Common Paradox Tech Blog

“To xfinity, and beyond!” No; doesn’t work for me either. But it probably doesn’t matter, it’s the name of Comcast’s new “TV Everywhere” service, like it or not, that lets some Comcast subscribers access extra TV programing, streamed from the Internet.

Xfinity, which is presently in beta, is open to customers who subscribe both to digital cable and broadband. If you qualify, head on over to Comcast.net, login in, and look for the “Fancast Xfinity TV” logo. Comcast will ask you to download a movie player and an Adobe AIR app, and afterwards authorize your computer. (You can authorize up to three computers.) Then you’ll be good to go.

There are some limits at present. First, you can only access the service on a Comcast network, although Comcast says that restriction will be lifted at some later date. Second, you can’t use the service internationally. Third, no mobile devices for now–maybe next year. But, for the time being, the service is offered at no additional cost.

With this new service could it be that Comcast is signaling a recognition that cable is no longer a standalone necessity? The Internet, while in its media streaming infancy, is offering potential to undermine cable’s entertainment dominance. As Comcast delivers both, it makes sense for Comcast to take advantage of both, giving customers who dump one (cable), a choice of another (Internet). And, as a business model, it beats out Hulu or Boxee and their ilk, because Comcast can make you pay for what you get.

I wonder how well this new service will mesh with Comcast’s bandwidth restrictions.

Image Credit: Comcast

Ransacked by the internet and teetering on the edge of the real ebook revolution, the publishing world is understandably afraid of what’s next. But their skittish plans to shoehorn digital books into the old publishing cycle are stupid. And doomed.

Simon & Schuster sees what’s happening: Real people are buying ebooks now, and the market, in its infancy, is forming habits and expectations. Like bestsellers for just 10 bucks—bestsellers that sell for 30 dollars in their hardcover form. Or should, anyway, but the devaluation of verbiage has been trickling over to real books too, since nobody fucks with Walmart, and they’ve been aggressively price matching, resulting in all out price war.

It’s the worst of all possible scenarios: Publishers aren’t just making less money on ebooks, but on the paper ones too. And people will get the crazy idea in their head that that’s what books are worth, the same way we all think a song is worth 99 cents. (Or, um, nothing to the unscrupulous.)

So Simon and Schuster’s plan is to plug ebooks into their own special place in the publishing cycle: Four months after hardcovers. Meaning you’ll have to wait 1/3 of a year after a book’s published to read it on a Kindle or Nook or tablet or whatever. It establishes a value hierarchy, that looks, as the WSJ points out a lot like the theatrical release cycle for movies. It’s true, the movie industry has fared better than the music industry in preserving the perception of value of their content. But if you look, digital movies have slowly crept up to be same-day as DVD. They’re just really damn expensive—15 bucks.

It’s hard for the publishing industry to do the same thing—charge a premium for the digital version—since they’re trying to get this whole ebook thing off the ground, not to mention the experience just isn’t as good as a real book, at least not yet. They’re still trying to hook people. It’s not an easy place to be, at least not until the ebook experience stacks up more definitively with the real book one. Making people wait 4 months to buy books on their Kindle will, at best, simply hurt ebooks, because no one wants to wait for new stuff, least of all, words. At worst, it’ll put people off of buying those books entirely—they’ll wait for them to hit nook at $10, but’ll have lost interest by the time it comes out. And then the publisher’s still screwed. More to the point, like the music industry found out, and as the movie and TV business is struggling with, the new model is going to break the old one, and arbitrary limitations, will fall like the dead trees they print things on.

I do not envy you, Mr. Publisher Man. [WSJ]

For some time now, it has seemed like Foursquare was the only game in town. I mean “game” literally, as of the major location-based services, Foursquare seemed to be the only one really emphasizing gaming elements. But now Gowalla is starting to emphasize it more.

To be fair, Gowalla has had a sort of sub-game based around the dropping and picking up of items (basically, virtual goods) since the beginning. But in the latest build of its iPhone app which hit the App Store today, version 1.3, there are some new gaming aspects. The first is that items now have histories attached to them. This allows you to see who has had an item before you in a city. Looking over some of my items now, it’s actually pretty interesting to see that I know some people who have some of them before me.

