Below are the 6 policies most commonly violated that will result in your app getting banned:

1. Your application tab or canvas page cannot serve as a doorway page to your site. Redirecting users from these to a microsite outside of FB is a no-no!
2. The application cannot link, redirect or integrate with a competing social platform like Google+, Twitter, etc. Many applications take advantage of the AddThis widget to cross promote other social platforms and with the change to Google’s search algorithm, it is expected that Facebook will try to further wall-off their garden.
3. The application may collect Facebook User data but the data is not yours to keep. In fact, you may retain access to the data only while your app is live; you must delete all user data if you disable the application.
4. User data can be used to create a physical product (like a book of your Facebook comments) but that product cannot be sold.
5. The application can also collect Friend data but only for the purpose of enhancing the application experience.
6. If your application lives outside of Facebook and uses Facebook Connect for authentication, Facebook usernames or passwords cannot be stored inside the application.

These guideline changes frequently so you have to stay on top of these policies. There are live applications that are in violation of these policies yet Facebook hasn’t banned them. While it may be tempting, don’t take the “I’ll jump off the cliff because someone already has” approach because Facebook can easily catch your promotion. Over the past few years, we’ve built a fair share of apps and fortunately we ran into an issue only once. Facebook put us through the ringer before they allowed our application to relaunch. It is an experience that I never want to repeat again.

• Microsoft Windows 8 Public Beta will be ready in February 2012. This was announced in December but Microsoft is notorious for missing deadlines so it is nice to hear that they’re still on track.
• Microsoft is going to disrupt television. They are looking to make shows two-way interactions via Xbox. In other words, television will no longer be just a lean-back technology
• Kinect will be available for the PC in February 2012. In my mind, this is Microsoft’s admission that gaming can occur on any device, not just a specific console since NUI’s (natural user interfaces) are the wave of the future.

Full notes are below:

9:40 PM Ryan Seacrest taking the stage; explains partnership with MSFT Bing. Ballmer hugs him; Ryan makes fun of his height.

9:41 PM Ballmer to talk about innovations on phone, PC, Xbox, and TV’s. Cools to see Metro interface/ live tiles in the background.

9:43 PM Ballmer is showing it off on a Nokia device; says that Windows Phone is about putting people first and highlighting your relationships. Explains how easy it is bring information together.

9:45 PM Derek Snyder (Sr Product Manager, Windows Phone) comes onto stage. Shows off “People Hub” that brings information about favorite people together. Shows how he great it is to see information for a specific group. Talks about they’re using Facebook Chat and Window Messanger together. Can also dive into conversations across all communications with a specific user. Phone also has a voice recognition (app crash stirs audience!). Demo’s live tile that shows off critical data without forcing user to dive into an app. Showing off how apps share information.

9:54 PM Ballmer talks about new LTE phones: Nokia Lumia 900 with LTE from AT&T  with 4.3″ AMOLED display, HTC Titan 2 with 4.7″ Super LCD and 16 megapixel camera.

9:56 PM Changing to Windows PC’s. Ballmer excited about the competition. Talks about the way that Windows PC’s have spurred innovation. Ballmer mentions that people have moved from desktops to notebooks. Ballmer pumps up Intel.

9:58 PM Ballmer shows off video of various Windows 7 PC form factors. Samsung Series 9 HP NV14 Spectra — lots of awesome looking ultrabooks.

10:01 PM Tami Relleer (CMO, Windows) takes stage. Mentions how Windows 8 introduced at CES 2011. “No compromise Experience”: effortless/flexibility of tablet but the power of a PC. Lock screen shows off critical bits of info (like unread email). Device uses picture password. With Windows 8, get charms with swipe from right. Launches finger-painting app which takes over the entire screen. Windows 8 runs on ARMS and x86 chips. Apps will run on both chipsets. Windows Store in now populated (vs. empty at MSFT Build Conference). Apps will connect people to as many as possible. Shows off Cut the Rope app — partnered with ZeptoLab to create an HTML5 app game. Shows seamless app switching by swiping from left. Windows Store to launch in late February — only free apps at first. Will have free and paid apps across 200 languages later in the year. Explains semantic zoom — can see how easy to manage apps by zooming out — can rename grouping. Talks about how Win8 works with touch and pointer device (mouse + keyboard). Can also use search to find an app. Apps share via app contracts — will share info without leaving app, makes for a richer experience. Demo’s snap function where two apps can be visible on the same screen at the same time. Tablet is very responsive. Next Windows 8 milestone will come in late February 2012. Samsung Series 9 is available in 15″; Dell will announce a new PC tomorrow.

10:18 PM Ballmer says that Windows 7 is the most successful OS – 500 M users. And Windows 7 PC will be compatible with Windows 8.

