Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Mozilla, Search

Are you sick of having multiple tabs open at one time because you’ve numerous items that you want to read or research? The Taboo Firefox extension will help cure your “tabitis” (their term, not ours, so don’t hate on it) and minimize the glut of tabs on your tab bar.

Once Taboo is installed, you’ll have two new items on your toolbar. When you click the first button, Taboo will take a snapshot of any web page you are on, including session state information (such as the scroll location and any data you’ve entered into forms), and store it for later. You can do this with as many tabs as you need.

When you want access to one of your saved tabs, click on the other Taboo button, and Taboo will load thumbnails of your saved pages into a new tab. From there, all you need to do is click on a saved page, and it will automatically load, complete with scroll location and any text you may have entered.

The saved pages are kept through browsing sessions and shutdowns, and for as many days as you like. Taboo even has a calendar view of all your saved tabs, if you want to access pages from days or weeks ago. You can also search among your pages using the url or page title as a keyword.

Taboo requires Firefox 2, and isn’t yet compatible with the Firefox 3 beta.

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Productivity, Beta

There seems to be an explosion of applications designed to help you schedule group meetings. In the last few days we’ve covered When Is Good, a simple, free web-based solution, and Jiffle, a desktop based application that synchronizes with Outlook and Google Calendar. Today Tungle launched a public beta of a desktop application that looks a lot like Jiffle.

When you install Tungle it will automatically find your contacts and schedule from Microsoft Outlook. When you want to schedule a new meeting you can choose times that work for you, choose from your contacts list, and send out an invitation. If the recipients are also Tungle users they will see your availability in their own calendars. If they’re not, you can create and share a “Tungle Space,” which is a web-based meeting planner. People can then view your recommended times, and choose one and/or leave comments.

Tungle is free while in beta. It’s not clear what the pricing will be when the application emerges from beta. In related news, Jiffle wasn’t available for download when we took our first look at it the other day, but you can now download the application from the Jiffle web site.

[via Mobility Site]

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Filed under: Products and services, Apple Inc (AAPL), Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising

Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)’s iTunes Store are teaming up again to promote “Song of the Day” cards for free downloads from the on the web music store. The first time the two companies worked together was last October when the iTunes WiFi Music Store was launched and featured promotion through the coffee chain. With the renewal, the promotion will follow a more “traditional” music release with new songs released each week on a Tuesday as the “Pick of the Week“. The first program resulted in more than 6 million downloads and the new program is hoped to reach a significantly lower figure: 1.5 million downloads.

More than 7,000 Starbucks locations will take part in the program that will also promote videos in addition to songs. It started this week with the new song “Washington Square” from the Counting Crows and future songs will be pulled from a huge cache of artists, including Starbucks’ own Hear Music label artists’ Carly Simon and Hilary McRae.

As it was last fall, this program is a nice promotion for artists and online music. Starbucks’ Hilary McRae’s first single was one of the tracks in the “Song of the Day” promotion which indicates it is also a nice place for the coffee chain to promote its own label and the CDs that are typicaly on sale in the stores. We can only hope that the program is as successful as its predecessor and that the 1.5 million figure mark is overtaken swiftly.

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Filed under: International markets, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising, News Corp’B’ (NWS)

News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) has not had its fill of the revenue failure of MySpace in the U.S., so it wants to try to address that problem overseas.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Every single market we’re going [into], we’re seeing significant growth in revenues across the board,” said Travis Katz, senior vice president in charge of MySpace’s international business.

Maybe the MySpace model of trying to sell advertising to marketers who want to reach social network users who have no interest in looking at ads won’t be such a failure outside the U.S.

MySpace might actually be doing worse, but in late 2006, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) signed at three-year deal making it the exclusive search engine for the social network and guaranteeing News Corp. $900 million in shared ad revenue. Without that, it is safe to say that MySpace’s revenue would be quite a bit lower.

The economic argument for making money on social networks posits that the tens of millions of people who go to MySpace and rival Facebook are good targets for marketing messages. It appears that this isn’t true. Trying to arrange social network consumers based on interests is almost impossible because they often disclose tiny about their activities or habits.

Getting more users outside the US will not help MySpace. It will go further in proving that marketers are better off sticking to vertical sites and portals where at least the content interests of users is known.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Good news, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising, Battle of the Brands

The idea of serving customer needs and desires is rooted in the age-old notion of listening to the customer. One company taking consumer input to a whole new level is our favorite specialty coffee vendor, Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX).

How about ice cubes made from Starbucks’ own coffee, so you can cool that java without diluting the savory stuff? That’s what one customer suggested. What do you think? Another thoughtful consumer thinks that Starbucks customers might like shelves in the restrooms to rest their coffee on while “taking care of business.” A nice idea perhaps, but I believe that the practice of taking consumables into restrooms is discouraged in most instances.

At least one Starbucks customer request has already had a major effect. Reusable “splash sticks” have been introduced by the company to reduce coffee splash through the sipping lid of its sturdy cups.

The entire focus of this new Starbucks business model is summed up by CEO Howard Schultz, who was quoted in BusinessWeek as saying that he wanted “to open up a dialogue with customers and build up this muscle inside our company.” Mr. Schultz would like to make response to the consumer a cornerstone of company tradition.

So, what do you think? Should Starbucks initiate valet parking? Should it have barristas on roller skates cruising its parking lots? Maybe it should offer complimentary mocha caramel biscuits for the dogs that accompany its customers? What about individual caffeine packets so coffee addicts could personally customize their morning buzz?

One thing’s for sure, Starbucks’ says it’s listening. Now is your chance to prove that you’re a marketing genius. Howard Schultz wants to return the company to its former glory. Give him a piece of your mind, would ya?

