Marketers find Twitter a tweet recipe for success

LOS ANGELES — Cake decorator Suzi Finer fills in spare time during the workday updating her “status” on Facebook, telling about 2,000 customers about what she’s working on.

It’s no frivolous exercise: Finer is looking to boost business for her employer, Hansen’s Cakes of Beverly Hills, and says that sales are up 15% to 20% since she embraced Facebook as a sales tool in September. “That’s even in a recession,” she says. “People are still having birthday parties and weddings, and seeing these little bits about cakes on updates get them excited about the possibilities.”

Welcome to the social world of Facebook and Twitter, where you are encouraged to tell your online “friends” and “followers” about every little thing you’re doing Most teens and young adults use the short space to discuss the latest movie, CD or TV show.

Business people — including folks like Finer — find that the updates also work as a valuable sales tool. “It’s become even more important than blogging,” says Chris Winfield, who runs New York-based 10e20, which helps businesses with their online marketing campaigns. “It’s more immediate than a blog post, and if you’re trying to get out a message to thousands of people in a flash, status updates are the way to do it.”

Just ask Aaron Chronister, who saw his status update on Twitter grab media attention from CNN and The New York Times, and even a book deal with Simon & Schuster. Chronister of Kansas City, Mo., wanted to get attention for his local barbecue club and a unique bacon recipe.

His status post in December got “re-tweeted” by someone else (the Twitter equivalent of forwarding), the media found it, and now he has a thriving ad-supported BBQ blog in addition to a forthcoming book.

It all started with a status update, which he renews about four times daily to his 1,500 followers. “It’s an easier way for people to see what’s up with you,” he says. “They don’t have to read an e-mail, or go through all this stuff to filter through. Just a short little 140-character message.”

According to measurement firm Quantcast, Facebook averages 78 million visitors monthly, compared with Twitter’s 6 million. However, traffic numbers on Twitter are hard to come by, as much of its traffic is on mobile phones.

From his office in Rochester, N.Y., Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak’s chief marketing officer, updates his status on both Facebook and Twitter as many times as possible during a busy day. He’s become the face of Kodak for many Twitterers and Facebookers, as he attempts to give them “a glimpse into my life, which puts a face to the Kodak brand.”

Like Hayzlett, Finer is the face of Hansen’s. She offers free cake samples to anyone on Facebook, posts celebrity-sighting snapshots and talks about the latest cake she’s working on, or just the scent of butter cream.

“I spend about an hour daily on this, in between cakes,” Finer says.

Her advice for entrepreneurs looking to boost business: “Don’t bother people with sales (pitches) — like ‘Come in and see what we have today.’ That is so annoying. I don’t want a commercial. I’m here to spread the cake love. Write about what makes you happy.”

Winfield’s business used to consist of helping businesses get better placement on search engines, primarily by working on their blogs and improving their websites.

Now, his staff spends a good deal of their time helping businesses update their statuses.

“It’s all about Internet marketing,” he says. “If you can catch someone’s attention on Twitter, and they go write a blog post about you, someone else might link to it, and that will help your Google rankings.”

Matt Rutledge, CEO of Dallas-based website Woot, sends out only one Twitter tweet a day — and it’s the only marketing he does.

Woot sells just one item a day and announces what it is nightly via a Tweet and an RSS feed to his website. Rutledge now has 270,000 Twitter followers — No. 18 overall on Twitterholic’s rankings, and No. 1 business. Whole Foods Market and Zappos.com are close behind with 263,000 and 262,000, respectively.

He can’t point to any measurable sales gains from his Twitter love but says, “It’s been enjoyable to watch Twitter grow. For us, with just one product per day, it’s really well aligned with a short, micro-summary.”

Jason Hirschhorn, who recently resigned his post as president of Sling Media, the online programming arm for Sling, is happily unemployed but eager to broadcast his latest missives on both Facebook and Twitter from two to 10 times daily.

“It’s whatever’s on my mind,” he says. “I love the idea of telling people what I’m thinking about without having to talk to them,” he says.

On the plus side, he says he reads their posts as well. “I’m able to ingest a lot more than if I was having conversations with them,” he says. “I wonder less about what to read or watch, because they post it, and I value their opinions.”

Disability no barrier to gaming

Jon Kuniholm sits in front of the television and plays Guitar Hero, the music video game. He’s sailing through Pat Benetar’s classic, Hit Me with Your Best Shot.

But unlike most players, he doesn’t strum a little plastic guitar with his hands; Kuniholm’s right arm is amputated just below the elbow.

