Selected by gleonhard

• Most Topular Stories

• Why Hollywood Really Will Shrink

  Inside Digital Media

  pleigh1@tampabay.rr.com (Phil Leigh | Podcasting & Blogging Consultant)

  9 May 2012 | 9:22 am

  Although it’s been predicted before, the stars in their courses are finally lining-up against the studios. First, most Hollywood motion pictures aren’t very good. As moviegoers we generally only learn about the good and successful ones. But the catalogues licensed to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and other websites reveal just how big the inventory of bad films really is. It’s the principal reason Netflix subscriber growth is weakening a second time. Download four minute audio narration to iPad, iPhone, or iPod here. Second, Hollywood films cost way too much. There’s a century of legacy…

• Digital Media/Desk Producer - WISH

  DIGITAL MEDIA - Google News

  16 May 2012 | 1:18 pm

  Digital Media/Desk ProducerWISHWISH-TV in Indianapolis has an immediate opening for a Digital Media/Desk Producer to join our award winning web staff. The Digital Media/Desk Producer is an individual with keen attention to detail and a drive to develop our site and news products.

• King Zuck's reign weakens, albeit slightly

  CNET News - Internet & Media

  Paul Sloan

  16 May 2012 | 11:57 am

  Insiders are selling more of their shares in Facebook's IPO, meaning Mark Zuckerberg will see his control slip.

• Sharing the love of Facebook

  Search for "DIGITAL MEDIA"

  15 May 2012 | 12:19 pm

  Facebook wants investors to like it when it goes public later this week. But it's the users that are the lynchpin to its appeal.

• Socialcam Beefs Up Privacy Features

  MediaPost | Online Media Daily

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  As with other social apps on Facebook, Socialcam spreads news about the videos people watch to their social networking friends. Socialcam revised its program so that it no longer automatically resumes sharing users' information with friends. Socialcam will keep sharing turned off until users affirmatively reactivate the feature.

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  Inside Digital Media

• Why Hollywood Really Will Shrink

  pleigh1@tampabay.rr.com (Phil Leigh | Podcasting & Blogging Consultant)

  9 May 2012 | 9:22 am

  Although it’s been predicted before, the stars in their courses are finally lining-up against the studios. First, most Hollywood motion pictures aren’t very good. As moviegoers we generally only learn about the good and successful ones. But the catalogues licensed to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and other websites reveal just how big the inventory of bad films really is. It’s the principal reason Netflix subscriber growth is weakening a second time. Download four minute audio narration to iPad, iPhone, or iPod here. Second, Hollywood films cost way too much. There’s a century of legacy…

• Subsidies for Internet Service

  pleigh1@tampabay.rr.com (Phil Leigh | Podcasting & Blogging Consultant)

  1 May 2012 | 10:52 am

  Since IP telephony is merely one of many applications available on Internet networks, it’s increasingly evident that broadband Internet access shall become more important to rural residents than traditional telephone service.  While the FCC is recommending subsidy changes, the situation warrants a more radical course of action. There’s a lot of money at stake and those with the inside track don’t seem to merit the rewards. Download five minute audio narration to iPad, iPhone, or iPod. First, some background. During the Great Depression Congress passed the bedrock 1934 Communications…

• The Great Locomotive Chase

  pleigh1@tampabay.rr.com (Phil Leigh | Podcasting & Blogging Consultant)

  13 Apr 2012 | 10:12 am

  Today the Disunion series of The New York Times published my third article. The story corresponds to a Civil War incident known as The Great Locomotive Chase which occurred one-hundred-and-fifty years ago yesterday. For Confederates the quickest connection between eastern and western theaters was a railroad from Richmond to Chattanooga. Consequently, the Mountain City’s strategic significance was far greater than its modest population. Union forces would not gain undisputed control of the town until November, 1863. To download two minute audio narration to iPhone, iPad, or iPod click here.

• Why I am Buying More Books

  pleigh1@tampabay.rr.com (Phil Leigh | Podcasting & Blogging Consultant)

  11 Apr 2012 | 11:30 am

  The four reasons I’m buying more books than five years ago are (1) Internet interactivity, (2) second-hand markets online, (3) Amazon.com rewards points and (4) iPad. Internet Interaction The ability to interact over the Internet stimulates my book buying in two ways. Download seven minute audio narration to iPad, iPhone, or iPod here. First, I can buy books with a mere mouse-click which is more convenient than driving to a store where the desired title may not even be in-stock. But there’s more to it than that. Almost unconsciously I’ve become increasingly skilled at using…

• Big News in Wireless Internet

  pleigh1@tampabay.rr.com (Phil Leigh | Podcasting & Blogging Consultant)

  3 Apr 2012 | 10:35 am

  Wireless Internet Service Providers held their semi-annual conference in Orlando last week. A number of important industry-specific developments were announced and one was coincident. 1. Last Friday Towerstream (Ticker:TWER) filed a Form 8-K with the Securities & Exchange Commission disclosing it “signed a Wi-Fi agreement with a national wireless carrier (for) utilizing our current and future rooftop assets.” During the past two weeks the stock moved from $2.75 a share to $5.15 this morning (April 3rd). Download four-minute audio narration to iPad, iPod, or iPhone. Presently the…

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  DIGITAL MEDIA - Google News

• Digital Media/Desk Producer - WISH

  16 May 2012 | 1:18 pm

  Digital Media/Desk ProducerWISHWISH-TV in Indianapolis has an immediate opening for a Digital Media/Desk Producer to join our award winning web staff. The Digital Media/Desk Producer is an individual with keen attention to detail and a drive to develop our site and news products.

• New Study Reveals Physician Device and Digital Media Adoption Rapidly Evolving - Mobile Enterprise

  16 May 2012 | 12:07 pm

  mobihealthnewsNew Study Reveals Physician Device and Digital Media Adoption Rapidly EvolvingMobile EnterpriseBy Tony Rizzo According to the newest Taking the Pulse US 2012 study from healthcare market research and advisory firm Manhattan Research, physicians' device and digital media adoption are evolving much faster than anticipated, especially when it comes New Study Reveals Physicians' Device and Digital Media Adoption Rapidly EvolvingPharmaLive (press release) (subscription)Doctors' Tablet Use Almost Doubles In 2012InformationWeekall 6 news articles »

• David Armano: The future of digital media - Washington Times

  16 May 2012 | 8:50 am

  Washington TimesDavid Armano: The future of digital mediaWashington TimesCHICAGO, May 16, 2012 — David Armano is one of the most respected voices in digital media. Six months ago, he listed the "Six Social Media Trends for 2012" in Harvard Business Review. All six are becoming increasingly more relevant.Lawyers Guide to Social MediaJD Supra (press release)all 4 news articles »

• IAB Launches Digital Media Sales Certification to Set New Professional ... - MarketWatch (press release)

  16 May 2012 | 6:15 am

  Marketing PilgrimIAB Launches Digital Media Sales Certification to Set New Professional MarketWatch (press release)That situation changes with today's announcement by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) establishing the first-ever educational standard for digital media sales forces with the launch of the "IAB Digital Media Sales Certification.IAB Launches Digital Media Sales Certification ProgramMarketing PilgrimIAB Debuts Digal Sales Certification ProgramMediaPost Communicationsall 5 news articles »

• Hearst Digital Media to Integrate Meebo Across 13 Premium Properties - EON: Enhanced Online News (press release)

  16 May 2012 | 12:00 am

  Hearst Digital Media to Integrate Meebo Across 13 Premium PropertiesEON: Enhanced Online News (press release)(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Meebo, a consumer Internet company that drives user engagement and reaches almost half the US Internet population, announced a partnership with Hearst Digital Media (HDM), a unit of Hearst Magazines, and on Twitter and more »

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  CNET News - Internet & Media

• King Zuck's reign weakens, albeit slightly

  Paul Sloan

  16 May 2012 | 11:57 am

  Insiders are selling more of their shares in Facebook's IPO, meaning Mark Zuckerberg will see his control slip.

• Google exec to Facebook: Uh, your users aren't really shoppers

  David Hamilton

  16 May 2012 | 11:48 am

  Following GM's decision to drop its Facebook ads, a Google advertising guy tweaks-by-tweet, noting that Facebook users aren't, y'know, really there to go shopping. He's got a point -- but maybe not for long.

• It's a Facebook backlash. Wow, that was quick!

  Jim Kerstetter

  16 May 2012 | 11:05 am

  commentary GM cancels an ad campaign, a national opinion poll is vaguely negative, and a co-founder swears off America to avoid taxes right before the long-awaited IPO. Welcome to Facebook's crazy week.

• Bing gets social, but it's too quiet in here

  Rafe Needleman

  16 May 2012 | 10:26 am

  Bing gets Facebook social smarts and a great design to find people related to users' searches, but the new engine yields surprisingly sparse social results.

• Facebook's latest filing: Insiders are cashing in

  Don Reisinger

  16 May 2012 | 10:04 am

  The company's latest S-1 Registration Statement reveals that the increase in available shares will come from investors and early shareholders, and not Facebook.

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  Search for "DIGITAL MEDIA"

• Sharing the love of Facebook

  15 May 2012 | 12:19 pm

  Facebook wants investors to like it when it goes public later this week. But it's the users that are the lynchpin to its appeal.

• Triton To Offer New Online Audio Metrics In Multiple Formats

  10 May 2012 | 8:33 am

  TRITON DIGITAL will provide online audio metrics "in multiple formats in response to market demand for more standardized metrics across on-air and online broadcasting," said the company.

• Content marketing, social media and blogging - how to make it work for your organisation

  8 May 2012 | 6:17 am

  Learn about the growing trend of content marketing and how your blog, your social media channels and your organisation's content all fit into your go-to-market strategy.

• Facebook "likes" small investors

  4 May 2012 | 6:39 pm

  As Wall Street shows it "likes" the upcoming Facebook initial public offering by raising very public banners in celebration.... Facebook is going after another crowd with a 31-minute video.

• B Culture Media Reveals New Analytics Proprietary Tool

  30 Apr 2012 | 1:34 pm

  B CULTURE MEDIA REVEALS NEW ANALYTICS PROPRIETARY TOOL DIGITAL BRAND IQ SCORING TOOL New York, NY - B Culture Media has added another value add to their proprietary list with the introduction of their new Digital Brand IQ Scorecard - "Culture Card." The new Culture Card measures a brand's digital and social presence and online engagement efforts.

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  MediaPost | Online Media Daily

• Socialcam Beefs Up Privacy Features

  16 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  As with other social apps on Facebook, Socialcam spreads news about the videos people watch to their social networking friends. Socialcam revised its program so that it no longer automatically resumes sharing users' information with friends. Socialcam will keep sharing turned off until users affirmatively reactivate the feature.

• New Data Links TV, Video Data To Aid Cross-Platform Marketing

  16 May 2012 | 12:07 pm

  TV advertising and measurement technologies have begun to better link television and video data, as online marketers begin understanding the importance and benefits of multichannel marketing. The report analyzes embracing TV audience data as a viable "audience intelligence source."

• Ask.com Answers Call Of Seattle Residents

  16 May 2012 | 11:25 am

  Granting three wishes of Seattle residents this summer could pay off in clicks and searches on Ask.com's question and answer site. The "You Asked, We Answered" campaign polled residents in and around Seattle, asking them to vote on the one thing they most want to change about the city.

• IAB Debuts Digal Sales Certification Program

  16 May 2012 | 11:22 am

  The digital advertising world now has its answer to the legal profession's bar exam and Wall Street's Series 7 certification, courtesy of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The trade group will offer an official certification for digital media sales executives starting next month.

• YouToo's Facebook App Uploads Video For TV Watchers

  16 May 2012 | 11:10 am

  Blurring the lines between old and new media, Youtoo just debuted a Facebook app, which encourages users to upload videos for TV consumption. Formerly AmericanLife TV Network, Youtoo TV can now be seen in 177 domestic cable markets; social-media platform Youtoo.com have been around since late 2011.

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  AllThingsD » Peter Kafka

• Harvey Geller, Universal Music Group's Top Lawyer, Is Out

  Peter Kafka

  16 May 2012 | 11:17 am

  Harvey Geller, Universal Music Group’s longtime lawyer, left the company earlier this week. A person familiar with Universal said Geller was now headed for another job but didn’t have other details. His name will be familiar to many digital-media companies, since he often led fierce and sustained battles against them on behalf of the world’s biggest music label.

• Facebook Is Still Figuring It Out. Will Advertisers and Investors Wait Around?

  Peter Kafka

  15 May 2012 | 7:42 pm

  There are a bunch of ways to explain away GM’s decision to stop spending ad dollars on Facebook. We’ll get to those. But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing. If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring.

• Google Says Forced "Sharing" Is a Bug, Not a Feature

  Peter Kafka

  15 May 2012 | 11:38 am

  Google is offering publishers a new tool that lets them force users to “share” a story before they read it themselves. That can’t be right, can it? Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen. Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email: Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a…

• Cannes Ad Conference Roars for Twitter's Jack Dorsey

  Peter Kafka

  15 May 2012 | 7:02 am

  The Cannes Lions, the people who put on a giant advertising trade show every year in France, have named Twitter’s Jack Dorsey as their “Media Person of The Year.” The honorific comes as Twitter has begun ramping up its ad-selling efforts. For context: Previous winners include Google’s Eric Schmidt and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

• Pinterest Prompts a Start-Up's Pivot: Meet Curalate, an Analytics Engine for Images

  Peter Kafka

  15 May 2012 | 5:20 am

  Pinterest’s rocket rise may be slowing, but there are still lots of companies struggling to keep up with the image-sharing site. Apu Gupta wants to help: His Curalate promises to help brands and e-commerce companies track the use of their products on Pinterest, and eventually on other image-focused sites, too. Curalate’s pitch: You need basic information about the way users and potential customers are interacting with your products on Pinterest, but it’s very hard to do it on your own, because users usually don’t identify the products they’re…

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  InformationWeek Mobility News

• Doctors' Tablet Use Almost Doubles In 2012

  16 May 2012 | 10:20 am

  Apple's iPad has emerged as the dominant tablet platform, according to Manhattan Research survey.

• Microsoft's Mobile Share Plunges 27% As Phone Sales Cool

  16 May 2012 | 8:22 am

  Worldwide mobile phone sales down 2%, but market leaders Samsung, Apple and Google continue to gain share.

• Bigger iPhone Display: Why Apple Has No Choice

  16 May 2012 | 7:07 am

  Does the next-gen iPhone's display size really matter? You bet, but size won't be the only big decision as Apple competes with Samsung, HTC, and others.

• 10 Wearable Devices To Keep Patients Healthy

  16 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Wearable devices equipped with sensors, Web connections, or both, help consumers and healthcare providers track health and fitness. Take a look at what's possible now.

• InformationWeek's RSS Feed is brought to you by

  16 May 2012 | 6:00 am

• 

  Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless

• The telecoms industry and a dual-dilemma problem

  Dean Bubley

  11 May 2012 | 7:09 am

  I had an interesting late-night Twitter spat with Keith McMahon last night, about the appropriate future model for telecoms operator strategy. He disagrees with my stance on Telco-OTT (operators launching their own pan-Internet services) and reckons that it will accelerate "value destruction". I'm adamant it's inevitable even if it does imply cannibalisation and revenue decline taken at a macro industry level.Thinking about this more today, I've realised that my view can be explained quite simply. The telecom industry is (as far as I can tell) the first to face two classical "dilemmas"…

• Phone number as OTT identifier - a problem in the making?

  Dean Bubley

  11 May 2012 | 1:21 am

  I got an SMS this morning from a business contact - actually a client from an operator who came to the Telco-OTT workshop a couple of weeks ago. It was an invitation to download TU Me, the new Telefonica VoIP and messaging app, sent from within the app itself.But as it happens, I've already got the app on my phone. But what I don't have on my phone is this person's phone number. So I can't connect to them. And so TU Me didn't realise we already knew each other.This got me thinking. A lot of the more successful recent OTT apps (whether Telco-OTT or Internet-OTT) have used the contact list and…

• Telefonica TU Me - first salvo in full-scale interoperator Telco-OTT warfare

  Dean Bubley

  9 May 2012 | 5:46 am

  Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big believer in operators developing their own OTT-style services. I published the first full analyst report on the Telco-OTT concept it a few months back, and conducted the first public workshop (summary deck here) about two weeks ago.Telco-OTT offerings are not new - I've found over 100 examples, split between four broad categories of Communications, Content, Connectivity and Cloud. Some have been around for a decade or more, and I am adding more on a weekly basis. I've also been engaged in numerous private consulting projects and…

• Summary slides on Telco-OTT rationale

  Dean Bubley

  5 May 2012 | 5:10 am

  Last week, Martin Geddes & I ran our first public workshop on Telco-OTT services, and why both fixed and mobile operators should be developing their own Internet-based services. This was a full-day event, with a varied attendance from operators, vendors, Internet companies, regulators and others. Rather than just being presentations from myself and Martin, we ran the event to get a good amount of discussion, interaction and networking among the participants.We covered general trends in the telecoms industry that make it inevitable that the historic "federation" model of telecoms services…

• Upcoming Events: Open Mobile Summit, NGMN, Small Cells & more

  Dean Bubley

  2 May 2012 | 2:26 am

  Future of Voice & Telco-OTTFirstly, a big round of thanks to everyone who came to last week's London Future of Voice and inaugural Telco-OTT workshops. Martin & I were very pleased with the levels of insight & interaction, and the general atmosphere of learning and collaboration among supposed rivals. I've come out of the events with a range of extra thoughts and ideas, and will be feeding those back into our ever-evolving story.On that topic, we're still finalising dates for our next public FoV / OTT workshops in the US (and after that, back in UK/Europe and maybe Asia later in…

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  Mobile Opportunity

• Yahoo: The Worst Way Ever to Pick a Corporate Strategy

  Michael Mace

  13 May 2012 | 10:56 pm

  So Yahoo has burned through another CEO, and I'm sure the next step will be a lot of media sermonizing about the need to be honest in your resume, the power of the Internet to rally outrage around an issue, and importance of making an immediate and full disclosure/apology when you're in the wrong.  All good lessons.But to me the most important issue, and I think a damning one, was contained in this comment down at the bottom of Kara Swisher's article on the resignation (link):"Thompson was pushing forward a vision of adding a much more significant data and commerce element to Yahoo’s…

• The "Bubble" and What's Really Going on with Startups

  Michael Mace

  29 Apr 2012 | 10:59 pm

  Today's New York Times declares that there an investment "bubble" in Silicon Valley being concealed by venture capitalists, and that it's so out of control that startups are being told not to generate revenue for fear of disrupting their fantasy valuations (link).I think the article is about 1/3 correct and 2/3 nuts.  Yes, some startup valuations do seem amazingly high.  No, there isn't some grand conspiracy, and there isn't necessarily a bubble.  This is an important issue for the mobile tech world because mobile startups are a huge part of the so-called bubble.  If…

