Raise Your Marketing IQRaise Your Marketing IQ

You’ve probably heard about Google’s Nexus One launch today, with a cost of $180 with a two-year T-Mobile contract and—wait, $530 without? Actually, that math might make sense, as blogger Ben Ferguson shows in his cost breakdown.

He’s considering buying a data-only plan from T-Mobile and relying primarily on SkypeOut purchases, with a backup of free Gizmo5 calls through Google Voice, although new Gizmo5 sign-ups are currently suspended. That means little to no mobile calling (unless you used the free Guava app). Then again, Ben sees some significant savings by the end of what would be a two-year contract, and considers himself a “near-total” dependent on Google services. Could you imagine making the data-only jump?

Brizzly, the web-based social media manager that ranked as one of our readers’ favorite Twitter clients, has dropped the invite code requirement and is available for anyone to log into. It’s still technically in “beta,” but mostly to keep up the fairly rapid pace of feature development. [via TechCrunch]

Having a consistent social identity is becoming increasingly important for users and businesses that engage in online communication. After all, people can associate you or your personal brand with your username.

Fortunately, a number of services like Namechk and KnowEm exist so that you can check to see what services have your desired username available. Today, KnowEm is launching some new services to make searching and registering usernames that much easier, across social sites.

The basic KnowEm search service is free. You can search more than 330 social media networks for your desired username to see what’s out there and what has already been snatched up. If you don’t have an established brand name, this can also be an opportunity to evaluate the right name to use.

Now, in addition to letting you search sites and get links to sign-up for free, KnowEm is offering three different packages to make signing up for accounts even easier.

The Corporate Edition clocks in at $350, but will register your desired username across 150 of the top social websites, set-up your profile, avatar, bio/description and URL. This is all done by KnowEm staffers in New Jersey and they set things up so you don’t have to worry.

The Individual Edition is $99 and will start the sign-up process at 150 different social sites. You’ll still need to confirm the sign-ups and populate the accounts with your own information.

For the true social media addict, KnowEm also offers a subscription service for $49 a month that will automatically register your username on 30 new social networks a month.

Although I think that many individuals and businesses underestimate the importance of having a solidified online identity, I’m not sure how many businesses will be prepared to have the sign-up process done for them.

What do you think? Would you pay to automatically guarantee that your username was associated with all types of social networks? Let us know!

Tags: knowem, namechk, social identity, username registration

With Microsoft’s Xbox Live update due out this fall, the company has announced that it is accepting sign-ups from Live subscribers to be a part of the update’s public beta program. In order to sign up for the preview, gamers have to fill out a comprehensive survey that includes information like one’s Internet connection speed, what kind of TV they’re using, and the type of display connection one is using to connect their console to the TV.

This system update will feature a number of incorporated features that will continue to turn the 360 into an all-in-one media center. Aside from allowing users to utilize Twitter and Facebook, it’s also known that the update will allow streaming music from last.fm and 1080p streaming video for the Zune Marketplace. Exactly which features will be incorporated in this preview have yet to be revealed.

Signing up for the preview doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get to take part in the preview once it launches, but the preview will be available to a fairly large sample group. “We’re looking for several thousand participants, so your chances of making it in are good,” Microsoft told ShackNews, though the company also revealed, “priority will be given to [Xbox Live] Gold members in the selection process.”

Google is letting a few more people play with its new communication and collaboration tool, Wave, starting tomorrow. Specifically, 100,000 developers, Google Apps users, and other sign-ups at the Wave website will be getting access to a preview version.

That’s a lot of people, but many more are being left out — Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen tells CNET Google received more than 1 million requests to participate. That’s confirmation that, despite the occasional fuzziness of the Wave concept (because it’s a combination of so many different concepts, such as email, word processing, news feeds, and photo galleries), there’s tons of interest in the product.

Here’s the state of Wave, according to Google:

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we’ve focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can’t yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can’t configure the permissions of users on a wave. We’ll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

As part of opening up, Google has also highlighted some of the cool extensions companies have built on top of Wave, even in its early stage, which give some sense of how broadly Wave might be used:

• A way to play Sudoku with your friends from Labpixies
• A telephone conferencing service from Ribbit
• Video chat from 6rounds
• An itinerary collaboration tool from Lonely Planet
• A weather forecast widget from AccuWeather
• Collaborative map editing from Google Maps.

Like driver’s license copies and health insurance sign-ups, 401k plans are something most employees sign off on their first day and never look back at. Webapp Brightscope aims to give workers fare more information about how their plan is doing.

The independent site provides a number ranking for companies it can compile data on, taking fees, employer contribution matching, employee participation, and other factors into account. The site doesn’t give a whole lot out about how their rankings are achieved, but it does provide a clean interface to scan all the data you’d like about average account balances, who’s managing the plan, and other data. You can contribute your own findings and comments on a company (anonymously, if you’d like), and see how other companies in the industry match up with their own 401k plans.

It’s not the most fun data in the world to look over, especially given the market conditions, but BrightScope just might inspire you to look at how much you’re putting in, and getting back, from your paycheck withholding. Free to use, sign-ups required for some features.