If you logged into your Gmail acount lately you’ve seen the pop-up window that introduces you to the newest Gmail feature– making calls to land and mobile lines from within the application.

From the site:

How does this work?
You can now place calls to landline and mobile phones from within Gmail. Just dial any phone number and you’ll be connected. Learn more.

Rates
Calls to the U.S. and Canada are free in 2010. International calls are billed at our insanely low rates.

You can call Afghanistan for $.27 a minute or Zimbabwe for the premium price of $.46 a minute, and some rates are as low as $.02 a minute. Not bad.

Have you tried it yet? How does it compare to Skype?

CBS Launch of Radio.com

Radio.com is combining the power of 600+ “real” radio stations along with Last.fm’s scrobbling in an attempt to become the online source of radio. Google shows 3,350,000 searches per month for “radio”, meaning CBS now has one of the most valuable domains on the web. But, Radio.com will have a lot of competition to deal with (Pandora and Grooveshark). What can CBS offer that is different?

The slick user interface, sections for news and sports, along with links to AOL & Yahoo stations are the main selling points of Radio.com. It seems as if they’re trying to give terrestrial radio a live-podcast feel. My first encounters with the service were basically nonstop advertisements for 3 minutes. Fortunately, mute still works.

But once the ads are over, a nice cover-flow appearance of what you’re listening to is displayed above relevant information to the station… [Read More]

Several months ago, I was asked to moderate a panel at the MEIEA Conference for Advanced Social Media Strategy. It was a great opportunity and I was thrilled to be asked to moderate. The conference coordinator asked me to put the panel together as well, and frankly, that was the hardest part! None of the panelists were compensated for their time beyond admission to the rest of the conference so imagine my surprise when all of my top candidates for the panel agreed to sit on it. Here they are:

Fran Vincent – Retro Island Productions/MySpace for Musicians
Katherine Stimson – Bennett Law Office/Suman Entertainment Group/Farm to Market Music
Janet Hagan – Social Deviants/Naxos of America
Tony Grotticelli – TOGA Entertainment

Each panelist I invited has exceptional experience in social media marketing. Fran even wrote MySpace for Musicians, and… [Read More]

Several months ago, I was asked to moderate a panel at the MEIEA Conference for Advanced Social Media Strategy. It was a great opportunity and I was thrilled to be asked to moderate. The conference coordinator asked me to put the panel together as well, and frankly, that was the hardest part! None of the panelists were compensated for their time beyond admission to the rest of the conference so

I don’t care what “sentiment” says, no way is a kid who slaps his mama’s date and the Dorito out of his hand going to upstage the intelligent, engaging storytelling of Google’s “Parisian Love” ad.

If it has any flaws at all, it’s that the viewer has to read it. Google did well to present it during the Super Bowl because you’d be hard pressed to find viewers who want to watch any commercials at any other time. However, during the Super Bowl, you have people who’d rather watch the commercials than the game glued to the set (I’m a fan of both).

“Parisian Love” proves you don’t need a big budget, just a big idea, to communicate well. Google can do a lot of things, from Analytics to Adsense, from Google Docs to Google Wave, and everything inbetween, but they chose to show what made Google great to… [Read More]