Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Last Thursday at a web conference in Beijing, Google introduced the latest step in visual search technology, VisualRank.

Currently, image search delivers results based on the text associated with each picture rather than anything about the image itself. Theoretically, if somebody labeled a ham sandwich as the Taj Mahal, your image search of “Taj Mahal” would show you a sandwich. Google wants to eliminate this method by an analysis of many of the more popular images on the web.
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A 12 person staff composed of some former Google employees is working on a new social search service through their startup Mechanical Zoo.

They’ve managed to keep the development under wraps, but are expecting to release a beta sometime in the next month or two.

Details are slow to emerge from the proceedings, but we do at least have an idea of who’s working on it. Ex-Google employees Nathan Stoll, Max Ventilla, and Fritz Schneider. The team also includs old-school computer scientist Damon Horowitz.
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Google, after showing off its well received App Engine, introduced an online chat app developed by employees on the new platform. The idea was to show off the possibilities of the App Engine to future developers.

Well, their efforts ran into a bit of snag after it became obvious their new app, HuddleChat, was eerily similar to an app developed by 37signals, Campfire.
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There’s a good article in Adotas by Lars Albright, Vice President of Business Development at Quattro Wireless, about how to most effectively advertise on the iPhone.

Not only is the iPhone being purchased in great numbers, but it is almost universally beloved by its owners. AT&T mobility president and CEO Ralph de la Vega reports that 95% of iPhone users regularly use the handset’s browser, and nine out of 10 users say that the iPhone is a better device than their previous phone. The positivity that users associate with the iPhone opens it up for effective targeted advertising.
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Facebook is going ahead with their own IM service that will be built directly onto the social network’s pages, and will use the Jabber open-source platform that Gtalk uses. This will allow users of other popular chat services to fuse Facebook chat with their favorite other instant messaging clients.

This comes at the expense of third party developers (like Social.IM), some of whom were being funded. No more; it’s over, and all the time and money that went into developing these services is for naught.
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