10:19 PM Tweet Choir. Impressive vocals but this is the lamest part of the show so far!

10:23 PM Gaming Discussion: XBox. Ballmer claims the most successful console: 66 M Xbox Users; 40 M Xbox subscribers tuning in. About delivering entertainment that you want, making it easy. Creating a different entertainment experience — Kinect is a leading part of this experience. Sold 15 M Kinect units.

10:26 PM Greg Davidson (Microsoft Xbox Team). Shows how he can control console via his voice. Discovery powered by Bing. Says “Bing [actor name]” and it brings up movie.

10: 28 PM Broadcast temporarily suspended due to intellectual property.

10:30 PM And we’re back! Talks about 26 of the most popular channels being broadcast live from Verizon FiOS will have program guide. Additional partnerships: Comcast Xfinity (launching library of top shows and movies), News Corp (bring Fox, WSJ Live, Fox News Channel and IGN), AT&T U-Verse. All coming this year!

10:34 PM Jamie Bauer and Ansley demo-ing two-way Xbox TV. Creating new experiences with the TV. Sesame Street TV via Kinect. Shows how kid can throw a coconut into basket — kid can shift from lean back mode to active mode. Also demonstrate how kid is a part of Elmo’s world. Not just watching — being a part of the TV. Coming later on this year!

10:40 PM Steve says that it will impact things like healthcare and education. Kinect commercial plays. Announcement that Kinect is coming to Windows in February!!!

10:42 PM Ryan asks what else is going on at Microsoft? Ballmer talks about Sync installed in Fords; 4 M since 2007, 9 M additional cars in the next 3 years. Office 2010 is the fastest selling version of Office; moving to the Cloud and stunning competition to Google Docs. Since CES last year, MSFT acquired Skype: 200 M people who used 300+ B minutes of voice and video in the last year . Bing reached 30% marketshare in US.

10:45 PM Final question: what’s next? Windows 8 and dynamic, more natural user interface. Ballmer makes fun of his “developers, developers, developers” chant by saying “Metro, Metro, Metro.”

I was excited to read an article in the New York Times by Quentin Hardy* about the potential analytics as a service offering from Amazon. While Mr. Hardy was somewhat unclear regarding what type of analytics service Amazon may provide, the article seemed to indicate that they are interested in developing a predictive analytics service. Predictive analytics is incredibly valuable to marketers as it allows brands to analyze volumes data, such as purchase history or social analytics chatter, to determine when will segments of consumers are most likely respond to a marketing tactic or to complete a purchase.

Mr. Hardy’s idea of an Amazon predictive analytics service is within the realm of possibilities. A prediction engine requires copious amounts of data to learn from and Amazon can easily use their data storage infrastructure (aka Amazon Simple Storage Service) to handle this responsibility. Amazon has already proven that they can build a service that appeals to mass markets: in early 2011 Amazon released Simple Email Service, an email delivery engine. While the service is still in beta, Amazon recently announced incremental improvements to the service, which indicates that they are committed to keeping such a service going. The combination of this and the fact that Amazon regularly releases new offerings on AWS solidifies the notion that a prediction analytics service may be in the cards for 2012. One thing to note is that if such a service does come to fruition, it will instantly face competition from two worthy opponents: Google, a cloud veteran that has been pushing their developer-friendly Prediction API since 2010 and Zillabyte, a stealthy startup with a user-friendly prediction service, is due out later this year.

Since there are no details on the service, it is premature to guess how it may impact the predictive analytics industry. While there’s certainly lots of interest, we simply have to wait and see.

*PS I’ve actually met Quentin at the Lithium UP conference last year. I know that he knows people who know things so I’ll give this rumor a 70% chance for happening this year.

1. Ensuring that you don’t waste time on the “blame game.”
2. Identifying a path to take the project from the current state to the end state.
3. Keeping the team focused on their goal avoid another project “derailment.”

So following these same steps, I decided to tackle our home media network panel (see image above). The network panel was organized in such a way that the wires from each room were bundled together. While in theory it sounded logical as the wires originated from the same outlet, the panel was very difficult to manage because the bundled wires from each room had to be split up and terminated into the same module. For example, the coax wires from the office and the living room, which were bundled with the telephone/satellite/network wires from the same room, had to be bundled together and terminated in the coax cable splitter module.

To correct it, I decided that I needed to organize the wires based on their function vs. the point of origination. So I cut a hole in the sheetrock above the panel and then fished out all of the cables from the panel. I then threaded them back into the panel through one of the three available holes — one hole served all of the coax cables together, another all of the RJ45 telephone wires together, etc. Since the network map got misplaced, I also checked and relabeled each wire so that I knew which room they serviced. The outcome of this 3+ hour project was a well-organized network panel:

From this point on, I can easily plug in cables and know that the outlet will be live. My next step is to look at replacing the telephone and A/V equipment.