Affiliate marketing is 15 years old this month—CyberErotica is said to have launched the first program in 1994. The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve, but I digress. Despite 15 years of existence, which is essentially an eternity in “online years”, the performance based marketing method is still in its infancy. Sure, there are lots of affiliate programs that exist for many online etailers (and other sites that seek sales, leads and visitors) and $2.1b was paid out last year from affiliate programs, but affiliate marketing is still not as easy as it should be for website/blog Publishers to implement and get compensated for their referrals.

For those that don’t know, affiliate marketing works like this—a company with a product or service for sale pays a referral fee to Publishers (marketing companies) that can drive sales, leads, or visitors to them. The Publisher is taking on the risk here—they might be outlaying their own cash on advertising to promote the product/service, or they are linking to that company’s product/service in the content of their site’s own webpages (when they could be linking to another company instead). The Publisher signs up for an account with the affiliate program and is then given “trackable links” to use in their content, which track referrals back to them. Most etailers have an affiliate marketing program in place—for example, Amazon.com’s Associates program will pay 4%-15% referral fees to you when a visitor of your website clicks a link on your site and makes a purchase at Amazon.com.

Twitter & Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Most recently, it’s not just websites/blogs that are referring sales, but rather individuals themselves, who are using realtime sites like Twitter and Facebook to influence their friends and followers by recommending products to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch. These realtime discussions are becoming important sources of referral sales and leads for websites—if someone is asking on Twitter what digital camera they should buy, you bet your ass that Amazon.com wants anyone on the Internet responding to that user’s question to be linking to a camera for sale on Amazon.com (and not Walmart.com or BestBuy.com). Amazon.com wants to make sure that those influencers are compensated for referring people to buy from their website, which thus positively reinforces them to continue linking to Amazon.com product pages in the future.

Think about your workspace and imagine if your furniture or your desk or cubicle could automatically reconfigure for different applications with a simple wave of the hand. Now check out the reality of Clemson’s Animated Work Environment (AWE).

Essentially, AWE is a programmable wall with varied displays that can switch between six configurations just by activating a proximity sensor. For example, when the wall is hanging overhead like a ceiling, the act of standing up triggers the sensor and instructs the wall to move out of the way. The project is in it’s infancy, but it is easy to see how future applications could lead to a whole range of dynamic, multi-functional furniture that automatically reacts to its environment. [AWE Project via IEEE Spectrum via BotJunkie]

This series is supported by Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Learn more about Grasshopper at Grasshopper.com.

Let’s face it: as an entrepreneur, the odds are stacked against you. Most businesses fail after the first few years, and even if you do manage to survive, that doesn’t mean your business will redefine an industry, become profitable, or change the world. Getting off on the right foot is essential to navigating a startup from its infancy to profitability.

Luckily, there have been countless entrepreneurs that have gone through the same toils building their own businesses, and most of them are happy to share their experiences to better prepare you for the journey ahead. In addition, there is now an array of social media and web apps that no entrepreneur has ever had access to before. Together, these resources can give you the edge in a fast-changing business world.

While we can’t highlight the thousands of resources at your disposal, we have put together twenty of our favorite guides, web apps, and tools that can help you build and launch a startup. This guide is divided into six sections, covering everything from coming up with the right idea to the steps you need to take and tools you’ll want to have to secure funding for your early-stage company. In total, you will find that this guide is a comprehensive resource for anybody who’s trying to realize his or her entrepreneurial dreams.

Guides to Getting Started

Before you dive into your startup (or maybe after you’re neck-deep), you should get yourself a crash course education in starting a business. There is no education like doing, but reading up on incorporating, collecting some checklists, and understanding just what it takes to get your specific business off the ground will save you plenty of headaches later on.

1. The Entrepreneur.com Startup Kits: Entrepreneur Magazine’s website has a gem for entrepreneurs: startup kits. There are kits for everything from starting a restaurant to a consulting firm, complete with articles, guides, marketing tips, and more.

