Webware

Yahoo Games announced on Thursday that it will expand into ad-supported online games by the end of the year, a move not without its controversy.

Yahoo Games expects to offer more than 400 ad-supported downloadable games via assistance from casual-game advertising network and technology players Double Fusion and NeoEdge Networks.

Under the partnership, Double Fusion and NeoEdge will sell and integrate video ads before, during, and after a game, which is downloaded from Yahoo Games. NeoEdge also is providing technology that will enable Yahoo to insert ads into its game library without requiring the game source code.

Yahoo, however, still plans to retain the ability for users to continue receiving paid game downloads, sans advertising appearing on the games.

That flexibility may be key in satisfying players who may not necessary want ads tucked into a shooter game or a jam session, nor ads scrolling by before or after a game. Nonetheless, Yankee Group Research projects worldwide in-game advertising to soar to $971.3 million by 2011 from $77.7 million in 2006.

Yahoo Games plans to offer ad-supported downloadable games from such publishers as Alawar Entertainment, Big Fish Games, and Last Day of Work.

As I've said before, in coverage of Satisfaction and SupportSpace, if you want to get good support for the products you own, your best bet is usually to skip calling the official support line and find other real users of your product. Somewhere out there, you can be sure, there's a geek who knows the ins and outs of the ice maker on your Frigidaire. Or at the very least, how to troubleshoot your HP Windows Home Server box.

And now, finally, someone's trying to bring those geeks back to the companies that could really use them. MinuteFix looks, at first, much like SupportSpace, a company that pays product experts to provide support to users. MinuteFix does that as well, but its real business model is to sell its service directly to the consumer product companies. It's competing with outsource service companies such as SlashSupport (which provides Vonage's support, for example).

MinuteFix certifies product experts around the world and pools them together into distributed call centers. The cost to companies is the same as for offshore-based support, but the support personnel are now local to the caller (in the same country, at least), sharing not just their language but cultural sensitivities. Plus, hopefully, their knowledge of the products they are supporting comes from enthusiasm and experience, not from a script.

MinuteFix certifies its support providers by testing them on customer service skills, language skills, and any relevant knowledge specific to their clients (similar to how oDesk certifies its providers). Ongoing quality is maintained through post-call caller satisfaction scoring (if a tech doesn't score well, he or she will stop getting calls). Also, the support techs have a channel they can use to communicate with each other during calls, even though they're not sitting near each other. CEO Diego Orjuela told me that techs can make $15 to $20 an hour when they are online taking calls. All the techs on MinuteFix connect via Skype. MinuteFix techs don't get access to sensitive data like billing records, but the company does integrate at least partially with its customers systems so its techs can do a bit more than just talk customers through issues.

Assuming the company gets its technology right, it has two big challenges: Getting good techs and getting customers. To the former, Orjuela told me that advertising on Craigslist has been highly successful, and that he's terminated some ads early since he's been overloaded with qualified candidates.

To the second point, getting customers, he's aware that Volkswagen is not likely to be one of his first customers. He's starting, instead, with the low-hanging fruit: He's going for companies that understand the power of community. His first relationship is with Skype: MinuteFix is the preferred partner in the IT division of Skype Prime; MinuteFix-certified provders earn more than if they are unaffiliated.

Orjuela also pitches more than just enthusiastic techs to his potential customers. His solution makes it easier for companies to set up support teams in different languages or timezones than using traditional call-center-based outsourcing.

MinuteFix is, basically, ChaCha with potential big-money customers. It will be difficult, though, for Orjuela to sell the service, since he'll be going up against the traditional centralized support model and entrenched sales relationships. But that's smart: He's not trying to invent a business model from whole cloth, like so many Web 2.0 start-ups. Instead, he's aiming Web 2.0 concepts at an established and lucrative market, where there are customers paying big bucks already and leaving their customers, to a large extent, unsatisfied. This is a good business model.

See also: 10 ways to make money while in your underwear.

The Rolling Stones were wrong. Sometimes you can get satisfaction. These four companies, presented at Under the Radar, offer Web apps for users to get, ask for, and give feedback better.

FeedbackFX puts a spin on the usual way people provide feedback to businesses--usually via e-mail, online or paper forms, or in-person focus groups. The screen shots in the demo show FeedbackFX as a slick media player, and gives users a lot more wiggle room to review multimedia content like video and designs directly on the media itself, in the exact location under review. This saves time writing up detailed descriptions that clarify exactly how and where the commenter thinks Thing X needs changing.

