Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.
A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..
The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.
Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."
Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.
A new study released on Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found some rather interesting tidbits of information about social network users.
According to the study, 19 percent of Web surfers use "Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others." According to the organization, its earlier findings in April 2009 found that just 11 percent of Internet users were using a status-update service.
But the reason why there has been such an uptick in status updates has much to do with the users themselves, Pew found. According to the organization, the growth is being driven by "social network Web site users, those who connect to the Internet via mobile devices, and younger Internet users--those under age 44."
The study found that 33 percent of those who are updating their status range in age between 18 and 29. Those aged between 30 and 49 make up 22 percent of the group. Just 13 percent of those who update their status are 50 years of age or older.
Pew determined that the Twitter user's median age is 31. MySpace's median age is now 26, down from 27 in May 2008. LinkedIn has also gotten younger by a year, featuring a median age of 39. But Facebook is one of the few social networks to buck the youth trend, upping its median age to 33, from 26 in May 2008.
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If you're running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees' avatars aren't dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.
"Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments," a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success" explained. "However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes."
That means your avatar might want to lose the sparkly pink torpedo bra, metallic leggings, and giant bat wings. When it's representing your company, that is.
The presence of businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life is nothing new--and has been much derided in recent years. But according to Gartner, it's still on the rise, particularly when it comes to training and virtual meetings. "Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behavior, and computing platform requirements," the release explained. Gartner estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will be regulating the avatars of employees who use virtual worlds for business.
Two years ago, Gartner put out a study detailing the risks and pratfalls of doing business in virtual worlds, among them the difficulty of brand and reputation management. Now it's getting more specific: Gartner now says that employees ought to know how to operate their avatars properly, use the same degrees of discretion and professionalism that they do on social-networking sites, and even keep separate avatars for personal and professional use.
As the health care debate rages on, we're still left wondering which doctor is best for what we need. Asking friends is a good way to find out about personal experiences, but one person's opinion might not be enough to go on. For those instances, you need some help from a Web site or two.
I've compiled a helpful list of services that will help you research doctors, and with any luck, pick a good one. Let's take a look.
Find your next doctor
DocBoard: DocBoard might feature one of the worst designs in this roundup, but I found it extremely helpful for those looking to learn more about doctors in their area.
DocBoard features a search tool called DocFinder. When inputting a query, you have the option of searching through the sites listed below the search box. There are a couple dozen state physician board sites listed. If you're looking for doctors somewhere else, you'll find links to the right of DocFinder, sending you to state pages you can't search directly on the site. Since I live in New York, I had to go to my state's respective physician's page to learn about doctors in my area.
But if you live in a state that did make its physician information available to DocBoard, I think you'll like what you find. The site will deliver information on where a doctor graduated medical school, whether or not she's still certified to practice medicine, and more. It's an extremely informative site.
DocFinder gives you useful information on several doctors.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)RateMDs: If you're familiar with RateMyProfessors, a service that allows college students to grade their teachers, you will be right at home with RateMDs.
When you start using RateMDs, you'll need to search by state. From there, you can narrow your search by city, the doctor's specialty, rating, and more. When I searched for doctors in New York, I was quite pleased by what I found. There were several doctors with dozens of reviews from patients who both liked and disliked the physician. RateMDs impressed me even more when I searched in suburban areas. Once again, the site delivered several useful reviews. And thanks to a nice design, you shouldn't have any trouble creating your own reviews.
As with any user-review site, some comments on RateMDs are inexplicably harsh, but for the most part, I think you'll be happy with what you find.
RateMDs features just about anyone you're looking for.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Intel is best known for making CPUs, but its research division continues to bring new ways for users to interact with data on the Web. Think Link, one of the company's most recent projects is attempting to help people spot misinformation, while providing the tools to correct it.
Similar to crowd-sourced typo-finder GooseGrade and SpinSpotter (coverage), Think Link is about bringing attention to mistakes, and inaccurate claims; be it blog posts, news stories, research papers or advertising. Where it differs is in giving users a relatively simple way to back up their claims of wrongness by linking to a reputable source, then letting others vote those ideas up (Google search wiki style), with the best rising to the top.
In other words: I make a mistake in an article, and instead of blasting me in the comments or via e-mail, you can very quickly create a case against something I've gotten wrong with a team of fellow contributors.
Items that have been disputed in Think Link show up with highlighting, and clicking them shows you the argument for and against.
(Credit: Intel)The only hitch is that to view and create Think Link content, users must have a browser extension installed. They'll then be able to see items other users have highlighted as disputed, or "interesting." Hovering over those items that have been disputed pops up with the most agreed-upon proof of something being inaccurate, or untrue.
You can also drill down to see arguments from both sides in something Intel calls the "argument graph." This tool pulls in data from related topics on Wikipedia, as well as other Think Link items, which can help whoever is reading a dispute to see a more complete argument with both sides.
What's really, really cool about this project is that... Read more
Which way is up? Google's test relies on finding images that are easy for people but hard for computers to orient correctly.
(Credit: Google)Google has released research results about a new test to foil computers pretending to be humans by requiring them to orient an image so it's upright.