So imagine my frustration when a lazy marketing email arrived in my inbox from Netflix, a company that I’m a big fan of and I’ve written about in the past. It was a win-back offer asking me to renew my recently cancelled subscription. I had closed my account when Netflix announced that their 1-DVD rental/unlimited streaming service was increasing from about $10 to $16 per month earlier this year. Actually, I considered subscribing only to their streaming service but felt that the value wasn’t there at the $7.99 per month price point. While I am a believer that streaming media is the wave of the future, I felt that the Netflix library (or anyone else’s these days) is a bit anemic. So shortly after shutting it down, the win-back emails started rolling in and while I ignored the first one or two, I started to notice a surprising pattern.

The imagery and copy varied slightly between the emails but the offer was always the same — $7.99 for streaming service (see for your self below).

Email #1 (click to enlarge):

Email #2 (click to enlarge):

Basically, the Marketing team was using two win-back email templates, and these templates were being “personalized” by inserting my name, which is an emailing marketing 101 tactic. Now for a company that’s recognized for their data mining prowess, I am surprised at how little of my user data was introduced into the email, especially when considering that higher levels of personalization drive engagement and that most ESP’s (email service providers) have significant built-in email personalization capabilities, like showing your prior viewing behavior. If you’re looking for solid example of such marketing efforts then check out the 26% increase in open rate and 2.3% average sales conversion rate that Ice.com experienced when they started personalizing email offers earlier this year.

I do realize that win-back emails were probably a low priority for the Marketing team since Netflix saw robust subscriber growth up until October, which is when the price increase drove 800,000 subscribers to turn off their Netflix service. But I would have expected that by now someone in the Marketing department would have experimented, maybe just a little more, by adding a template that varies more than the messaging. How about changing the offer? Considering that Netflix spends approximately $0.05 to deliver a 2-hour movie, I would need to watch 5+ movies a day on a $7.99 per month account to break the business model and I doubt that most folks have that kind of time. At the very least, applying such a simple solution would buy time for the Netflix Marketing and the Data Science teams (aka, data mining team) to join forces to devise an alternate and probably more elegant, data-driven approach to bring subscribers back.

What’s the worse thing that could happen? You may even net me back!

• Brand loyalty. Some people are admittedly Apple fanboys — they own everything Apple and they refuse to look at anything else because it is crap. They certainly won’t dare think about an iPhone (even for a second)!
• Lack of awareness. Most consumers do not know that Android and iPhone devices are on par both from a hardware and software perspective. In fact, certain Android devices sport better hardware (processor, expandable storage, thinner form factor) than the iPhone 4S.
• Fear of change. We’re human and so we generally resist change. In fact, we are only agreeable to change once we can ensure that change doesn’t upset the status quo. All of this requires a time investment and so it is easier to just stay the course.
• Popularity. iPhone’s popularity is greater among affluent households. By possessing an iPhone, we make a statement that we’re not commoners — it is the epitome of conspicuous consumption.

For more than two weeks I’ve been testing the iPhone 4S and researching my options and I’ve decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy S II, an Android-powered phone. Why turn my back on Apple when the iPhone is king? Here are the 5 reasons why the Galaxy is better smartphone (in no particular order):

1. Overall form factor. The Galaxy S II is one incredibly sleek device. It is thiner and lighter than the iPhone 4S — measuring at 8.89mm and 4.13oz (vs. 9.3mm and 4.9oz for the iPhone).
2. Crisp, larger display. While the retina display, an LED-backlit IPS TFT screen, on the iPhone 4/iPhone 4S is ultra-sharp, the Super AMOLED+ screen on the Galaxy S II is equally sharp. But the big different is in the screen size – the Galaxy S II packs an additional 0.8 diagonal inches into their screen that it feels more like a tablet.
3. Faster processor. Both phones are powered by a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU but the Galaxy S II sports an even faster 1.2GHz processor (vs. the iPhone’s 0.8GHz CPU).
4. Mobile application parity. While I have 50+ apps on my iPhone, I only use a select few on a regular basis. The most popular apps — like Facebook, Pandora, Skype, Kindle, Evernote, MapMyRun and the Starbucks Mobile app — have all been ported to Android so I won’t feel like I’m suddenly a second class smartphone citizen.
5. iTunes independence. I’ve been using iTunes to buy and transfer music since I owned an iPod. But over the last few months I’ve been regularly using Spotify to the point that I’ve stopped listening to my own music. Additionally, I generally buy music from Amazon and I can listen to these tracks via the Amazon MP3 Player/Amazon Cloud Drive app that iTunes doesn’t matter.