• Apple is Not Sony

  Michael Mace

  26 Apr 2012 | 11:47 pm

  I'm not sure what I disagree with more, Forrester Research's glib prediction that Apple will be the next Sony (link), or the assumption that it's even possible to predict something that complicated.  Let me start with the second issue.The longer I've been in the tech industry, the more I've come to realize that predictions about it are usually worthless.  Leave aside the big failed dreams like nuclear-powered aircraft (link) and the transatlantic train tunnel (link).  Even products that seem relatively straightforward can be very hard to predict.  The industry thought…

• The Two Faces of RIM

  Michael Mace

  17 Apr 2012 | 2:10 pm

  At the risk of turning this weblog into the "BlackBerry channel," I wanted to add a couple of additional thoughts to my post on Research in Motion's recent earnings and strategy announcement (link).  There was an interesting divergence in the press and analyst comments about Thorsten Heins' statement that RIM would refocus on enterprise customers.  Commentators in the US and Canada generally responded to it fairly well, while those in Europe and other parts of the world were a lot more negative.I think that's because there are really two BlackBerry customer bases, one in North…

• Rebuilding RIM

  Michael Mace

  2 Apr 2012 | 10:54 pm

  There's something sick about our love of disaster movies.  We take pleasure in seeing great works of ego laid low -- that unsinkable ship is going down, the fireproof skyscraper is going to burn all the way to the top.  I think many observers are now watching Research in Motion like a disaster movie: It's too big to ignore, too sick to survive, every quarter is a new plot twist of devastation.  Some of the press coverage is taking on a mournful air of inevitability:"RIM weighs bleak options," says the Wall Street journal (link).  The article quotes a customer as saying a…

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  Mobile Marketing Watch

• U.S. Postal Service Promotes Mobile Marketing Integration

  Michael

  16 May 2012 | 12:33 pm

  The U.S. Post Office is a big supporter of mobile marketing and the digital tools of the modern trade. To that end, the post office is offering the 2012 Mobile Commerce and Personalization Promotion to encourage commercial mailers to use mobile marketing tools such as QR codes on their mail. The move comes just as the post office itself clings to solvency as dwindling revenue continues to hinder the institution. During July and August, the Postal Service is offering an upfront 2 percent postage discount on Standard Mail and First-Class Mail letters, flats and cards (presort and automation)…

• Acquity Group Expands Into Canada

  Michael

  16 May 2012 | 12:16 pm

  Canada and eCommerce haven’t exactly had the best relationship. But that may change in the months and years ahead. Just this week, Acquity Group Limited, a global Brand eCommerce and digital marketing company, confirmed plans to expand into Canada. “With online consumption in Canada expected to reach $51 billion by 2016,” said Acquity Group in its announcement, “major North American retailers and B2B brands serving the Canadian market have engaged Acquity Group to design elegant yet functional experiences integrated across all digital channels, including web, mobile…

• Facebook Makes One Last Pre-IPO Acquisition

  Michael

  16 May 2012 | 11:48 am

  With only hours to go before Facebook becomes a publicly traded company, the social networking giant has what could be it’s final acquisition before debuting on NASDAQ. According to Tech Crunch, Facebook has “just closed a deal to hire the full team of seven employees from Android photosharing app developer Lightbox.” The latest acquisition comes just one month after Facebook gobbled up Instagram for $1 billion. Along with the Instagram buy, the last-minute-before-IPO Lightbox hires will help assure investors that Facebook will do what it takes to win the very mobile-centric…

• Was The iPhone a Smart Move for Sprint?

  Michael

  16 May 2012 | 10:57 am

  As the most recent major U.S. carrier to get the iPhone on its network, one would expect the globe’s most popular smartphone to instantly make a splash – and some big bucks – for the third largest mobile operator in the United States. But given the huge subsidy Apple charges its carrier partners for access to the device, it can take some time for the iPhone to bring in the green. A long time. In fact, just this week, All Things D published comments from Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who says it could take another three years for the iPhone to become profitable for his company.

• Zumobi Creating Mobile Buzz in Partnership with Starbucks

  Michael

  16 May 2012 | 10:02 am

  With coffee in one hand and a mobile device in the other, this is how millions of Americans start their day every day. And that’s exactly why Zumobi has partnered with java giant Starbucks for a more sophisticated mobile endeavor. Zumobi today announced an extension to its partnership with Ology Inc., a social discovery and networking company, launching the site’s first app for Android devices. And Starbucks is coming along for the ride. Through a partnership with Starbucks, Ology has released their new app on the Zumobi Brand Integration (ZBi) platform. Now users can skim through…

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  Future Perfect

• Popup Studios

  janchip

  12 May 2012 | 7:22 pm

  Today’s office is a 31st story penthouse overlooking Singapore. Or at least it’s notionally a penthouse, with a frog team of four having turned it into a popup studio for a project we are currently running in the city state, with every available inch of wall space liberated to hang daily schedules, incoming data, observations, insights, ideas and iterations of the research plan. Renting someone else’s apartment comes with nuanced perks: a glimpse at an opulent lifestyle; and understanding of tastes, textures, priorities; a sense of apartment block rhythm, lilt. The Egyptian…

• Air Con Norms

  janchip

  12 May 2012 | 6:51 pm

  Back alley for smaller retail outlets in Singapore’s Chinatown. What the diversity of air conditioning units in use can teach us about the products sold, competition in the retail air conditioning market and the replacement cycle?

• The Networked Urban Environment

  janchip

  7 May 2012 | 10:32 am

  Imagine never having to look for a parking space ever again. An essay here.

• Renovate

  janchip

  30 Apr 2012 | 4:28 am

• Xuhui Textures

  janchip

  29 Apr 2012 | 6:03 am

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  Telecom News

• Survey: 66% of consumers happy with their pay-TV subscription

  Sean Buckley

  16 May 2012 | 8:10 am

  Are you happy with your pay-TV service? Well, according to a new American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) released by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, 66 percent of U.S. consumers say they are dissatisfied with their service. Interestingly, the overall pay-TV industry only slightly beat out the one of the kings of consumer frustration--the airline industry, which scored a 65 ACSI. FierceIPTV reports the survey findings. Read more...

• Cyan names telecom industry veteran Mark Floyd as CEO

  Sean Buckley

  16 May 2012 | 7:45 am

  Cyan has appointed Mark Floyd as its chief executive officer, in a move the company said will help it take advantage of new international growth opportunities. Floyd Having joined the board of directors in 2007 and named the company's board chairman this January, Floyd is hardly a stranger to Cyan. He will also continue to serve on the Petaluma, Calif.-based company's board. Floyd replaces company founder Michael Hatfield, who will remain as the vendor's president. In his role as company president, Hatfield will oversee overall solution strategy and driving development, engineering,…

• BT employs Equinix data centers for its Radianz cloud-based service

  Sean Buckley

  16 May 2012 | 6:43 am

  BT (NYSE: BT) is leveraging Equinix's (Nasdaq: EQIX) data centers to deliver its cloud-based Radianz Venue targeting financial-trading companies with a set of hosting and low-latency interconnectivity solutions. Through this agreement, BT will offer Radianz Venue capabilities from Equinix's data centers. BT's move adds 10 financial ecosystems to its Radianz footprint across North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. BT Radianz Venue will offer three low latency products: BT Radianz Venue Access: connectivity to the BT Radianz cloud from 40 non-BT centers, including Equinix and other data…

• Consolidated Communications raises cash to complete SureWest acquisition

  Sean Buckley

  16 May 2012 | 6:23 am

  Consolidated Communications (Nasdaq: CNSL) plans to generate new funds to wrap up its pending acquisition of fellow independent ILEC SureWest (Nasdaq: SURW). The Mattoon, Ill.-based service provider, as reported in the Sacramento Business Journal, plans to sell $350 million in senior notes that will mature in 2020 to partially fund the deal. SureWest agreed to be purchased by Consolidated for $340.9 million in cash and stock, in February. When the purchase is complete, the combined company will have operations that stretch across six states. Although both service providers were raised in…

• House panel to examine broadband stimulus spending

  Chris Rizo

  16 May 2012 | 6:05 am

  A congressional panel is scheduled to meet this morning to discuss broadband loans and grants programs bankrolled by the 2009 federal economic stimulus package. Top to bottom: Strickling, Adelstein, Zinser to testify. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will met at 10 a.m. ET, to review broadband stimulus efforts from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA; Pub.L. 111-5). A Republican-drafted subcommittee staff memo indicates that discussions at the hearing will likely include whether U.S. taxpayers "are getting their money's…

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  Mobile

• Japan’s Docomo buying mobile content powerhouse Buongiorno for €224 million

  Robert Andrews

  15 May 2012 | 1:52 am

  Japan’s largest mobile telco is about to buy in to mobile media content in Europe and farther afield, by acquiring one of the space’s pioneer companies. NTT Docomo has tabelled a €224 million ($287 million, 24 billon yen) bid for Milan-based Buongiorno, which began in 1995 and has built up through acquisitions to offer mobile games, music and other services. The price is 32 times Buongiorno’s €7 million annual operating profit. Buongiorno founder chairman Mauro del Rio (pictured) is selling his 20 percent stake. Docomo says it wants to grow outside of Asia by adding…

• Expect a 6 month freeze on Facebook’s Instagram acquisition

  Jeff John Roberts

  11 May 2012 | 1:05 pm

  A former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer and antitrust expert says Facebook’s purchase of photo-sharing site Instagram will take between four months and one year to clear regulatory hurdles. In the meantime, the deal is effectively on hold. One month after Facebook announced it bought Instagram for an eye-popping $1 billion, the Financial Times reported that the deal would be delayed due to a probe by the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s what you need to know: Why is the FTC messing with the deal? The federal agency conducts a routine 30-day review of any deal over $66 million…

• Nokia launches Reading app for Lumia in Europe

  Laura Hazard Owen

  11 May 2012 | 8:25 am

  Nokia is launching its Reading app and e-bookstore for the Lumia Windows Phone in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK. In doing so, the company hopes to bring more local-language e-books to countries where e-readers haven’t yet taken off. Nokia’s app will compete with Amazon’s Kindle and Kindle apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows in France, Italy, Spain and the UK. The Reading app, first announced with the new Lumias at Mobile World Congress in February, will be available for the Lumia 900, 800, 710 and 610 this week. Nokia says, “While e-books are…

• Beyond the birds: Rovio finally ready to diversify?

  Robert Andrews

  10 May 2012 | 3:14 am

  For too long now, Angry Birds maker Rovio has talked loftily of becoming the next Disney, on its never-ending road to an IPO. But, whereas Disney got early hits with Micky Mouse’s Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie and quickly expanded its portfolio to a host of new characters and franchises, Rovio has appeared a one-hit wonder. It had developed a whopping 51 under-the-radar mobile games and nearly fell bankrupt before finally finding its Angry Birds hit in December 2009. Now, however, Rovio appears finally to be looking beyond the birds. This video released by the company on Wednesday…

• Samsung boosts its mobile ecosystem with mSpot purchase

  Kevin C. Tofel

  9 May 2012 | 1:32 pm

  Samsung announced on Wednesday that it has acquired mSpot, a cloud-based content company formed in 2004. Until now, mSpot offered music storage with streaming playback, including song lyrics, and also movie rentals for various mobile platforms. There’s no indication if mSpot will continue to support iOS and BlackBerry devices. Currently mSpot’s movie rentals are available on either the day of or the day after the DVD release; Samsung already has its own media hub for movies but it doesn’t have a digital media locker solution of its own. Instead, Android owners of Samsung…

• 

  Communities Dominate Brands

• Smartphone Market Shares after Q1 - Its the Digital Jamboree year of Smartphone Bloodbath

  Tomi T Ahonen

  16 May 2012 | 10:31 am

  Yes, its now Year 3 (Digital Jamboree) of the Smartphone Bloodbath. We have Q1 results, now that each of the four major analyst houses has given their final count of how many smartphones were sold or shipped in the quarter. I report on this blog the overall market share pictures as the most thorough review of the biggest smartphone makers by every measure you could hope for. Here is my review of Q4 and the full year 2011. The four big analyst houses (Gartner, IDC, Strategy Analytics and Canalys) were remarkably unanimous this time, just over 1.5 million units separated the highest and lowest,…

• Updating Many Mobile Numbers and Milestones

  Tomi T Ahonen

  15 May 2012 | 7:37 am

  We've had many stats reported recently, including Chetan Sharma's big market update and a global survey by TNS and many other data points from various sources. Lets take a survey of what kind of numbers we can confirm and update.THE BIGGEST NUMBER EVERThe 7 Billion milestone is coming in less than 12 months. We've seen this number coming. Some are already suggesting we'll hit the 7 Billion level by the end of this year 2012. I have said it will hit about March-April of 2013. The number of 7 Billion is not really the exciting number, the real number will be the point where…

• The 'I Wish I Had Known This' List about 101 Things Wrong With Windows Phone Smartphones Like Nokia Lumia

  Tomi T Ahonen

  11 May 2012 | 7:23 am

  I told my readers last year, that Stephen Elop's new Nokia Microsoft strategy with Windows Phone has only one chance to get it right. This was because I accurately predicted that the market share will fall from Nokia's 29% market dominating position using Symbian OS, to the 12% it was at year end 2011 when the first Lumia smartphones started shipping. ELOP NOW SAYS BURNING PLATFORM MEMO HURT NOKIA SMARTPHONE SALES IN 2011Note that the decline needed not be that intense, Nokia could have held to a far more gradual decline in Symbian sales if it were not for the misguided Elop Effect…

• Electronic Echoes and the Bizarre War Nokia Communications Director John Pope Now Waging With Me?

  Tomi T Ahonen

  10 May 2012 | 4:48 am

  This is so weird, so illogical, so bizarre. I am 100% sure Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa is not aware - and would not approve. That Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is not aware, and would not approve. That Nokia Exec VP of Markets, Niklas Savander does not know, and definitely would not approve. That Nokia Chief Marketing Officer Jerri DeVard is not aware - and would absolutely disapprove. Disapprove of what? Of this ridiculous war that Nokia Director of Communications John S Pope (who Twitters as @JohnAtNokia and calls himself the 'social media strategist for Nokia' - so even his TW handle…

• Understanding OTT - Why Carriers dislike BBM, hate iMessage and fear Skype (updated)

  Tomi T Ahonen

  10 May 2012 | 12:35 am

  I was just speaking in the Netherlands doing a keynote at the Mobile Convention. As I was in town, the news broke that the local incumbent fixed and mobile operator, KPN, was laying off 5,000 employees in an austerity measure, and simultaneously, Carlos Slim's America Movil was making an offer to buy about a quarter of the company. KPN has significant telecoms presence in several European countries like Germany and Belgium. America Movil is the giant telecoms giant out of Mexico, and Carlos Slim is obviously the richest man on the planet. Why would this be relevant to OTT, Over The Top…

• 

  Wireless Watch Japan

• Wireless Japan 2012 Conference

  admin

  7 May 2012 | 1:44 am

  The 17th annual ExpoComm Wireless Japan Conf. and Trade Show at Tokyo BigSite runs May 30th - June 1st: http://bit.ly/JJPYXT

• Smartphone App to Monitor Drivers

  admin

  5 May 2012 | 1:27 am

  New smartphone app. recognizes when a traffic accident has occurred, records images before and after the event: http://bit.ly/IQwveZ

• Panasonic Shifts Production to China

  admin

  4 May 2012 | 1:27 am

  Panasonic plans to shift 50% of mobile lithium-ion battery production to their Suzhou, China facility by 2015: http://bit.ly/IxMjhQ

• Disaster Proof Mobile Networks

  admin

  3 May 2012 | 1:19 am

  A 'Disaster-proof' mobile networks project is in development by Japanese carriers with Tohoku University: http://bit.ly/IQwisd

• Otosan - The Iconic SoftBank Mascot

  admin

  1 May 2012 | 1:19 am

  Great post with full story on Otosan, the iconic SoftBank mascot, along with a Youtube TVCM collection: http://bit.ly/Lt0EjL

• 

  Mobile Entertainment: Stream

• TxtNation launches new HLR lookup platform

  16 May 2012 | 7:54 am

  'Data cleanses' messages to make campaigns more cost-effective

• Mobile porn filters block clean content

  16 May 2012 | 7:16 am

  It's not just the filth users can't access, according to the ORG.

• Alawar signs with PlayPhone

  16 May 2012 | 6:57 am

  Addiiton of four casual games titles takes PlayPhone Social Gaming Network past 150 titles.

• Twilio launches on Android

  16 May 2012 | 6:49 am

  Developers will be able to build voice features into apps using the Google platform.

• SexEntertain to bring amateur porn to mobile

  16 May 2012 | 6:42 am

  A result of partnership with fellow adult content provider Homegrown Video.