2. eHow’s Introduction to Entrepreneurship: Collaborative knowledge resource website eHow has hundreds of thousands of great articles, including a strong set of guides and resources for how to open a business, how to incorporate, raising money, and bookkeeping.

3. About.com Starting a Business Hub: Another resource you should not miss is About.com’s Entrepreneurs Hub. They’ve curated some of their best content for starting a business, including checklists, a small business startup kit, and detailed articles on naming and calculating the cost of your startup.

4. Library of Congress’s Entrepreneur’s Reference Guide: Yes, the U.S. Library of Congress has an entrepreneur’s reference guide, while it’s dated (1999), it also lists a lot of great books that are updated yearly. It covers practically every topic related to starting a small business.

Inspirations for the Idea

There are few things more important to the success of your startup than having the right idea and continuing to be innovative with your product as it gets built and released to your customers. Ideas don’t just come in cans from the store, though. That’s why we’ve brought together some resources that should help inspire your creative juices and help you nail down the next big idea.

5. Vator.tv: A play on “elevator pitch,” Vator.tv is a place where entrepreneurs can upload short video pitches about their startup. Not only that, but you can follow industry news and specific companies. Watching these pitches will certainly jolt your brain’s creative juices. Also check out VentureBeat Profiles (formerly TradeVibes), which also has a great database of startups and a community discussing each one.

6. Alltop Startups: Reading the latest news and opinions in the startup world can only help jolt your brain and keep you current. Alltop has a great list of blogs and news websites dedicated to the subject (including my personal blog). Take a read, subscribe to the blogs that interest you, and you’ll be guaranteed to be reading about great ideas soon enough.

Startup Web Apps

While there is an array of great web tools for entrepreneurs (10 of the best we previously highlighted), there are some tools that just make your life easier when you’re trying to bring order to the chaos of launching your startup. Consider these tools when you’re in the early stages of building a company:

7. Evernote: Information is king, and there are few web apps that do a better job of collecting information in front of the computer screen or on-the-go than Evernote. The service simply helps you remember everything. You can take pictures of your receipts for easy organization or save key info while you browse, for example, among many other ways to organize and catalog the things you need to remember for your startup.

8. Zoho: Zoho is a suite of online collaboration tools. Not only does it include email and spreadsheets, but it includes, wiki, chat, customer relationship management (CRM), and web conferencing as well. While it is similar to Google Apps, it is built specifically for businesses.

9. PBWorks: Wikis are amazing for organizing ideas and sharing them with team members. There are few better suited for business than PBWorks, which is not only a wiki but a collaboration tool, document manager, and project management tool.

10. FreshBooks: If your business is client-based, you need to track invoices, teams, and payments constantly. While there are many choices, Freshbooks is one of the best due to its mobile apps, integration with Basecamp, and reasonable pricing.

Social Media for Startup Success

Social media is about connecting with people. Interestingly enough, so is business and entrepreneurship, which is perhaps why there is so much overlap between the two. If you want to get your startup off the ground, you have to network, build up your social circle, and reach out to the right people. These social tools are adept at that task:

11. Plaxo: There are few tasks more important in business than maintaining and organizing your contacts. You never know when someone you meet will lead you to a big business deal, venture capital, or a new team member. Plaxo acts as a digital address book that efficiently organizes everyone you meet. Plus, it integrates with Outlook, Thunderbird and the Mac OS X Address Book to make importing contacts a snap. You have to be diligent about adding contacts, though.

12. Google Wave: Google’s experimental real-time communication platform not only has a consumer version, but also comes in a corporate flavor for users of Google apps. Having your team collaborate on projects through waves is a unique experience, one that we have used with success over here at Mashable. No other social tool has the same collaboration features.

13. LinkedIn: This one may be obvious, but its importance in business cannot be overstated. It is the world’s most popular business social network for a reason. Its business features, especially those connecting you to friends of friends, are unmatched, and with over 50 million users, it’s a social media tool you need to be using constantly.

Raising Money

Bringing your startup to the next level takes more than willpower, determination, and grit. In most cases, you need startup capital to build the product, hire the right team members, and maintain the product after it launches. That’s why it’s vital to do your homework on how to effectively raise money.