Kuniholm is a bio mechanics researcher at Duke University who lost his arm in an explosion while serving in Iraq. His efforts at Guitar Hero are more than just fun and games.

He is trying out a system developed by Jacob Vogelstein and Robert Armiger of the Applied Physics lab at Johns Hopkins University who hope to use games like Guitar Hero to train people to use prosthetic limbs.

“We call it Air Guitar Hero, actually, because there’s no guitar involved,” Dr Vogelstein told the BBC.

To play the game, users wear electrodes on their residual muscles, such as those found on their chest and shoulder. The system translates the signals from the electrodes as if they were coming from the game controller, allowing players to strum along, despite not having any hands.

Dr Armiger came up with the idea after becoming a Guitar Hero fan himself. He realized that the movements used by the game were similar to those required during the hours of tedious rehabilitation needed to learn to control a prosthetic limb.

he researchers are designing a prosthetic arm, which also learns from the user. So, the more users practice, the better the limb will work. By making practice fun, Guitar Hero helps keep users motivated.

But training prosthetic limbs isn’t the only way that music video games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band and SingStar are surprising people. Music games have sold tens of millions of copies, and they are starting to show up in hospitals, laboratories, and classrooms.

Nintendo Wii sales hit 50 million

Global sales of Nintendo’s Wii console have passed 50 million, the company’s boss Satoru Iwata has said.

The Wii is now the fastest-selling games console in history, surpassing the PlayStation 2.

Mr Iwata also said that Nintendo’s handheld DS console had shipped 100m units around the world.

“Almost no one expected them to reach the current level of mainstream acceptance. It’s even beyond what we possibly hoped for,” Mr Iwata said.

“The market has expanded as video games have been accepted by more consumers than ever before,” the Nintendo president, told the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

“It’s a cliche but it’s not just the 18-year-old kid, it’s the mom on the train, it’s the high-school girl after she’s done with her homework, everyone plays games. “

3/3/09: Math fans to celebrate Square Root Day

REDWOOD CITY, California (AP) — A rare event is upon us, touted by math fanatics as Square Root Day.

The holiday, which only occurs nine times each century, falls on Tuesday this time — 3/3/09 (for the mathematically challenged, three is the square root of nine).

“We have but nine of these days in a century, and hope all can enjoy a little math fun on Tuesday,” said Ron Gordon, a Redwood City teacher who started a contest meant to get people excited about the event.

The winner gets, of course, $339 for having the biggest Square Root Day event.

Gordon’s daughter even set up a Facebook page — one of a half-dozen or so dedicated to the holiday — and hundreds of people had signed up with plans to celebrate in some way. Celebrations are as varied: Some cut root vegetables into squares, others make food in the shape of a square root symbol.

The last such day was five years ago, Feb. 2, 2004, which coincided with Groundhog Day. The next is seven years away, on April 4, 2016.

Gordon knows most people won’t notice the odd calendar event, but hopes those that do get a chuckle out of it.

“These days are like calendar comets, you wait and wait and wait for them, then they brighten up your day — and poof — they’re gone,” he said.

A vibrating hand for the pianist, please

Georgia Tech researchers are trying to reinvent how students learn to play the piano by developing a glove that vibrates to cue a budding musician which finger needs to be played at a given moment. The goal is to fuse music with muscle memory to teach pianists their craft.

“You can literally feel the notes,” said Kevin Huang, the Georgia Tech graduate student who came up with the idea.

His early design is basically a golf glove powered by a battery that’s hooked into five vibrating motors. The glove has a wireless link to a PC, and sends a tiny jolt through the motors to prompt each suggested tap of a piano key.

The glove’s software links to only a handful of songs now, but developers say it can be synchronized with iPods or other music players. That means a student wouldn’t have to be sitting at a piano to begin building the muscle memory of how songs are played.

Huang and his professors were encouraged by a pilot study that showed it helped some users learn basic songs quicker. Eventually he hopes to turn the glove into a wristband that could teach users to play woodwind instruments as well.

Piano instructors need not worry: The glove won’t squeeze out traditional teaching methods.

“It’s not a replacement,” Huang said. “If somebody wanted to learn in a traditional way, they still can. This just augments it. It provides a new, alternative way to learn the piano for people who don’t have time for the traditional, vigorous process.”

Nine-year-old writes hit iPhone app

You might think you’re pretty hot stuff because you’ve figured out how to change your Facebook status from your iPhone, but you’ve got nothing on nine-year-old Lim Ding Wen.