• 

  Blog of the Long Now

• The Lost (and Found?) Battle of Anghiari

  Austin Brown

  16 May 2012 | 10:56 am

  Friend and Member of Long Now Davide Bocelli wrote in recently to update us on the story of a lost fresco painted by Leonardo Da Vinci: This is a story about an incredible error, an act of respect, and a multicentennial game. As I wrote to Alexander Rose, some years ago the mystery of the Lost Da Vinci is still in the news after five centuries and it intends to stay there. This story is also a bridge between California and old Italy, as Maurizio Seracini is a UCSC San Diego graduate and the director of CISA3 at the San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and…

• Rachel Sussman Searches for Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic Wonder

  Charlotte van den Hout

  15 May 2012 | 10:04 am

  In 1854, Sir Francis Galton published his first edition of The Art of Travel, a practical handbook for the serious globetrotter. The work offered useful tips and advice to help expeditions deal with unforeseen issues along the way, from building a makeshift shelter and navigating without a compass, to dealing with hostile “natives.” The guide quickly became a bestseller, and multiple new editions were printed in the years to follow. This was, after all, the heyday of global exploration. Fifteen years earlier, Charles Darwin had discovered new species on the Galapagos Islands; fifteen…

• Smithsonian Magazine: Thinking About Futurism

  Charlotte van den Hout

  14 May 2012 | 10:46 am

  Solar-powered houses, computerized education, flying cars, and strawberries the size of your head: that’s how artist Arthur Radebaugh once imagined the future. In the 1950s and ‘60s, he published a series of newspaper cartoons entitled “Closer than We Think,” in which he illustrated a shiny, grand, and technologically revolutionized world of tomorrow. Radebaugh is but one of many thinkers who have creatively theorized about what the future might look like. The Smithsonian Magazine is exploring their ideas in a series on “Thinking about Futurism;” a collection of articles that…

• Conservation in the Age of Man

  Charlotte van den Hout

  11 May 2012 | 11:11 am

  Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change. Environment & Energy Publishing recently featured an article on former SALT speaker Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy who argues that conservation work is in need of a new direction and philosophy. The “horror stories” ecologists love to tell about how humanity is singlehandedly (or better said, too-many-handedly) destroying nature are, he claims, not corroborated by…

• Benjamin Barber Seminar Tickets

  Austin Brown

  10 May 2012 | 10:11 am

  The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking Benjamin Barber on “If Mayors Ruled the World” TICKETS Tuesday June 5, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10   About this Seminar: Democracy began in cities and works best in cities. Mayors are the most pragmatic and effective of all political leaders because they have to get things done. “The paramount aims of city-dwellers,” says Barber, “concern collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or…

• 

  Open the Future

• The Pink Collar Future

  Jamais Cascio

  1 May 2012 | 11:22 am

  The claim that robots are taking our jobs has become so commonplace of late that it's a bit of a cliché. Nonetheless, it has a strong element of truth to it. Not only are machines taking "blue collar" factory jobs -- a process that's been underway for years, and no longer much of a surprise except when a company like Foxconn announces it's going to bring in a million robots (which are less likely to commit suicide, apparently) -- but now mechanized/digital systems are quickly working their way up the employment value chain. "Grey collar" service workers have been under pressure for…

• New Pollution

  Jamais Cascio

  1 May 2012 | 8:39 am

  I spoke last month at the Swissnex office in San Francisco (Swissnex is kind of the Swiss embassy for technology issues), at an event entitled "Data is (sic) the New Oil." The focus of the event was the tension between privacy and "publicy" (Stowe Boyd's term for the intentional revelation of aspects of one's life, the opposite of privacy). A video of the entire event is now online, and below you'll find the 15 minutes or so of my talk. Jamais Cascio on Polluting the Data Stream from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo. This talk covers what I wrote about in "Opaque Projections," but this is a moving…

• Opaque Projections

  Jamais Cascio

  11 Apr 2012 | 11:35 am

  Last night (April 10, 2012), I spoke at the San Francisco Swissnex office on a panel entitled "Data is* the New Oil." When I was told the title of the panel, it struck me as an odd metaphor. Oh, I understand the intent: oil was the fuel for the 20th century industrial economy, and information is the fuel for the 21st. But oil has a key characteristic that simply isn't true for data. Oil is limited -- we have a declining stock. Whether you think peak oil happened a few years ago, will happen soon, or is still a ways off, the truth is the same: there is a finite supply of oil, and unless we…

• Okay, so what does that mean?

  Jamais Cascio

  10 Apr 2012 | 1:49 pm

  I realize I just sort of left that post hanging, with the only conclusion being something on the order of "You maniacs! You blew it up!" There are three general scenarios that come out of that last post. The first, and most likely, is that we (as a planet) keep doing what we've been doing until things get even worse and we get much closer to irreversibility. The second, and the one I hope happens, is that this scares enough people that there's a "cigarette phase shift" -- a rapid change in public discourse such that something that once just scientists and hippies cared about becomes a…

• Not-So-Distant Early Warnings

  Jamais Cascio

  10 Apr 2012 | 1:23 pm

  In the middle of prepping for IFTF's 2012 Ten-Year Forecast event at the end of April, then traveling to Kazakhstan in late May. In the meantime... US Experienced warmest March ever. Average temperature in the lower 48 states was 8.6 degrees above normal (although apparently not in California). Or, in video form: Unsurprisingly, permafrost in Siberia and northern Canada appears to be melting. This is all something we've understood for quite awhile. A paper in Science in 1981 offered up a projection of temperatures, and the last 30 years has tracked closely (and slightly exceeded) the…

• 

  Institute For The Future

• Book Launch: Leaders Make the Future, Second Edition

  Deepa Mehta

  6 May 2012 | 9:35 pm

  teaser:  IFTF is pleased to announce the release of the second edition of Leaders Make the Future. In this book about leadership and decision-making, Bob Johansen shares nearly 40 years of expertise as a ten-year forecaster at IFTF. This book is for any leader who wants to successfully navigate the challenges of the present and find opportunities to thrive in the future. May 7 marks the publication of the second edition of Leaders Make the Future: 10 New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World by IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen. image:  cover.jpg IFTF Staff Posts read more

• A Century of Transformation, A Decade of Turbulence: 2012 Ten-Year Forecast

  Sara Skvirsky

  4 May 2012 | 10:44 am

  attachment:  Event Graphic Recording - Sample (image) teaser:  From April 24-26, Ten-Year Forecast members gathered together at Cavallo Point in Sausalito, CA for the program's 2012 Annual Retreat, which explored the six fundamental shifts that will shape the century to come. We find ourselves facing a gap between the familiar past and an alien future: our incumbent path is predicated on trends that may well have reached their peaks, yet the emergent path has not yet taken shape.   From April 24-26, Ten-Year Forecast members gathered together at Cavallo Point in Sausalito, CA…

• Brinda Dalal Joins Health Horizons as Research Director

  Ben Hamamoto

  1 May 2012 | 2:57 pm

  teaser:  Health Horizons is pleased to announce that Brinda Dalal has joined our team as a research director. Brinda's career has spanned two decades and three continents. Her research has taken her to India, where she co-developed micro-credit and housing programs with local women, and to Japan, where she explored high-tech innovation. Health Horizons is pleased to announce that Brinda Dalal has joined our team as a research director. Brinda's career has spanned two decades and three continents. Her research has taken her to India, where she co-developed micro-credit and housing…

• Driving a Cleaner and More Resilient Future

  Tracey Grose

  23 Apr 2012 | 4:12 pm

  California’s innovation engine has the potential to shift the economy to a cleaner and more resilient future.  Next 10, a nonpartisan nonprofit just released the 2012 California Green Innovation Index. In its fourth edition, this important document illustrates along multiple measures that you can indeed choose both, environmental improvement and economic growth. IFTF Staff Posts read more

• It’s Official: More than 18,000 Paths out of Poverty!

  Kathi Vian

  18 Apr 2012 | 9:30 am

  teaser:  On April 3-5, IFTF and the Rockefeller Foundation invited people all over the world to join the Catalysts for Change game and imagine thousands of paths out of poverty. More than 1,600 people from 79 countries responded to the call to action. And after 48 hours of gameplay, they had built long chain reactions of ideas that added up to 18,160 ideas for ways to catalyze change in poor, vulnerable, or marginalized communities. On April 3-5, IFTF and the Rockefeller Foundation invited people all over the world to join the Catalysts for Change game and imagine thousands of paths out…

• 

  Copyfight

• Elsevier Loses a Big Name, Publicly

  16 May 2012 | 7:59 am

  Elsevier took another shot to the face today, with the very public resignation of an associate editor of its journal Genomics. Winston Hide, the now-former editor, is a teacher at Harvard School of Public Health, and his resignation reasoning centered around his feeling that Elsevier's high-priced model was not compatible with the needs of people in developing countries. Hide, who is South African, has some direct experience with trying to do research on the continent where, he says:The vast majority of biomedical scientists in Africa attempt to perform globally competitive research without…

• How The Harvard Book Store is Reinventing Retail Bookselling

  14 May 2012 | 12:07 pm

  Writing for Forbes last week, Phil Johnson profiles the modern-day re-creation of the venerable Harvard Book Store. When I moved to Cambridge in the pre-Web days it boasted more bookstores (and ice cream parlors) per square meter than any other place on earth. Awesome stuff. But over the years they've been dying out, like small independent and big chain bookstores everywhere. When the biggest of the lot went under it seemed like confirmation that nothing could compete with Amazon and other online offerings. But lo, Harvard Book Store is back, under the direction of Jeff Mayersohn, who…

• "The Mongoliad" As Business Model

  10 May 2012 | 9:39 am

  I recently got to hear Neal Stephenson talk at MIT. As usual, he was a pleasure*, and the talk ranged over a wide variety of topics, from why America is in a massive idea deficit to why we should all stand up more and sit down less. What he didn't really discuss, to my disappointment, was the Mongoliad. Fortunately, Mark Teppo's "Big Idea" post in Scalzi's Whatever gives a little hint of what's going on here. The Mongoliad on offer here is a book - a collaborative work. But what's of interest to Copyfight is the structure and entity that produced this book. To quote Teppo:[W]e formed a…

• Village Person Terminates Cartel Rights

  9 May 2012 | 11:27 am

  Way back in August of last year, I noticed that there was a storm brewing over so-called "termination rights" in music recordings. That storm appears to have had a first crash, with former Village People member Victor Willis reclaiming his rights in some of their hit songs. To review quickly: a feature of the Copyright Act that went into force in 1978 gave record companies 35 years' worth of profits from albums, after which the artists would be allowed to reclaim their rights in the music. Several artists have done so, and the Cartel is fighting them. According to Larry Rohter's NY Times…

• Kindle Sales Dropping Already, Publishers Back Off IPad Apps

  9 May 2012 | 6:36 am

  Last month I noted that Charles Stross was giving the stand-alone e-reader 2-5 years, whereas I was betting that sales had already peaked and we'd see a decline after the holiday season this year. I might have been too optimistic. Now comes Jon Mitchell on ReadWriteWeb, reporting that "Kindle Sales Plummet". He claims that sucks but I think he's exaggerating. Anyway, Amazon doesn't exactly report its sales of Kindles, so it takes a little bit of sleuthing to infer this. Mainly the inference comes from E Ink Holdings, which supplies the screens for Kindles, reporting that it had a quarterly…

• 

  Creative Commons » Commons News

• Culture Freedom Day is May 19

  Jane Park

  16 May 2012 | 8:05 am

  This Saturday is Culture Freedom Day, a worldwide celebration of free and open culture through education efforts, on- and offline events, and promoting artists who work in free culture. Culture Freedom Day is organized by Digital Freedom International, a nonprofit that also promotes software freedom. As stewards of the open licenses and tools that enable creators to contribute to a free and open culture, Creative Commons encourages you to celebrate this day by learning more about it and the open licenses that make up the infrastructure for free cultural works. You can also CC license one or…

• COMMUNIA explores role of digital public domain in final report

  Jane Park

  16 May 2012 | 7:12 am

  From 2007 to 2011, COMMUNIA was a project funded by the European Commission to explore the role of the public domain in the digital age. Over four years, COMMUNIA, or The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, gathered over 50 members from academia and the CC community to research, promote, and preserve the digital public domain. In 2011, COMMUNIA’s members decided to continue the network as an international nonprofit association. We would like to highlight two recent publications by COMMUNIA that shed light on COMMUNIA’s progress: In April, COMMUNIA released,…

• Saylor Foundation expands $20,000 Open Textbook Challenge

  Anna Daniel

  10 May 2012 | 9:36 am

  The Saylor Foundation provides global grants of US $20,000 to college textbook authors seeking to openly license their educational textbooks for use in free Saylor college-level courses. Authors maintain their copyright and license textbooks to the world via Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) to enable maximum reuse, remix, and redistribution. To learn more and apply, visit Saylor’s Open Textbook Challenge page for more details. In addition to providing grants for existing textbooks, the Saylor Foundation has announced a new option to award authors seeking to create open textbooks that…

• CC News: The Liberated Pixel Cup

  Jane Park

  9 May 2012 | 12:38 pm

  Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. The Liberated Pixel Cup: an epic contest for gaming freedom We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game authoring competition being launched in cooperation between Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, and OpenGameArt! Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of this… but…

• Day Against DRM 2012

  Jane Park

  4 May 2012 | 9:29 am

  Today is Day Against DRM. If you don’t already, you should know that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management (or probably more accurately, Digital Restrictions Management), and that we have blogged about this day before for good reasons, including, DRM causes problems regarding fair use, lack of competition, privacy and security breaches, forced obsolescence, and more… (Read the Wikipedia article on DRM.) CC provides tools to make it easier for creators and owners to say what rights they reserve and permissions they grant — maximizing sharing and collaboration. This is in…

• 

  Beyond the Book

• BTB #296: Free E-books Is Gluejar’s Mission

  rob@burstmarketing.com (BurstMarketing)

  13 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  It sounds like a caper in a Wallace and Gromit movie. Liberate the e-books. But that unlikely mission is the work of Gluejar. A technologist, entrepreneur, and writer, Eric Hellman is Gluejar’s president, who became interested in technologies surrounding e-journals and libraries after 10 years at Bell Labs in physics research. “We want to offer rightsholders the opportunity to get a one-time payment in exchange for making their books into Creative Commons-licensed e-books. And the way we’re going to do this is by crowd-funding campaigns,” Hellman explains for CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

• PW’s Week Ahead 05.11.12

  rob@burstmarketing.com (BurstMarketing)

  10 May 2012 | 11:01 pm

  Authors’ representatives – otherwise known as literary agents – have done some writing on their own this week. In a missive to the US Department of Justice, the board of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR) conveyed “in the strongest terms possible” its opposition to a proposed settlement with three publishers over alleged e-book price fixing. “The AAR acknowledges they have no idea whether the publishers that settled colluded or not,” PW’s Andrew Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “And, all good points aside, that’s the key issue here. If these CEOs…

• BTB #295: The Trouble With E-Book Pricing

  rob@burstmarketing.com (BurstMarketing)

  10 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Consumers are taking to e-books fast – almost as fast as they have taken to the readers and tablets where e-books live in the digital world. A February 2012 report from the Pew Research Center found that one in five US adults had read an e-book in the last year. The latest figures available from the American Association of Publishers show that year-over-year sales of adult e-book titles rose 49.4 percent in January 2012, from $66.6M to $99.5 M; children & young adult eBook climbed 475 percent over last year from just under $4M to $22M. But there is trouble in e-book Eden. News that the…

• BTB #294: E-Books – You Can’t Write Just One

  rob@burstmarketing.com (BurstMarketing)

  6 May 2012 | 11:00 am

  The price of e-books is on many people’s minds, including the Federal Department of Justice, which recently sued Apple and three leading publishing houses. At least as much as consumers care about getting the lowest price, however, authors and publishers care about getting a fair price for their works. But when you’re the author and the publisher at the same time, how do you know you’re getting the best deal and the most sales? “What we’ve learned is that a volume of titles makes such a difference. For those of you out there who are self-published authors or for those of you out…

• PW’s Week Ahead 05.04.12

  rob@burstmarketing.com (BurstMarketing)

  4 May 2012 | 12:21 pm

  The parties returned to Judge Denny Chin’s Manhattan courtroom yesterday for motions in the Google Books Case. The search engine giant sought to remove the Authors Guild as an associational plaintiff, even as the Guild pushed for its own motion to certify the class of authors. And what about the publishers? Well, they were elsewhere, keeping busy with the burgeoning e-book market. “From the questions he asked from the bench, it certainly seems like Judge Denny Chin wants to see the Authors Guild lawsuit against Google and its library book-scanning program proceed as a class action, and…

• 

  Copyright Questions & Answers

• Happy World Intellectual Property Day! | copyrightlaws.com

  26 Apr 2012 | 6:12 am

  Happy World Intellectual Property Day! | copyrightlaws.com

• copyrightlaws.com » Copyright Facts for Librarians

  27 Mar 2012 | 7:44 am

  copyrightlaws.com » Copyright Facts for Librarians

• copyrightlaws.com » Copyright Law Commentary and Information

  5 Jan 2012 | 11:53 am

  copyrightlaws.com » Copyright Law Commentary and Information

• copyrightlaws.com » The International Copyright Symbol

  5 Jan 2012 | 7:00 am

  Does your copyright symbol and notice need to include the year 2012? copyrightlaws.com » The International Copyright Symbol

• copyrightlaws.com » December 2011, LEH-Letter: Copyright, New Media Law & E-Commerce News

  19 Dec 2011 | 6:31 am

  copyrightlaws.com » December 2011, LEH-Letter: Copyright, New Media Law & E-Commerce News

• 

  paidContent

• Netflix CFO: Really, we didn’t kill Spongebob’s ratings!

  Daniel Frankel

  16 May 2012 | 12:39 pm

  Don’t blame us for cratering Nickelodeon’s ratings. That was a key takeway from Netflix chief financial officer David Wells Wednesday, as he addressed investors at the J.P. Morgan 40th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston. “The presence of a DVR full of Spongebob is probably more disruptive than Netflix, and that doesn’t come with Netflix revenues,” Wells said. Also read: We’ve got hard data: Netflix really is killing Nickelodeon Viacom-owned Nickelodeon’s once-buoyant popularity among youthful viewers has experienced inexplicably…

• Facebook’s biggest problem is that it’s a media company

  Mathew Ingram

  16 May 2012 | 10:46 am

  There’s been a lot of attention paid to Facebook’s business model recently, especially with the news that General Motors has killed a $10-million advertising campaign devoted to the giant social network — not exactly a great sign of confidence in advance of the world’s most eagerly anticipated IPO. And GM’s move is only the latest indication of discontent, as other advertisers are also questioning their spending. What all of these moves reinforce is that while Facebook may look like and function like a social network for the majority of its users, on the business…

• Industry Moves: Operative; Rubicon Project; Texas Tribune; AdSafe Media; GumGum; Exponential

  Amanda Natividad

  16 May 2012 | 10:36 am

  The latest hires in the tech and media industry. Operative: Manu Warikoo has been promoted to lead the company’s product strategy and R&D roadmap as chief product officer. He was previously SVP of solutions, where he worked on product strategy and services. Prior to joining Operative, Warikoo co-founded search-driven research firm FirstRain. In April, former Incentone COO Francois DeCourtivron signed on as CFO of Operative. Rubicon Project: Former Ticketmaster CTO Brian Pike joins as CTO of the company. Former Ticketmaster Deputy General Counsel Victoria von Szeliski also joins as…

• Can Yell turn online around with self-serve marketing?

  Robert Andrews

  16 May 2012 | 10:36 am

  Yell.com and Yellow Pages operator Yell Group is acquiring UK point-and-click website builder Moonfruit, as it tries to salvage even digital classifieds that are in reverse. Over five million sites, including 230,000 e-tail stores, have been created using Moonfruit since its 2000 launch, according to the buyer. Yell is a tortured soul. Its classical print directory business, of course, goes on losing advertisers to the internet. But even Yell’s online directories like Yell.com and Yellowbook lost 15.7 percent of their ad sales during Q4, compared with the prior year, Yell reported in…

• Google shakes up search with new Wikipedia-like feature

  Jeff John Roberts

  16 May 2012 | 10:00 am

  Just months after rolling out a controversial personalized search feature, Google  is shaking up its search pages once again. This time, the search giant is carving out a chunk of the site for “Knowledge Graph,” a tool that offers an encyclopedia-like package in response to a user’s query. The idea is to get users to spend more time on Google and also to make the search engine offer a more human-like understanding of questions and context. “This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the…

• 

  NYT > Media & Advertising

• Dish Network’s Hopper Cuts Ads and Causes Tremors at TV Upfronts

  By BRIAN STELTER

  16 May 2012 | 12:39 pm

  Dish Network is promoting a digital video recorder that can automatically skip ads, a device that undermines broadcast TV’s business model.

