release click here

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IDG Calls On ‘Hero’ Display Ad Units To Save The Banner

February 21st, 2013

Adexchanger

In the two months since tech publisher IDG finished a major redesign of its PCWorld, Macworld and TechHivesites, the company is ready to expand the centerpiece of that effort: the “Homepage Hero” box.

The box is intended to serve as a front door for each site, displaying a large slot called the “Content Hero,” where editors display the biggest stories for each day, with one section saved for sponsorships sold by the IDG Consumer & SMB division, which operates the sites. The Hero units seems like yet another bid by a publisher to “go beyond” the 728×90 banner ad to attract lucrative brand awareness dollars. But IDG Consumer & SMB CRO Brian Gleason is quick to tell AdExchanger that while the redesign does reduce the number of ad units on a page in favor of the larger, higher priced Hero unit, the format is ultimately being used to complement regular ad spots, not replace them.

“There’s certainly a place for a banner, even today,” Gleason said. “There’s just not a place for nine units on a page. Otherwise, it starts to look like Nascar – a logo placed everywhere. That’s part of the reason we did this — there’s more breathing room for both consumers and advertisers.” Within the past few weeks Microsoft, Intel, Samsung, Brother and TrendMicro have tried out the Hero units, which IDG has claimed to have yielded average click rates of between 2 and 4%

Continue reading… 

Categories: Advertising & Marketing News, Digital Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

America’s most tech-friendly cities

February 14th, 2013

TechHive

Albert Filice, Leah Yamshon and Mike Homnick contributed to this feature. Special thanks to OpenSignal, Semiocast, Ookla and the U.S. Census Bureau for contributing data and expertise to this feature.

What makes a “tech-savvy” or “tech-friendly” city? It may be a combination of public and private amenities that are available to those people who spend a significant amount of their time online, whether they’re at home or out and about. It could also mean the availability of such services at prices that don’t make it difficult to live the digital lifestyle. A tech-savvy city might be one where a significant part of the local economy is driven by information technology or by the production of the machines that allow people to create or access information.

TechHive developed a set of ten measurements to reveal the extent to which the country’s largest cities possess those tech-friendly traits, or, put a different way, to show which cities are the most and least hospitable places to live for the tech-inclined.

Specifically, we looked at the number of IT jobs, the computer sciences graduate programs in the area, the availability of public Wi-Fi, the speed of 3G and 4G cellular services, the number of LTE wireless services to choose from, the speed and cost of home broadband service, the number of tweets that originate from each city, and the availability of city-government apps. (More about each of these measurements below.)

The most tech-friendly cities

After we had gathered and crunched all the numbers, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Atlanta, and Boston emerged as the most tech-friendly and tech-savvy cities in the land. The winner, San Jose/Silicon Valley, is not so surprising, since that Northern California area has long been considered ground zero for the computer industry. As such, personal technology is a deeply ingrained part of the local culture.

San Jose and the surrounding cities of Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and Sunnyvale have by far the largest proportion of computer pros of any place in the country. More than 52,000 IT jobs—or about 3.7 of them for every 100 residents—are based in the area. That number put San Jose/Silicon Valley well ahead of the city with the second-highest IT jobs per capita, Seattle, which has about 2.5 IT jobs for every 100 residents.

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Categories: Tech Business & Marketing Research | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

IDG Consumer & SMB Sees Ad Performance Rise With Redesigned HTML5/Responsive Sites

February 6th, 2013

Business Wire

PCWorld, Macworld, and TechHive, get a big boost in click-through rates with high-impact ad placements

SAN FRANCISCO—   Two months after the launch of redesigned HTML5/responsive websites, IDG Consumer & SMB is seeing encouraging results from its changes to PCWorld.com and Macworld.com, along with newly launched site TechHive.com. Overall, ad placements are delivering an average click-through rate (CTR) around 80% higher than pre-redesign levels.

IDG Consumer & SMB’s sites are also performing well against industry benchmarks. Ad units scheduled as run-of-site are delivering an average 0.38% click-through rate, compared to the tech industry average of 0.11% (MediaMind Global Benchmarks 2012). All three sites have better than average click performance with content and user targeting as well.

