From this report on CNN, it's about what you would expect ... cultural differences yield a difference in look, feel and dynamics. I expect we'll see more and more of these kinds of cultural shadings and nuance, and that there will come to be observable patterns in how people share, comment and use advertising in such a space.
The tools and services offered by Qumana are designed from an ease of use point of view, and hopefully offer little in terms of cultural barriers to their use. The content assembly and advertising selection and placement capabilities we offer users let them make the choices and stay in control of what they want to do and how they want to do it.
If we had an arrangement with a major Japanese advertising supplier, the users of Mixi could go about assembling and publishing content, and could use advertising supplied by Mixi in a work-and-revenue sharing arrangement .. getting content into circulation with appropriate Mixi-approved advertising woven into the content.
Mixi is projecting 4.8 billion yen ($40 million) in sales, mostly advertising revenue, for the fiscal year through March, more than double what it made the previous year. Its initial public offering last year earned more than 6 billion yen ($50 million), catapulting Kasahara to dot-com stardom.
Fumi Yamazaki at Technorati Japan, a blogging search company, isn't too upbeat about MySpace's chances in Japan as people usually don't want to switch social-networking services.
"Mixi and MySpace may be able to appeal to different needs," she said. "But there are some hurdles MySpace needs to overcome."
Even MySpace Japan Vice President Naoko Ando acknowledged MySpace isn't about to put Mixi out of business, but she believes Japanese can use both.
Ando is hoping that Japanese may want to check out American musicians, who offer tunes, messages and virtual friendships on MySpace. The site plans to use its Softbank partnership to sign on Japanese artists.
MySpace also has strengths in video sharing. It's among the leading sites where users post video clips, but MySpace does not yet offer video sharing in its Japanese service and is trying to win over copyright protection groups here, said Softbank spokesman Takeaki Nukii.
Mixi started offering video sharing earlier this month.
Qumana has been selected as one of the select IT companies in British Columbia on Rocket Builders ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list for 2007
Compiled by the Canadian-based firm Rocket Builders, the ‘2007 Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ named a small select group of British Columbia technology companies gaining traction within the information technology trends that contribute to faster growth than the IT sector as a whole. These companies represent high-potential growth in revenue and profile and that are beginning to be of real interest to potential partners and venture capitalists.
“Companies that make our annual ‘Ready to Rocket - Ones To Watch’ list come from a variety of technology businesses and industry sectors across British Columbia, and Rocket Builders has a credible track record of identifying these emerging companies,” says Geoffrey Hansen, managing partner at Rocket Builders. "Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list."
About the Ready to Rocket 25 and the Ones To Watch
Each year, based on analysis of trends that will drive growth in the information technology sector, Rocket Builders identifies twenty-five (25) private companies that are best positioned to capitalize on the trends for growth. This selection methodology has been an accurate predictor of growth with "Ready to Rocket" companies exceeding the industry growth rate. Also, many of these companies raise investment capital and each year many of the profiled "Ready to Rocket' companies are acquired. To be eligible for selection to the "Ready to Rocket 25" list, companies must be a nominated Canadian-Controlled Private Corporation, and have a commercialized product on the market that has customers and is generating ongoing revenue.
Additionally, Rocket Builders also identifies early-stage high-potential companies it places on its 'Ones To Watch' list
"Many promising companies are too early in commercialization, too early in first revenues, or in transition to new markets or business models. Based on the potential of their technology alone, we recognize their potential in a "Ones to Watch" list." Visit: www.readytorocket.com
About Rocket Builders Rocket Builders is a market strategy and consulting firm focused on helping technology companies to capitalize on market opportunities. Since 2000, we have been engaged in market research, market planning, business development initiatives, strategic selling, and product launches for over 100 organizations. As a service to the local community, each year Rocket Builders shares its insight on market trends to showcase the most promising information technology companies in British Columbia through its “Ready to Rocket” event. Visit: www.rocketbuilders.com
The recent announcement that YouTube will share advertising revenues with members who contribute their work to YouTube is yet another marker is the steady march towards dissembling the structure and dynamics of the traditional broadcast media industry.
