The Suggested Users feature on Twitter is getting a lot of buzz. A study revealed that those who were on the list for suggested users on the microblogging service receives a sudden influx of followers. Jason Calacanis even made a $250,000 offer to be added to the list of suggested users.
Up until now, there hasn’t been an explanation about how Twitter chooses the list of suggested users. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone offered a politically correct explanation on the Twitter blog about how they choose suggested users:
We’ve explained that the Suggested Users list is a bit like your local book store’s staff picks but there’s a little more to it than that. Our Chief Scientist developed a program that scans active Twitter accounts for a bunch of key ingredients such as how much of the profile is filled out, certain indications that the account is interesting to others in some respects, and a few other signals.
If the company suggests a celebrity or business, they ensure that it is a real account.
Stone mentioned that if you want to be added to the list of suggested users, filling out your profile information in the account settings is a good start. The company may get rid of the feature if they find an alternative way to get the job done.
I’ve got mixed feelings towards the feature. I think that they should suggest only mainstream news companies and a couple of other online publications. For example, they should suggest you to follow BreakingNewsOn, CNN, BBC, New York Times, and Wired. I think that if you are in a certain zip code, the feature should recommend local newspapers too. But to make individual, mainstream blogs, and celebrities suggested users on Twitter just seems wrong.
There are other Twitter users out there that have more to offer than some of the pinheads that are suggested.
Obopay.com is a mobile service that allows people to transfer money through text messages. The Redwood City-based company was founded by Carol L. Realini and John Tumminaro. Nokia Corporation wanted to get in early on the company’s success so they invested $70 million into the company. The deal was primarily in exchange for preferred stock.
Obopay currently works in the U.S. and in India. Some of Obopay’s competition includes PayPal Mobile, TextPayMe, and Mpayy.
Now Obopay is over $139 million in funding. The previous round was $69 million from Qualcomm, Essar Communications Holdings Ltd., Alliance Bernstein, ONSET Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Richmond Management, Richmond Global Cellular, Citi, Societe Generale, Promethean, and Olayan America Corporation.
According to a source with BusinessInsider, The Huffington Post is interested in acquiring Deadline Hollywood Daily. DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com started a couple of years ago and has built themselves to about 25,000 on Alexa. No deal has been made yet, but rumor has it that the company is shopping around.
Nikki Finke, founder of DHD met with several people to sell their website in the past. Rumor has it that Nikki met with paidContent and Variety. The Huffington Post recently raised $25 million from Oak Investment Partners so they have money to focus on acquisitions. HuffPo acquired 236.com several months ago.
Sharon Waxman of TheWrap.com revealed that Nikki said she has a couple of other offers on the table. Waxman pegged the deal to be worth around $400,000-$500,000 based on the website’s unique visitors. Waxman also said that Charlie Koones, a former publisher at Variety made a $500K offer.
Pixazza.com is service that connects advertising to images. The company released a press statement about their $5.75 million in funding earlier this week. Investors include Google Inc., August Capital, and CMEA Capital.
Let’s say that you find a picture of a celebrity, Pixazza places a price tag icon on the apparel that they are wearing. Putting your mouse over the price tag reveals an ad that tells you where you can find that product online.
Like.com has a very similar feature where you upload a picture and it e-mails you the place that you can find similar products. Like.com used to be called Riya and it was rumored that Google wanted to acquire that company a couple of years ago.
“Pixazza hopes to do for images what Google’s AdSense did for web pages,” stated Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza. “We are excited about the potential our technology holds for delivering an engaging user experience that creates incremental revenue for web publishers.”
Pixazza’s angel investors consist of Ron Conway, former eBay COO Maynard Webb, and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu. The company was started by James Everingham. He brought together a team of people that worked on Netscape in the 1990′s to put together Pixazza. The company is based in Mountain View, Calif.
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), the $126 billion company (worth less than Microsoft, but slightly higher than Google) that is known for consulting both domestic and overseas announced earlier this week that they are laying off roughly 5,000 people (1.3% of total employees).
The layoffs started on Wednesday and continued through Thursday. But here’s the interesting part. They are moving a large number of jobs to India. In India, you could basically pay about $220 per month in salary to an employee and they would live as good as an $80,000 per year salary employee.
The job cuts will not affect the 3,400 IBM employees that work in Washington, also known as those that work in IT for the federal government. The federal government division of the company is actually growing.
“My understanding is that it isn’t targeting the people who have skills leaning toward federal or local governments,” stated Ben Pring of the Gartner market research firm. “Outsourcing those jobs doesn’t fly in the government context.” IBM made offers to employees to work in different countries, but would be given equivalent wages.
At one point, IBM was rumored to be acquiring Satyam, the IT company in India that is sometimes considered to be the “Enron” of the subcontinent. Later it was declared that IBM wasn’t planning to bid on Satyam. That comes to no surprise because they offered to move their own talent overseas. IBM didn’t become as rich as they are by writing checks.
Every time someone on Flickr uploads an image, they let people know the location of where each photograph was taken. Each photo is also tagged. In the Design Museum in Barcelona, the above video is being used and the display is called “Los Ojos Del Mundo.”
The display tracks local photographers throughout their adventures around Spain and transmits it into the video. According to the MIT City Lab website:
When posting photos online, users of the photo sharing platform Flickr transmit to the world their perspective of a place or event through the lens of a digital camera. Each digital photo file codes both the time when that photo was taken and the location it captures. Analyzing this information allows us to follow the trail that each Flickr photographer travels through Spain. (Un)photographed Spain maps thousands of these public, digital footprints over one year. As photos overlap in certain locations, they expose the places that attract the photographer’s gaze . In contrast, the absence of images in other locations reveal the unphotographed spaces of a more introverted Spain.
Sometimes you have cognitive dissonance after you purchased a home. “Damnit, I wished I moved to the other side of town instead.” The Walking House by N55 laughs at problems like those. The Walking House is a dwelling that moves slowly around landscape with minimal damage to the environment. In the photo above, you will notice a man enjoying the view from the living room of The Walking House.
The Walking House uses a system to collect rain water and to collect solar heat to produce hot water. The Walking House has a composting toilet system that allows sewage produced by the tenants to be disposed of. To cook food, the Walking House has a wood burning stove.
If you get too lonely living in a Walking House, there is also a Walking Villages concept where several Walking Houses are connected. Below are additional specifications about The Walking House:
- Height: 3.5 meters
- Width: 3.5 meters
- Max speed: 60 meters per hour
- Plating and framework wood and plywood
- 12 linear actuators
- Solar panels
- Micro windmills
- Polycarbonate plates
- Interior equipment
Check out the photo gallery below to see what the Walking Village would look like and see other rooms in The Walking House.
InterActiveCorp subsidiary CollegeHumor.com was started in 1999 by Jakob Lodwick, Josh Abramson, and Rick Van Veen. The parent company of CollegeHumor is called Connected Ventures and they also operate BustedTees, Defunker, and Vimeo.
Now they have another company to add to their portfolio: SportsPickle.com. The design of SportsPickle looks like it was made in the 1990′s and I’m assuming the company wasn’t making much money, thus giving CH a chance to buy it on the cheap.
However SportsPickle has been around for a while (November 2001) and had a book released based on their columns a couple of years ago. Some of their articles were syndicated on ESPN also. CollegeHumor will be revamping the whole brand eventually.
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