“We’re very pleased with these metrics,” notes IDG Consumer & SMB Chief Revenue Officer Brian Gleason. “We focused our redesign efforts on giving users visually-rich and intuitive websites that work across devices. We also wanted to make sure our advertising partners had a prominent place among our content. We’ve hit the mark for both readers and marketers.”

InCaseHero Macworld 0912 300x281 IDG Consumer & SMB Sees Ad Performance Rise With Redesigned HTML5/Responsive Sites         SamsungHero TechHive 0912 300x285 IDG Consumer & SMB Sees Ad Performance Rise With Redesigned HTML5/Responsive Sites

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Categories: Digital Media News, Tech Business & Marketing News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

IDG’s Stab at the ‘Premium’ Banner Ad

February 6th, 2013

Digiday

Banners aren’t going anywhere, but publishers are busy trying to remake them into something more interesting — and that advertisers will pay more for them than the rock-bottom rates available in programmatic ad buying.

For some sites, that means rethinking the page. Gannett, for example, eliminated 47 percent of its ad slots in its September 2012 redesign of USAToday.com. At the same time, IDG Consumer & SMB took a “less is more” approach, removing two to three standard display ads per page. It instead rolled out what it’s calling “the content hero” on TechHive, PCWorld and Macworld. The oddly sized unit, which is 1130 x 500, takes over the site on the homepage and highlights the advertiser’s offering. The unit sits on top of editorial content for the first eight seconds of the user’s visit. It then reduces in size and leaves the brand logo on the site.

“By taking fewer ads, we thought it was risky because eliminating ads means we may lose money,” said Brian Gleason, chief revenue officer at IDG TechNetwork and IDG Consumer & SMB. “But [this] proves larger units, more impactful units that can fit in with the design of a page without taking away from the user experience is being welcomed on both sides.”

Continue reading… 

Categories: Digital Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Facebook Graph Search turns ‘Likes’ into searchable data

January 16th, 2013

TechHive

MENLO PARK— Putting hardware rumors to rest, Facebook didn’t announce a branded phone Tuesday. And it didn’t even launch a dedicated mobile initiative that would have remedied the company’s ability to make money on smartphones and tablets. But Facebook did go straight after Google’s bread and butter: You can finally search through the massive piles of information, photos, music, “likes,” and other data on the social networking giant’s servers.

The new feature is called Graph Search, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dubbed it the “third pillar” of Facebook behind the site’s News Feed and Timeline features. Within the next few weeks, a few hundred thousand users in the U.S. will get a chance to use the new search functions. You can sign up for the Graph Search beta program at the bottom of this page.

“We’re giving people the power and the tools they need to search through the content on the site,” Zuckerberg said.

For example, users can now search for all their friends in their hometown that use the site, a relatively simple task that couldn’t be done before on Facebook. The site now hosts content from nearly a billion people, including 240 billion photos.

Zuckerberg stressed that Graph Search is not the same thing as Web search, which is, of course, rival Google’s main business. One difference is that Graph Search does not use keywords. It’s a structured search, where users can type in phrases such as “friends of friends who like Star Wars,” or “Friends of Pete who went to Stanford,” or “restaurants in New York my friends liked.”

Continue reading… 

Categories: Social Media Blog, Social Media News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PCWorld and TechHive Pick Top 100 Products in Time for Holiday Gifts

December 18th, 2012

PCWORLD
Mobile and home entertainment products dominate list topped by Windows 8

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–With big technology launches and announcements now on par with blockbuster movie premiers and red carpet galas, tech fans were treated to their fair share of pageantry and promenading from the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and many others this year. The experts at PCWorld and TechHive took a look back at 2012 to rank the 100 Best Products that made the biggest impact, and have released their list just in time for the holidays.

Windows 8 is No. 1

At the top of the list of 100 Best Tech Products sits Microsoft’s biggest operating system update and rollout since Windows 95: Windows 8. In some ways, the jury is still out on whether Windows 8 was/is a big success, but the experts at PCWorld and TechHive credit its substantial performance improvements and bold step into the mobile/touch-screen universe with winning the top rank for 2012.