The company is quickly establishing partnerships with Fortune 500 companies, and is already working with WebEx to deliver feedback for webinars. The product also extrapolates to document reviews, PowerPoint presentations, and so on. You won't hear much about the product on the market, since FeedbackFX will mostly be selling solutions for other businesses to brand as their own.

GetSatisfaction bends the power of crowd-sourcing to customer support in a forum for reporting problems and offering solutions. We at CNET think it's a great idea (see previous coverage here and here,) especially the collaboration vibe. Users ask questions, reply, and rate other peoples' replies. "We make it easy for the companies to get involved," said Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction's President. "Ridiculously easy." Company representatives can jump onto the focused forum in real-time to give their customers better service than the tinny and antiseptic experience of most customer service calls.

What customers can do in on GetSatisfaction.com

It's also a great system for companies to answer a question once and to tap into a community of customers who are helping each other and sharing open dialog. The service's biggest plus? There's no annoying hold music.

Imagine if Facebook hadn't been built by Facebook. What if Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster all created the skeleton for their community by clicking boxes from the same Web site? HiveLive is doing something just that, acting as the conduit between a corporation and its cheery community network. HiveLive's platform lets companies choose the components of their sites, including setting permissions and facilitating online events like a mashup exchange or voting.

It's a good idea, the judges echoed, but not unique. Jive Software and Ning (video) one of the five or six other enterprise software solutions referenced in the space.

"Geek Squad is a stone-age call center with a Web site," said Yair Grindlinger, whose tech support network SupportSpace (see previous coverage,) brings together working technicians ("independent experts") with people who need their help. Search is a main feature on the site, as are Yelp-like features for leaving comments and reviews, and bookmarking favorite techs. Live tech support is a big draw for users, as is the pricing structure, paid either by the minute or by session. Keep in mind that users won't be paying for time spent in lengthy queues.

Like the judges, I'm a little wary of the undefined certification process that the techs (mostly college grads and moms who need flexible work schedules, said Grindlinger) go through before they can collect cash and remote-access into your computer, but user ratings help mitigate dodgy agents. That gives rise to the other problem--how to keep a service like this keep from becoming a Digg-like popularity play, where the techs who succeed are those who have already succeeded.

SupportSpace is a new tech-support network. It certifies independent tech experts and connects them with people in need. I'm unclear how this certification and rating works, but I imagine it's based partly on feedback from users. The company provides call connection, desktop-sharing services, and other utilities to its contractors.

It's a shame that this service (and its several competitors) is needed, but since the tech support we get from most companies is maddeningly poor, this evolution in UGS (user-generated support) is a workable fix. Plus, it could be another decent way for geeks to make a few bucks without changing out of their jammies. The service has been in beta for a while but is opening up to everyone at Demo 2008. See also one of my favorite UGS sites, Satisfaction (see Satisfaction is smart, crowd-sourced support).

It's like an adult chat network. Except they'll fix your PC.

As SAP tries to untwine its third-party support and maintenance company, TomorrowNow, from its legal entanglements with archrival Oracle, a sale, or effort to wind down the company, may be its preferred path.

SAP, which earlier this week announced TomorrowNow's chief executive and several managers had resigned, is now apparently operating without its senior vice president of sales, Bob Geib, and vice president of international sales, Nigel Pullan. Both executives are no longer on the company's management roster, and Pullan's office phone is no longer active. Geib, when contacted by his mobile phone, referred all calls to the company's press contacts.

Meanwhile, one source noted that a couple of TomorrowNow's best sales representatives have been folded into SAP's sales team.

Calls and e-mails to SAP were not immediately returned. It's not clear whether SAP plans to fill those TomorrowNow sales positions, in light of its announcement earlier this week that it was considering selling its subsidiary. TomorrowNow continues to be run by Mark White, TomorrowNow executive chairman.

Meanwhile, TomorrowNow customers were migrated off the company's systems Wednesday and left to get their Oracle updates for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel Systems applications on their own systems, according to a report in eWeek.

TomorrowNow was making good on a promise it made last August during its case management hearing in federal court. SAP said it had revamped its download policies and planned to require any download of Oracle updates for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel be done on the customers' premises, rather than hosting that work on its own servers.

SAP, which acknowledged it had engaged in some improper downloads of Oracle's support and maintenance software on behalf of the customers it wooed away from its rival, is debating its next steps for TomorrowNow, a company it acquired nearly three years ago.

Upate: November 21, 1 p.m.