The other service cited in the article has been sharing revenue for a while, but is not the Web 2.0 darling status acquired by YouTube based on it's acquisition by Google.
Qumana's business model has since the beginning been based on sharing advertising revenue with users who use the Q-Ads service to attach relevant advertising to their social media content.
The bulk of social media sharing (the 'social' in the term social media, tho' there's more to it than that) still happens on and in blogging networks, and IMO this is unlikely to change in the near future.
As advertising gets more and more relevant to niche markets, and gets easier to identify, pull and place into or alongside media-born work created by personal publishers, we believe that Qumana's value proposition will get stronger and stronger.
Joe Eigo, a martial arts expert in Toronto, used to pay hundreds of dollars a month for computer and hosting services to distribute his own acrobatic and martial arts videos on the Web, in the hope of raising his profile in the TV and film industry.
Today, not only is he able to distribute his content to millions of people at no cost using a popular online video-sharing site, he has also been paid nearly $26,000 (U.S.) by the site owner.
Welcome to the new world of user-generated content on the Internet. What some people consider quirky material at best, companies are increasingly starting to view as a valuable asset. So valuable, in fact, they're willing to pay for it.
Metacafe, a private firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, has been paying thousands of dollars to participants for over a year.
Every video on Metacafe that is watched more than 20,000 times, and is rated 3 out of 5 or higher by viewers, starts earning the producer $5 for each subsequent 1,000 visitors.
Metacafe rates Mr. Eigo as its top earner. One of his clips has been viewed more than five million times and has helped him attract the attention of several producers and film companies, he said.
“It's an amazing opportunity for anyone who wants to produce their own material now. The Internet has become more popular than television,” he said.
Ok .. so we've rearranged our priority list to move to the head of the list making Qumana 3.0 operate smoothly once again with the newest version of the Blogger platform.
None of us here use the Blogger platform.
Would any of you out there who used to use Qumana with Blogger (and hopefully still use it if you operate blogs on other platforms) mind giving us a hand by helping us zero in on what doesn't work, what Qumana does poorly, rudely, or not at all when attempting to publish to Blogger using it ?
Your help will be invaluable .. we want to modify / repair Qumana as quickly as possible.
San Francisco and Vancouver (Nov. 29, 2006) -- Qumana Software Inc today announced availability of the Q-Ads tools (http://tools.typepad.com/get/qads) and the popular Qumana offline blog editor (http://tools.typepad.com/get/qumana) for users of the TypePad blogging platform. Users of Six Apart's popular hosted blogging service can now quickly and easily insert keyword-based ads directly into their blog posts, whether they use the Qumana editor or not.
"Qumana is thrilled to be offering the industry's easiest ad insertion tool to this important blogging community," said Fred Fabro, CEO of Qumana. "Q-Ads puts TypePad bloggers at the center of the explosive growth taking place in online advertising," said Fabro.
"TypePad bloggers deserve creative and powerful ways to earn money from their blogs. Qumana offers bloggers a unique approach, and we're happy to introduce their tools to our customers." said Michael Sippey, VP & GM of TypePad at Six Apart.
"With Q-Ads TypePad bloggers can choose which keywords best represent the editorial message of the blog post and then with one click pull an ad from our network that best relates to that content," added Fabro. "The result is a matching of TypePad bloggers' content to an ad message, which can give the ad message greater relevance to blog readers. Greater relevance means higher click-throughs and happier advertisers," said Fabro.
Qumana's Q-Ads tool is a browser extension that works as an Internet Explorer plugin or Firefox extension that enables users to "pull and place" text-based advertising based on the keywords they enter. The Q-Ads Tool works with all major blogging platforms, including TypePad. There is also a Q-Ads plug-in for Windows LiveWriter.
Qumana also offers Typepad users the leading off-line blog editor in the blogosphere. Qumana allows bloggers to create media-rich blog posts in a familiar WYSIWYG interface and with simple button clicks insert the keyword-based ads, Technorati tags, and multimedia (e.g. YouTube videos) through the innovative Insert HTML button.
