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New Media News Every Morning

AT&T Goes to Infinity and Beyond with New Social Recommendation Tool, Buzz.com

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AT&T has launched its newest interactive product called Buzz.com. Interestingly, aside from the similarity with Google Buzz, it seems that both service might tend to overlap in terms of function and purpose. AT&T’s Buzz is a social recommendation site with a dash of local search function. It’s a new service for sharing local tips or “buzz” with your friends.

Similar to most social media sites, Buzz.com also taps into the growing social networks. Hence you can register using your Facebook credentials. So, once you register to Buzz.com using your Facebook profile, you don’t really need to build a new community of friends or sift through rants and raves from strangers.

Buzz.com also provides personalized local search based on the recommendations of people you know and trust. Again, another vital ingredient of a successful social recommendation site.

David Krantz, AT&T President and CEO Interactive said that Buzz.com was built on the strong foundation influnced by AT&T Interactive’s leadership and success in local search.

“By offering buzz.com alongside our other local search properties like YP.COM, we create opportunity to reach a broader – and growing user segment that relies on their community to make decisions. For favorited businesses, it means immediate recognition of a loyal customer and positive exposure among a network of friends,” said Mr. Krantz.

[Read more…]

Originally posted on April 20, 2010 @ 5:47 pm

Google Now Selling Unlocked Nexus One for AT&T, Ships to Canada Too

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Earlier today, mobile analytics company Flurry published a report about the dismal performance of the Google Nexus One in terms of its day 74 sales from the first day it was released. According to the report, Google was able to ship only 0.135 million units of the Nexus One. Flurry then compared this with the day 74 sales of both the iPhone and Motorola Droid which were 1 million and 1.05 million units respectively.

The report certainly is not a good publicity for the Nexus One especially since Google hasn’t gone all out in terms of marketing its first major fully branded handset.

A couple of hours later, Google announced that unlocked version of the Nexus One that is compatible with AT&T 3G network and Roger Wireless in Canada is now available for sale at the Google online store.  In addition, this new version of Nexus One will also run on GSM operators worldwide.

I’m not saying that Flurry’s report has anything to do with Google’s decision to announce the availability of the AT&T and Roger Wireless compatible Nexus One versions.  But we just can’t discount this fact since Google certainly wants to protect its investment from any bad publicity, whatsoever.

Google also announced that this new Nexus One can now be ordered from Google’s web store and can be shipped to Canada. As you all know,  Google only ships the Nexus One to the U.S., HongKong, Singapore and the UK.

The AT&T and Roger Wireless compatible Nexus One get the same price as the previously released unlocked Nexus One – $529.

Originally posted on March 16, 2010 @ 4:40 pm

Apple Taunts Verizon with New iPhone Ads

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Apple iPhone Ad – Did You See My Email? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Have you caught the two new iPhone ads shown on TV last night? Reports had it that the new iPhone ads were supposed to appear on shows such as “House”, “Dancing with the Stars”, “How I Met Your Mother” and other Daily Shows on Comedy Central.

Anyway, the ads are appended at the start and end of this post, so enjoy watching. In case you’re wondering what are those iPhone ads are all about. Rumor has it that it’s Apple’s subtle attack on Verizon Wireless which was in a mobile phone ads war with AT&T. AT&T of course is the exclusive distributor of the iPhone. So, you get the picture? [Read more…]

Originally posted on November 24, 2009 @ 5:55 am

AT&T releases online video search application

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AT&T Inc. announced the public beta of VideoCrawler, a new web application designed to provide a better way for people to search for, organize and share online videos and other multimedia content.

Developed in collaboration with Divvio, VideoCrawler indexes hundreds of millions of video clips from thousands of sites, with new sites and millions of clips added every day. Enter a search term and you’ll receive consolidated results from across this vast index. From there, you can organize your favorites into collections, which you can choose to keep private or share with others via the VideoCrawler site or social networking widgets.

“We want to do everything possible to connect customers to the content they want, and today more than ever, what they want online is social media,” said Sean O’Leary, vice president, AT&T Business Development. “With thousands of popular video web sites, it’s become more and more challenging
to find, sort and manage all of the best clips that are out there. That’s exactly what we’re working to solve with VideoCrawler by allowing users to search from an index of the most popular media sources from across the web.”

Originally posted on November 10, 2008 @ 5:47 pm