A persistent problem on the Internet is screening out automated computer systems that can be used, for example, to sign up for spam-sending e-mail accounts or post comments designed to improve a site's search results. Google, which already devotes a lot of resources to block e-mail and Web spam, has tried a new test to keep the bots at bay.
The test is the latest variation on a screening technique called a Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). The idea is that people can often tell which way is up in a photo, but computers have a harder time.
Captchas are in widespread use today, usually in the form of obscured or distorted text that people can still read. But there's a lot of work in the area, including identifying 3D images and distinguishing between cats and dogs.
Here's how Google authors Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, and Shumeet Baluja described the image-orientation technique in their paper (click for PDF):
This task requires analysis of the often complex contents of an image, a task which humans usually perform well and machines generally do not.
Given a large repository of images, such as those from a web search result, we use a suite of automated orientation detectors to prune those images that can be automatically set upright easily. We then apply a social feedback mechanism to verify that the remaining images have a human-recognizable upright orientation.
The main advantages of our Captcha technique over the traditional text recognition techniques are that it is language-independent, does not require text-entry (e.g. for a mobile device), and employs another domain for Captcha generation beyond character obfuscation. This Captcha lends itself to rapid implementation and has an almost limitless supply of images.
We conducted extensive experiments to measure the viability of this technique...Our Captcha technique achieves high success rates for humans and low success rates for bots, does not require text entry, and is more enjoyable for the user than text-based Captcha.
Images can be hard for people to orient upright, too. One 500-person test showed wide disparities in the opinion of which way was up for the left image but not the right image.
(Credit: Google)The tricky part is finding the right balance between too easy and too confusing. Some images are hard for people to orient correctly, and some have cues--faces, text, blue skies, and green grass--that computers can use to figure out which way is up.
To get around this issue, while being able to draw from the large number of images on the Web, the technique presents people with new images as well as those known to perform well. If people have trouble consistently telling which way is up, that image isn't included in the library.
The researchers like their system in part because the image doesn't have to be obscured or distorted, as in text-based Captchas such as those Google currently employs. But image-based Captchas aren't immune from the bot vs. Web site arms race.
"As advances are made in orientation detection systems, these advances will be incorporated in our filters so that those images that can be automatically oriented are not presented to the user," the researchers said. "The use of distortions may eventually be required."
In five minutes, please walk away from your computer, take out your moral compass, and ask it for an update. Then, please tweet the results.
Yes, after the powerful and persuasive arguments of M'lady Greenfield of England--she who declared that Facebook was making us infantile--we now have further cause to worry about ourselves and our children.
Scientists at the University of Southern California have broken away from their task of finding the next 20 or so great football talents for the university to conduct research suggesting that Twitter may take the nerve endings out of our sense of morality.
Here's how researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang put it to CNN: "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states, and that would have implications for your morality."
The idea is that information is coming at us at such great speed that we don't have time to experience the pain or the joy that such information should engender.
Apparently, when scientists scan our brains, they find that we are pretty quick at responding to any sign of physical pain in another human. But we are painfully slow at showing such feelings as compassion or admiration.
In this particular piece of research, the scientists relied on telling people different kinds of stories, and then scanning their brains and asking them to recall the stories, and the emotions attached to them, to see what effect the storytelling might have had.
I have to say that, given my occasional skepticism about research, there were only 13 people who had their brain scanned for this study.
Your brain might, at this point, be scanning the thought that if all the subjects of this research were from Los Angeles, it might be surprising that the scientists found any moral compass at all.
Of course, I couldn't possibly comment on that. I have at least three friends who live there. However, isn't the more general point that the demands of western life seem to have tended toward greater speed for the last 100 years?
Every piece of technology somehow offers a greater speed of something--information, communication, healing, pleasure. Somehow, one has a sense that humans do adjust. (But should they? Should they?)
Surely, any moral compass that exists in our souls is still more heavily influenced by those perennial scourges, like parents, teachers, lovers, social environment and, naturally, reality television.
Sorry. Must go and check my tweets.
OK, I'm back. Mark Cuban just tweeted: "Thought of the Day: "You don't live in the world you were born into" - think about it #FB."
Seems like a pretty moral tweet to me.
Yahoo has signed up three new universities to participate in Internet-scale computing research, the Internet pioneer said Thursday.
The University of California-Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have joined an effort that already included Carnegie Mellon University, Yahoo said Thursday. The universities get access to a cluster of Yahoo computers called M45 that runs open-source software called Hadoop that can be used to process data rapidly.
Yahoo is a major contributor to Hadoop, a project within the Apache Software Foundation's collection, but Google created the underlying technology through its MapReduce algorithm. MapReduce and Hadoop can be used for tasks such as finding, relatively rapidly, all the Web sites that link to a particular Web site, a task that's essential to the companies' search engines.
Berkeley plans to investigate "societal-scale information" including voting records, polling data, and online news. Amherst plans projects involving the million scanned books in the Internet Archive. Cornell has its eye on biodiversity, socio-economic research, and renewable energy.
The universities also will get access to a research computing research project called Open Cirrus spanning several data centers internationally, Yahoo said. The M45 cluster is part of Open Cirrus, which is run by Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and the National Science Foundation.