The insert ad interface is designed to allow users to enter the keyword of their choice and then customize the size and colour of the ad before inserting it into their post.
About Qumana Qumana Software Inc. is an advertising and web services company that provides content providers and personal publishers with market-leading methods for delivering and adding advertising to online content. Qumana's mission is to make blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers globally. Qumana is run by Internet industry veterans, hardcore bloggers, software purists, and world-class designers committed to keeping things simple. For more information, visit http://www.qumana.com/
About Six Apart, Ltd. Six Apart Ltd. provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate across the world every day. Founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott, Six Apart has grown into a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, CA, and offices in Europe and Japan. The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type publishing platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service LiveJournal, an online community organized around personal journals, and Vox, a free personal blogging service for friends and family. For more information, visit http://www.sixapart.com/
For more info: Fred Fabro - CEO and President, Qumana Software Inc. e: fred AT qumana.com Tel: 604.837.0400
We've gotten some reports and have confirmed that the latest version of Qumana and the lastet version of OSX aren't playing nice together. We're working on the fix and will have a new version of Qumana for the Mac out as soon as possible.
We've been very busy working on important bug fixes, enhanced stability and the addition of valuable new features designed to expand users' publishing capabilities andoverall ease of use.
More specifically, here's what we've addressed and accomplished over the last two months.
First, we recently completed Phase One of a formal usability study, which essentially told us everything you, the users , have been telling us since our beta launch in mid-February. It has been very useful to have all the bugs and improvements grouped together in one place, and organized such that we can either say ... "oh, good, that's been dealt with" or "thanks for that recommendation .. now we know for sure how and why (and where) to implement that", and so on.
Next ... we recently completed and made available versions of Qumana in French, Dutch and Spanish. With this release we will be adding a German version to the suite of Qumana blogging tools.
We’ve made major improvements in the stability of the editor, notably, Qumana no longer freezes when a user is moving an image around in the editor, and the quirkiness some users have experienced when dragging and dropping text onto the DropPad and thus into the editor has been fixed.
The rather annoying problem with blockquotes has also been fixed, too.
On the font front, you can now set not only the face (we list the common fonts all users will have), the size, andthecolour!
Finally, we have made it easier for the average user to add video clips and other web-based objects or services that use HTML snippets into their posts... whether it be a video, a podcast, an mp3 ... you get the drift. Look for the blue button between the Insert Link and Check Spelling buttons (represented by a closed brackets icon to denote HTML code).
We've also been reading a lot about Windows Live writer and thinking what it's appearance means for us.
We think it means two things. We'll be glad to hear your opinion, too.
First, it seems a clear signal that Microsoft is declaring that "blogging is NOT a fad" .. the release of MS Live Writer helps to raise awareness of the need and market for such applications. We believe this is good news for us .. and for Ecto, Blogjet, Zoundry, Performancing, w.bloggar, Marsedit and other similar applications. May the best amongst us find traction, niches and ways to prosper.
Second, it sharpens the issues about what adds value to blogging … what is it that reflects users' input, doesn't waste time, or valuable resources, and still delivers a -free product that offers use and value over and above the basics.
We’re proud of this new version of Qumana, which offers greater ease of use, stability and reliability and the ability to post video clips to a wide range of blog platforms with one or two clicks. Thanks to Ianiv Schweber and ou suppliers / colleagues in the development process …
Here's how I used to do things before I started using Qumana regularly:
I'd be browsing, and I'd be reading something which triggered a thought and then the desire to blog about it.
I'd leave the page, open my blog page, go to "Post New Entry", which would take me to the blog software's editor (which had taken me a while to learn).
Then, I'd put in a title, and maybe write a sentence or two. I usually quote an excerpt from what I have been reading, so I would have to go back to the web page I was on previously, highlight the excerpt, and then go back to the blog software editor .. where I would paste what I copied.