• Media Decoder Blog: Clear Channel Buys WFNX, Venerable Boston Rock Station

  By BEN SISARIO

  16 May 2012 | 12:37 pm

  The station, which was founded in 1983, had a role in popularizing grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the early 1990s. If the deal is approved, Clear Channel would add a fifth station in the Boston market.

• G.M. to Quit Facebook Ad Campaign Worth $10 Million a Year

  By TANZINA VEGA

  16 May 2012 | 12:36 pm

  The loss of $10 million in ad dollars does not represent a financial disaster for Facebook, but it is a public relations headache so close to the company’s initial stock offering this week.

• Advertising: Broadcasters Pitch Programming for Hispanics - Advertising

  By STUART ELLIOTT and TANZINA VEGA

  16 May 2012 | 12:17 pm

  Nine cable channels and broadcast networks are offering advertisers a way to reach the Hispanic population, up from five at the upfronts presentations last year.

• Rebekah Brooks Testifies About Relationships With British Elite

  By SARAH LYALL

  16 May 2012 | 10:52 am

  Rebekah Brooks’s appearance on Friday before an inquiry into press ethics offered a glimpse into the relationship between political power and the press in Britain.

• 

  Conversation Agent

• Most Marketers Still Not Making Data-Driven Decisions Surveys Find

  Valeria Maltoni

  16 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  How do large corporate marketers collect and use data? Are practices in marketing measurement and ROI changing? How about the integration of digital and traditional marketing? Has the excitement around big data brought about a shift in how marketers conduct their business? These are some of the topics for investigation in a recent study conducted by Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA). The short answer: there is still a big gap between where organizations would like to be and where they actually are in…

• Answering Common Inquiries About Content

  Valeria Maltoni

  15 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Three kinds of inquiries I receive regularly: write about us give us your content allow us to post Many of you find the contact form for consulting work. In that case, I'm happy to provide a quote and scope of work. If that's not what you're after, the quickest way to find out what is accepted for review and publication is by following the link to -- submit your question on the top menu. In all cases, the best outcomes come when the ask is appropriate. Note the term "pro" is part of the word. Making the ask Don't know how to ask? Here's how to write an email that stands out for your review.

• Why Experience is Key to Customer Loyalty

  Valeria Maltoni

  14 May 2012 | 2:00 am

  Whenever I travel, I'm reminded of the many amazing opportunities that come from being able to reach many parts of the world relatively easily. Let's face it, things can go wrong with the weather and with technology. It is how an airline -- or any company, for that matter -- handles customer fairness that will make a big difference to its bottom line. Will they have to discount fares more deeply so people will do business with them again next time? There is plenty of room left for improving customer experience in the travel industry -- airlines, hotels, car services, even airports, with a few…

• Business Lessons I Learned from my Mother

  Valeria Maltoni

  13 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  My mother was Miss Romagna. Her name is Anna Laura. I wanted to have her purple blue eyes and ready smile. She has the welcoming spirit of a woman always ahead of the times and comfortable in her own skin. In addition to being a mother of three (all girls), she has had multiple careers -- accounting, sales, public office, geriatric care, and beautician; some overlapping for years. Mother really gets communications -- the listening part especially -- the organization of work, along with the care of the individual.  Whether she negotiated credit rates or the recovery of the elderly, she made…

• Fair Pay, Participation Value, and The Intention Economy

  Valeria Maltoni

  12 May 2012 | 3:00 am

  Do you know the pay scale for your industry? I'm not talking about the job wanted ads -- those may mislead you and take you down the generic path. You're not generic, you have specific skills, and you should be able to calculate market value. Just like with salary, where you don't have a cut and dry answer, interaction and involvement are not exactly the same thing. Community participation has highs and lows, and they may not follow the touted 1% route. How active are people online? Has it changed in the last couple of years? Marketers can optimize campaigns and programs only so far. Without…

• 

  PSFK

• Experimental Art Project Generates Energy From World Currency Exchange

  16 May 2012 | 12:01 pm

  A "poet of ideas" creates a company that captures the current between two metal currencies that mirror those being traded digitally.

• Man Implants iPad Nano Into His Arm

  16 May 2012 | 11:36 am

  Professional body piercer Dave Hurban causes controversy by inserting magnetic studs into his forearms that allow him to attach and detach gadgets.

• Wearable Exoskeleton Can Help Users Carry Heavy Items With Ease

  16 May 2012 | 11:02 am

  Soon to be commercially available in Japan, the exoskeleton will help people to carry almost 90 pounds without strain.

• Steve Clayton: How To Design Technology So It Becomes Natural [Video]

  16 May 2012 | 10:30 am

  Microsoft expert presents a vision of the future where gesture, sound and artificial-intuition create a world that extends the possibilities of our creativity.

• Land Rover Edible Survival Guide Will Keep Drivers Alive In The Desert

  16 May 2012 | 10:21 am

  Car company creates a book explorers can eat that also gives car owners tips about terrain, shelter, and wildlife.

• 

  Brian Solis

• The Fallacy of Information Overload

  Brian Solis

  15 May 2012 | 6:50 am

  Some of you know me through my work in studying how social media and disruptive technology impact business and culture. Others have worked with me in translating insights into action and change within the enterprise.  Every now and then, I share another side of myself that evokes the aspiring social scientist in me as I explore how all of this is affecting us as individuals and human beings. Not a day goes by when I’m not asked about whether or not the social media bubble will finally burst. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, this all has to be too much right? More…

• Music, Film, TV: How social media changed the entertainment experience

  Brian Solis

  10 May 2012 | 7:56 am

  Social media is more than a digital water cooler for TV and movies. The global conversation that takes place around events and the experiences people share based on what they watch teaches us about consumer preferences. More importantly, their activity influences behavior. Behavior counts for everything. Studying it is just the beginning of course. In order to understand and eventually steer behavior, we must translate activity into insights and in turn, translate insights into actionable strategies and programs. The Hollywood Reporter recently published an exclusive poll about social media…

• The future of TV is more than social, it’s a multi-screen experience that needs design

  Brian Solis

  7 May 2012 | 11:19 am

  The future of television is much more than social; much in the same way that the future of media is too, more than social. Social is a fabric; it connects the individual nodes that make up the human network. But, social however, is not a means to an end. And, as such, the same is true about the working theories driving Social TV. Understanding the role social plays in how viewers connect with programs and other people is essential to defining the future of television. Over the years, I’ve written much about my vision for the long overdue convergence of not only web and TV, but also how the…

• The Path from a Social Brand to a Social Business

  Brian Solis

  2 May 2012 | 9:17 am

  I’ve been a long-time supporter of MediaTemple’s (MT)Residence program along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel, and many others whom I respect. I wanted to share my “7 questions to answer to become a social business” with you here.. Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing. Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebook, but they’re hardly alone. Disney follows just behind with 29 million…

• Do Customers Really Matter to Your Business? Prove it.

  Brian Solis

  30 Apr 2012 | 8:21 am

  Frank Eliason and I have known each other for many years. We’ve shared the stage on many occasions, he’s made an appearance on Revolution, and most importantly, I’m proud to call him a personal friend. Frank has championed the adaption and transformation of customer service during his time at Comcast and at CITI. Never one to shy away from sharing his opinions, he’s certainly bullish on where service needs to be as a function and a philosophy versus where it is today. In fact, he’s gone so far as to call out social media customer service as being a…

• 

  Advertising Age - Digital

• Turner Takes Stake in Funny or Die, Will Manage Site's Ad Sales

  16 May 2012 | 9:50 am

  Funny or Die CEO Dick Glover said the site has done well but still doesn't have big enough reach.

• Siri, Why Don't You Speak Spanish?

  16 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  With the voice-activated assistant its big selling point, the iPhone 4S has flown off the shelves, despite putting off the U.S. ethnic group most gaga for smartphones: Hispanics.

• Intel Launches Employee-Curated Digital Magazine

  16 May 2012 | 3:55 am

  It looks like Flipboard, aggregates and posts like Reddit, and presents news like Newsmap. Intel iQ, launching today, is the tech giant's latest content-marketing experiment.

• GM Cuts Facebook Ad Spending, But Ford Steps on the Gas

  15 May 2012 | 2:39 pm

  The pullout points to Facebook's biggest challenge: Though most consumer brands see the social network as a way to connect with consumers, opinions are mixed on the value of advertising there.

• Ross Levinsohn Lays Out His Vision for Yahoo (Before He Became CEO)

  15 May 2012 | 12:30 pm

  Want to know what Mr. Levinsohn thinks Yahoo should become? He explained it pretty well, in November.

• 

  Advertising Age - Blog Posts

• Why Facebook Isn't Screwed When It Comes to Auto Marketing

  16 May 2012 | 8:04 am

  The real questions we should be asking ourselves, before we blame Facebook for GM's marketing effectiveness, are were they doing it right and were they measuring it right?

• Social Sharing Data Vampires: They Vant to Suck Your Data

  16 May 2012 | 6:15 am

  With social sharing tools, publishers are bleeding themselves dry, giving up the very customer data that hold the promise of their continued relevance

• Will Facebook be an Internet Behemoth in 10 Years?

  15 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  Facebook will need to fight a constant battle if it wants to maintain its dominant position amid ever-shifting consumer preferences and changing technologies.

• Six Things You Need to Know About Real-Time Bidding

  9 May 2012 | 7:28 am

  Real-time bidding campaigns perform well when executed correctly. But many assumptions about RTB 1.0 are incorrect. An integrated approach is essential.

• Hey Publishers, Time to Increase Your Video Ad Load

  8 May 2012 | 7:45 am

  Traditional TV found a model that works, but online publishers refuse to fully replicate the TV ad load model in their long-form content.

• 

  Advertising Age - The Media Guy

• It's Curtains for Google! And Facebook! And Tumblr! And ...

  12 May 2012 | 9:00 pm

  When you're done tweeting or updating or pinning things or checking in, run for your lives, because the tech sky is falling!

• Six Totally Necessary Regulations That Go Into Effect Immediately

  21 Apr 2012 | 9:00 pm

  In keeping with the spirit of this, the Regulation Issue of Advertising Age, your Media Guy proposes -- nay, mandates -- a whole slew of new laws, bylaws, bi-laws, in-laws and bi in-laws.

• Believe The Hype? Four Things Social TV Can Actually Do

  13 Apr 2012 | 1:22 pm

  Two recent conversations I had with high-level media executives reminded me that not everyone understands the term "social TV."

• Thanks for Proving My Point, Gawker!

  31 Mar 2012 | 9:00 pm

  You may have read about my plans to form a Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. Whether what you read got the details right is another thing.

• Introducing the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation

  12 Mar 2012 | 10:23 am

  A code of ethics for content aggregators? In today's New York Times, media columnist David Carr writes about a new group devoted to establishing and maintaining such guidelines.

• 

  MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors - iOS Blog

• China Mobile Again Confirms iPhone Talks with Apple

  Eric Slivka

  16 May 2012 | 6:26 am

  Reuters reports that China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua has once again publicly stated that the world's largest mobile phone carrier is engaged in talks with Apple about offering the iPhone to its customers."We've been actively talking to Apple on how we can cooperate," China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua, who assumed the post in March, told a shareholders meeting. "I can't give you too many details, but I'd like to repeat that both sides do hope to boost our cooperation," Xi added after the meeting.China Unicom was Apple's launch partner for the iPhone in China, and availability expanded to China…

• In Lawsuit Over Siri, Apple Says the Technology is "Cutting Edge"

  Jordan Golson

  15 May 2012 | 11:29 am

  Apple has filed a motion to dismiss in a case filed by customers over alleged misleading advertising depicting the Siri technology in the iPhone 4S. The lawsuit, filed in March, alleges that Apple's advertising of Siri doesn't reflect real-world usage. When asked for directions or to locate a store, "Siri either did not understand what Plaintiff was asking, or, after a very long wait time, responded with the wrong answer." In a motion to dismiss (via Scribd), Apple attempts to shoot down the Plaintiff's arguments, reports the Wall Street Journal: They offer only general descriptions of…

• iPhone a 'Game Changer' for Customer Satisfaction

  Eric Slivka

  15 May 2012 | 10:44 am

  The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) today released its latest rankings of customer satisfaction in the United States for mobile phones and a number of products and services, with the new mobile phone rankings being expanded to include Apple, Research in Motion, LG, and HTC for the first time. In its first appearance in the rankings, Apple easily topped the list with a score of 83, outdistancing Nokia, LG, and HTC in a tie for second place at 75. Apple's performance marks the first time a mobile phone company scored above 77 in any of the group's surveys dating back to 2004.For…

• Google Chrome Browser Coming to iOS?

  Eric Slivka

  15 May 2012 | 8:57 am

  Business Insider reports on a new research note from Macquarie analyst Ben Schacter, who claims that Google is working to bring a version of its Chrome browser to iOS devices. According to the report, Apple "may already be reviewing" the app, which could debut before the end of the quarter. Google Chrome browser for Android Google currently splits ad revenue share with Apple for Google searches performed through Safari, a deal that currently sees Google paying Apple roughly $1 billion per year. With a potential Chrome browser for iOS leading to Google keeping all revenue for searches…

• Book Pricing Lawsuit Reveals More Details of Apple's Negotiations, Including Steve Jobs Email

  Jordan Golson

  14 May 2012 | 2:04 pm

  Seventeen more states have joined the antitrust lawsuit against Apple and several book publishing houses over the pricing of ebooks. Perhaps more interesting are certain details released in the latest filing that were previously redacted, including one from Steve Jobs. Portions of this email have been seen before, but this is the first chance the public has had to see a major negotiation written by the former CEO. As reported by PaidContent, Steve Jobs became directly involved in the pricing negotiations after Apple executive "Eddy Cue could not secure one of the Conspiring Publisher’s…

• 

  iDownloadBlog.com

• Verizon to end grandfathered unlimited data plans in LTE switch

  Cody

  16 May 2012 | 11:31 am

  Bad news for folks with unlimited data plans on Verizon looking to buy Apple’s new [purported] LTE-flavored iPhone later this year. It appears that the carrier won’t be honoring grandfathered unlimited plans in the switch to LTE.Fierce Wireless is reporting that customers on the Big Red network will be forced to choose from a data-share plan when moving from a 3G handset to an LTE one. The news comes straight from Verizon’s CFO Fran Shammo…(...)Read the rest of Verizon to end grandfathered unlimited data plans in LTE switch "Verizon to end grandfathered unlimited data…

• iPhone tops another customer satisfaction survey

  Cody

  16 May 2012 | 11:07 am

  Even though the Android platform sits on top of several major smartphone categories — marketshare, hardware specs, etc. — there’s one list that it can’t seem to climb: customer satisfaction. That particular stat belongs to iOS.The iPhone has taken home more than 6 J.D. Power Satisfaction awards, and countless other smaller surveys. And it just added another notch to its belt, coming in first in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report…(...)Read the rest of iPhone tops another customer satisfaction survey "iPhone tops another customer satisfaction survey" is…

• Samsung just lost $10B market value on Apple order stoppage rumor

  Christian Zibreg

  16 May 2012 | 10:51 am

  Samsung has lost a whopping ten billion dollars of market value on rumors of order stoppage concerning DRAM chips. The iPhone maker has reportedly secured half the manufacturing output from Elpida, a struggling Japanese maker of dynamic random access memory chips.Apple is Samsung’s biggest client and Cupertino’s business contributes substantially to their fortunes so no wonder Samsung’s shares fell yesterday more than six percent to a nine-week low, effectively wiping out a cool $10 billion of the company’s market capitalization…(...)Read the rest of Samsung just…

• Poll: should the next iPhone have a bigger screen?

  Christian Zibreg

  16 May 2012 | 9:14 am

  With Android devices typically sporting displays measuring between 4.3 and 4.8 inches diagonally (and beyond) and the usually credible Wall Street Journal throwing its weight behind recent reports asserting a four-inch iPhone, we’re eager to learn about your take on this drama.Would you prefer the next iPhone to sport the same 3.5-inch display as prior iPhones? A four-inch iPhone, you say? How do you feel about a monstrous 4.8-inch iPhone?(...)Read the rest of Poll: should the next iPhone have a bigger screen? "Poll: should the next iPhone have a bigger screen?" is an article by…

• iDB Deal of the Day: 44% off the iGrip PerfektFit ClearCase Traveler Kit for iPhone

  Sebastien

  16 May 2012 | 8:56 am

  Get a great deal on the iGrip PerfektFit ClearCase Traveler Kit for iPhone. Today, and today only, you can get it from the iDB store at a 44% discount.The iGrip PerfektFit ClearCase Traveler Kit is designed specifically for your AT&T iPhone 4 and can be used as a protective case or a phone holder in the vehicle.The PerfektFit ClearCase does not interfere with the AT&T iPhone 4 fundamental elements or buttons, and protects the sides, edges, and surface of the device.A foldable stand allows you to place your AT&T iPhone 4 in landscape mode to view movies more conveniently.  The…

• 

  Lifehacker: Iphone

• In Memoriam: Our Favorite Apps and Services That Have Gone Belly Up (and Their Replacements)

  Whitson Gordon

  15 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  More »

• Chrome Likely Heading to iPhone and iPad

  Thorin Klosowski

  15 May 2012 | 8:15 am

  More »

• Change the Font Size on iPhone and iPad Web Sites with Bookmarklets

  Thorin Klosowski

  14 May 2012 | 7:30 am

  More »

• Instacorder Is a No-Frills App For Emailing Yourself Voice Memos

  Shep McAllister

  13 May 2012 | 4:00 pm

• SloPro captures beautiful, 60 frames per second video with your iPhone 4S

  Shep McAllister

  12 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

  More »

• 

  Gizmodo: Iphone

• Apple's Defense of Siri in Class-Action Lawsuit Never Actually Says Siri Doesn't Suck

  Kyle Wagner

  16 May 2012 | 7:10 am

• WSJ: The Next iPhone Will Have at Least a 4-Inch Screen

  Jamie Condliffe

  16 May 2012 | 3:49 am

• Your Favorite Magazines Are Coming to the iPhone

  Adrian Covert

  15 May 2012 | 6:30 am

• There's Not an App for That: When Will Our Smartphones Be Recognized as Valid Forms of ID?

  Molly Oswaks

  14 May 2012 | 7:00 pm

• Use This iPhone Case and Your iPhone Will Be Replaced if It Breaks

  Casey Chan

  14 May 2012 | 5:20 pm

• 

  AppleInsider | iPhone

• Sprint won't profit from carrying Apple's iPhone until 2015, has no regrets

  16 May 2012 | 8:55 am

  Sprint's CEO views his company's up front payment to offer the iPhone as a long-term investment that won't see any returns until 2015. Sprint is estimated to spend $15.5 billion on the iPhone over ...