Gary Sattler is a freelance blogger. He does not knowingly hold interest in the companies mentioned in this blog post.

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Filed under: World wide web, Utilities, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Over the years, odds are you’ve accumulated more contacts than you know what to do with. What’s more, those contacts are spread out across an array of applications and services. There’s your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail contacts. There’s the contacts stored in Outlook on your desktop. And then there are your social networking contacts on sites like Orkut and LinkedIn. Keepm lets you import all of your contacts from each of those locations and store them online in one place.

When you need to find an email address or phone number, you can then just login to Keepm and find it, no matter where you had initially stored it. You can also share individual contacts with others by sending an email from the site. And of course, you can export your contacts as V-Cards or CSV files.

While we’d be much happier with Keepm if it were actually integrated with an application that lets you use your contacts like Gmail or Outlook. Give us a tool that lets us combine all of our contacts and make phone calls or send email from that application and you will make us very happy.

Note that Keepm also needs your Gmail, Yahoo! or other email passwords to import your contacts. The site states it won’t save your login information, but you do have have to trust the site before using it. But that should go without saying for any web-based contact manager.

[via CyberNet]

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Filed under: Deals, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Time Warner (TWX), Marketing and advertising, Verizon Communications (VZ)

It is the kind of deal most people would have thought would go to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Google (NADSAQ: GOOG). Verizon (NYSE: VZ) will out-source the advertising sales for all of its world wide web operations.

In an arrangement that bypassed the usual subjects, AOL, a division of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) will handle selling Verizon’s online inventory through the web portal’s advertising network and marketing operation called Platform A. According to Reuters, “The Verizon ad deal, whose price was not disclosed, will give Platform A the right to represent all of Verizon’s advertising space on the Internet, including premium space.”

In the last year, Google, Microsoft, and Time Warner have all made purchases of businesses that’ll help them sort, target, and sell on the web ads. Large web operations like Facebook and MySpace have already cut deals for having one of the massive portals or search companies to sell their inventory, but AOL has not been in that mix.

It looks like the incumbents for online advertising representation have a new competitor.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Business, World wide web, Windows, Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware

Tired of sending emails back and forth trying to decide when to hold your next team meeting, video game night, or birthday celebration? Well, while we generally recommend having your birthday celebrations as close to the actual date of your birth as possible, Jiffle can help with the rest.

Jiffle is an online scheduling service that lets users pick the times they’re free and then share their calendar with other users. In other words, it’s a lot like When is Good, but with a desktop client that works with Outlook to let you share your existing calendar on the web. A new version will add Google Calendar compatibility.

You can sign up for Jiffle for free, but we found that when we tried to download the client today we were instead greeted with a message letting us know that a new version would be available next week and we’d be notified when it was available. Jiffle is a commercial application, but there’s a free version that’ll let users schedule up to 10 meetings per month. For $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, you can schedule unlimited meetings. A few bucks more gets you a version with your company branding, and for $99.99 per month you can get the corporate edition with licenses for five users and no advertising.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Products and services, Starbucks (SBUX), Marketing and advertising

In the wake of his nasty divorce, Paul McCartney and his management are in the process of planning a massive world tour for next fall including shows in the United Says. According to British newspaper NME, McCartney is also preparing to debut a big amount of new material on the tour, which will undoubtedly also feature material from his most recent album Memory Nearly Full after McCartney played only limited venues last summer for its promotion. The pending tour will be the largest of its size for McCartney in almost three years, after he toured in promotion of his 2006 Grammy Award winning album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

The announcement that a tour is in the planning stages comes nearly a month after a British court awarded McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills a nearly $49 million divorce settlement, granting her about $34,000 a day for their marriage. McCartney’s separation from Mills began in the summer of 2006, and the divorce included security matters and details related to the pair’s daughter.

There should be no surprise that McCartney would start to plan a massive world tour, especially given that he was unable to do one after Memory Almost Full was released last summer and he has a history of going on the road after each new album in current years. Some may question the timing given how current his divorce was finalized. Regardless, the prospect of new material is very exciting and may indicate that the tour isn’t in promotion of a past album, but of one to come. If that’s the case then attendees and listeners will be in for a treat since no new album has even been hinted at or mentioned aside from long term deals with Starbucks’ (NASDAQ: SBUX) Hear Music.

That prospect, combined with the success McCartney has enjoyed with Hear Music could mean that a new album would fare very well. Time and a tour will only tell that outcome though.

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Filed under: Amazon.com (AMZN), Marketing and advertising

Internet retailer Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is following Ideal Purchase Inc.’s (NYSE: BBY) lead and is now supplying $50 gift certificates to those customers who purchased a now-obsolete HD DVD player on the e-tailer’s website prior to February 23. Customers who bought an HD DVD player before that date have until April 9, 2009 to contact Amazon.com and claim their $50 credits (limit of 10).

It’s good that Amazon.com is finally doing this — but why did it take so long? The pioneering e-tailer didn’t lead the charge on this one, and left that task to brick-and-mortar retailer Ideal Purchase. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) followed shortly behind and then a month later, Amazon.com joins the fray? Generally, Amazon.com is the leading trendsetter — but not this time.

So, Amazon.com is giving previous HD DVD unit customers a $50 credit on anything else available for sale while pitching some great offers on the format winner Blu-ray format (always have to work an upsell in there). It would be great if every retailer who sold HD DVD players would follow along Best Buy’s lead and provide $50 credits to customers as a future business retention tool, but that probably won’t happen. The lack of that action, though, shows just who is in tune with customers and who could care less.

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