For example, in the past, if a photographer was tasked with shooting publicity photos for a rock band, she might pull tear sheets from magazines (Rolling Stone, etc). She might have scrapbooks she has collected over the years. Or, she might keep a library of books of her own to show clients. She would meet with the band and show them her ideas for the shoot.

Now, she has the world at her fingertips with the Internet. And Pinterest can help her show it to the band.

All she has to do is create a Pinterest board for that project and start pinning things to it. She can invite someone in the band, or the whole band – to join Pinterest where they can see her ideas, comment on them, discuss them, etc. She can even add them as collaborators on that board (or another) and get their own ideas.

This is what such a board might look like.

This is one great business use for Pinterest. There are tons more that do not exploit Pinterest directly for the sake of advertising and sales. Let’s hear about them in the comments.

“In a sense, the millions of people who come to Expedia® are now serving as your own personal travel agent, helping you find the best and most popular deals from your home city,” said Joe Megibow, vice president and general manager, Expedia.com. “So many customers travel with Expedia every month that it puts us in a great position to deliver this type of service to our customers. With Last-Minute Deals, you can get the best deals available by letting everyone else do your research for you.”

The deals are part of a new program by Expedia titled ASAP (A Sudden Amazing Price).

Weatherbug – The simplicity of Apple’s Weather app, but with a few extras for your phone. It’s the largest network of professional weather stations in the US and is the only source for truly live, local weather (as taken from their site).

BePut – enables users to share their whereabouts with people they want to find them. Users simply use the application to locate their exact position and with a touch of a button, have the opportunity to send an email or text message to the desired recipient with their exact location. The recipient gets a special FindMe Key which is secure. The only guaranteed way to not get lost.

Car Care & Roadside Emergencies – I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate it when things don’t go according to the plan. You have this important presentation, and you end up with a flat tire in an express way. Or maybe you are trying to get home from a concert, and your car doesn’t start up. These situations happen all the time, and they usually tend to happen when you expect them the least. Now some of us have a knack for breaking and fixing things as far as cars are concerned.

Waze – Waze is a social mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road intelligence. The service includes constantly-updated road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data providing users with the fastest route to get to wherever they need to go. Map and traffic updates are automatically collected and generated as users drive with Waze activated, but drivers can also actively report and update other users with what’s happening on the road.

Shazam – In the car for hours and can’t figure out the song playing on the radio? When you hear a song and wonder what it is, Shazam is there with the answer. Hold your iPhone to the music and within seconds Shazam will tell you the artist and track name. You can even download the song through iTunes on your iPhone.

Comments

The pretty pictures were used with Arthus-Bertrand’s permission, but there’s much more to it than that.  Google’s Rebecca Moore explains, “Each image is paired with thought-provoking statistics about the current environmental situation they depict.  The facts and figures were put together by GoodPlanet.org, Yann’s non-profit organization established to promote environmental awareness and sustainable development.”

And although many of the developments we cover tend to be picked up by the American press, this one seems to interest a much larger audience – a query for “Google Yann Arthus-Bertrand” in Google Blog Search turns up more top-ranking results in French and Spanish than in English.

Google’s environmentally-friendly projects were once viewed as an oddity, but if anything, the company has participated in them with increasing frequency over time.  Since Google’s market share and market cap have continued to grow, shareholders have no reason to complain, and the rest of us get to enjoy interesting offerings like the Yann Arthus-Bertrand layer.

By the figures from Hitwise
Google continues to rise.
Its search share reached 65.10 percent.

With declines at Yahoo,
MSN/Live and Ask.com too,
Their search share continued its descent.

Will a new search engine gain
On Google’s runaway train
Or is this something no one can fix?

Forty-six other search sites
May want to reach Google’s heights.
Their combined share percentage? 1.96.

follow me on Twitter

Comments

Tag:

89.98 – that’s the exact figure for August, according to XiTi and Alt Search Engines.  Since Google won over 89.79 percent of the French market in July, that means Google’s liable to hit 90.00 at any given moment.  And that means Google’s opponents are in serious trouble.

After all, we’ve nearly reached the “nine out of ten people prefer Google” point, and most of us can admit that at least one person in any group that size is bound to be asleep, stupid, or, in the tradition of an old Trident commercial, being bitten by squirrels.

Still, Yahoo might take some comfort in the fact that it’s in second place (with a market share of 3.17 percent).  MSN is next (with 2.33 percent), followed by Orange (with 1.82 percent).  Would-be challenger Quaero remains nowhere to be seen.

It’s going to take quite a lot for anything to overthrow Google as France’s top search engine.  At the rate things are going, it actually seems more likely that Google will hit 100 percent than plummet to 49.

Compete blogger Jay Meattle said social networking darling Facebook saw an increase of 14.6 million visitors, but MySpace and its gain of 10.2 million should not be discounted.

At the top of the 50 domains, Yahoo and Google rated one and two in unique visitors. Despite Yahoo’s documented issues and reorganizations, they haven’t suffered in traffic. Over 130 million unique visitors arrived at Yahoo’s domains in September, 124.5 million at Google’s.

Microsoft likely had traffic to its domains shuffle from one to another during the month. Passport.net and MSN.com both lost visitors.

“My guess is that most of their lost traffic went to Live.com, MSN’s new portal. Live.com is up 10.2M unique visitors during the same time period,” said Meattle.

On a closing note, those looking for love, or at least a reasonable, physical facsimile of it, have increasingly turned to Fling.com. Their traffic rose by 17.4 million from September 2006 to September 2007 to 18.7 million. AdultFriendFinder had nearly 24 million visitors in the month.

You can practically see minds being boggled left and right, and that isn’t necessarily a result of admiration or envy – the word “bubble” was spoken often enough even as Google approached the $600 mark.  That was before Google released its third quarter earnings report, though, and the numbers within were admittedly impressive.

So, where does this fresh news land us?  Every financial analyst is likely to have his (or her) own opinion as to how rational a price $675 per share is.  From more of a tech and business perspective, I will at least note that there’s been very little that hasn’t gone Google’s way in recent weeks.  Also, things haven’t been so smooth for its rivals.

Here’s one other observation: before the market closed, Google’s stock seemed relatively stable at $675 – there wasn’t a massive sell-off once it reached that point.  So the search giant’s current investors, at least, seem to feel it should go higher.