• 4" screens for Apple's next iPhone will be built as soon as June

  16 May 2012 | 7:31 am

  A trio of screen suppliers are reportedly gearing up to begin production of 4-inch displays for Apple's next iPhone as soon as next month, putting the device on track for a fall launch. LG Display,...

• Apple grows to 7.9% of all mobile phones sold worldwide

  16 May 2012 | 5:58 am

  Though it only sells smartphones, Apple represents nearly 8 percent of all worldwide mobile phone sales, making it the third-largest handset maker. Research firm Gartner on Wednesday announced its ...

• Apple ordering screens sized at least 4" for next iPhone - WSJ

  16 May 2012 | 4:28 am

  Apple has begun placing orders for a new, larger screen that will measure at least four inches diagonally, according to a new report. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the next iPh...

• Apple argues plaintiffs are too vague in class action lawsuit over Siri

  16 May 2012 | 1:00 am

  Apple has filed a motion to dismiss a set of class-action lawsuits, which accuse the company of falsely advertising its Siri voice assistant feature for the iPhone 4S, under the grounds that the plain...

• 

  streaming music - Google News

• Monetizing Music Videos & Live Shows With Evinar & Gyroskope - hypebot.com

  16 May 2012 | 9:06 am

  Monetizing Music Videos & Live Shows With Evinar & Gyroskopehypebot.comBoth Evinar and Gyroskope are services that musicians can use to monetize streaming video. Evinar focuses on livestreaming via Facebook while Gyroskope features videos for which customers pay to stream as often as they like.

• Google Music Now Only Allows You To Deauthorize Four Devices Per Year - Android Police

  16 May 2012 | 8:53 am

  SlashGearGoogle Music Now Only Allows You To Deauthorize Four Devices Per YearAndroid PoliceThe problem with any account-based music streaming service, from a corporate standpoint, is that end users are a shared password away from getting access to free media. Really, who hasn't shared their Netflix account once or twice?Google Music restricting device deauthorizationSlashGearall 14 news articles »

• With Spotify and Its Ilk, There's No 'My' in Music Anymore - PopMatters

  16 May 2012 | 8:47 am

  With Spotify and Its Ilk, There's No 'My' in Music AnymorePopMattersMy collection, along with my many books, have been the physical manifestation of the musical data I have accrued, the accumulated evidence of my passions. But with the evolution of streaming and download services such as iTunes Match, Spotify, and more »

• Loveline Signs Live Web-Exclusive Content Distribution Deal with Ustream - San Francisco Chronicle (press release)

  16 May 2012 | 6:04 am

  Loveline Signs Live Web-Exclusive Content Distribution Deal with UstreamSan Francisco Chronicle (press release)Courtside Entertainment Group Partners with Ustream to Provide Fans with Live, Interactive Video of Loveline with Dr. Drew, Mike & Simone San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 16, 2012 Ustream Inc., the leader in live, interactive, streaming video, and more »

• New CBC Service Should Be Music To Canadians' Ears - Toronto Star

  16 May 2012 | 5:36 am

  Satellite Radio PlaygroundNew CBC Service Should Be Music To Canadians' EarsToronto StarThat is clearly part of the CBC's mandate, and is not – as some assert – an egregious infringement on the rights of companies that are trying to stream music over the internet for a profit. If you haven't listened to CBC's new service, you should.The Canadian Government Launches Free Online Music Service — CBC MusicSatellite Radio Playgroundall 4 news articles »

• 

  streaming music - Yahoo! News Search Results

• Rdio

  15 May 2012 | 9:47 am

  Rdio features a new and simplified interface, rewindable tracks, and strong social networking elements that make it one of the most intriguing streaming music services around.

• Spotify (for iPad)

  15 May 2012 | 9:44 am

  Spotify for iPad is an ear- and eye-catching way to enjoy Spotify, the Editors' Choice pick for streaming music players, on your iPad, but it lacks the intuitiveness, flexibility, and depth of its desktop service.

• With Spotify, there's no 'my' in music anymore

  15 May 2012 | 7:18 am

  Streaming and download services offer a whole new way to keep and share one's recording collection. But why is it so hard to toss all those LPs, 45s, CDs and MP3s? I am sitting on a couch facing two turntables, a DJ mixer, a dual-drive CD player/recorder, a cassette deck and a wireless two-terrabyte hard drive half full of music — all in one way or another plugged into my sound system. The ...

• How the launch of the Official Streaming Chart heralds a new chapter in our relationship with the music industry

  15 May 2012 | 1:02 am

  From vinyl to CDs to MP3s to Apple iPods to Playlists to Sonos wireless music systems, the way we listen to our favourite artists has moved on as fast as our tastes in chart acts has changed.

• Library offers free streaming music

  14 May 2012 | 1:31 pm

  The Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County announced today that it has partnered with online streaming music service Rdio to offer free unlimited streaming music.

• 

  Inside Facebook

• Horoscopes, Yahoo, video, Instagram, Lost Bubble, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by DAU

  Sara Inés Calderón

  16 May 2012 | 8:57 am

  Daily Horoscope was the No. 1 gainer on our list of Facebook applications that grew by daily users this week. Additionally, there were two other horoscope apps, Yahoo, a few video websites, mobile apps, Instagram, Facebook’s developer site, and games led by Lost Bubble. The titles below grew between 100,000 and 1.7 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week Name DAU Gain Gain,% 1.   Daily Horoscope 1,900,000 +1,740,000 + 1,088% 2.   Yahoo! 6,500,000 +1,700,000 + 35% 3.   Siz.net 670,000 +530,000 + 379% 4.

• Facebook adds app ratings and negative feedback metrics to insights tool

  Brittany Darwell

  15 May 2012 | 2:46 pm

  Facebook introduced app ratings and negative feedback metrics to the app insights tool today as a way to help developers gain a better understanding of how users respond to their apps. Detailed on developer blog post, these new metrics allow developers to go beyond monitoring growth trends and gain. Facebook has used this data to determine what appears in News Feed, but developers previously did not have the ability to see these insights or track their performance over time. Facebook says app ratings and negative feedback will also factor into what apps appear in the recently announced App…

• Mobile, Adele, Halo, Will Smith, Porsche, Target, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages

  Sara Inés Calderón

  15 May 2012 | 1:09 pm

  Facebook for Every Phone once again topped our list of growing Facebook pages, reaching almost 3 million new Likes this week. There were several musicians, movies, games, sports, and brand pages that also made the list. Pages on our list this week grew from between 326,100 to 2.9 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook. Name Total Likes People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth  1   Facebook for Every Phone 86,571,250 3,016,214 +414,856 +2,933,819 2   김현중 (Kim Hyun Joong) 2,508,779 2,220 +558 +2,439,528 3…

• Lightbox employees go to Facebook, shut down Android photo-sharing app

  Brittany Darwell

  15 May 2012 | 9:56 am

  Facebook has hired the team behind Android photo-sharing app Lightbox, according to a blog post on Lightbox’s website. The app has already been removed from the Google Play store. It is likely Facebook did not acquire the company or its technology because of its recent acquisition of Instagram. As the social network plans to keep Instagram as a standalone app, the opportunity for Lightbox was diminishing. According to the Google Play store, Lightbox had between 1 million and 5 million installs. Instagram has between 10 million and 50 million. What Facebook gains is a team that’s…

• Facebook ups share price range to $34-$38, likely putting market cap above $100B

  Brittany Darwell

  15 May 2012 | 9:24 am

  Facebook today increased the expected share price range for its initial public offering to $34 to $38 a share, according to an amendment to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On the high end, the new price range puts Facebook’s market cap over $100 billion. Previously, the company set a range of $28 to $35, giving it a maximum valuation of $96 billion. Facebook’s initial price range was relatively low considering that company shares went for $44.10 on secondary exchange SharesPost in March. The increased price range suggests there has been significant…

• 

  AllFacebook

• Know Your (Price) Limit Before Buying Facebook Stock

  Julie Andrews

  16 May 2012 | 7:24 am

  If you’re contemplating whether to place a buy order for Facebook, weigh the pros and cons before making a final decision. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Facebook Tweaks Recent Activity Box

  David Cohen

  16 May 2012 | 6:30 am

  Facebook tweaked the design of its recent activity box on timeline profiles once again, after enlarging its size at the end of March. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Grandpas Go Gaga Over Facebook Stock?

  Julie Andrews

  16 May 2012 | 5:57 am

  An engineer, two doctors, and a business owner, all now retired, are sitting around at a retirement home. Up shoots the topic of the Facebook initial public offering, and the crew chatterboxes on how to wrest shares at the initial price. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Facebook Scoops Up Lightbox Developer Team

  Julie Andrews

  16 May 2012 | 5:27 am

  How Facebook planned to monetize mobile was a big question mark that surfaced during the social network’s roadshow to promote its initial public offering Friday. Then, photo application Lightbox announced yesterday that its seven-strong mobile team had been snatched up by Facebook (although it is not technically an acquisition). continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• How Much Are You Worth To Facebook?

  David Cohen

  16 May 2012 | 4:59 am

  Facebook has more than 900 million monthly average users, but not all of them are worth the same to the social network. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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  @ProBlogger

• 5 Effective Tricks to Create a Killer Call to Action

  Guest Blogger

  16 May 2012 | 7:04 am

  This guest post is by Greg Digneo of Sales Leads in Thirty Days. Here’s the dirty little secret: there are actually two steps to building an extremely popular blog. The first and most popular step is to drive traffic by guest posting, social media, and SEO. The far less sexy step is to convert that traffic into loyal readers who will become the backbone of your community.  Who will share every piece of content you produce with their friends.  And who will ensure that every post sparks an engaging discussion. But most of all, they will be the first to buy your products and services. The…

• Get Obsessed with Your Message

  Guest Blogger

  15 May 2012 | 1:01 pm

  This guest post is by Danielle LaPorte of DanielleLaPorte.com. Blog = up? Posts = rolling? It’s time to get obsessed with your message. A quick dictionary moment, to differentiate between your voice, your topics and your message. Your voice is what makes your writing distinctive, compelling, unmistakably you. You’ll carry your voice from your blog, right into your book. Seamless, identifiable. Individual. Your topics are the categories or subjects you write about (Eco-luxe weddings on a shoestring budget! Savvy corporate management, with heart and soul! Thrifty vegan recipes!) Your…

• On the Elusive “Next Level” of Blogging

  Darren Rowse

  15 May 2012 | 7:04 am

  We’ve all heard of it—the elusive “next level” that so many bloggers talk about online. But what is the next level? How many levels are there? Is there an end point in leveling up? These are all worthwhile questions—especially for more experienced bloggers who have spent a lot of time and energy in reaching the level they’re already at. For these bloggers, trying to reach the next level can involve a degree of risk, so the steps that get us toward the next level might be taken slowly and with care. On the other hand, the web isn’t exactly undersupplied with…

• Grab Your BWE Virtual Ticket for $100 Off—24 Hours Left

  Darren Rowse

  14 May 2012 | 5:09 pm

  Wish you could get to Blog World Expo this year, but can’t make it to New York? Me too. I’ll be in Queensland with the winners of my blogging competition, but I know there are plenty of bloggers from other countries, as well as within the States, who won’t be able to attend Blog World this year. Fortunately, you and I don’t need to miss out on the information and fun of the Expo (and if the speaker list for this year is anything to go by, the conference is going to be really impressive). We “remote” bloggers can still “attend” on a BWE virtual…

• Install Your First WordPress Theme

  Guest Blogger

  14 May 2012 | 7:09 am

  This guest post is by Karol K of ThemeFuse. Seeing a headline like “How to Install a WordPress Theme” on ProBlogger might seem strange at first. This doesn’t sound like a “pro”-thing at all, right? If you’ve been dealing with WordPress for a while then this is probably even more than obvious to you. However, everyone starts somewhere, and there are plenty of experienced bloggers who haven’t ever installed a WordPress theme—but would like to give it a try. Maybe you’re installing your first theme right now, and you’re searching for a…

• 

  Copyblogger

• What Does it Take to Write a Billion-Dollar Marketing Story?

  Amy Harrison

  16 May 2012 | 4:00 am

  In 1984, two artists used a simple process to create a story that captivated an audience for years and generated billions of dollars in revenue. That same process is being used today by a master copywriter to attract hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. With companies creating millions of web pages of content marketing, finding an untold story or a new angle can feel like an impossible task. Especially when you want to avoid creating a story so unique nobody understands it … or wants to pay for it. So how do you create a story that cuts through the noise and strikes at the heart…

• How to be a World-Changing Writer

  Pace Smith and Sonia Simone

  15 May 2012 | 4:00 am

  As a copywriter, you know that words have power. You know words can influence, inform, and inspire. They can persuade your fellow humans to do some amazing things (or to do the wrong things, but we won’t go there today). What you may not realize is that your words can change the world. Here’s something else that’s really cool that you might not have realized … The keys to world-changing writing are also the keys to damn good copywriting. But as you know, good writing doesn’t happen all by itself. So let’s talk about what it takes to be damned good ……

• WordPress Hosting That Means Business

  Brian Clark

  14 May 2012 | 8:00 am

  Did you know Copyblogger Media has a WordPress hosting division? Many people don’t, because it’s been a bit under-the-radar. The whole thing started with our frustration with web hosting in general. Specifically, the fact that a lot of “WordPress hosting” amounts to generic one-click installation of the CMS on a standardly-configured box — which simply doesn’t cut it for optimal performance and security. So, last year we decided to manage our high-traffic network of content and product sites ourselves. We did this by bringing into the family a team of people who themselves…

• The Truth About Making Money While You Sleep

  Jonathan Morrow

  14 May 2012 | 4:00 am

  Want to hear about the day in the life of a so-called “successful entrepreneur?” Yesterday, I stayed in bed until about 2 PM. I watched the last few episodes of Mad Men. Around sunset, I took a leisurely stroll down the beach. When I got back, I hung out with a friend for a couple of hours, ate dinner, and went to bed. In other words … I goofed off. And while I was goofing off, my business generated a pretty decent chunk of revenue. You want to know the coolest part? I did absolutely nothing to “earn” it. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t talk to…

• 7 Instructive Content Marketing Links

  Robert Bruce

  12 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  This week on The Lede … Are Content Publishers Waking Up from Their App Dreams Nightmares? An Email Marketing Autoresponder Schedule that Sells 3 Quick Tips To Conquering Your Fear of Public Speaking Does Your Domain Say “Trust Me?” Why “Freemium” Fails for Startups: 3 Business Lessons from the Band New Order 5 Basic SEO Truths We Can Learn from Star Wars Peter Shankman on the Value of an Audience If you want to grab more useful links (than the seven we highlight here) every week, follow @copyblogger on Twitter. Are Content Publishers Waking Up from Their App Dreams…

• 

  John Chow dot Com

• How to Make $593 in less than one hour?

  Guest Blogger

  16 May 2012 | 10:05 am

  Can you make $593 in 30 minutes from the comfort of your own living room? In this article you will see that yes, YOU CAN! With just 3 quick steps, the easy to learn technique of following the trends of the market will enable you to do just so. The trends monitoring method is simple and easy to do. Step 1/3: Understand the system The trading system shown here is based on the monitoring of trends , a strategy widely used by many professional traders and recognized for its effectiveness. An asset rises or falls when pushed in that direction by large financial powers that influence the financial…

• How To Get Shoemoney’s Local Marketing Blueprint for $9

  John Chow

  16 May 2012 | 10:01 am

  My friend Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney) recently published his Local Marketing Blueprint on udemy.com. This course is made for two types of people: those who own small businesses, and those who want to sell services to these small businesses. As you may know, ShoeMoney is a huge Internet marketer. He has over 172,000 followers on Twitter, over 21,000 Likes on Facebook, and a Klout score of 73. Yes, those numbers are even higher than mine! The Local Marketing Blueprint has over 43 lectures and 3.5 hours of content. The course sells to Udemy users for $197 but I got Shoe to offer it to John…

• How To Dominate Google By Guest Posting

  John Chow

  15 May 2012 | 1:17 pm

  This is not going to be another post on why you should write guest posts for other blogs because I don’t recommend you do that. I have never written a guest post, and I doubt I ever will. One of the best ways to get higher blog traffic and Google rankings is by guest posting. By having a popular blog (like this one) post your guest article, You expose your writing to a much bigger readership. However, an equally big benefit is you’ll be able to link back to your blog from the guest article, which not only sends you traffic, but helps your blog rank higher on Google. Why I…

• 6 Ways to Protect Your Blog from being Hacked

  Guest Blogger

  14 May 2012 | 7:44 pm

  You know how it feels…you’ve been writing a blog post every day for the past 2 years now, and you recently checked your dashboard to see that you already have over 600 posts; 600 posts that took an average of an hour to write, proofread and edit, format with images, and publish and share. You’ve also noticed that you have a little over 10,000 comments; that’s at least 10,000 minutes of yours and you readers’ time, cumulated over the span of several years. The above scenario seems cool, until something really strange happened. You no longer own the 600 posts, and the 10,000 comments,…

• Email Marketing with The New Aweber Follow Up Editor

  John Chow

  13 May 2012 | 11:22 pm

  If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, then you know that my email list is the secret to its money-making system. At the heart of the system is Aweber and the auto responder sales funnel. This sales funnel is powered by Aweber‘s follow up editor and I’m happy to report that they’ve given it a complete makeover! The new follow up editor is basically the same as the revamped broadcast editor, but with a different method for scheduling the messages. Scheduling With Send Windows With the broadcast editor, you choose the exact date and time your message goes…

• 

  Chris Garrett on New Media

• What to Say When Nobody Cares What You Do

  Chris Garrett

  1 May 2012 | 12:00 pm

  It’s a simple but uncomfortable truth. Nobody cares what you do. Oh, people might ask. At a networking lunch, a cocktail party, and so on. But nobody cares. What do people actually care about? “Enough about me. What do you think about me?” It’s funny because it is true. People want to hear if listening to you is worth their time and energy. How might you help them? Who do you know who might be useful? Are you fun to be around? Wait … didn’t I say they don’t care what you do? Yup, it’s not about what you DO, it’s about what they GET! I…

• Breaking the Rules for Fun and Profit

  Chris Garrett

  30 Mar 2012 | 1:04 pm

  I joke that I am the most conventional unconventional guy you might ever meet, but it is true in a way. When we think of unconventional we often think about specific things. Going off to live on a commune might be a big one, having tattoos and piercing might be smaller “bucking the system” type ideas. Anyone who knows me at all will know I am not the extreme kind of unconventional, and I expect you will be somewhere on the spectrum too. So what makes me a “rule-breaker” and why might you consider breaking some rules yourself? The Rules Have Changed I don’t need…

• New Edition of the Problogger Book Released

  Chris Garrett

  14 Mar 2012 | 12:15 pm

  Problogger Book 3rd Edition Well it’s finally here! The third edition of the Problogger book is now available to order. (You might have already seen the news at Problogger). The first edition came out May 2008, co-authored by Darren Rowse and myself, and published by Wiley Publishing. We released the second edition in 2010 to expand and update the contents. Now you can grab your copy of the third edition over at Amazon paperback for $16.32 and Kindle ebook for just $9.99. (Not sure if Wiley are going to make other formats available or not). The third edition again has loads of…

• The Real ROI of Engagement

  Chris Garrett

  2 Mar 2012 | 1:58 pm

  Loyalty means business We are bombarded by “feel good” social media advice. Join the conversation. Engage. Listen. But this stuff takes time and effort. Where is the return on investment? It’s not just about chatting, and the ROI is not found by simply throwing up a Facebook page. If you are struggling to convince your boss (or yourself) that the effort of engaging your customers and prospects is worth it, the two headline reasons you should work on engagement are: 1) If you lose as many visitors as you attract then you are making your marketing twice as difficult. and 2)…

• Authority Blogging for Artists

  Chris Garrett

  10 Feb 2012 | 11:02 am

  What should a blogger do when they want to profit from their creativity, knowledge, experience and skills, but not by teaching “how to”, but instead from the results of their work? As you no doubt know, my strategy for building a profitable blog around what you know is called Authority Blogging. Build an audience of people who know, like and trust you. Get to know what they really want and need, then develop a solution for them that they are eager to buy. How does this work for artists, writers, crafts and other creative people? This is the dilemma Brian Dubé had when he…

• 

  Business Blogging - How to Build A Better Blog

• Meditation as a Blogging Practice

  Linda Dessau

  14 May 2012 | 6:45 am

  This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com. This recent Twitter interchange with small business marketing consultant and former meditation instructor Jeff Korhan got me thinking about meditation as a blogging practice. I find it most helpful to brainstorm, draft and write my blog posts in the morning. This rejuvenates my creativity for the day ahead, fulfills my most important marketing strategy and fills me with a sense of accomplishment that energizes my productivity for other tasks. Sometimes, this creative work begins as a form of written meditation, long before I…

• Is Digital Publishing Part of Your Content Marketing Plan?