These are a few resources that will give you a crash course education in venture capital and raising money to grow your startup:

14. Introduction to Venture Capital: If you’re clueless about how venture capital works (most people are), this short presentation by Will Price, former venture capitalist and the current CEO of Widgetbox, explains all of the basics. It was given at Stanford University in 2007:

15. TheFunded: This entrepreneurship community is very unique in that it is focused on helping you raise money. How? By giving you ratings and inside details of the practices of countless venture capital and angel investor funds. The information, once you’re in, is invaluable to choosing the firm that will help propel your business to the next level.

16. How to Fund a Startup: This guide by Y Combinator co-founder and early-stage investor Paul Graham is shockingly detailed on the different ways to raise money, the disadvantages of each approach, how venture capital firms operate, and the reality of bringing investors into your company. A must-read for any startup founder before raising capital.

Startup Social Communities

You cannot and should not build your business alone. The world’s greatest entrepreneurs not only had co-founders, but they had friends, family, and a community of entrepreneurs and advisors that helped them with difficult decisions, overcoming adversity, and fixing mistakes.

With the rise of social media and the web, a crop of incredible startup communities have popped up, each one with a unique character but with a wealth of community knowledge that you’d be crazy to pass up on your journey to build a great company.

17. StartupNation: The recently redesigned startup community network has extensive and active forums, useful knowledge hubs, community groups, and plenty more.

18. Hacker News: The seed investment firm Y Combinator has built a thriving and active startup community known as Hacker News. Users add relevant and interesting stories on the topics of programming and startup entrepreneurship and consistently hold thought-provoking discussions. It’s an incredible place for insight and advice on startups.

19. Young Entrepreneur: Focused around discussion forums, Young Entrepreneur is a great place to ask any startup question on your mind or just to read the over 240,000 posts made over the years on the site.

20. PartnerUp: PartnerUp is a community that really focuses on one thing: helping you find business partners. In business, finding the right co-founders is often the difference between stellar success and a quick, painful startup death. PartnerUp is a community ideal for finding and networking with people that will shore up your weaknesses and help you answer those nagging questions about the partnership side of business.

Series supported by Grasshopper

Sound more professional and stay connected with Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Grasshopper works just like a traditional phone system, but requires no hardware to purchase – it’s all managed online or by phone. Callers reach you whether you’re in the office, on your cell, or at home.

Get a toll free or local number, create extensions for employees, forward calls, get voicemails via email, and more – starting at only $9.95 a month.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cmcderm1

Reviews: Basecamp, Evernote, Google, Google Wave, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Mashable, Plaxo, iStockphoto, zoho

Tags: alltop, entrepreneurship, evernote, Google Wave, grasshopper entrepreneur series, linkedin, PartnerUp, PBWorks, plaxo, startup, startups, TheFunded, y combinator

Personal genomics startup 23andMe has just gone through a round of layoffs, we’ve confirmed. The company declined to comment on how many people were laid off, but offered this statement:

We have reduced our staffing levels in a restructuring of our workforce. This was a very difficult decision, but one that we felt was necessary to achieve 23andMe’s long-term business development goals and maintain our strength in the industry.

These cuts, which are a reflection of the current economic environment all companies are facing, will allow us to continue to invest in the growth of our Personal Genome Service and research endeavors.

Google Wave may still be in its infancy, but it’s already looking towards the future – a future that includes monetization. And part of that monetization will apparently come from an iPhone (or Android)-like app store, where developers can market Wave apps and consumers can buy them, with Google presumably taking a cut.

According to The Next Web, Google confirmed an app store is in the works at an event in London on Monday. The blog speculates that “a Wave marketplace could stock in-Wave applications, along with desktop applications, browser extensions and a world of devices, from laptops, phones, tablets and more with built in Wave support.”

The development doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as Google Wave already has an extensions platform for adding functionality. Back in June, we wrote that “we wouldn’t be surprised if entrepreneurs created robots or gadgets for businesses they could charge for, and expect applications that rival the usefulness of Twitter apps.”