This young prodigy from Singapore is fluent in six programming languages, according to a BBC report this week, and his newest creation, an iPhone drawing game called Doodle Kids, has racked up over 4,000 downloads in just two weeks. He wrote it for his younger sisters, who love to draw.

Doodle Kids, which lets players sketch with their fingers on the iPhone’s screen and shake it, Etch-A-Sketch-style, to clear, has already racked up a healthy three-and-a-half star rating on the App Store. One reviewer commented: “Awesome app!…Amazing that something like this was made by a 9 year old”.

Using Google to find your friends

Ever sit at a cafe waiting for a friend to show up, and wonder where or where could they be? Google has a solution.

On Wednesday, Google introduces Latitude, a tool to track your friends’ locales, via the Web and smartphones, such as Blackberry, Google Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia. It doesn’t work with the iPhone yet, but that’s coming soon, says Google product manager Steve Lee.

Here’s how it works: sign up for the free service and add it to your phone, then agree to sign-up for the friends sharing feature.

When you open the program, Google figures out where you are. Invite friends to track your whereabouts, and they can keep up with you on their phone, or via Google’s iGoogle personalized pages.

If that sounds eerie, Lee begs to differ. “It’s certainly not for everyone,” he says. “But we think it’s going to be really useful for families and close friends and attractive to a lot of users.”

Possible uses outlined by Lee: board an airplane, and Mom can find out, via Google, that you landed. If you’re hanging out downtown on a Saturday night and looking for something to do, you can check your phone to see who else is nearby.

Latitude only works with more advanced smartphones, and Lee says the smartphone audience has grown tremendously. Lee says in the U.S. alone, the potential audience is 50 million phones. Google is launching the service in 27 countries.

Student fitted with bionic hand

A student who had his hand ripped off in an accident has become the second person in the UK to be fitted with a revolutionary bionic replacement.

Evan Reynolds, 19, from Haslemere, Surrey, said it took him minutes to get used to the prosthetic, which has five separately working fingers.

His brother contacted Livingston-based firm Touch Bionic that makes the hand after it was featured on television.

Mr Reynolds lost his left hand when the car he was in scraped a post in 2006.

He had been resting it on the vehicle’s wound-down window ledge when it hit a wooden stake at the exit of a car park and his hand was amputated.

Mr Reynolds, a sports biology student at the University of West of England in Bristol, said: “It was very nasty. It was amputated in a second.

“I always wanted to join the Army, that was what I wanted to do with my life, I dreamed of going to Sandhurst. Obviously I couldn’t join the Army any more, I was devastated.”

However Mr Reynolds said since he had the i-Limb hand fitted it meant he could do lots of everyday task again.

He added: “I put it on and within minutes I was using it as well as I can today.

“People always ask how it’s changed my life, but there’s no specific thing. It’s the hundreds of everyday things you take for granted, which I can do again – like peeling a potato, catching a ball, holding a bottle of water”.

“I’m incredibly grateful to my brother for looking it up and to Touch Bionics for developing the hand.”

Yahoo, Intel have high hopes for Internet TV

(CNET) — Yahoo and Intel built their success upon widespread use of personal computers, but the two companies hope products to be shown at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show will mark the beginning of their Internet-fueled expansion to the world of TV as well.

Yahoo and Intel hope next week’s CES show will mark the beginning of their expansion to the world of TV.

The two companies have attracted several significant manufacturing and content allies in the attempt to bring new smarts and interactivity to a part of the electronics world that has remained a more passive part of people’s digital lives.

Intel and Yahoo showed off Net-enabled TV prototypes in August, but the companies’ technology will be presented in more finished form at the electronics show within products by Samsung, Toshiba, and a number of new partners that have signed on since the debut.

What exactly are they trying to achieve? For Yahoo, it’s establishment of the Widget Channel, a software foundation that can house programs for browsing photos, using the Internet’s abundant socially connected services, watching YouTube videos, or digging deeper into TV shows — and through which Yahoo will be able to show advertisements.

For Intel, it’s a foothold in an industry whose microprocessors have typically been cheaper, less powerful, and less power-hungry.

Yahoo is confident the products will catch on, in part because it’s set “very low” licensing requirements, said Patrick Barry, vice president of Yahoo’s Connected TV initiative.

“We do not see it as a niche offering in a few high-end models. We see this as moving into the mainstream. In 2009 we’re going to see good penetration into the product lineups of the consumer electronics companies,” Barry said. “Beginning in 2010, I think, you’re going to see Internet-connected consumer electronics devices dominating the lineup.”

But for both companies, TVs are terra incognita. “We emerged from the ocean of the PC,” Barry said.