  Denise Wakeman

  27 Apr 2012 | 2:17 pm

  If you missed it on DeniseWakeman.com, my colleague Ellen Britt and I have a survey running about how professionals and small business owners like you, are incorporating digital publishing into their content marekting. We would love to get your input, and then, if you choose, we will send you a copy for the indepth industry report we create from the information we glean. At the moment of writing this post, 770 people have added their two cents. Our goal is to have a minimum of 1000 responses. Whether or not you're actively involved in digital publishing, or plan to, your level experience is…

• Why Your Business Blog Needs to Be More Than a Diary

  Linda Dessau

  13 Apr 2012 | 6:38 am

  This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com. As your business grows (and grows up), it can be inspiring to look back at a chronicle of what you've accomplished and how far you've come. Having that record is one of the benefits of blogging, and a reason to continue dating your posts. But when business blogs are completely filled with announcements and personal musings from the business owner, that's a missed opportunity to connect with your prospective clients. Sure, your family, clients and other supporters will always be thrilled to hear of your latest successes,…

• Business Blogging vs. Facebook [Infographic]

  Denise Wakeman

  11 Apr 2012 | 2:50 pm

  Just ran across this infographic and I have to say, I'm in total agreement and have been preaching this for several years. This doesn't mean I don't think you shouldn't be using Facebook as a marketing tool, but think about where you're putting your effort and what you get out of it... Embedded with permission from Patricia Redsicker. Which side do you come down on...Facebook or Business Blogging...which is better for YOUR business?

• Facebook Marketing - Two Resource Articles for Your Online Marketing

  Denise Wakeman

  12 Mar 2012 | 11:57 am

  Recently I posted a couple of articles on DeniseWakeman.com about Facebook marketing. While they are not specifically about business blogging, if you are using the Web to market your business, then no doubt Facebook is one of your online tools. In case you missed the articles, I want to make sure you get access to these resources.First, if you are intimidated or confused about how to create videos, there's a cool, easy and FREE tool you can use to create videos from the pictures in your Facebook albums. In the post I share five ways you can use this for your business.CLICK => Easy Video…

• 

  The Speculist

• Enterprise in 30 Years?

  Phil Bowermaster

  12 May 2012 | 10:45 pm

  Very ambitious! An engineer says we could have a working starship Enterprise within the next 30 years. One teeny-tiny drawback: this would not actually be a starship: This “Gen1” Enterprise could get to Mars in ninety days, to the Moon in three, and “could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse – rovers, special-built planes, and satellites. For a ship longer than the Burj Khalifa is tall, those speeds sound a little on the pokey side, don’t they? On the one hand I think it would very cool indeed if we had such large manned interplanetary…

• The Quest for Immortality — FastForward Radio

  Phil Bowermaster

  9 May 2012 | 2:10 pm

   Phil and Stephen discuss the quest for immortality, which has been with humanity for a long time — perhaps since the very beginning, and which has done much to shape the world in which we live. New organizations are emerging with a whole new take on the proposition that life can be extended indefinitely. How do we get from here to there? The phases might look something like this: Life Extension Durable Digital Replacements Substrate Mobility Immortality So, will some of us live forever? And what does that even mean? Join us! Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk…

• The Singularity University… Worldwide — FastForward Radio

  Stephen Gordon

  2 May 2012 | 6:32 am

  Question:“What do you make of the Singularity University?” Buzz Aldrin: “I’m a pretty high achiever. But I come here and think ‘Gosh. I’ve just got to do better.’” Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss what makes Singularity University special and indispensible. Then they’ll talk about how to adopt some of the Singularity U awesomeness in your own life: In case you can’t attend, OR in preparation for when you do. Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio

• A New Gold Rush…In Space! — FastForward Radio

  Phil Bowermaster

  25 Apr 2012 | 2:44 pm

  Planetary Resources has announced their plans to begin mining near-earth asteroids for the valuable resources that can be found there. Launches may begin in a couple of years. Is a new Gold Rush on its way, one that will open up space in the same way that previous rushes opened the western frontier? Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio

• Drivers of Change — FastForward Radio

  Phil Bowermaster

  18 Apr 2012 | 3:13 pm

  Our good friend futurist John Smart joins us for an overview and quick tour of 10 distinct areas of accelerating technological change, along with a discussion of the opportunities, disruptions, and threats they represent. We’ll look at: Nanoscience and Technologies Resource Technologies Engineering Technologies Information Technologies Social Technologies Economic Technologies Political Technologies Security Technologies Health Technologies Cognitive Technologies Listen to internet radio with The Speculist on Blog Talk Radio John will be delivering a talk on “Forecasting the…

• 

  Deeplinks

• This Week in Internet Censorship: India, Iran, Brazil, Russia, and More

  eva

  15 May 2012 | 5:27 pm

  Iran Continues March Towards “Halal Internet” This past weekend, Iran’s minister of telecommunications announced that domestic institutions including banks, telecom companies, insurance firms, and universities are now prohibited from dealing with emails that do not come from an “.ir” domain name. This means that customers who use foreign email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail will have to switch to domestic Iranian accounts, which are subject to Iranian legal jurisdiction. While the announcement suggests that the use of foreign email clients leaves Iranian data vulnerable…

• TPP: Internet Freedom Activists Protest Secret Trade Agreement Being Negotiated This Week

  maira

  14 May 2012 | 4:06 pm

  The U.S. content industry will try anything to preserve its profit margin and power over the creative content market at the expense of the Internet. They will use any tactic that circumvents democratic processes to make new rules for the Internet that favor their interests and not the interests of Internet users or the technical community that actually builds the Internet as we know it. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is yet another example of these tactics. The TPP is a secretive plurilateral1 agreement that includes provisions dealing with intellectual property, including online…

• DHS Considers Collecting DNA From Kids; DEA and US Marshals Already Do

  jlynch

  14 May 2012 | 1:45 pm

  Documents just released by US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) in response to one of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests show that DHS is considering collecting DNA from kids ages 14 and up—and is exploring expanding its regulations to allow collection from kids younger than that. The proposal appears to be working its way through DHS in the wake of regulations from the Department of Justice that require all federal agencies—including DHS and its components such as ICE—to collect DNA from individuals arrested for federal crimes as well as “from non-United States…

• Global Network Initiative Gets an Inside Look at Tech Firms’ Human Rights Practices

  eva

  11 May 2012 | 12:53 pm

  On April 18, the Global Network Initiative (GNI) released its annual report documenting third-party assessments conducted in 2011 and 2012 for GNI’s three founding corporate participants: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. GNI was formed to bring major Internet companies together with human rights organizations to improve practices around human rights, privacy and freedom of expression on the Internet. In the past year, GNI expanded to include two more corporate participants—Evoca and Websense—and Facebook has recently joined the organization as an observing member. GNI has also added seven…

• NY Twitter Decision Fails to Recognize Content and Location Data Require a Warrant

  hanni

  11 May 2012 | 10:57 am

  A New York judge's broad opinion, ordering Twitter to comply with a subpoena (PDF) and turn over account information about one of its users arrested for disorderly conduct in connection with an Occupy Wall Street protest, is worse the deeper you dig into it.  The judge ruled (PDF) that the user, Malcolm Harris, lost ownership of his tweets once he posted them online, and therefore had no legal standing to challenge the subpoena. This decision prompted several worried responses, including our own, because our Fourth Amendment privacy rights should not be surrendered simply…

• 

  FriendFeed - adamostrow

• Facebook Users: 13 Ways the IPO Could Affect You - http://t.co/nZ26N0Fe

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 8:38 am

  Adam Ostrow Facebook Users: 13 Ways the IPO Could Affect You - http://mashable.com/2012... 4 hours ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

• Facebook Users: 13 Ways the IPO Could Affect You

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 7:13 am

  Adam Ostrow Facebook Users: 13 Ways the IPO Could Affect You - http://mashable.com/2012... 6 hours ago from Mashable » Adam Ostrow - Comment - Like

• Can Social Media Help Solve Crimes? - http://t.co/uEVwBYby #mashcon

  FriendFeed

  15 May 2012 | 12:07 pm

  Adam Ostrow Can Social Media Help Solve Crimes? - http://mashable.com/2012... #mashcon yesterday from Twitter - Comment - Like

• Can Social Media Help Solve Crimes?

  FriendFeed

  15 May 2012 | 11:38 am

  Adam Ostrow Can Social Media Help Solve Crimes? - http://mashable.com/2012... yesterday from Mashable! - Comment - Like

• It's @BarackObama outside @MashableHQ! http://t.co/tf5lJu71

  FriendFeed

  14 May 2012 | 1:01 pm

  Adam Ostrow It's @BarackObama outside @MashableHQ! http://twitpic.com/9l44mn Monday from Twitter - Comment - Like

• 

  FriendFeed - alizasherman

• Start with your goals; who you're trying to reach; what you'd like them to do; how you'll measure. Have focus.

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 11:28 am

  Aliza Sherman Start with your goals; who you're trying to reach; what you'd like them to do; how you'll measure. Have focus. 1 hour ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

• Get my session materials for Pinterest for #Biz free (MP3, Handbook, Slides) http://t.co/qRKwbRin #pintip

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 11:15 am

  Aliza Sherman Get my session materials for Pinterest for #Biz free (MP3, Handbook, Slides) http://www.mediaegg.com/telesem... #pintip 2 hours ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

• Pinterest: It's Time to Go 'Pinternational' http://t.co/AYAF2xoM #pintip

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 11:10 am

  Aliza Sherman Pinterest: It's Time to Go 'Pinternational' http://mashable.com/2012... #pintip 2 hours ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

• RT @matthewprewett It's one thing to believe that the impossible is possible. It's another thing to see it as if it has already happened.

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 9:29 am

  Aliza Sherman RT @matthewprewett It's one thing to believe that the impossible is possible. It's another thing to see it as if it has already happened. 3 hours ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

• If you use Instagram & lament the lack of profile pages, try @Followgram http://t.co/SRYoPNdq

  FriendFeed

  16 May 2012 | 9:29 am

  Aliza Sherman If you use Instagram & lament the lack of profile pages, try @Followgram http://followgram.me/alizash... 3 hours ago from Twitter - Comment - Like

• 

  Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

• Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links

  Danny Sullivan

  16 May 2012 | 10:00 am

  Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

• With Fix In Place, Wolfram Alpha Explains How Siri “Recommended” The Lumia By Mistake

  Danny Sullivan

  16 May 2012 | 8:15 am

  It wasn’t Siri that was recommending the Lumia as the best smartphone to some last week; it was Wolfram Alpha. That won’t happen again, now that Wolfram Alpha has made changes to to fix problems it had dealing with customer reviews. Reviews Weren’t Weighted To Account For Number... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

• 3 Guidelines To Scale Your SEM Team

  Richard Carey

  16 May 2012 | 7:03 am

  There is a phenomenon within organizations that causes productivity to decline as teams grow larger. This phenomenon is described in economics as a diseconomy of scale and is caused by at least three factors including increased communication costs, duplication of effort, and top-heavy management.... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

• Did Google Drop 100+ Small Directories

  Barry Schwartz

  16 May 2012 | 6:44 am

  Yesterday I covered a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were complaining that Google has been removing tons of free web directories from their index. I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

• Do Search & Display Really Belong Together?

  Dax Hamman

  16 May 2012 | 6:27 am

  The premise is simple – PPC and display are both media buys trying to achieve similar outcomes; both are forms of ‘bought media’ and now with display moving to a biddable environment both now require quantitative skill sets to manage them. It’s not a tough sell to convince a budget holder that a... Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

• 

  John Battelle's Search Blog

• Penner Ash Willamette Pinot 2009

  jbat

  15 May 2012 | 10:42 am

  Penner-Ash Willamette Valley 2009 Pinot drank VERY well last week.

• New Feeds For Searchblog

  jbat

  15 May 2012 | 10:11 am

  Pardon the site-specific interruption, but as part of my ongoing quest to keep my content here on my own site, I’ve begun posting pictures of stuff here that I’d otherwise put on Instagram, Twitter or other services. Given that many of you read Searchblog for my trenchant commentary as opposed to my preferences in pinots, I promised you that I’d create new RSS feeds. Well, here they are! You’ve got a lot of choices – Everything (all photos and posts), Everything But Photos, Headlines Only, and Photos Only. Many thanks to the team at Blend for helping me make this…

• Get to Know Ross Levinsohn

  jbat

  13 May 2012 | 6:23 pm

  The remarkable news today that, among other important board moves, Ross Levinsohn will take over as interim CEO at Yahoo may well mark the end of an era – should his tenure stick, perhaps we can stop talking about the web pioneer in past or conditional tenses. If you’d like to get to know him a bit better, here’s an interview I did with him at Web 2 last Fall.

• The Audacity of Diaspora

  jbat

  13 May 2012 | 6:13 pm

  Last Friday Businessweek ran a story on Diaspora, a social platform built from what might be called Facebook anti-matter. It’s a great read that chronicles the project’s extraordinary highs and lows, from Pebble-like Kickstarter success to the loss of a founder to suicide. Given the overwhelming hype around Facebook’s IPO this week, it’s worth remembering such a thing exists – and even though it’s in private beta, Diaspora is one of the largest open source projects going right now, and boasts around 600,000 beta testers. I’ve watched Diaspora from…

• Oh, MacROSTIE!

  jbat

  11 May 2012 | 10:48 pm

  A very happy Friday night with my wife, mother in law, and kids (and tomatoes, kale, wild rice, et al), made round by this MacRostie Pinot, 2007. Yippee, it’s the weekend!

• 

  Online Marketing Blog

• Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue

  BLarson

  16 May 2012 | 4:50 am

  At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients. In late 2011 Vocus welcomed Jason Jue as Chief Marketing Officer. As Vocus & PRWeb’s Account Manager at TopRank, I was keenly interested in getting to know Jason better and learning his plans for the future – and what better way than through an interview for all readers of Online Marketing Blog to see? In this interview Jason talks about the undeniable…

• Channel Your Internal Marketing Warrior: 4 Tips for Strengthening Your Marketing Plan

  Ashley Zeckman

  15 May 2012 | 3:25 am

  Release Your Internal Marketing Warrior In March of this year I made a decision: I wanted to get healthier.  The problem I have always faced is that I didn’t see the point of exercise, just for the sake of exercise.  Treadmills and stationary bicycles never did much for me, but I was looking for a way to regain some focus and start down a healthier path. About a month ago I spoke with my good friend Ali who had recently started a training program to become a yoga instructor.  She convinced me to attend a class with her and I even though I’ve done yoga before, this was an entirely new…

• 5 Ways to Optimize the Business Value of Attending Conferences

  Lee Odden

  14 May 2012 | 9:37 am

  Are you optimizing your conference experience? TopRank receives a lot of value from having me speak at conferences but you don’t have to be a speaker to realize a positive return from events. Small, large online or offline, there are numerous ways to optimize and maximize your return on conference involvment both in the short and long term. If your company is considering whether to send you to events because of uncertain return or benefits, show them the following list. In fact, if I were running a conference, I’d make sure these tips are shared with attendees, sponsors and…

• Online Marketing News: Take Action on Social Data, LinkedIn Gets the Scoop, Google Reigns Supreme, Google & Big Data for SEO

  Ashley Zeckman

  11 May 2012 | 3:35 am

  Actionable Social Analytics This recent infographic by awareness takes a dive into social analytics.  In an era where virtually every brand is online, it is essential that action is being taken off of the data we are collecting from social networks.  This infographic provides not only some of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that your company should be tracking, but how to calculate these numbers as well.  Examples of the KPI’s your company should be tracking: Brand Awareness & Reputation Marketing Program Effectiveness Lead Generation Effectiveness Use LinkedIn to Get Juicy…

• Holistic Optimization Across the Sales Cycle: Optimize Speaking Events May & June

  Lee Odden

  10 May 2012 | 8:08 am

  When you have a business that relies on attracting new business online the sheer volume of options can be confusing. Should offline advertising efforts transfer to online? Maybe email marketing? What about SEO or the hot topic, social media? So much focus is placed on tactics and channels, that a lot of misplaced digital marketing budget gets wasted or spent inefficiently. To bring some clarity to the myriad online marketing options available, I think it’s worth marketers taking a holistic approach that starts with an essential understanding of goals and customers. Who are your best…

• 

  The Content Marketing Revolution

• An Essential Resource for Building and Managing an Online Community [NEW BOOK]