TomorrowNow's remaining sales team will now report into Mark White, TomorrowNow's executive chairman, a representative for SAP said in an e-mail late Wednesday. The representative declined to elaborate, however, on whether the company is winding down its operations.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article about Imeem, pegged to the news that this fledgling site has signed a third major label, EMI, leaving only Universal in the "not yet" column. The service is getting credit for trying to pioneer a new business model for digital music distribution: users can select songs and stream them for free, as long as they're willing to sit through the occasional advertisement.

I registered and fired the service up, and while I'm not ready to call ad-supported music DOA, Imeem isn't about to unseat the current digital music leaders. The main problem: I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing on the site.

The team from Satisfaction had a demo table at the Stirr event last night. Satisfaction reps were showing off their new system for "people-powered customer service."

I'm all over this one. Because most product support and service just stinks. On everything from washing machines to software, the experience you're going to get from a company is highly variable. You might get a dolt reading from a script. You might get the engineer who built the thing. And you might wait on hold for 45 minutes before you get anyone. That's why customers have been flocking to the Web for support from each other. But customer-to-customer support could be better, too. Web forums, the typical venue for user-to-user support, aren't as easy to use as they could be. Messages and topics get lost, know-it-alls dominate some discussions, and newbie users often have to be up on the concept of forums to take advantage of them to begin with.

Satisfaction is taking a swipe at this problem. Check out getsatisfaction.com/Pownce for an active example of the system applied to Pownce (or go here for more companies). You can see that search is front and center. Also, topics are broken out into questions, ideas, and problems.

Satisfaction: User forums 2.0

Users can rate replies, add their own, and subscribe to discussions (although for the a general audience there should be an easier way to sign up to receive updates on a topic). You also rate responses by "how it makes you feel," which is an interesting new take on ranking user-generated content. The "satisfactometer" will be used to surface the best comments and users, I gather, although there are also ways to more simply flag posts as "useful."

How does it make you feel?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

And this is very nice: users get their own "dashboard" that tracks their topics across companies. So, assuming Satisfaction takes off, we'll be able to keep up with our user-to-user conversations in one place, instead of trying to follow discussions on multiple services (with multiple log-ins and user interfaces). That's important, because Satisfaction is for more than just problem solving, and people might use the service more frequently than they do today's troubleshooting-based forums. Satisfaction has made a good place to discuss broader issues around a product, and, I can imagine, to talk with product managers and designers and engineers who could probably use a better way to connect with users.

While the service is still being built, it's already clear that Satisfaction does a better job of building a town square around a product or company than most other company-sponsored forums do. The design is approachable, and the social tools on the site make sense. It feels more like a site for users than for the companies who make the products, which, of course, is better for the customers and the companies.

Satisfaction reps told me they are "quietly testing the service" now, which means don't be surprised if the servers collapse while they are scaling up the business.

See also: Fixya (review).

WebMD's symptom analysis is nice.

Although you can't singlehandedly fix the woes of national health care that are spotlighted in the movie Sicko, many free Web sites at least put a bit more power in your hands to manage personal wellness or a medical crisis. Just share your data wisely.

WebMD (a Webware 100 winner) offers videos, virtual support groups, quizzes, blogs, doctor lookups, and a spiffy symptom checker. Look up drugs by a pill's color, imprint or shape. WebMD won't spam you, but as with its competitors, if you subscribe to e-mail updates about some unappetizing ailment, then prepare for related tidbits in your in-box. It's too bad that some ads, like those for toothpaste, are hard to distinguish from the rest of WebMD.

Although WebMD offers more activities, HealthAtoZ is also helpful, letting you chat with nurses and create a personal health record with feeds from your insurance claims. But community features, blogs, and videos are lacking.

RevolutionHealth pivots around a treatment portfolio you create in addition to blogging and rating doctors and hospitals. You can pose questions anonymously to the community. Talking to experts about care and insurance costs $129 annually, or is free for a month.

A newer site, TauMed (also here), enables you to create a medical library of clips from the Web, as well as a Health Space profile to add doctors and collect "friends." The question-and-answer service is novel--although it lacks a stealth mode in case you're curious about something blush-worthy.

The ad-free, clean, and less peppy FamilyDoctor and HealthFinder are excellent and encyclopedic. You can dig deeper into the latest medical studies via the National Library of Medicine's Pub Med and Medline, which also offers drug interaction lookups.

For health care quests, social networking takes on a deeper dimension beyond collecting friends, songs and party plans on MySpace or Twitter and the like. Ill people from around the world can compare symptoms anonymously online, share suffering or healing tales, and tip off each other about treatments.

