Check out this graphic based on a study by BASEX on a typical day of a knowledge worker.

The key culprit for this unproductive waste is the Information overload manifest in many shades. Google search confounds us with a gazillion results, Tweets multiply around us like weeds on steroids, Facebook provides a wailing wall of endless updates, Emails make us bite more than what we can chew and mobile devices rings in all these miseries together wherever we go.

So what the heck do we do about it ?

PLAN A: Just fly past the cuckoo’s nest of digital noise and perch on the bandwagon of the Slow Internet movement.

PLAN B: Embrace it through the extensions built and made available to the human mind a.k.a tools that will help you mine, filter, organize, sync and archive your most noteworthy discoveries in the internet wastelands.

well, we here at Zukmo offer you PLAN B ! Try us out for a free ride and see if it will help you. We will aggregate your content from as many sources that are important to you. That includes Desktop files, Google Docs, Notes, Bookmarks, RSS feeds, Embedded Multimedia, Twitter. You can easily share the collected content with your friends and colleagues. You can invite discussions with any group of people on bookmarked page or a specific note or a work related document.

Zukmo simplifies your knowledge gathering and makes it available to you wherever you go and on whatever device you choose to use.

Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

Get it now

Get Zukmo 1.0 now from the Android Market. If you are viewing this page from an Android device, click here to view and install Zukmo Android App from Android Market.

Sign in

Browse or Search your content

Zukmo for Android comes bundled with a crisp content browsing view, which means that you can easily browse or search through all of your content items such as saved Bookmarks, Tweets, RSS feeds, Notes, Google docs, Desktop Documents etc.

Due to built-in synchronization feature, all the content items that you can view in your personal digital library in the cloud are now instantly accessible from your Android phone. Currently, we list all your content items in chronological fashion by default and provide for a way to list the favorites from the clickable icon on top.

What’s on the Menu?

Offline Reading

More to come

This is simply the beginning with respect to our exciting venture in the mobile marketplace and we are laying out a broad plan for unveiling a mobile optimized web site of Zukmo so that our smart phone users can benefit immensely by directly browsing to Zukmo through their preferred mobile browser. In addition, we will also plan on releasing similar feature rich mobile apps for other popular devices such as iPhone/iPad in the near future.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start your free Zukmo account today!

Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Apple Safari go through a rigorous review process to ensure that each update we submit is clean, free of issues, and offers a streamlined, integrated experience with their browser. This, of course, takes time on their end, and until they complete the process and post our update to their site (also automatically notifying you/updating your browser button), our users can sometimes be left without the features that we’ve promised.

We’d like to let you know that any updates to our browser buttons are available immediately after each release. If you’re having trouble accessing any of Zukmo’s functions you can update your browser button from our direct download page

If a direct update doesn’t solve the issue in question please contact us directly at help@zukmo.com. Alternatively, if you have any suggestions about how we can make Zukmo more useful for you, shoot us an email at feedback at feedback@zukmo.com. We’d love to speak to you about them!

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start a free Zukmo account today!

Notes and Web Clippings:

Until today’s release users needed to import whole content sources to their libraries, even if only a small portion of it was of interest to them. We recognized the need for something more adaptable and that’s why we’re pleased to announce one of our most exciting new features: notes and web clippings. Users browsing through web content who are interested in only select portions can now simply highlight the desired content and use the right-click menu to import it to Zukmo as a note. Notes can also be made from directly within a user’s Zukmo library. Play with it. Learn to love it! These tools aim to make your library more useful, and your life a lot easier.

RSS and Atom Feed Handling:

Speaking of easier, how about those RSS feeds? They do the job of aggregating content on the stuff that’s interesting to us, but what if we follow more than one? For that, we’re pleased to introduce our new RSS feed handler. Think of it as your RSS feed for your RSS feeds. It’s a brain-full, but that’s what we’re here to help alleviate! Users can now subscribe to up to 10 of their favorite RSS feeds directly from Zukmo. This can be done by either by right-clicking the RSS feed button and selecting “Add this link to Zukmo”, or by inputting the feed’s link into the Zukmo library’s bookmark tool.