The top 10 includes many of the most popular and successful products from the year: Apple’s iPad (3rd generation, for its groundbreaking, high-res Retina display), Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone, and even TV maker Vizio’s first foray into the laptop market with a sleek ultrabook. Check out the full list here:http://go.pcworld.com/100best

Tech in the Home

The era of the smart home is dawning, as indicated by the large number of home automation and home entertainment products turning tech experts’ heads in 2012. Vivint ranked in the top 100 for bringing sophisticated home security and automation systems (alarm, electronic door lock, door/window sensors, lighting controls, an IP camera, and a programmable thermostat) to the mainstream market. Automation solutions from ADT and Lowes also made the list. Other top products for the home include a handful of wireless and network-capable sound systems and speakers, two HDTVs, several acclaimed video games, and a number of headphone offerings. Take a closer look at what PCWorld and TechHive had to say about the products from the list in the categories of home technology and entertainment.

5 Flops & 5 for the Future

For the PCWorld magazine version of the 100 Best list, editors also took the opportunity to review some of the products of the past year that didn’t quite make the impact they could have, and some others to look forward to in the coming year.

The five on the list of flops and failures: Google Nexus Q—Google’s overpriced media streaming device; Ping—Apple’s ignored music-oriented social network; Sony PS Vita—the underachieving handheld gaming system; 3D TV sets—in only 3% of U.S. households; and Windows Home Server 2011.

For 2013, the PCWorld team recommends keeping your eye on five highly anticipated products: Open-source gaming console Ouya; Google Glass—the wearable display product demoed this year; A hand gesture device for controlling your computer called Leap Motion; Microsoft’s Pro version of the Surface tablet; and the epic third sequel to one of the best video games of all time—Half Life 3.

Overall, the editors at PCWorld and TechHive have come up with a thorough list of the year’s most exciting and impactful tech, just in time for everyone to hit the electronics stores and websites for the holidays. If you’re looking for more advice about a category, or insightful reviews on all of the top 100 products, visit PCWorld.com and TechHive.com.

About PCWorld & TechHive

IDG Consumer & SMB publishes leading tech media brands, PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive. PCWorld includes PCWorld.com and PCWorld magazine, reaching nearly 16 million readers each month who look for advice on getting the most from the PC ecosystem. TechHive.com launched in Sept. 2012 and gives it’s growing audience of almost 2 million visitors a fresh, enthusiastic perspective on new technology and its active role in our lives. Both PCWorld and TechHive can be found in apps and readers across many smartphone and tablet platforms, along with responsive, HTML5 websites, built to flex to virtually every screen size.

IDG Consumer & SMB is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading technology media, events and research company.

Additional information about IDG, a privately held company, is available at http://www.idg.com. Additional information about IDG Consumer & SMB is available athttp://www.idgcsmb.com/.

Contacts

IDG Consumer & SMB
Jim Hopkins, 415-978-3380
jhopkins@idgcsmb.com

Categories: Digital Media Blog, Social Media Blog, Tech Business & Marketing Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The 100 Best Products of 2012

December 7th, 2012

PCWorld

Around this time each year, the editors at PCWorld and TechHive gather to recognize the best new tech products—the hardware, software, gadgets, and devices that had the biggest impact on the world. The process starts out casually enough, because editors get to name their favorites from their respective beats, and everything is included in the first pass.

But passions rise when the time comes to winnow what inevitably becomes a very long list to just 100 new products. There’s a fervent back and forth as the editors make their cases as to why their product should remain on the list—and someone else’s should be whacked. Staff alliances form and dissolve as editors strategize how they’ll win the day for their picks.

A list with 100 computers, smartphones, printers, cloud services, and other great products inexorably emerges over the course of a few weeks. But that’s only half the battle, because the editors must now decide the order of importance that each product holds. That came together surprisingly quickly this year—at least for the top 10 products. As for the other 90; well, let’s just say the list was settled only after great deliberation.

And here, without further ado, are our picks for the 100 best products of 2012:

1. Windows 8 Professional (operating system)

Continue reading…

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