Flought, a really fun project, was the winner of this idea. You can find more about the teams that participated, here.

These are some of the pictures that I took during the event. The Startup Weekend took place at the Kicklabs Offices, a very cool place! (Look at the pictures)

For one more year, O’Reilly and UBM Techweb co-produced a very successful conference on May 3-6 in San Francisco,CA. One of my favorite presentations was the one from Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Adam Smith (Xobni) with the title: “From Zero to One Million Users” This is their presentation:

Many great keynote speakers and some of them were: Tim O’Reilly, Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger), Ge Wang (Stanford University, Smule), June Cohen (TED Conferences), Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare, Inc.) and my favorite Steve Blank (Stanford/Berkeley/Columbia) You can view all the keynote speeches here

Photos from the event:

The Adobe CS Live services have just been launched. (8pm PST) Go here and start using them with your Adobe Account (free).

Here you can see some screenshots of the new Adobe CS Live services:

With Square Up application you can have paperless iphone-based transactions. An iPhone user can easily receive a credit/debit card payment in 5 seconds. The system involves a small plastic card reader which plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone (or iPod Touch) and transfers the credit card’s swipe data to the app. The user has already synchronized his Square Up application with his bank account that automatically receives the payment. It looks like PayPal but it is simpler and mobile!

So, you go out with your friends and you pay all the drinks. Your friends don’t have cash to give you and of course you don’t want a check. They just give you their cards, you swipe them and you get the money you want in 5 seconds! Isn’t it cool? You have a garage sale or you sell something through Craigslist. You meet with the buyer and you get the money instantly through your iPhone! No cash, no checks!

It is safe and easy! According to Paul, “Today there many ways to pay with a credit card but very few to receive money with a card.” Square Up solves this problem and makes the money transactions iPhone-based and paperless.

The plastic ‘square’ will cost $1 or so and the application will be free. Square Up keeps a small percentage of the transaction every time you use the app.

(Picture via)

I guess that most of you have noticed or read about the change in Flickr‘s logo.. Yahoo recently added “from Yahoo!” next to Flickr logo in order to enhance its brand through this very successful image and video hosting service. What yahoo did is very reasonable and it might help the company’s brand. Apparently this action is a part of its new campaign. Why Yahoo chose only Flickr and some others and not all of its websites? For example Zimbra and Delicious, two very successful websites, don’t have a yahoo logo in the header or the footer. I can understand that the audience of Zimbra is much different than the one of Flickr but Delicious focuses on the similar target market that Flickr does. Interesting..

Yahoo has several websites, services and divisions. It is quite difficult to have a uniformity across its websites but it is important. I navigated through several Yahoo websites and I noticed that there are some differences in the logos (old red and new purple) and in favicons (the small icon next to the web address). Yahoo has several logos: ‘a Yahoo division’, ‘a Yahoo service’, ‘this is Yahoo’ and ‘from Yahoo’. Why all these different? Some of them in the old red and some others in new purple.

With favicons, Yahoo has not a uniformity across its websites. In most of them we see the new purple Y! and in some others the old red one.

I like that Yahoo has a very modern logo. I also like that on the web purple means Yahoo! and they chose a unique and rare color instead of using blue that most companies do! But.. They need to pay more attention in uniformity across its websites..

Someone has to drive him in the right place and by this I mean pages as sitemap, store, member registration etc. Each company has to take advantage of this page and drive the visitor where it wants. Especially for the eCommerce websites or online stores, companies have to keep the visitor and drive him where they want. There are several good and bad examples that I found on the web.

Hewlett Packard has a great 404-Not Found page. There is a search form, the four major product categories and many links at the bottom of the page. There is no way that visitor will leave this page.

New York Times has a landing page that drive people to the Member Center. This is how they make money and this is why they care about.

The landing page of Macy’s could be much better. Their main goal is to drive visitors to the homepage but why not directly to the product categories as HP does?

Citibank has a complicated 404 page. The user can either search what he wants or to use the drop-down menus at the very right. Bank of America has a much better way to do it.

The 404-Not Found page of Microsoft is weird. If someone writes: www.microsoft.com/windoWWs goes to Bing results for Windowws and after 3 seconds he will be redirected to Bing.com website. But I visited Microsoft and not Bing and I care about Windows or Office and not about results of ‘Windows’ in Bing.com

Do you have any good or bad examples of 404-Not Found page? BTW this is my favorite one! (Get in the train!)

Dear Kodak,

You made a mistake and you named your camera Zi8. It’s ok.. Everybody does mistakes but is this the right way to say it?

Kodak Zi8 is a competitor of the very successful Flip camera and Creative Vado. Boston Globe didn’t like the Kodak’s name and they said:

When Kodak needed a name for its new pocket video camera, its marketing geniuses came up with something dreadful: the Zi8.”

And now Kodak creates a new model and they decided to find a new and better name for this. According to them, maybe they cannot find the name by themselves. What? How can you say this? It sounds like: “We tried to name a model and we failed.. We think that we cannot make it..” Come on.. You cannot say this. You are Kodak and you must be capable to find a name.  For this reason, they created a contest. I totally agree with the contest. It is a great way to create a buzz, involve your community and spread the word. But the post on Kodak’s blog (A Thousand Words) was a fail. This is what Jenny Cisney, the chief blogger, wrote:

You may have seen a recent review of the Kodak Zi8 by the Boston Globe where it received high praise for everything… except it’s name. “When Kodak needed a name for its new pocket video camera, its marketing geniuses came up with something dreadful: the Zi8.”

Woah. Ok. With our next pocket video camera in development we started thinking about the name. A few were run past our discerning CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett who said “Are you serious?” Back to the drawing board. Or is it?

Maybe we don’t have the answer. Maybe YOU do! We are asking people on Twitter and on this blog to tell us… what do you think the next Kodak pocket video camera should be called? What would you call a video camera that is rugged, simple and ready for action and adventure? (Hint – we like the letter “Z”!)

Is this the right way to say it? I guess not. I agree that you have to admit your mistakes and be honest but this is not the right way. Kodak could just announce the contest in a more fun way without mentioning the Zi8 mistake. (At least don’t write it as an introduction in your post)

Yesterday I visited the Cool Product Expo 2009 in Stanford University. I saw several new ideas.. Some of them were quite complicated and some others were too simple. Most of them were interesting though.  Some of the interesting products were the new Yahoo Service “Search Pad”, Cooliris browser add-on, the Hot Topper, NeuroSky and many more..

Here is all the companies that participated: 23andMe, 3Brick Design,  3Prong Power, Adolph Consulting Services, Aerobie, Inc., Alite Designs, Anybots, B.Minima, Blackbird Guitars, California Cars Initiative, Catapult Design, ConXtech, Cooliris, Cyclute, D.light Design, Dante Beatrix, Inc, Development by Design, D-Rev, Driptech, Elliptigo Inc., Embrace, Evernote, Green Gears, Green Harvest Technologies in cooperation with Ziba Design, HandMe, HighLite, Jaipur Knee Project, Joby, Karven Holdings LLC, Klutz, Logitech, Lunar Design, MagnoGrip Inc., MINIWIZ S.E.D. Co., Ltd, NeuroSky, Nila, Obscura Digital, Pianistica, PlantSense, Plug-In Supply, Psyleron, redmark, Speck Design, Stanford PRN, TacDial, Taco Lab, Think Gum LLC, Tieks, Visible Energy, Volkswagen, Xhibitr, Yahoo! Inc,.

And of course here comes the answer (from the Apple fans!)