Marketing

Netflix reportedly getting kid-friendly with new tab

Select Netflix members have been getting a new tab labeled "Just For Kids" in the main menu of the Netflix Web site, according to a GigaOm post.

When clicked, the tab opens a sliding bar of characters from a number of kid-friendly sources, including Nickelodeon and Disney, GigaOm explains. A click on one of those characters opens up a new page with access to TV shows and films starring that character. "Each episode is previewed with a screenshot," the post says, "and there is barely any text at all. Everything is optimized for instant playback … Read more

Khronos updates OpenGL high-performance graphics

The nonprofit Khronos Group standards organization announced a new specification this week for OpenGL 4.2, which brings new graphics functionality to the what's considered to be the most widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API.

OpenGL 4.2 includes specs for enhancing pixel rendering, geometry and efficiency in memory storage and bandwidth, as well as a lot of other very technical specs. In short, OpenGL 4.2 makes graphics looks better across multiple platforms and gives developers a consistent set of APIs to work with.

Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content for Nvidia, said there were … Read more

Spanish ERP company flexes open-source muscle

Most open-source companies rely on business models (and development models) that aim to leverage large global communities of users and developers. The goal? Monetize some percentage of a very large number of community members. So it's hard to imagine a more unlikely candidate for an open source play than Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), an industry dominated by big enterprise proprietary vendors such as Oracle and SAP that sell to Global 2000 organizations.

Openbravo, a Spanish-based ERP start-up, recently expanded its sales and executive footprint to the United States (the company's third largest market), with new CEO Paolo Juvara … Read more

New Relic moves into real user monitoring (Q&A)

New Relic is one of those unusual companies where an entrepreneur who helped create an entire product category--application performance management (APM), a billion-dollar industry--comes back for a do-over that aims to put his first company, Wily, out of business.

New Relic CEO and founder Lew Cirne (the company name "New Relic" is an anagram of his name), spawned the first SaaS-based APM start-up in 2008 as an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital. Today, New Relic is announcing what it says is the first Real User Monitoring solution from a SaaS vendor.

Cirne compares real user monitoring with … Read more

Marketers rethinking social media

Marketers have become more realistic about how to best engage their audiences, according to the results of a new IBM survey.

The State of Marketing 2011 report presented today at a marketing event in Boston covered nearly 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes. Results reveal that marketers have become more practical about their expectations for both mobile and social marketing, as well as the realization that their efforts are strongly tied to IT, especially when it comes to making marketing campaigns actionable for the end-user.

From the survey results:

More than … Read more

Commemorating 20 years of Linux (video)

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Linux Operating System, the nonprofit Linux Foundation has produced an infographic and video that reminds us how much of an impact the open source operating system has had on the world.

In case you've been living under a rock for the last two decades, Linux is part of pretty much every technology ecosystem--mobile (Android), Web (Google), consumer (TiVo), and powers a huge amount of the Internet itself. And it continues to grow, both as an enabler of new services in the cloud and as the operating system that powers huge corporate … Read more

IBM takes aim at Smarter Commerce

IBM is putting its expertise in data analysis and business process to work under a new initiative called "Smarter Commerce" to help make sense of what consumers want and help vendors to better target offers.

"Smarter Commerce" is a reaction to the shift in the dynamics of commerce as a whole, with the customer leading the path to sales, according to Yuchun Lee, VP of enterprise commerce for IBM. The newly packaged offerings are designed to help businesses engage customers with a higher level of relevancy, putting the customer back to the center of the business … Read more

Square aims for growth, drops per transaction fees

A number of blogs pointed us today to news that mobile payment company Square is dropping the $.15 per transaction charge for any business using its mobile payments device and service. Square previously charged 2.75 percent of each transaction amount plus a flat $0.15 per transaction fee.

On the one hand, this is not that big of deal considering that the 2.75 percent is where the bulk of the company's revenue will eventually be made as higher-ticket purchases become more the norm. And, if you consider that 2.75 percent of $5 is $.13, the company … Read more

Still need a job? Learned Drupal yet?

A year ago, I wrote about how those looking for work should consider learning Drupal, an open-source Web content management system. According to the project team, Drupal now powers 1 percent of all of the Web sites in the world.

This week, as the project celebrates its 10th anniversary, the team announced the release of Drupal 7, which features an easier-to-use administrative interface, more flexibility in customization, new database support, and an increased effort to make Drupal sites scale more readily. Nearly 1,000 people contributed to the release. It also announced that it is planning to host DrupalCon 2011 … Read more