NEW: Ben Prendergast

Facebook apologises, online video revolution, mobile phone airline bookings – there’s so much happening online it’s mind boggling…

Facebook apologises

Facebook’s Beacon advertising model has drawn the ire of privacy campaigners since its announcement last month. The controversial ad model, which effectively enables Facebook users to share their web activities with friends and thereby give advertisers another viral marketing angle, was not able to be switched off by users until today.

Via a blog posting from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he today apologised, saying: “About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologise for it.”

Hulu the future of online video?

Still in Beta, invite-only stage, the joint venture between NBC and News Corp has offered high definition full-screen (H.264) video to its beta testers for the first time, without the need for standalone viewers (for example, Joost) and using compression that is suitable for broadband speeds. With this kind of backing we might be peeking at not only the future of online video, but of home entertainment in general.

New Airline Tech

Coutesy of Engadget, Continental airlines will trial mobile phone boarding passes from next month.

10 Rules for Startup Success

Courtesy of TechCrunch and The Financial Times, Loic Le Meur has released his 10 Rules for Startup Success. I couldn’t agree with them more, and they are:

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible.
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Tetris iMaxMaxMax

This is genius. Those wacky Finnish students are at it again, converting an entire university dorm building into a giant Tetris game. 

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