Author Archives: Kristen Nicole

What’s more frustrating than going over your minutes on your cell phone plan? Not much, right? The act of receiving a simple reminder could help you stay on track, so that’s what PageOnce, the web-based personal assistant service, has added to its suite of features.

The new PageOnce Cell Minute Tracker not only keeps track of your minutes but it keeps track of how you use your minutes as well. The application reminds you of what day your billing cycle ends, how your minutes are being used, and what you’ve payed for past bills. Got a family plan? The PageOnce Cell Minute Tracker will break that down too.

There’s also an option to pay your bill directly from the PageOnce Cell Minute Tracker. This of course ties in directly with the PageOnce personal assistant tool, which aggregates several services into one in order to help you stay organized and up to date on things like bills, travel itineraries, and more.

The PageOnce Cell Minute Tracker will cost you just under $1.00 per year, which is extremely cheap, even in light of other services like SkyDeck that offer similar services for free. Even your phone service itself will most likey offer similar tracking and payment tools, but the PageOnce Cell Minute Tracker comes with all the other personal assistant tools the service has to offer.

More importantly, PageOnce would be able to use much of its data for recommendation purposes later on down the line. Taking the data from its users and turning it into personalized recommendations based on things like payment history is something that can eventually be done in a way that also maintains the privacy of its users.

by Kristen Nicole

Acquisitions are part of business, and they can be pivotal for a company looking to quickly expand on its own offerings. Sometimes businesses like to wow the world with their finished product, and don’t publicize the details of an acquisition. Perhaps this was the case with Amie Street, which acquired the online music streaming service Songza some six months ago. After a TechCrunch article revealed the acquisition, I got in touch with the folks at Amie Street to hear the firsthand story behind the deal. Below is the brief interview I had with co-founder Joshua Boltuch of Amie Street:

Kristen Nicole: It’s been found out that Amie St acquired Songza late last year. Why keep it a secret?

There is no big secret. We acquired Song with a bigger vision for the product and we were planning on announcing the acquisition when that vision was ready for the public. From our customer’s perspective, the experience on Songza has not significantly changed since we acquired it so there was no urgency to announce it.

Kristen Nicole: Can you reveal any of the financial details about the deal?

No, although I can say that the unattributed report coming from TechCrunch that the price of the acquisition was for the high six figures or low seven figures is not true.

Kristen Nicole: Songza started out with a different model for streaming music. How are you looking to integrate Songza into your long term plans?

Songza adds another dimension to our company and gives us a great product to build upon in an area that is extremely popular with music fans. Our focus is on providing the most enjoyable music experience possible and compensating artists and labels for their hard work, and we’ll listen to our customer’s (both artists and labels) to tell us what they want and how they want it.

Kristen Nicole: What did your previous partnership with Songza consist of?

It was an affiliate partnership.

Kristen Nicole: Amie St’s model has always been based on supply and demand determining the actual price of a song, which is a model that larger services such as Apple and Amazon are now adopting. How does this furthered trend affect you?

I think it’s good validation of our model and that pricing all songs at $.99 is not the best way to sell digital music. But I wouldn’t say Apple is adopting our model. Pricing songs at $.69, $.99, and $1.29 is not demand based pricing–just three different price points. We are the only store where fans drive the price because we continue to see that empowering fans and including them in the process is the best way to maximize sales.

Kristen Nicole: Your model is also very socially driven. Any plans to incorporate this into aspects of Songza as well?

If you’re talking about incorporating something like the REC system on Amie Street—where you’re rewarded for recommending music with site credit for more downloads—that’s not something that can just be plugged into Songza. But if you mean making Songza more social in general, absolutely. You’ve already seen some small but important improvements on Songza around sharing and connecting members, for example sharing your favorite music via Facebook and Twitter, and there’s certainly bigger improvements on the way.

by Kristen Nicole

Diddy knows how to market his brand, and that ability has leaked further into the realm of social media with the latest promotion. An iTunes application, which is free to download, turns to users to submit photos of themselves that may end up being used for Diddy’s upcoming album, Last Train to Paris, which will be in stores on September 22, 2009.