Then, I write some more to flesh out the post. And then, if I wanted to include some links, I'd have to start the round trips back and forth between the web pages where I would copy the links, then go back to the blog software editor and type in all the <a href> tags, and any WYSIWYG effects such as italics or bold, etc.
And THEN, on top of all that, I would have to preview and proof read, because I am not a hugely accurate typist.
AND THEN ... what if I wanted to include Technorati tags ? I still don't know how to include Technorati tags in a Blogware blog post using the Blogware editor.
Lots of work, demanded lots of concentration ...
Now, using Qumana ... here are my newly developed blogging work habits:
I'm browsing, and I read something which triggers a thought and the desire to create a blog post around the quote.
I highlight what I want to quote, drag and drop it onto the DropPad .. double-click on the DropPad, which opens the Qumana editor.
I add a title, I write some text to flesh out the post. I go back to the quoted page, or surf to another page (leaving the editor open), copy the URL of the links I want to include, go back to Qumana, use the Insert Link function to create the links (it's just pasting the URL into the dialog box).
There' still some back and forth, but it's much easier because the Qumana editor window is open just "over there" on the left.
There's spellchecking, so the final review is much easier (for me).
Tags ? Click on The Insert tags button, type in the Technorati tags you want to include, and click OK. That's it, that's all.
Adding images and video clips is easy .. and will get easier still in the future (it's one of the things we are working on).
If you're a blogger that wants to use advertising on her or his blog, that's easy too .. but just because it's a function available to you in Qumana doesn't mean you HAVE to use that functionality.
I'd never go back to the way I used to compose blog posts ... no way.
Just noticed whilst browsing .... dragged and dropped it, fixed a link, chose a few categories, added some tags and hit "Publish Post".
Google Testing Ad Supported Premium Video Google is running a test offering about 2,000 premium videos available for free streaming viewing, inserting a persistent banner-type ad at the top of the screen and showing an additional post-roll video ad once the premium content has finished streaming.
The test is expected to last about a week, according to Peter Chane, group business product manager, Google Video.
Of course, all sorts of bloggers who know how to play with html and embed video clips into their blog posts. But most newbies, and many of us more practiced amateurs, still don't like wrestling with image and video upload and the publishing function inside the major blog platform editors. Even if it isn't complicated any more, it still may seem complicated to many users, so they don't get into the habit.
And it can really be fun to publish video clips easily ... and often.
Qumana now makes it really really easy to publish video clips from YouTube or other similar services. It's not elegant (yet), but here's how ... now.
Update: I had a whole section here .. well, actually only three or four sentences ... describing the "How-To", but hadn't noticed Arieanna's earlier post. I've deleted mine
Thanks to popular demand, Qumana now lets you change your font and font size.
How to use the font features:
Select the text you want to change
Use the pull-down menu to change the font and fontsize
Defaults:
If you leave the font menu as either "Default Font" or "Default Size", your post will use the font choices you have selected in your blog template.
Fonts:
If you choose a specific font, like Arial or Time's New, it will display to all readers of your blog the same way.
If you choose the "serif", "sans-serif" or "cursive" font options, the font will be displayed based on browser preferences - so, with these, the font may appear differently to you than to your readers.
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Where is font color, you may ask? Well, it didn't quite make it in. We want it to be slick - you know, with a fancy color picker and stuff. We'll have it in the next release.
We hope you enjoy the new features! If you have not yet downloaded Qumana, go give it a try.
A new Qumana beta (version 3.0.0-b4) is available to download. This new Qumana is a step up from our last release - we have been working to squash bugs, add a couple of features, and make Qumana easier to use than ever.
We are, of course, extremely excited about this new release. It has been an exciting few months of plans and partnerships, and now we have something to give back to Qumana bloggers to make their lives easier.
One of the biggest advances we made is in the image dialogue. After banging heads for a while trying to figure out how to make it simple and fast, we borrowed some ideas and concepts from familiar word processing and email, and here is what you get:
Everything you used to see (title, size, etc.) is now hidden in the "Advanced" tab, and the "Basic" tab has the biggest time saver in pictures I've seen: Wrapping Style. This means you can click one button and your picture will wrap with your text, giving you tons of creative power without all the fuss.