Automakers have been in the news quite a bit lately. The future of some is very much in doubt. And since the economy is hitting most of us quite hard, I thought it appropriate to take a look at sites that help us find high-quality used cars.
Many of the sites in this alphabetical roundup will provide the research and information you require before you buy a car. Others will allow you to find cars in your area or buy them right on the site. Either way, they're all worth a look.
AOL Autos AOL provides some of the best informational resources on the Web, if you're looking for a car. Whether it's reviews from some of its experts, information on sales, or news, the site has it all. It's a full-featured resource that you'll want to check out.
Automotive.com provides outstanding research.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Automotive.com Automotive.com is a huge site offering car availability in your area, research pages, and loan information. But where it really shines is in its reviews, which provide everything from value and pricing to quality and miles-per-gallon information. It's a very useful site.
AutoTrader.com AutoTrader makes it easy to find used cars for sale and even lets you sell your own car right on the site. But if you're looking to research some models, the site's "Research and Compare" page enables you to find the right car for you based on its make, model, type, and price range. All of the reviews are informative.
Carfax Don't even consider buying that used car until you consult Carfax with its Vehicle Identification Number. Once you get to Carfax, you can input the VIN into the search field, and the site will return the vehicle's history report. The report details past owners, when it was manufactured, where it has been registered, and most importantly, whether it has been through a major accident. It's a paid service (one report will run you $29.99), but it's a necessary step in buying a used car.
CarGurus A community of car lovers combined with vehicle information, CarGurus is a nice site, if you want to find out about a car from those who already have owned it. The site has active discussion forums, which are helpful when you need to ask questions. And its research pages and automobile history reports are worth checking out. But the real value of CarGurus is in those forums.
CarMax Much like AutoTrader and Cars.com (below), CarMax provides you with research information on cars in which you're interested. It also allows you to find cars for sale in your area so you can find what you're looking for sooner. And if you're looking to get rid of your old vehicle, the site will buy your car from you for its estimated value. It then sells the car on CarMax to turn a profit.
Cars.com has some outstanding reviews.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)Cars.com Cars.com is one of the best ways to learn about vehicles in which you might be interested. Its research menu boasts outstanding reviews on practically every car dating back nearly a decade. The site's shopping-advice page comes in handy when you want to determine the real value of a vehicle. It's a must-see before you start your search for a used car.
CarShopSmart CarShopSmart, affiliated with AutoTrader, is a nicely designed site that might be useful. If you want to research vehicles, it boasts some basic information. But the focus of the site is on finding a car in your area or locating dealers close to your home. Unfortunately, though, the size of its vehicle database is a little too small for my liking.
CarZen If you'd like some car-buying advice, CarZen may be the place to find it. From negotiating tactics to in-depth vehicle information, the site will provide you with all the resources you need to place a strong offer. It even helps you find the right car with the help of its fantastic tool, CarConsult. Try it out. You might be surprised by what you find.
Consumer Reports Consumer Reports provides outstanding car reviews, and its simple scoring system helps you quickly determine if a car is for you. The reviews aren't as in-depth as they are on other sites, but what Consumer Reports lacks in quantity, it makes up for in trustworthiness.
Craigslist Craigslist might be a classifieds site, but it's a great place to find cars that are available in your area. Whether you're buying a vehicle or are putting your own up for sale, you can do your research elsewhere and then hit the popular listings site. A variety of vehicles in any price range are always listed.
... Read moreBy now, many prospective college students have received responses from all the colleges to which they've applied. But now comes the hard part: deciding where to go.
Luckily, there are some sites that help them in that endeavor and provide them with valid insight before they make their final decisions. Even better, these sites can also help those who haven't applied yet and are starting their initial research.
For the high school junior who is considering applying to different colleges or the high school senior who needs to make a decision, these sites are outstanding resources.
BeRecruited: BeRecruited is designed specifically for the high school athlete. Instead of waiting for a team to find the student, BeRecruited gives them an opportunity to find colleges across the United States that have the kind of athletic program for which they're looking. They can then upload information about themselves and their high school athletic performance to attract the attention of team recruiters.
CampusExplorer has a lot of great information.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)CampusExplorer: CampusExplorer allows students to search more than 6,000 colleges in the United States to find which campus is right for them. They can search by area, curriculum, or type of school. The site provides information on the size of the school, what it offers to students, and the attendance cost. It even has advice on getting into the school from students who have asked questions about the college on Yahoo Answers.
Cappex: Cappex requires students to sign up and create a personal profile that includes grades, extracurricular activities, and SAT/ACT scores. Once that profile is completed, they can search for colleges, learn about the schools in which they're interested, and use a handy tool called "What are my chances?" to help them determine if they really have a chance at being admitted to a particular school.
CollegeAnswer: Owned by college financial-aid company SallieMae, CollegeAnswer provides students with information about all facets of college admittance. From basic research on schools to information on paying for a college education, the site has it all. It provides in-depth information about colleges, including their demographics and attendance costs. But where it really shines is in its information about college life in general. It's an outstanding resource for prospective and current students.
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