  Joe Pulizzi

  14 May 2012 | 5:49 pm

  I have always believed that a focus on truly unique and incredibly relevant content, shared in the right channels with the right customers and prospects, was the core to most corporate content marketing strategies. I’ve never focused (as much as I have needed to) on how important building and managing an online community is to an overall content marketing strategy. Two events have opened my eyes to the idea that online communities can take your content marketing and put it on steroids. First, I spoke with Todd Wheatland, VP of Thought Leadership for Kelly Services. Todd showed me how…

• 10 Ways to Optimize Your Enewsletter Landing Page

  Joe Pulizzi

  9 May 2012 | 7:19 pm

  I had the pleasure of presenting at the Enewsletter World workshop this week with Jeanne Jennings and Ryan Dorhn (two amazing, first-class media experts). In one of our breakout sessions, Jeanne broke down 10 specific ways to optimize an enewsletter landing page. In our new social media world, email assets are more important than ever before. As content marketers, it is critical that we develop our audiences and build our channels, with a primary emphasis on email in conjunction with social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Why? Theoretically (and legally) the customer names that sign up to…

• 3 Ways to Extract Brand Stories from Inside the Company

  Joe Pulizzi

  30 Apr 2012 | 12:43 pm

  You’ve done it.  You’ve developed why you need the content, created and vetted the buyer personas, and  identified the buying stages where this essential content will have impact on the business.  As you start to dig into your content marketing channel and workflow strategy, you realize that you simply don’t have enough brand stories to meet the demands of the content marketing initiative. In many content marketing programs, the core brand stories have to deal with transforming an employee’s, customer’s or stakeholder’s passion and expertise into one or…

• 6 Amazing Retail Content Marketing Examples

  Joe Pulizzi

  26 Apr 2012 | 11:18 am

  In doing some research for a retail-oriented content marketing workshop, I learned one thing: retail content marketing case studies and examples are hard to find.  That said, I was able to find a number of print and digital content marketing examples that impressed me.  Here are six of them. …and, if you have some you’d like to share, please add them to the comments below. Lifetime Fitness – Experience Life Experience Life is the lifestyle print and online magazine developed by Lifetime Fitness, the billion dollar health and fitness company with over 100 centers around the…

• Optimizing Social, Search and Content: A Q&A with Lee Odden

  Joe Pulizzi

  18 Apr 2012 | 6:18 am

  I’ve had the distinct pleasure of knowing Lee Odden for more than four years now.  I first started following his blog back in 2007/2008 when we launched the Junta42 Top Content Marketing blogs.  During the 11 times we released the top content marketing blogs from around the world, Lee’s blog ranked #1 three times.  Quite an accomplishment and a testament to Lee’s expertise around content marketing. Better yet, I’ve had the opportunity to run into Lee at dozens of events around the country (Lee will also be speaking at Content Marketing World).  He is truly one of…

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  Writing On The Web by Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad

• 5 Pinterest Pinning Tips: Don’t Be a Pinhead

  Patsi Krakoff

  11 May 2012 | 4:01 am

  Don’t Be a Pinterest Pinhead 5 etiquette tips for pinning on the world’s favorite social pinboard It’s true that Pinterest is fun—designed to be a simple, beautiful way to pin all your favorite ideas, products and places on the Web—but it’s also true that it’s powerful. With a registered user base that includes over 10 million and grows every day, Pinterest represents great potential for influence. That’s why, to avoid serious copyright infringement or even just the simply bad manners that are possible on this popular social pinboard, it’s vitally important to practice good…

• Pinterest: 3 Reasons To Take Note

  Patsi Krakoff

  25 Apr 2012 | 5:09 am

  Even if you’ve never been on Pinterest, you’ve probably heard of it—this hot social network is drawing attention everywhere, from newspapers and magazines to television and political campaigns. Since beginning just a few years ago, it has become the fastest website in history to hit 10 million visitors a month—buoyed to success by loyal fans who spend hours on the network each day. So what’s all the fuss about? What is this latest social craze? Why does it matter? 1.  Pinterest Is Visual Bookmarking. To put it in a nutshell, Pinterest is a super simple way to visually bookmark what…

• Content Marketing: Stories are Key

  Patsi Krakoff

  11 Apr 2012 | 4:42 am

  If you want your content marketing messages to be remembered, you must engage the emotional memories of your readers. Memory formation happens in two ways: 1.  You say or do something that makes an emotional connection. 2.  Something happens that closely resembles a previously established emotional connection. What results is a neural network of associations that get triggered by a hot-button stimulus. Everything we retain in memory is because it’s gained an emotional place in our brain. At some point, something was important enough because it was emotional. That’s what…

• 5 Uses for Your Business Blog

  Patsi Krakoff

  28 Mar 2012 | 4:43 am

  Maintaining a business blog is time-consuming. However, if you have clear objectives in mind, the effort very well could be worth your while. As you establish your blog, define your goals to determine whether to keep it alive. Below are five common uses for feeding regular content into a business blog. (photo courtesy digitalart) 1.  Raw Sales For retailers and service providers, the most obvious reason to host a business blog is to peddle products or services. You want to show what you have to offer, and a blog is a great way to advertise deals to engaged customers who are clearly in the…

• Online Persuasion: Seeing Through the Eyes of Customers

  Patsi Krakoff

  21 Mar 2012 | 6:37 am

  There’s an important shift in content marketing tactics that affects professionals who want to get found, get known and get clients online. And that shift means a different mindset. Not too long ago I came across a great blog post. There was a picture of a pair of glasses lying on a bench with this caption: Don’t you wish you could see through your customers’ glasses? What if you could live in their shoes for a day? Or, track their brains as they go online to your website? What makes them click? What makes them take action? Here’s where you should start thinking…

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  Conversation Marketing from Portent, Inc: Internet Marketing with a Twist of Lemon

• Wanted: Enterprise Search Gods

  Marianne Sweeny

  15 May 2012 | 10:30 am

  Lately, I’ve been feeling like a grade schooler punished along with the rest of the class for one student’s bad behavior. With Google’s Pandas, Penguins and other pandemonium-producing updates yet to come, we’re all Bart Simpson being forced to write on the SEO chalkboard, “I will not outsource link building to third-world countries that spam blogs.” Sheesh! It’s times like that that my mind turns to flights of fancy… If I could make Google do whatever I wanted… Well, I can and so can you — just not for the whole Web. We can control…

• Google Penguin for non-SEOs

  Ian Lurie

  14 May 2012 | 9:43 pm

  They were cute until Google got to 'em If I say ‘Google Penguin’ to an SEO pro, they shudder. In the SEO world, Google’s Penguin update is the nastiest, scariest update since, I dunno, Florida? Here’s an explainer for all the marketers who are wondering what the hell just happened to their traffic: What’s an update? The engineers at Google constantly tune their search software to provide (hopefully) more accurate results. Most of these tune-ups are pretty small, and go unnoticed by anyone except us hardcore search geeks. They’re like thunderstorms: You…

• SEO & UX – Working together to make your site better

  Josh Patrice

  10 May 2012 | 12:57 pm

  A few years ago I stepped into a role as an information architect and user experience designer at a Portland ad agency. Coming from a background in search marketing, this was quite a bit of a change for me. The first thing I noticed was that SEO & UX should really be a more integrated system in the designing of a site. The second thing I noticed was that SEO really gets a bad rap from the UX and design community. This was really an invaluable experience for me, as I was able to look at both my former job and my current job in a different light. I got to be removed from my instincts as an…

• How to hire an SEO company, 2012 edition

  Ian Lurie

  9 May 2012 | 4:34 pm

  I’ve written other posts about hiring SEO firms: How to hire good ones. How to hire bad ones. But an update’s in order: Questionnaire for an SEO agency Start each agency you interview with 10 points. Add or subtract as indicated. Ask yourself: How did this firm get in touch with you? They cold-called or e-mailed you. No. -1 They answered your ad. Sorry, but good SEOs don’t spend their days scouring the internet want ads. Ads are good for comic relief, not smart hiring. -5 You found them. Good. That’s a good start. +1 Can you give me some references? No. Well, duh.

• How to Use Hootsuite and Twitter Lists to Engage Your Audience

  Jack Martin

  8 May 2012 | 9:41 am

  I remember when I got my first Twitter follower. I was a bright-eyed web surfer with a bushy tail (since birth). @getfree_ebooks3 followed me, and our relationship blossomed. She was beautiful. I would tell her about what I was eating for lunch and other important Twitter issues, and she would suggest nice pieces of malware for my computer to download. I eventually discovered that @getfree_ebooks3 was a spam bot. It was heartbreaking. I realized the truth about Twitter. At that moment, I realized that the best way to create quality relationships on Twitter is to seek out the people in your…

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  Brian Solis

• The Fallacy of Information Overload

  Brian Solis

  15 May 2012 | 6:50 am

  Some of you know me through my work in studying how social media and disruptive technology impact business and culture. Others have worked with me in translating insights into action and change within the enterprise.  Every now and then, I share another side of myself that evokes the aspiring social scientist in me as I explore how all of this is affecting us as individuals and human beings. Not a day goes by when I’m not asked about whether or not the social media bubble will finally burst. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, this all has to be too much right? More…

• Music, Film, TV: How social media changed the entertainment experience

  Brian Solis

  10 May 2012 | 7:56 am

  Social media is more than a digital water cooler for TV and movies. The global conversation that takes place around events and the experiences people share based on what they watch teaches us about consumer preferences. More importantly, their activity influences behavior. Behavior counts for everything. Studying it is just the beginning of course. In order to understand and eventually steer behavior, we must translate activity into insights and in turn, translate insights into actionable strategies and programs. The Hollywood Reporter recently published an exclusive poll about social media…

• The future of TV is more than social, it’s a multi-screen experience that needs design

  Brian Solis

  7 May 2012 | 11:19 am

  The future of television is much more than social; much in the same way that the future of media is too, more than social. Social is a fabric; it connects the individual nodes that make up the human network. But, social however, is not a means to an end. And, as such, the same is true about the working theories driving Social TV. Understanding the role social plays in how viewers connect with programs and other people is essential to defining the future of television. Over the years, I’ve written much about my vision for the long overdue convergence of not only web and TV, but also how the…

• The Path from a Social Brand to a Social Business

  Brian Solis

  2 May 2012 | 9:17 am

  I’ve been a long-time supporter of MediaTemple’s (MT)Residence program along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel, and many others whom I respect. I wanted to share my “7 questions to answer to become a social business” with you here.. Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing. Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebook, but they’re hardly alone. Disney follows just behind with 29 million…

• Do Customers Really Matter to Your Business? Prove it.

  Brian Solis

  30 Apr 2012 | 8:21 am

  Frank Eliason and I have known each other for many years. We’ve shared the stage on many occasions, he’s made an appearance on Revolution, and most importantly, I’m proud to call him a personal friend. Frank has championed the adaption and transformation of customer service during his time at Comcast and at CITI. Never one to shy away from sharing his opinions, he’s certainly bullish on where service needs to be as a function and a philosophy versus where it is today. In fact, he’s gone so far as to call out social media customer service as being a…

• 

  www.vanksen.com

• Facebook fan profiling

  Justine Puccio

  11 May 2012 | 12:36 am

  http://theunintelligentblog.blogspot.fr Today many advertisers are on social media just for the sake of it. During the Digital Paris exhibition, Mediaprism communicated the results of its Facebook study for which they surveyed 36 million people aged of at least 18 years olds during the 2011-2012 period: Users “like” at least one brand Users “like” from 2 to 5 brands on average On fan out of two is ready to share brand information 70 % of the fans expect engagement from a brand Regarding these figures, we can think the following: 1.    People’s first motivation for being on…

• I pin, you pin, Vanksen pins !

  Jennifer Manez

  26 Mar 2012 | 7:42 am

  You’ve probably heard about it, you might even have tried it, but what is Pinterest exactly? Launched in 2010, this social network (While some might think “What? Another one?” others will be happy to spend even more time “getting social”) is based on a very simple principle: pin photos and videos that we like on different boards and share them with our friends. Time to update your web vocabulary! From now on people pin! After liking and tweeting, it’s all about pinning and repining, the question now is how are you going to make the most of each social network. Pinterest is also…

• 2012 Trending Topics

  Vicky Balnave

  10 Feb 2012 | 12:44 am

  SOLOMO, ATAWADAC, Social graph, connected TV, Fluid Life, Real-Time, Gamification, Mobile Marketing, Magnetic Content, Programmatic Media Buying, Techno Reality, … We could have invented new acronyms and neologisms to “shine” during trendy networking parties. We could have followed the example of our friends (and competitors) with another post about the latest trends with efficient “paraphrasing” to make us sound like we’re original. We could have forced ourselves to recycle 12 (to match perfectly with the year ahead of us) of the trends that seem to be reappearing every year for…

• PlayStation get their Facebook fans moving for the launch of the PS Vita

  Jennifer Manez

  25 Nov 2011 | 2:24 am

  PlayStation has launched an exclusive campaign for its 350 000 fans on Facebook in France. A very special campaign as the brand will be giving away the brand new PS Vita two months before its official release in Europe and in the United States to a lucky winner that will be picked out and will have to go over to Paris to collect his precious gift. This campaign is part of a global social strategy. PlayStation has put a lot of energy in social media in France for the past two years with the objective of offering what any fan expects from a brand on Facebook : live news, special offers and…

• Urban Lights: Remy Martin VSOP limited edition

  Sophie Kantjas

  14 Oct 2011 | 12:29 am

  New York hits it rock’n’roll style , L.A throws down the red carpet, Moscow brings the bling on, Tokyo becomes bright and flashy, Singapore keeps it sharp and smart…and Bangkok is on full power…it’s midnight, cities are coming to life ! Inspired by the night and the city life, Remy Martin has realized an immersive experience that makes the internet user feel as if he was in a real night club. Dance floor, VIP lounge, bartender and of course, the bouncer waiting for you at the door… There is only one way to get in the club: you have to know the password! Without the latter,…

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  TheContentWrangler.com

• Hey, Book Publishers! Evolve or Get Out of the Way

  scottabel

  15 May 2012 | 1:44 pm

  Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler Book publishers are an endangered species. That’s right. The producers of textbooks, romance novels, and cookbooks aren’t long for this world. Their likely extinction is both predictable and preventable. Even if they put up a good fight, it’s unlikely they’ll survive in their current form for one reason: They are slow to evolve. Case in point: Just over two years ago, while book publishers were busy conducting business as usual, an outsider invaded the industry and reshaped it in the publishers’ image. The invading force was…

• Detecting Expensive Inefficiencies: The Case For Optimizing Content Production Processes

  scottabel

  7 May 2012 | 7:17 pm

  Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler I’ve got a challenge for you. Take a look at the way you create, manage and deliver content. No, really. Take a close look. Conduct a systematic, fair, scientific survey of your content production lifecycle. Get professional help if you need to. Look at each and every step in your process and ask yourself, “Is this the best we can do, or is it just the way we’ve been doing it for so long that we believe it is the correct — and only — way to work?” What I’m certain you will find is that your organization utilizes an…

• Are You A Failed Writer If You Haven’t Spent 10,000 Hours Writing?

  scottabel

  7 May 2012 | 12:40 pm

  Yuvi Zalkow is a self-described “writer, storyteller, novelist, shame-ridden schmo, and maker of online presentations about [his] failures (and occasional successes) as a writer”. This video is one such presentation. In it, Zalkow discusses an idea from Malcolm Gladwell, author of the book “Outliers” (a book that Zalkow admits he has never read), about success. Gladwell says that in order to master your art, you have to spend 10,000 hours practicing it. I’m not sure 10,000 hours is the definitive number, but there is, generally speaking, something to be said for…

• Re-Thinking In-Line Linking: DITA Devotees Take Note!

  scottabel

  3 May 2012 | 2:17 pm

  by Mark Baker The question of whether links on a web page should be inline in the text or relegated to one of the margins is not a new one. It deserves re-examination because the increasing popularity of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) introduces a technical bias into the question. Managing inline linking in reusable content in DITA is complex, which makes it expensive, which makes it rare. It is commonly considered a DITA best practice to avoid inline links in favor of links created by external reltables, which means that the links are listed at the bottom of the page.

• [Infographic] Changes In Technical Communication Staffing And Budget

  scottabel

  26 Apr 2012 | 6:46 pm

  Money, it’s a hot topic these days, given the economic situation in which we find ourselves. This infographic takes a look at the state of technical communication budgets and staffing levels today. How does your situation compare?

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  BuzzMachine

• Creepy

  Jeff Jarvis

  8 May 2012 | 6:18 am

  I just reamed an ITN producer who emailed me this clip about Google seeking a patent for using background noise in audible search requests and wanted to talk to me “off the record” (why he’d offer that, I don’t know; bad reporters’ reflex) to find out what “worries” I had about privacy and security. Note well that he didn’t ask me what I thought of the technology — whether I thought it was good or bad, how I thought it could be used positively or negatively, what its potential is. No, he showed his bias clearly by asking me to tell him…

• Consumer Reports’ moral panic

  Jeff Jarvis

  3 May 2012 | 4:42 am

  I’m very disappointed in Consumer Reports for falling into the moral panic about privacy and social services. Today it issues a survey and a Reefer Madness report that covers no new ground, only stirs it up, over privacy and Facebook. Let me address instead the survey. In its press release, Consumer Reports says — as if we should be shocked at these numbers — that: * 39.3 million identified a family member in a profile. Do we really live in a world where it should be frightening to talk about our family? * 20.4 million included their birth date and year in their profile. And…

• Social (network) pressure

  Jeff Jarvis

  1 May 2012 | 6:08 am

  By adding an organ-donation tool to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is setting up a dynamic of social pressure for virtue. Is that always good? Now getting us to sign our drivers’ licenses so our vital bits can be harvested to save others’ lives is a moderately low-impact decision. But what about the occasional calls for folks to sign up to be tested for a marrow transplant — as in the drive for Super Amit? That’s no easy decision. Imagine tomorrow, God forbid, one of your Facebook friends needs a kidney. There’s a tool staring you in the face asking you to get tested…

• Journalism Inside®

  Jeff Jarvis

  20 Apr 2012 | 10:42 am

  I wonder whether we should be teaching journalists to embed themselves and their abilities into the world rather than always making the world come to them. Thinking out loud… The other day, when Amazon peeved me by suddenly trying to sell me software — who has bought a box of software in years? — it occurred to me: After software left store shelves, demand for the programmers who make it has only grown. So why, as newspapers, magazines, and books leave shelves, is there not more demand for the journalists who make them? Companies are clamoring to hire more programmers and…

• A new BuzzMachine

  Jeff Jarvis

  16 Apr 2012 | 3:26 pm

  At long last, and by popular demand (and disgust at my old design), BuzzMachine is reborn thanks to my son and webmaster, Jake. After I’d let my old design go to seed, he didn’t much like me calling him my webmaster. So he took matters into his own hands, rebuilt my WordPress installation from scratch, fixed all kinds of things I’d messed up or neglected over the years, and — best of all — gave me this wonderful new look. The image above — like the photo on the old header — is of a paper-making machine: the old origin of buzz. I’ve been…

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  MediaShift

• Daily Must Reads, March 16, 2012

  16 May 2012 | 9:45 am

  The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung 1. E-book pricing lawsuit moves ahead (NYT) 2. General Motors plans to pull the plug on its Facebook ads (WSJ) 3. Despite its huge population, Google+ is a 'virtual tumbleweed town' (Businessweek) 4. Bitly may be launching a real-time viral search engine (The Verge) 5. Flipboard now does audio, too (Time) 6. Research explains how journalists verify information on Twitter (Poynter) Subscribe to Daily Must Reads newsletter This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

• How Design Links Storytelling to Social Enterprise

  16 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  That a story can give voice to a cause and incite a social movement is an old concept. But at a recent gathering of more than 100 documentary filmmakers, social entrepreneurs and designers, the real question was not whether stories can make change happen, but how to make storytelling a systemic part of how a social enterprise disseminates its message and gathers support for its cause. So how do you link storytelling to social enterprise? In a word, design. That was the message at a lively panel discussion on April 30 at the Brower Center in Berkeley, Calif. Titled "Designing Change," the…

• Could Facebook, Twitter Be Charged Under Thailand's Computer Crime Act?