The album cover will actually be a mosaic of photos submitted from the participating Diddy fans. Until then, submitted photos will be used for the application’s mosaic, which gives a good indication of how the album cover will look. From the app, you can submit photos and also tweet them (see Diddy’s Twitter stream here).

The application itself is pretty basic and lacks any other media integration, such as clips from songs to be expected on the album, or videos. This is quite unlike Pink‘s iPhone application, which isn’t specific to a particular album or promotion, but acts as a mobile hub for all her media (music, videos, photos). But it’s the social media aspect of the application that Diddy is really relying on here for participation and promotional purposes.

Sending in photos of themselves and the Twitter integration works, but is it enough? It makes sense that this app would have Twitter integration, as this app will be used mostly by iPhone users. But what about the rest of social media? Facebook and MySpace both have platforms that could be leveraged for support within this app, and could spread Diddy’s promotion even further across the web. Facebook would be a particularly interesting integration as its platform is now fully compatible with Apple’s mobile platform.

The good thing for users is that the world of social media is getting so intertwined that you can set up most of your activity on one site to appear on another. Twitter can be fed into any service that supports RSS, and a plethora of third party apps have made the redistribution of your tweets an automated afterthought. Most the status updates on my Facebook home page are now imported tweets.

So it’s perhaps for this reason that Diddy has no qualms with the fact that Twitter appears to be the sole form of direct social media integration for his Last Train to Paris application. This really demonstrates the growing influence of Twitter as a platform, and its mobile-centric design only further establishes Twitter in this position.

note: image credit Gizmodo

April Fools day was an entire week ago, but we’re still learning of some of the hoaxes that we fell for on the 1st of the month. Remember that photo of a giant helicopter that doubled as a flying hotel? The hotelicopter turned out to be real, but as a hotel search engine instead of a flying cruise ship.

The hotelicopter’s engine aggregates search queries from over 30 different hotel search websites in order to give you a free, comparative review of hotel prices. The search is done in real time, and displays hotel room rates, availability, photos and videos in order to provide a multi-layered and media-centric approach to helping you find the right hotel and the right price.

This aggregate search engine is achieved through its 65 travel partners, and access to a database of 150,000 hotels. Hotel bookings are done through hotelicopter’s partnership with hotel chains as well as independent hotels, through Hotelier Suite extranet. So instead of going to a single website that searches several hotels, or opening up multiple tabs in order to compare your own prices for diffrent hotel search sites, take the one-stop approach at hotelicopter.

Another added benefit to the newly revealed hotelicopter is its integration with Facebook Connect, giving users easy access to the hotelicopter service (if they’re an existing Facebook user), as well as the ability to share travel plans as recommendations to friends. This works both ways, as others can look at your previous activity to get ideas on their own hotel search.

The icorporation of Facebook Connect is important as it takes hotelicopter into the realm of direct recommendations to an existing social graph. I think in partnering with other services to expand within the travel booking realm, as well as with platforms such as Facebook Connect, hotelicopter can take a broader approach to recommendations given the type of data it’s collecting from its users. This is all valuable information for itself as well as for its partner sites, as it acts as an aggregator that segues between thes traight search and data providers and the socially driven users.

Last week Twitter removed its auto-follow feature, deeming it “disingenuous.” What’s that mean, exactly? And since Twitter is still allowing celebrities and high-profile users use the auto-follow feature (upon request), why can’t the rest of us?

Let’s take a quick step back and look at what the auto-follow feature is. As a Twitter user, you’re able to follow other users in order to receive their updates on your home page or your mobile phone, depending on your settings. If you follow another Twitter user, it’s most likely because you care about what they have to say and you’d like to keep up with their updates. But sometimes, you follow other Twitter users for reciprocity reasons. It’s the nice thing to do, to return-follow, when someone cares enough about what you have to say in order to follow you.