Posted April 26, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Ask’s Dictionary.com has reached the 10 million download milestone for its mobile apps in just over a year. Dictionary.com gets about 50 million unique visitors a month between its site and its mobile apps. The company’s new iPad app already has over 100,000 downloads to date. I spoke with Dictionary.com President Shravan Goli who expressed a great deal of excitement about the iPad and tablet-style devices in general. He says their iPad app already gets a higher level of engagement from users in terms of time spent with the app. Over 40% of users, he says, are coming back 2-5 times a day. Pageviews for the app are nearly 2-3 times what they are for the site. It’s worth noting as well, that the site has games that are not even available through Dictionary.com’s regular apps (though a couple of them have their own apps in Apple’s App Store). While Goli is clearly ecstatic about the popularity Dictionary.com’s iPad app is already receiving, he’s more excited about the future. “What we’re excited about is working on the 2nd generation of the app.” Don’t rule out games in future versions either. Like other smartphone makers have come into play following the iPhone, we’re going to be seeing this big time with tablet devices like the iPad. This is at the beginning of its lifecycle, Goli says. “We look at it as something that’s going to explode.” And Dictionary.com will continue to look for ways to take advantage. “At the end of the day we’re definitely seeing some of our fastest growth.” This a good example of what we’re talking about when we discuss mobile making search more diversified – people are finding different kinds of information in different ways than they might have in the past. Of course Dictionary.com has been around for over a decade, but mobile simply changes the game – someone who may have used Google to look up a word on their computer, may have also downloaded the Dictionary.com app specifically for definitions – or maybe for some of its other features. People aren’t just going to look up words, he says. They’re going for pronunciations, how to use a word in a sentence, word of the day, etc. – things that aren’t incredibly easy to find through “generic search”. Goli says Dictionary.com’s well-recognized brand has played a great role in the success of its apps. “We haven’t done any marketing on the mobile side,” he says. They’ve essentially just marketed the apps on Dictionary.com itself, and they still reached the ten million downloads. Look for an even bigger expansion of Dictionary.com’s presence as they have also opened up their API, giving developers access to words and definitions for use in games and other types of apps.
Tags: api, Apple, apps, ask, decade, dictionary-com, iPhone, rule-out-games
Posted April 16, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click If computing is going to the cloud, does that include printing? It does in Google’s plan. The company has introduced preliminary designs for a project called Google Cloud Print, a service that would allow any desktop, web, or mobile app on any device to print to any printer that the user sets up. “Rather than rely on the local operating system (or drivers) to print, apps can use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs,” explains product manager Mike Jazayeri. “Google Cloud Print will then be responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.” It’s important to understand that Google Cloud Print is in the early stages of development , and there’s no telling when it might become available, but Google has released all the documentation and code as part of its open source Chromium and Chromium OS projects. My guess is that they will want to make something available before too long, as the release of the Google Chrome OS devices gets closer. In case you don’t remember, that’s Google’s web-based operating system, on which all applications on a device are run from the cloud. “While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices. Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system– from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices — simply isn’t feasible,” says Jazayeri. “Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today.” Google says it will have more information to share about which Google products will use Google Cloud Print in the coming months. The company will eventually offer an API for any app to use it. The company expects “cloud aware” printers to become standard, although it acknowledges that none exist today. Google says it will engage with the printer OEM community in the coming months to help drive the effort forward. For regular printers, users will be able to install a print proxy on their PCs to enable functionality with Google Cloud Print.
Tags: api, chrome os, chromium, cloud, desktop web, desktops, google-chrome, google-cloud, open source, print, printers, printing, printing capabilities, Review and Story, web apps
Posted April 14, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Real-time search provider Collecta has released a new API program . “Starting today, developers can plug into Collecta’s network for free,” a representative for the company tells WebProNews. “In light of the recent Tweetie acquisition, we believe that taking advantage of Collecta’s Twitter-compatible, 15+M source real-time network can give developers a real competitive edge.” “Developers have built some amazing applications using data from Twitter’s network,” says Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. “Collecta’s API allows developers to extend their tools far beyond Twitter, to the rest of the real-time web.” Collecta’s Twitter-compatible API delivers real-time web results, in a format the company says is simple to integrate into any desktop app, mobile app or web app. This means third-party developers can now integrate fresh streaming results from Collecta’s base of social media, established news, and unique content sources directly into their applications. Sites like CNET and MySpace, and apparently thousands of others are already using Collecta, and today’s announcement will allow many more to join them. “We want to support the explosion of creativity in the real-time space,” says Campbell. “We love seeing new, clever ways to take advantage of Collecta’s real-time data. We’ve done a lot of the hard work to create the real-time stream so that app companies can focus on their specific ideas.” More information about how to implement the Collecta API can be found here .
Tags: acquisition, api, ceo, cnet, competitive edge, explosion, fresh-streaming, party developers, real, real time, Social Media, time web, web results
Posted April 9, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click As you probably know, Microsoft and Yahoo have a search and advertising deal in place. Microsoft has now released a guide for migrating from the Yahoo Search Marketing API to its own adCenter API. The guide is intended to explain how to develop ad campaigns and request reports in adCenter. “More specifically, the guide maps Search Marketing operations to adCenter operations,” explains Microsoft’s Scott White. “For those Search Marketing operations that adCenter does not support directly, steps are provided to perform a similar functionality in adCenter, if applicable. The guide includes a mapping from each field in the adCenter objects (for example, Campaign and AdGroup) to the corresponding Search Marketing object and field.” The 46-page guide runs down identifiers, building SOAP requests, quota, deleting entities, fault handling, campaigns (adding, deleting, getting, updating, etc.), ad groups (adding, bidding, deleting, updating, etc.), ads (adding, deleting, updating, etc.), keywords (adding, deleting, updating, etc.), targeting (adding targets, getting targets, deleting targets, updating targets, et.), and reporting (requesting a report, getting the report, report type mapping). Readers are encouraged to let the company know (presumably via the comments on this announcement ) if they come across any missing details that they feel would make the transition process easier.
Tags: ad campaigns, api, apis, getting-targets, marketing support, place microsoft, s scott, targets, type mapping, yahoo, yahoo search
Posted April 7, 2010 by cgseo under under
Pay-Per-Click Yahoo has announced that the Yahoo Mail API now allows Read and Read+Write access to full message contents for any type of user. What this means is that developers can create more useful ways to use Yahoo Mail. “Say a company builds a tool that sends users a text message alert whenever their boss e-mails them,” says Risher . “With the new tools we’re announcing, Yahoo! Mail users who are interested in this service can securely grant access to that company without sharing their password (which would be a definite no-no); because they don’t have to share their password, they can also easily revoke access if they change their mind. We’ve even added the ability to limit whether the company can view whole messages or just selected bits like the Subject line.” “With these enhancements, it’s easier than ever for companies to build new features, and we’re all excited to see what new inventions they’ll build with this service,” he says. Last month at SXSW, we spoke with Risher about some innovations going on at Yahoo Mail, one of the most widely used email services to this day (the video was done live – the actual interview starts a couple minutes in): Risher said Yahoo mail has about 350 million users. We don’t know what all companies will come up with, based on Yahoo’s new full API access, but with that kind of usage, there is plenty of reason for them to innnovate in this area.
Tags: api, api access, definite-no-no, developers, enhancements, mark risher, message contents, new features, new tools, password, Review and Story, subject, sxsw, text message, yahoo