However, an app store is only attractive to developers if there are users. Between iPhone and iPod Touch, there are more than 40 million of them – hence, why you now have more than 100,000 apps, with every other mobile platform far behind. Wave was just rolled out to 100,000 users last month, who are slowly getting invites so they can add friends and colleagues.

We have a long way to go until a Wave app store becomes a reality, let alone a viable business, but it’s an interesting possibility to think about.

Reviews: Google, Google Wave, Twitter

Tags: Google, Google Wave

Leah Betancourt is the digital community manager at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minn. She is @l3ahb3tan on Twitter.

Video blogging is nothing new — after all, video has existed on the web long before YouTube. But video equipment is now cheaper, post production software more accessible, and online platforms on which to distribute video — such as YouTube — are easier to use than ever before. Still, only some of the many people posting videos regard themselves as video bloggers.

Even though the notion of video blogging itself isn’t new, the actual endeavor is still novel to many people. This guide will explore concepts behind video blogging and the tools for creating and distributing that content.

Video Blogging is Still in its Infancy

Robb Montgomery, CEO of a public charity that promotes journalism education called Visual Editors, said in an email interview that web video consumption overall is a booming phenomenon but maintains that we are still at the beginning of an emerging art form and story form with video blogging and it may be too early to generalize about long-term effects.

It may seem surprising that video blogging hasn’t take off considering how cheap the equipment has become and how easy it is to shoot, edit and post video online. According to Adam Singer’s Future Buzz blog, some reasons it hasn’t include: it’s time consuming to produce compelling video, video is not searchable, and pros still have an advantage.

But the demand is there. In August, more than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer, according to data from the comScore Video Metrix service. A whopping 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video and the average online video viewer saw 9.7 hours of video in August.

Video viewing doesn’t show signs of slowing, but what about video blogging?

Web Video Puts People on Equal Footing

Video on the Internet does two things — it puts people on equal footing versus the top-down communication of broadcast media and it allows for direct talkback from the audience.

Michael Rosenblum, CEO of Rosenblumtv, said in an email interview, that the only reason people used to differentiate between average person and journalist is that access to the equipment and the ability to publish was just too complicated and too expensive. He said that went away with the web, which gave anyone the ability to write or publish whatever they wanted.

“Now that freedom comes to video — as the cost of cameras goes to next to nothing and the web carries video with the same fluidity that it carries text,” he said. “What we are looking at here is the true democratization of video — a real ‘free press.’ This, I think, is a very positive thing.

“The move to video blogging, just getting started, is to my mind the same as the move to writing books post-Gutenberg. It took the printing press to liberate writing from the few literate monks; now the web will liberate video from the few ‘video literate’ TV types,” said Rosenblum, who just launched an online video training site called the New York Video School.

What Makes a Good Video Blog

With lower costs for equipment and software, anyone with a video camera phone could become a video blogger. Technical barriers to video production are getting lower, but the big question is, what makes a good video blog?

Ryanne Hodson, a video blogger, editor, and trainer who, with co-founder Michael Verdi, launched Freevlog.org in 2005, said the number one tip for video bloggers is to be passionate and to cover topics they care about. She and Verdi, along with Diane Weynand and Shirley Craig, wrote the book Secrets of Videoblogging. “Be excited about something and go out and capture it,” she said. “If you have something to say and you want to share it, you have a venue.”

Montgomery said that most web video needs to get to the point right away. “Hit them with your best sound bite and start your story arc there to pull them in. People make a go or no-go decision usually within the first 10 seconds. Once you have them, standardizing on story length becomes less important. The key is to know how to keep the story moving at a good pace,” he said.

The length of video clips can vary depending on the style of the video created, but always keep your audience in mind.

“We live in a world of rather short attention spans. We find that two minutes or so is the ’sweet spot’. The whole notion of hours is kind of an abstraction. Think of music. Most songs are three minutes long and that works great, and delivers a great story and experience for the listener,” Rosenblum said.

Josh Leo, who has been video blogging since 2005 and has four vlogs, said good videos are a mixture of the basics of good production: editing, good, clear shots, and good lighting. Beyond that, he adds, it’s an incorporation of one’s personality. “You can create a copycat video, but you’re contributing to the noise,” he said. “It’s not about the quantity, but the quality.”