With all that said, there are drawbacks of going with the Samsung Galaxy S II:

• Unlike the iPhone, all of the carriers cram their own apps onto the  smartphone. Additionally, carriers control when you get to update your device with the latest OS. The good news is that Ice Cream Sandwich, the upcoming Android OS, runs smoothly on the Galaxy II S so I won’t feel the immediate need to upgrade in another 2 years.
• The Galaxy II S is pre-loaded with a custom User Interface (UI) called TouchWiz 4.0. Hopefully, this UI will be replaced with a standard Android UI when Ice Cream Sandwich is released.
• The new white Galaxy S II is not currently available but it is expected to ship by the holidays.

How can Boxee dominate the market?

Content is king and Boxee aims to bring all of your home media content together in one device. With Boxee, users can scan/access their music library from another computer, a feature that is missing from both Google TV and Roku. Ronen anticipates using the funds to grow their development team and introduce additional (paid) content on their device. According to the support forum, requests for Amazon Video Streaming integration have become extremely popular ever since the announcement of free movie and TV content streams for Amazon Prime members so I believe that Boxee may focus on supporting this in the next release. With the major networks blocking access to their free streams, Boxee is better served by focusing on integrating with partners that want to share content.

The Boxee team also plans to expand on the embedded software front. In addition to serving as an interface for an Iomega home media storage device, the Boxee software will soon be integrated into ViewSonic TV’s. This should solidify Boxee as a software solution that can complete with the Google who has partnered with Logitech and display vendor Samsung. Boxee will hopefully leverage their already active developer community to expand the availability of content (and functionality) on their offering.

This exciting news signals additional interest and trust in the future of interactive TV.

Consumption of video content is primarily conducted on the web. According to a recent report by Nielsen on video consumption, usage in January in the U.S. is up considerably from the same time last year as time spent viewing video on PC/Mac/laptops from home and work locations increased by 45%. And Netflix users on average spend 11 minutes watching videos, which is more than double the amount of time spent by Hulu subscribers.

When considering these numbers, it is clear to see that video on demand services are an integral component of next generation TV or interactive TV (iTV). This begs the question: how will Amazon’s service impact Netflix? To best answer this question, one may want to look at a few factors:

• Number of subscribers. According to a recent report on Neflix vs. Amazon via Investor Business Daily, roughly 13% of Amazon’s 130 million active users are Prime members. Netflix has 20 million subscribers for its streaming and DVD-by-mail services in the U.S. and Canada. So Netflix is only slightly ahead of Amazon in regards to users.
• Availability of Titles. Based on the 20 current bestselling videos on Amazon (see table below), Netflix hosts only 65% of them as video streams while the remainder are available as a only DVD rentals. Unfortunately, these titles are mostly two years old (in some case much older!) which make less attractive in comparison to Netflix which features multiple 2010 and 2011 titles.
• Device Support. While Amazon is only available on Tivo, Google TV, and Roku, Netflix is available on these devices and more, including favorites like the Boxee Box, Apple TV, multiple blue-ray DVD players and Apple’s iPad and iPhone mobile platforms.

It seems that Amazon Prime subscribers would logically try out the service and a fraction would defect to Netflix once they understand the value of unlimited streaming service and the expanded availability of content by latter provider. While Amazon’s foray into unlimited streaming may appear to be a total bust, in actuality it will benefit Amazon as Netflix fully transitioned to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in 2010. So Amazon will make money out of this deal even if it is only through growing consumer awareness/demand.

The only potential wrinkle in the future of streaming video is broadband metering. While the battle has just begun in the US, Netflix is already contending with ISP’s charging overage fees for video consumption. Netflix has to convince the FCC in the US that unlimited broadband is important for competitive pricing.

While there is no denying that Bing autogenerated the same results as Google, there are two important lessons that technologists and marketers should learn from this fight:

First, your browsing habits are not private. Are you surprised? I recall an incident from several years back where an administrative tool was accidentally indexed by Google. How did the spider find the tool? While there were no links to the tool, the admin manager had bookmarked the site using the Google Toolbar. FYI: the Google Toolbar shares links among computers by storing bookmarks in the cloud. So it seems that Google’s spider dipped into the manager’s bookmark data (as there were no links to this tool on the web) and just added it to their cache. Thankfully, the link disappeared once a rule was added to the robots.txt file to exclude the tool from Google. So Google clearly is not an innocent bystander in this fight to catalog the web.

Second, search is still an automated process. While there are a few engines that still curate search results via human-powered review (eg: Blekko and Mahalo), the majority of the searches for the foreseeable future will depend on algorithms that will be tweaked only when and if necessary. That trend will hold true until enough of us get tired of these giants and switch to the smaller alternatives.