RSS feed content (title and description) is stored to the RSS section of the library. The option to go a level deeper and store an entire article is also available by simply bookmarking the article itself once it is opened. This permanently saves the article as a separate bookmarked item.

Twitter Changes:

With the way we handle RSS feeds, we’ve chosen to make a few changes to what users can do with their Twitter accounts. On the Twitter website you might find yourself overwhelmed looking for old tweets, but count on avoiding that with us! The latest 1000 of a user’s tweets, and 1500 of a user’s following tweets are now saved to the user’s library, and are indexed for searching. We decided to take it a step further and created an option to add any tweet URLs displayed in a tweet, as an indexed bookmark if desired.

Enhanced Account Management:

In an effort to provide you with better control over your account, we have integrated new areas for users to enable/disable/re-activate their linked accounts. By clicking on an activated service in the upper portion of the screen, a pop-up window will provide the option to disable the service and to additionally retain or delete indexed content associated with the account.

In addition, we have implemented an account usage stats area in the “My Account” profile page.  This will display various data regarding a user’s account and the composition their stored data

Changes to Delicious Integration:

With the acquisition of Delicious by the founders of YouTube, there have been several changes to the way Delicious feeds their data to us. Rest assured that we’ve worked to make this transition period as seamless as possible. As it stands, users can continue to import Delicious bookmarks to Zukmo with a linked Delicious account, as they are slated to disable servicing of Yahoo! accounts soon.

Miscellaneous:

Always last, but rarely least, we’ve also done some housecleaning to improve the way Zukmo looks and feels. In our official releases, you can always look below to see a list of the things we’ve changed if you’re interested. Of course, as we always like to remind our users, we rely on your help to improve Zukmo.  If you have any feedback, comments, or questions, feel free to contact us at feedback@zukmo.com. We look forward to hearing from you. Happy Zukmoing!

-The Zukmo Team

Kieran Kay is a Marketing and Business Development Associate for Vembu Technologies’s Zukmo product.

Zukmo is a cloud-based information and content management solution designed for the frequent information consumer. Zukmo indexes user-uploaded files, Web bookmarks, and streamed content, enabling easy organization, searching, and sharing via an integrated suite of tools. Start a free Zukmo account today!

Though we could write paragraph after paragraph about why Zukmo and Readitlater aren’t exactly in the same market space (Readitlater focuses on one-time reads, Zukmo focuses on longer-term information management solutions, Readitlater stores content offline while Zukmo indexes it in the cloud for easy management, etc.), a chart always seems to do the trick a little bit better:

*Information obtained through staff research and is not independently verified

As it’s easy to see, Zukmo and Readitlater actually differ quite significantly, and Zukmo continues to grow in terms of integration and functionality, weekly. We aren’t aiming for anything less than the best information management tool around. In order to actually shape Zukmo into the best, though, we need your help! Please send us any feedback or suggestions you might to feedback@zukmo.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Apologies for the corny headline. This has nothing to do with working out.

But it is good news for all those laptops that are backing up online…

G.Y.M. is short for Google, Yahoo & Microsoft. The three companies seem to be in the midst of a flurry of FREE WiFi announcements. Here’s stuff that came through from G.Y.M. in the last 48 hours:

Google announced free WiFi at 47 airports – through the holiday season and into January 2010. They even have a FreeHolidayWifi web site on this. In what could easily be spun as a “limit the joy to Microsoft” tactic, Seattle airport joins the list of 47 a little later.

Yahoo announced free WiFi at Times Square, NYC – for a whole year.

Microsoft, not to be outdone, and in an effort to popularize Bing,  has announced an interesting promotion going with JWire. Their “search for access” program offers  a session of free Wi-Fi access in exchange for a search on Bing. Users are presented with their search results, and they can then enjoy free Internet service for a specified time period.