PatientsLikeMe hosts support communities for people dealing with ALS, Parkinson's disease, or multiple sclerosis. You can create quick graphs that track prescription regimens and symptoms. Hopefully similar tools are in the works for a wider array of conditions. I like PatientsLikeMe's Answer Network, a Q&A service that delivers data in novel ways. For instance, bar charts display other members' top reasons for discontinuing specific drugs.

Patients Like Me helps you track complex drug dosages and symptoms.

In addition to linking you with strangers, the Internet provides gathering spaces for family and friends. I've used theStatus, which partners with hospitals, to see from San Francisco how a dear family friend in Ohio fared after heart surgery. TheStatus feels like it sounds--a no-nonsense check-in service for the straight dope on an urgent medical situation. You can leave well wishes, too. BabyStatus is new.

I have another close family friend whose ongoing medical care requires regular attention from people in far-flung places. We tried to set up a Web-based spreadsheet to track our visits via Google Docs & Spreadsheets (more here), but only the few geeks among us could get past the awkward document-sharing steps.

We turned next to CarePages, which was built for our purpose. But its colorful design somehow didn't feel appropriate for tracking the care of a retired mathematics professor who would kick back with paperbacks about string theory in his free time. But CarePages seems a good fit for the million families, particularly those with young children, it has served. Opening a page is uncomplicated. There are sections for pediatric cancer, brain injury, and much more. CarePages is now part of RevolutionHealth.

Similarly, CaringBridge steps you through selecting one of several age-appropriate designs for a patient. You can share photo galleries, a guest book and a journal. But while I picked privacy options, CaringBridge displayed my password in clear type on its site. At least nobody was looking over my shoulder. Security sin aside, I can see why the nonprofit site's ease of use has led to success for more than a decade with some 64,000 patient sites.

With any highly personalized service dealing with sensitive topics, security should be paramount. It's hard to peek inside these sites without registering. You might want to set up a separate e-mail account for medical matters first, and never use your real name as a user ID.

The Truste seal marking WebMD, FamilyDoctor, HealthAtoZ, and CarePages shows that they use the same encryption as bank sites (so does theStatus). I like WebMD's privacy policy best for telling you how you can ask to yank your data from its servers.

All of these Web sites pledge not to send all of your data with third parties--except for John Law. No patient-client privilege here. If you are hiding a medical condition that you don't want unearthed by a search warrant, then you have the nearly impossible option of accessing these sites with a PC and IP address separate from anything else you do in life, also while using strong security software. That's still no guarantee that you won't leave personal cookie crumbs.

On that note, wouldn't it be nice if you could find what's inside all of your medical files from over the years, lickety-split, just like Googling yourself? What if you could connect that information to your genetic code? Such dreams of convenience would trigger obvious privacy nightmares. As Web-based health care tools become easier and richer to use, striking the balance between approachability and security will become trickier.

A new diet site and social network is launching this week: DietTelevison. It looks like a good resource for people trying to lose weight. It has a ton of diet-related information, as well as a social network to give dieters a support group.

As an information source, it's very rich. You select your tolerance for various diet aspects (your affection for bread or for meat; your preference for affordable or restaurant-friendly plans, for example), and the site then gives you a list of diets that matches your wishes. While the site doesn't have arrangements with the people who run the big diet programs (like Atkins or Weight Watchers), it will display them as options, and give you meal plans that are supposed to match their guidelines.

The site lets you pick diets that best match your food preferences.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Users can track their intake by typing their meals into the site. There's also supposed to be a voice-recognition system you can call in to report on your meals, although for the life of me I couldn't find the call-in number on the site. (Personally, I would prefer Nutrax's cameraphone recording system.)

The site can advise you on exercise in much the same way: You tell it what you want to do (choices include variations on working out, running, and activities such as yoga), and it will come up with a list of weekly exercises for you. However, for selecting a diet plan, the system doesn't take your preferred physical activity level into account. That looks like an oversight to me.

And there's a big social angle: you can find people with similar goals and support each other (although when you first connect to the support system, the way it shows photos of other members makes it feel more like a dating service that a support network). You also get badges for various things, such as being a parent, losing 5 pounds, loving junk food, and so on. Users can also award badges to others.

The service has a lot of information on it and is cleanly organized. My only concern--and I only used the system for a few minutes so I may be wrong--is that there is so much information that DietTelevision tries to collect and manage that users might find it overwhelming.

But I think this could be a great research tool for finding diet plans. I really like how the system ranks plans based on what you like to eat.

See also: Traineo, Gimme20 (review), and The Daily Plate, among others.