Leo tries to post a video every other week. He said he learned to improve his videos through trial and error — posting, watching them, and posting again. “The important thing is to post something and learn as you go,” Leo said.

Creating a Video Blog

Montgomery said choosing a video camera depends upon your beat, style, audience and frequency of posting. “I have seen people be effective with a mobile cam or laptop camera. At the other end of the spectrum are solo video journalists who have the chance to make high-quality stories from the field with small cameras like the Sony A1U and about an equal dollar investment in microphones and Final Cut,” he said.

The software Montgomery recommends is a mixture of low-cost and professional applications: Final Cut Studio, GarageBand, iPhoto, Fission, and Audio Hijack Pro for editing and audio.

Leo said that during his first three years of video blogging, he used a Sony Handycam for shooting and iMovie for editing. He now uses Final Cut Pro, an HD camcorder, and an iMac.

Hodson said she likes the Flip cam and Sanyo’s Xacti HD cams. She said Mac users can use iMovie and PC users can use Windows Movie Maker, and a step up from those are Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere Elements.

Rosenblum said Flip cams and the JVC HM100u are great, and noted that shooting in HD is important for certain types of video blogs. “HD is necessary if you want to sell the content for broadcast, and the market for that is expanding all the time. So if you are going to buy a camera, I strongly suggest HDV,” Rosenblum said. He said he loves Final Cut Pro because it’s simple and accessible, and users can start editing from the first moment.

But it’s not just about the video — audio also matters, according to Montgomery. “It is far wiser to invest in microphones and recorders that capture high-definition sound than it is to go for a camera with high-definition pictures and a small lens,” he said.

In the end, though, video blogging is exploding because the barriers to entry are so low. “The bottom line is, if you want to get into video blogging it is remarkably simple and very, very inexpensive,” Rosenblum said.

Distributing a Video Blog

Hodson posts her videos on YouTube, Blip.tv, Archive.org and embeds clips on her blog. She also likes using Flickr for video and photos because she can email them from her iPhone 3Gs, then Flickr sends a link out to Twitter. But, she stresses, no matter where you post your videos, you should add your video clips on your own web site or blog as well.

Rosenblum said he loves YouTube because it is simple and so easy to embed, and that quality of Vimeo and Blip.tv is great and fast, while Montgomery said he uses Vimeo for its quality and YouTube for its search.

“It really helps if you engage with your audience in social media. I got 9,000 YouTube views in one day for my ‘Obama in Cairo’ report (second only to Al Jazeera) because I used Twitter, keywords and other social media to promote the publication at the right moment and in the right social space,” he said.

Leo posts his clips to Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook and his blog sites. He points out that people are loyal to their video providers, so uploading to multiple sites is smart. “It’s just giving people the opportunity to choose how they want to view your video,” he said. “Not everyone uses an RSS feed. Find who your audience is and post it to where they are.”

Video Blogging Tips from Robb Montgomery:

- Only avoid using a tripod when it is impractical

- Be yourself

- Avoid trying to copy TV news formulas

- Film exciting and visually interesting B-roll

- Audio matters for brand identity

More social media resources from Mashable:

- The Journalist’s Guide to YouTube

- The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter

- The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook

- 12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive

- How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jorgelum

Reviews: BLIP, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, iStockphoto, video

Tags: video, video blog, video blogging, vlog

We’ve looked at wireless, inductive chargers in the past, but none of them had a commercial quite as fun as the Powermat. It almost tempts us to spend $100 on it along with the extra $40 per special case.

Wireless charging is still in its infancy, but the idea is great: you have a lil’ mat or platform onto which you can toss your gadgets and let them charge. No tangled wires and fumbling around. There’s a catch, of course, in that most of these chargers will require a special case or add-on to be hugging your device. This makes something like the Powermat one pricey charging station if you want to charge each of your gadgets. But hey, we’ll overlook that because we like their commercial. [Dvice and YouTube — Thanks, GitEmSteveDave for the video link!]