The next big feature is Advanced Posting - letting you pick the day and time your post will publish. So, if you go on vacation, you can set posts to go up when you're away.
Of course, this means you can also post to the past, if you had news that you wanted date-specific.
This is not all we've done. Check out below for a full list of the changes in the new Qumana release:
New features:
Post date can be set to any time (advanced posting) for blog platforms that support it
We have received many requests for features over the last couple of months. Rest assured, we have an aggressive development plan for our next release, mostly focusing on features as well as other fixes. Let's just say we're excited about making it easy for people to publish multimedia rich posts, and to make money from them of course.
We're not going to set down a date, but it will be sooner rather than later ;)
Robert Scoble (based on a post by Jonathan Schwartz) put up a very thought-provoking piece today entitled "The problem facing every tech company", which asks the question, how do you reach the unreachable masses to see and use your technology?
So, question # 1 is: how do you reach your customer? Question #2 appears in a comment by Kirupa, asking, what everday problem does your product or service solve?
Kirupa rightly points out that the most effective marketing works upon existing wants, needs or problems of customers. They don't have to create a need and then fill it, but simply tap into something already felt by the customer. Thus, effective marketing can easily point out the problem and offer a solution.
Most technology companies fall into the rut of saying their technology is so fancy and has all these great widgets and features and lets you do everything in one easy way. It's an easy rut to fall into. You are proud of your features, and customers tell you they love your features. But the fundamental thing is that those features solve some sort of problem. It's just a matter of figuring out what.
In order to reach your customer, you must first identify what problem you can solve for them.
Here at Qumana, we are asking ourselves this question. We know many features of our product make blogging easier, but that is not the fundamental problem that we solve. So what is?
I often find myself wondering what will be next .. and then next .. and then next .. in the endless stream of applications that help us manipulate, manage and sometimes mangle the process of writing and publishing to the Web.
At Qumana we have been conscious for a long time that every individual has her or his own working style (have you ever watched over your friend's, or your sister's, or your dad's shoulder whilst they are doing something on the computer, or on the web ? I'll bet you're just like me, and everyone else I have ever seen ... you just instinctively want to reach out ands steer, because they aren't doing it the way you do) ... ;-)
The Web is now a major part of hundreds of millions of peoples' lives. Personal publishing of some form or another, whether it's called blogging or something else, won't be going away any time soon.
On the Web, info flows in to your conscious awareness all the time .. continuously. Whether it's via an RSS aggregator, or through some search activity, or just by browsing and link-hopping. You're always watching, reading .. using your cognitive capabilities and style to *interact* with the flows of information passing in front of your eyes.
Ours (and many other peoples') quest is to design, make and offer applications that give you maximum time for reading and thinking whilst you are at the center of this continuous flow of information. Ideally, we would get most operations - most anything you want to do, other than typing itself - down to one click, but it's not likely that we'll get every operation down to that level of simplicity. But many, if not most will be.
In the blogging / personal; publishing environment, we want to make publishing all sorts of other digital content (think podcasts, self-created mp3's, photo slide shows, video clips) as easy as publishing text, links and images are now. We want to make Qumana, and Qumana integrated with Lektora, formidably simple *information pivots* which will allow you, the personal publisher, read, think, write and express yourself as clearly and elegantly as possible ... whilst still offering you significant flexibility, versatility and power to address the wide range of individual's personal publishing habits.
We want to help you become more effective in the ongoing, never-ending, flow of information. We will welcome any and all feedback that helps make this quest a reality, for you and all your fellow personal publishers.
A new Qumana beta (version 3.0.0-b4) is available to 
We are, of course, extremely excited about this new release. It has been an exciting few months of plans and 
The next big feature is Advanced Posting - letting you pick the day and time your post will publish. So, if you go on vacation, you can set posts to go up when you're away.