So there, you have it. Connectivity can’t be your excuse this season – for not backing up! I’m curious though – how did the free WiFi idea hit G.Y.M. – at almost the same time (all of the above announcements happened in the last 48 hours)

Crunchgear has an article on this too.

Prediction: Amazon will make a similar announcement – soon.

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Besides this affinity for many things ‘Google’, three other events inspired this post:

a) Google announced its quarterly results earlier this month. Though revenues were almost stagnant, Google managed to deliver a higher net income of $ 1.48 bn (Qtr ending June 30, 2009)

b) Techcrunch says Bing users are twice as likely to click on ads than Google users.

c) I clicked on the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button on Google today – more out of curiosity than out of habit! This got me thinking…

Who clicks the ‘I’m feeling Lucky’ button anyway?

So, I googled it up (note the subtle irony here) and came across a very interesting article from Nov 2007 ; here’s an excerpt:

Google cofounder Sergey Brin told public radio’s Marketplace that around one percent of all Google searches go through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn’t get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt’s Tom Chavez. So why does Google keep such a costly button around? “It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here,” Google exec Marissa Mayer explained, or at least tried to.

So Google left $110 million on the table two years ago! Let’s try and recalculate the figure now…

a) Google’s annual revenue in 2008 was $22 billion – about twice its revenues in 2006. 66% of Google’s revenues are from Google owned sites. I’m simply assuming that Google.com (and other country sites) account for about 50%, and properties like Gmail and other Google sites account for the balance 16%. In effect, I’m assuming that search from Google homepage(s) contributes to $11bn of the total $22bn revenue.

b) Lets assume that the ‘1% of people click on I’m Feeling Lucky’ still holds. In fact, I suspect that this number would be higher considering the increasing number of newbie net users especially in developing countries! You’d expect the people who click on “I’m Feling Lucky” to be net newbies and unable to really differentiate between organic and paid results. Those well crafted & well placed ads (like ours!) would attract their attention a lot more.

c) If the average Bing user is twice as likely as the average Google user to click on an ad, I’d argue that the average ‘I’m feeling lucky’ clicker, had he clicked on the money making ‘Google Search’ button instead, would be at least thrice as likely to click on an ad. Hence the ‘I’m feeling Lucky’ guys could account for (almost) 3% of ‘opportunity’ revenues

So, let’s do the math…

$11bn in annual revenues x a conservative 3% =

$ 330mn in increased revenues – simply by removing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button!

What does this do for the bottom-line?

There is no direct cost (of revenue/goods sold) for this ad inventory – unlike the ad inventory from the content network where about 75% of the revenues are paid out to the content network partner. Hence this is $330mn of PURE Gross Profit! Google typically spends 30% of its revenues in R&D & G&A expenses. Assuming this ratio applies for the incremental revenues, and taking that expense figure of 30% out ($100mn) , you’d expect them to add a whopping $230mn annually to their net income – simply by removing the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button!

This $230mn translates to an increase (in net income) of over 5%

I believe this is too tempting an opportunity for Google to pass up! When the going is good, its easy to say stuff like “It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money… “ . In the current economic climate, you can expect Google to milk every opportunity they have. After all, they still ‘answer’ to Wall Street!

Considering all this, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” opportunity is too much of a potential cash cow (or sitting duck, or low hanging fruit – pick your metaphor) to pass by. Remember, it translates into a direct increase of 5% in net income!

Of course, when it happens, Google won’t tell you the real reason! Expect to hear something like…

“…extensive research conducted by Google showed that the absence of the I’m Feeling Lucky button translated to a user taking 6 milliseconds less – to reach the results page he was looking for. As much as the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is a part of Google history, removing it makes for an enhanced user experience, and finally, Google is all about the user’s experience. So, with a heavy heart…”

As some people say, It’s all about the Money, Honey!

Remember, you saw it here first!

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.