Don’t read today’s post unless you want to reach out and scoop more than your fair share of customers and sales. If you’re already making more money than you want, this one’s not for you.

Are you evil enough to join us?

OK. Here are 7 dastardly, fiendish, and just plain frickin’ evil tactics to get ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Or more customers. Whatever.

As with most any medium, if the eyeballs are there, advertisers will follow. Now it's just up to the medium to deliver on the predictions coming in for the next year.

According to a new survey from eMarketer, video content is being consumed online at a rapidly growing clip. eMarketer found a quarter of Internet users were watching TV online in 2008. Almost 30% did so in 2009. And 77% of all internet users in the U.S. will watch videos online by 2014.

Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.

And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

This is a stunning, inspiring way to see different people, perspectives, seasons, events and even times of day at a given spot.

Check out this feature when used to view the Eiffel Tower (below), and then try it at a popular tourist attraction or someplace you’ve always wanted to visit. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Article Highlights:

• Combining the login and register fields into one interface creates a simpler experience for the user.
• How the registration screen is presented to the site visitor can impact willingness to fill it out and complete the process.
• By tracking conversion and drop-off rates, websites can make adjustments to how the registration page is presented.

A common objective for a website is to convert an anonymous visitor to an engaged and active registered user. The challenge is to make this process easy for the visitor while still obtaining valuable demographic information that the site can then leverage to personalize the user experience. The good news is there are established best practices for implementing user registration, and it is possible to easily collect user data without sacrificing conversion rates.

Here are some real world examples of how leading websites from The Los Angeles Times to Lady Gaga have optimized the online user registration processes.

Key Takeaways:

• Keep it simple, don't hide it
• Provide a choice in how a user registers
• User interface counts
• Watch, learn, and adjust
• Make the most of user profile data

Great video, wonderful summary..

The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says — predicting that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.” As she puts it on one of the slides in the report: “Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened.”

Meeker says that mobile Internet usage is ramping up substantially faster than desktop Internet usage did, a view she and her team arrived at by comparing the adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch to that of AOL and Netscape in the early 1990s. According to Meeker, adoption of the Apple devices is taking place more than 11 times faster that of AOL, and several times as fast as that of Netscape. Helping to drive this is 3G technology, which Morgan Stanley says recently hit an “inflection point” by being available to more than 20 percent of the world’s cellular users (although penetration is only 7 percent in Central/South America and 13 percent in Asia/Pacific — excluding Japan, where it’s 96 percent).

But that mobile boom will take its toll on carriers, Meeker says, because mobile Internet use is all about data. The average cell-phone usage pattern is 70 percent voice, while the average iPhone is 45 percent voice. At NTT DoCoMo, data usage accounts for 90 percent of network traffic. The analyst says her team expects mobile data traffic to increase by almost 4,000 percent by 2014, for a cumulative annual growth rate of more than 100 percent. Such numbers will likely strike fear into the hearts of carriers, but joy into the hearts of equipment suppliers and mobile service companies.

One of the implications of mobile access is a growth in ecommerce, says Meeker, featuring things such as location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc. In China, the success of social network Tencent proves that virtual goods can be a big business, she says — virtual goods sales accounted for $2.2 billion worth of the company’s revenue in 2009 and $24 in annual revenue per user. Online commerce and paid services made up 32 percent of mobile revenue in Japan in 2008, up from just 14 percent in 2000. Meeker’s report suggests that the rest of the world — which is still below the 14 percent-mark — could see much the same trajectory over the next 10 years.

Meeker says that users are more willing to pay for content on mobile devices than they are on desktops for a number of reasons, including:

* Easy-to-Use/Secure Payment Systems — embedded systems like carrier billing and iTunes allow real-time payment

* Small Price Tags -– most content and subscriptions carry sub-$5 price tags

* Walled Gardens Reduce Piracy -– content exists in proprietary environments, difficult to get pirated content onto mobile devices

* Established Store Fronts -– carrier decks and iTunes store allow easy discovery and purchase

* Personalization -– more important on mobiles than desktops

On the social networking side, Meeker’s report notes that social network use is bigger than email in terms of both aggregate numbers of users and time spent, and is still growing rapidly. Social networking passed email in terms of time spent in 2007, hitting about 100 billion minutes/month globally — it’s now twice that — and passed email in terms of raw user numbers in July of 2009, with more than 800 million. Given the rate at which Facebook has been growing, that number is probably now closer to a billion. Meeker attributes social networking’s success to the fact that it’s a “unified communications + multimedia creation tool/repository in your pocket.” And Japan’s experience makes how crucial mobile is to that equation: Mixi, one of the country’s largest social networks, has seen its mobile page views grow to 72 percent of the total from just 17 percent three years ago.

Mary Meeker’s presentation:

Meteor has built an analytics solution that tracks how content is shared. It dynamically creates a social graph that uses first-party tracking tags in the URL of hosted content. When a person copies and pastes that URL into some vehicle, and someone clicks on it, Meteor captures that activity and creates a new node. If one of those people then copies and pastes the link, it creates another node.

This is a very simple mechanism that takes advantage of standard behavior. When an article, video, game, ad, or any other content is tracked this way, the content owner can understand how that content was disseminated from a root source (such as a publisher site, corporate site, or even a UGC sharing site) and where it ended up.

Fifteen-year-old Parker Liautaud and 44-year old David Newman are racing to be the first to check in at the North Pole via popular location-based service Foursquare

Liautaud and Newman are leveraging recent hype around the platform to drive attention to pressing environmental issues in the Arctic region. Foursquare, in turn, has created a special Last Degree Badge (see above) for the mission, which is expected to conclude over the weekend.

Part one of this two-part series on Location in the Cloud covered Wireless Location in the Cloud, noting that after ten years of wireless carrier control, it’s now finally possible to pull down the location of any mobile phone or connected machine-to-machine device from US wireless carrier clouds through mobile location aggregation services such as Veriplace. In a tweet from the floor of Where 2.0, Tim O’Reilly said Veriplace's service is "the inverse of knowing where your phone is--an outside-in approach--supporting all phones beyond Smartphones."

Building on his description, the other perhaps more popular "inside-out" check-in approach, which I call Social Location in the Cloud, leverages local smartphone location smarts on iPhone and Android to publish location data up and over-the-top of carrier pipes to Social Nets and Web services, where the data is often accessible via APIs for additional development. 

The check-in way of doing mobile location on the Web is crowded and without a clear leader. SimpleGeo, who used Where 2.0 as a launch pad, showcased a SXSW spatiotemporal time lapse highlighting various check-in services.

The animation reveals a check-in silo situation similar to the wireless carrier location data islands prior to aggregation services such as Veriplace. The difference however is there are only a handful of wireless carriers, but an ever-growing list of smartphone apps on virtual shelf-spaces stocked by abundant app choice which will inevitably lead to even more check-in fragments of mobile location available on the Web, therefore building a good case for a check-in Social Location in the Cloud aggregation service similar to Veriplace.