  16 May 2012 | 7:00 am

  On June 3 of last year, MediaShift published the article "Crisis in Thailand Leads to Net Crackdown, Censorship" on the harassment journalists and netizens faced as political clashes arose in the country. Many of the comments in a long thread following its publication mentioned the monarchy. Some of the comments were just opinions, but according to the lese-majesté law, they could be considered a threat to Thailand's national security. According to the Computer Crime Act -- the first text the Thai government adopted after the coup d'état in 2006 -- such comments could become crimes. Let's…

• Journalism and Digital Education Roundup, May 15, 2012

  15 May 2012 | 1:17 pm

  The best stories across the web on journalism and digital education 1. Students with computer science degrees are in high demand this year (Bloomberg) 2. Libraries in this county are buying, not leasing, e-books (Boing Boing) 3. Tax increase could bring iPads to classrooms in S.C. (Island Packet) 4. Teacher behind Calif. school's iPad program gets laid off (NBC) 5. Students in Vancouver work off "the cloud" (Vancouver Sun) Get the weekly Journalism Education Roundup email from MediaShift This is a summary. Visit our site for the full post ».

• Daily Must Reads, May 15, 2012

  15 May 2012 | 10:25 am

  The best stories across the web on media and technology, curated by Lily Leung 1. Former head of Murdoch U.K. newspaper empire faces charges in hacking scandal (NYT) 2. Facebook bumps up its share price (Washington Post) 3. Should This American Life fact-check David Sedaris stories? (Poynter) 4. With a new CEO in place, can Yahoo focus on becoming a great media company? (GigaOm) 5. MarketWatch founder Larry Kramer is named publisher of USA Today (Politico) 6. Adweek requires you to share some articles in order to finish reading them (Scott Kidder) Subscribe to Daily Must Reads newsletter This…

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  Poynter. » MediaWire

• Software developer revives debate about whether journalists should learn to code

  Steve Myers

  16 May 2012 | 12:51 pm

  Coding Horror | Learn Code the Hard Way | Highgroove Studios | NPR | O’Reilly Radar This week’s debate in the software development community about whether everyone should learn to code shows that journalists aren’t… Read more

• How tiny Silverton, Colo., saved its newspaper (and ended up on the ‘Today’ show)

  Andrew Beaujon

  16 May 2012 | 11:39 am

  “Today” Silverton, Colo., has a population of 637 in the last census, but it didn’t let its newspaper die, Bob Dotson reports on “Today.” The San Juan County Historical Society agreed in 2009 to become publisher of the Silverton… Read more

• Stearns: Journalism needs more foresight than hindsight

  Julie Moos

  16 May 2012 | 9:11 am

  Free Press’ Josh Stearns worries about “hindsight journalism” and proposes instead: “We need a journalism of exploration and investigation, a journalism not afraid to wander or to fail. For in those forays into the wild, the complex, the unknown,… Read more

• John Derbyshire finds new home for columns

  Tracie Powell

  16 May 2012 | 8:43 am

  The Atlantic Wire Fired National Review writer John Derbyshire has found a new niche for his commentary. The Atlantic explores Derbyshire’s new job as a columnist for VDARE, which publishes anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism content, and is… Read more

• Valérie Trierweiler, France’s new first lady, is a journalist

  Andrew Beaujon

  16 May 2012 | 8:17 am

  The New York Times Maïa de la Baume profiles Valérie Trierweiler, whose partner, François Hollande, was just elected president of France. Trierweiler (her last name will henceforth serve as a useful shibboleth for sorting out who was paying attention… Read more

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  GalleyCat

• How A Book Is Born

  Dianna Dilworth

  16 May 2012 | 8:47 am

  Publishing house Weldon Owen created an infographic called “How a Book is Born,” tracing the path of a book from idea to final product. We’ve embedded the whole infographic below–all book professionals can learn from this image which shows how a book is conceptualized, pitched, picked up, written, edited and who gets drunk along the way. Check it out: “Here’s the heartwarming, only slightly messy, and roughly 74 percent accurate story of how an idea churns through the publishing process just like—as a publisher we once knew put it—a rat travels through an anaconda.

• Aaron Sorkin to Write Film Adaptation of Steve Jobs Bio

  Jason Boog

  16 May 2012 | 8:23 am

  Sony Pictures Entertainment will adapt Walter Isaacson‘s bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, with The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin writing on the script. Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman Amy Pascal had this statement:  “Jobs’ story is unique: he was one of the most revolutionary and influential men not just of our time but of all time. There is no writer working in Hollywood today who is more capable of capturing such an extraordinary life for the screen than Aaron Sorkin; in his hands, we’re confident that the film will be everything that Jobs himself…

• Zombie-Based Learning on Kickstarter

  Maryann Yin

  16 May 2012 | 8:07 am

  David Hunter has raised more than $6,800 for his zombie-based learning project, “Geography Taught in Zombie Apocalypse.” Above, we’ve embedded a video about the Kickstarter project–what do you think? Here’s more about the project: “I love geography, and I love zombies. I believe that students can learn important educational concepts through the lens of their interests. I’ve chosen to combine geography and zombies because I don’t think it is a natural connection. By building this project, we can show that learning can be done through far out scenarios, or even…

• Literary Groups Defend ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

  Jason Boog

  16 May 2012 | 7:47 am

  Comparing Fifty Shades of Grey to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fear of Flying, prominent literary groups criticized the Brevard County Public Library system for refusing to carry E. L. James‘ racy novel. The National Coalition Against Censorship circulated the letter, getting signatures from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, Association of American Publishers, PEN American Center, American Society of Journalists and Authors and The Independent Book Publishers Association. Follow this PDF link to read the letter. Here’s an excerpt: The idea that…

• Michael Dirda Answers Questions on Reddit

  Jason Boog

  16 May 2012 | 6:23 am

  What is the worst book you’ve ever read? Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and author Michael Dirda held an epic “Ask Me Anything” interview at Reddit, fielding questions online from readers about self-publishing, Amazon and the worst books he ever reviewed. At one point, he talked about the worst book he’d ever read. Check it out: “Judith Krantz‘s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally meretricious work. John Sutherland–a distinguished English authority on the novel and the best seller–once included Dazzle in his list of…

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  Slashdot

• Japanese Researchers Transmit 3Gbps Using Terahertz Frequencies

  samzenpus

  16 May 2012 | 12:15 pm

  MrSeb writes "Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new wireless transmission system that works above all currently regulated spectrum frequencies. The new system works at the range of 300GHz to 3THz (terahertz), which is the Far Infrared (FIR) frequencies of the infrared spectrum. That spectrum is currently totally unregulated by any country or standards organization in the world, making it ripe for development of new technologies. So far the Japanese researchers have transmitted data at 3Gbps, but in theory speeds of up to 100Gbps should be possible."Read more of…

• LinuxMint13 RC Is Available For Testing

  samzenpus

  16 May 2012 | 11:53 am

  donadony writes "LinuxMint13 RC is available for testing, this release comes with 2 versions in a separated dvd`s: Mate and Cinnamon. LinuxMint13 Cinnamon is very light and offers some customization, integration of new applets, extensions and themes that can be found on the official website."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Apple Tells Siri To Stop Recommending Nokia

  samzenpus

  16 May 2012 | 11:33 am

  judgecorp writes "Apple has changed the answer Siri gives to the question 'what is the best smartphone ever?' to prevent the voice-driven assistant from promoting the Nokia Lumia 900. Originally Siri trawled online reviews on the web using the wolfram Alpha search engine, to come up with the Lumia, much to Apple's embarrassment. Now, apple has intervened, replacing that answer with a joke: 'Wait there are other phones?'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Kevin Bacon Meets Wikipedia With New Pathfinding Program

  Unknown Lamer

  16 May 2012 | 10:51 am

  New submitter BLT2112 writes "Inspired by the Oracle of Bacon, the Oracle of Wikipedia finds the shortest path between two Wikipedia articles, as in Wikipedia Golf. As explained in the site, 'One selects one article as the tee and another article as the hole and then completes the course between them clicking as few links as possible. No typing is allowed. . . . The Oracle also allows you to search for the most challenging potential Wikipedia Golf courses. Can you find a longer course and merit a place in the "records" section?'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• The Pirate Bay Suffering Global Outage From Massive DDoS Attack

  Unknown Lamer

  16 May 2012 | 10:10 am

  MoldySpore writes "If anyone has tried to get to The Pirate Bay in the last 24 hours, they have most likely been met with a timeout. As an article on TorrentFreak notes, only a week ago The Pirate Bay scolded Anonymous for its attack on ISP Virgin Media, and now the site is currently the victim of a DDoS attack that is effectively keeping people from viewing the site. There is a lot of speculation as to whether this is retaliation from Anonymous, the work of an agency such as the RIAA and their associates, or an anti-pirate company such as PiratePay." Cyberwarfare? Pimple-faced teenagers?

• 

  TechCrunch

• Viacom Gives Up Fight Against Time Warner Cable, Adds Channels to TWC iPad App

  Ryan Lawler

  16 May 2012 | 12:35 pm

  Customers of Time Warner Cable have some reason to rejoice today, as the cable company has gotten the go-ahead to add channels like MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to its live streaming iPad app. The addition comes after the channels’ owner Viacom has settled its differences and resolved litigation with Time Warner Cable. The legal fight erupted last year, after Time Warner Cable released its iPad app, which lets subscribers stream live shows to tablets inside their homes. While many networks grumbled about the app, Viacom was most vocal in rejecting the app, taking its distribution…

• How Many Daily Downloads Does It Take To Reach The Top Of The App Store?

  Frederic Lardinois

  16 May 2012 | 12:01 pm

  It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes…

• Third Pivot’s The Charm? Events Site Ravn Becomes Flash Sales Site Touch Of Modern

  Ingrid Lunden

  16 May 2012 | 11:34 am

  No one ever called a limit on the number pivots a company can do, right? So here’s the latest at a company we’ve been watching for a while now. RAVN, an event planning and sharing app that itself was the product of a pivot from the developers behind “experiences marketplace” Skyara, has sent a letter out to its users telling them that the app is getting shut down at the end of this month. In RAVN’s place, the founders are starting up yet another business — their third — also loosely based around events but with a decidedly more commercial bent: a…

• This Won’t End Well: Toyota Connects With Nintendo DS For In-Car Navigation Interface

  John Biggs

  16 May 2012 | 11:31 am

  For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles. The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option. The compatible Toyota Smart Navi system costs about $3,000 while the game itself costs $92 – quite a bit of cash to simulate the map screens…

• Forrester: 32.1 Million U.S. Households Now Access Online Video On Their TVs

  Frederic Lardinois

  16 May 2012 | 11:04 am

  Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least one TV set and 36 million own four or more. That’s a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try to wrestle more of this business away from the traditional content and hardware players, the old-school cable and satellite providers now suddenly have to content with this new group of challengers that, until now, barely registered on their radars. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey, it’s Microsoft that’s winning this platform war so far. Why? Microsoft, MCquivey argues, currently has a massive…

• 

  ReadWriteWeb

• Startup Swingers: Swapping Founders to Generate Fresh Ideas

  16 May 2012 | 12:00 pm

  Remember "swinging"? Two people in a committed relationship go to a party with a bunch of other people in committed relationships. They all separate, find new partners for the evening and get jiggy. It may sound lurid and gross, but it’s the cool new thing for startup founders. Swapping Ideas, Not Spouses First, let’s be clear. We’re not talking about sex. We’re talking about Founder Swap, a June 1 event in New York where teams from six different startups will get together, trade partners for a day and go home with an injection of fresh ideas. The tagline? “Like Wife Swap but for…

• Google Goes Back to What It Does Well: Finding Things

  16 May 2012 | 10:00 am

  Surprise! Google has completely transformed the way search works again. But this time, it's a kind of search that would have made the old Google proud. Today, starting with U.S., English-language users, Google unveils the Knowledge Graph. Search now looks at the words of your query and identifies the things in it. You're not just searching the Web anymore. You're searching the world. From Words to Things Most of Google users' queries are ambiguous. In the old Google, when you searched for "kings," Google didn't know whether you meant actual monarchs, the hockey team,…

• Read/Write Daily: Bionic Eyes That Can See Clearly

  16 May 2012 | 9:45 am

  Today's theme is improving on life. Nature did a pretty good job of engineering some hardy life forms. But now we're able to tinker with life ourselves. We're further along than you might think. Researchers have lifted the lid on turtle evolution, a perfect demonstration that technology is natural. But now we have our own genetic ideas. We're able to triple the physical endurance of mice in the lab. This paper shows that high-resolution prosthetic human eyes are possible! Here are slightly and greatly more accessible articles about these bionic eyes. We've also developed low-cost artificial…

• Why the iPad Works for Writing

  16 May 2012 | 8:02 am

  When the first iPad launched in 2010, critics were quick to lampoon the device for being geared too heavily toward content consumption. The criticisms weren't entirely without merit, especially considering that the first-generation iPad didn't even have a camera, and external media slots are still nowhere to be found.  Over time, the iPad has evolved into something that's much more creation-friendly. It still doesn't compare to a desktop or laptop computer for many things, but it's great for quite a few others. Writing is one of them.  I happen to write things for a living, but the…

• The Truth About Why Yahoo's CEO Got Fired

  16 May 2012 | 7:02 am

  What's the takeaway from Yahoo's recent CEO fiasco? Don't lie on your corporate bio, for one, and make sure no one else has lied on your behalf. But the real lesson has nothing to do with falsified credentials. Sure, the world will remember Scott Thompson as the Yahoo CEO who got fired over a fake computer science degree, but the context is crucial: A battle with Yahoo shareholder Dan Loeb for control of the company. If not for Loeb, we may never have found out about Thompson's juiced resume, and he might still be CEO. The real lesson is: Beware the activist investor. Four months…

• 

  Mashable!

• The Facebook IPO Timeline

  Stephanie Buck

  16 May 2012 | 12:32 pm

  If the Facebook IPO were a real person, we certainly wouldn’t blame it for posting braggy status updates. This infographic, created by our friends at mbaonline.com, imagines the road leading up to the decade’s most-anticipated initial public offering, as if it were documented on its own Facebook Timeline. As a Facebook user, give yourself a pat on the back for helping the company make it this far. You are one of 900 million, and you spend an average of 20 minutes per day surfing the network. That means Facebook’s usership logs 16,000 years of combined time on the platform…

• Facebook Fans Get to Pick Bonus Levels in ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD’

  Chelsea Stark

  16 May 2012 | 12:06 pm

  Activision is polling fans via Facebook on which levels will be included as additional downloadable content on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a rebuilt version of the classic games. It features seven levels from the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, released in 1999, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which came out in 2000. Players will be able to skate all over classic levels such as “Warehouse” and “Mall” that have been rebuilt using the old maps. Starting Wednesday afternoon, fans will be asked to pick which of their favorite Tony…

• Facebook IPO Gets a Boost: 84 Million More Shares For Sale

  Joann Pan

  16 May 2012 | 11:15 am

  Just days away from launch, Facebook is continuing to make last-minute changes in its IPO plans. On Wednesday, Facebook announced that an extra 84 million shares will be added to its stock pool for sale. The extra shares will come entirely from insiders and early investors, according to the Associated Press. Facebook and its current stockholders will offer more than 421 million shares in the IPO. The company has raised the price range of its stocks to $34 to $38, up from $28 to $35. If the shares trade on the higher end, Facebook could raise $16 billion when it goes public. Some of the early…

• 18 Mashable Family Photos

  Jeremy Cabalona

  16 May 2012 | 10:47 am

  What does a family portrait look like when it represents a community of millions of people? For our photo challenge this week, Mashable readers sent us their photos, helping us to create a family portrait of our community. This past Sunday was Mother’s Day in the U.S. Sons and daughters found time to pick up the phone and call their moms, and many families enjoyed the day together. In honor of Mother’s Day, we asked you to show us a photo that represents family to you. At Mashable, we loved seeing your photos of family outings, newborn family members and canine best friends.

• Behind the Launch: A Promising, Yet Controversial Job Candidate

  Lauren Drell

  16 May 2012 | 10:31 am

  Discuss the show on Twitter: #BehindTheLaunch In Mashable‘s new video series, Behind the Launch, we’re taking cameras behind the scenes at Vungle, an in-app video advertising startup. Last week, we met the the founders and saw them bring on Colin Behr to head up business development. This week, they courted big-name startup investors, such as 500 Startups‘ Dave McClure, DFJ Esprit‘s Krishna Visvanathan and AOL Ventures‘ Adam Smith. But Vungle needs to focus more on the core — developing the product instead of fleshing out press releases and a website…

• 

  Charlene Li

• Beyond the IPO: Ten Implications of a Public Facebook

  Charlene Li

  8 May 2012 | 8:05 am

  By Susan Etlinger, Charlene Li and Rebecca Lieb The run-up to Facebook’s IPO reminds me a bit of a wedding: everyone’s attention is on the big day (expected to be Friday May 18), without much regard for the weeks, months and years afterward. Charlene Li, Rebecca Lieb, and I sat down to discuss some of the implications of a newly public Facebook: on shareholders, business and Facebook itself. — SE  (Cross-posted from altimetergroup.com.) Whether or not Facebook’s IPO ends up being one of the world’s largest (this Washington Post article places it 6th, between…

• Webinar: A Foundation For Mobile Business

  Charlene Li

  20 Mar 2012 | 10:46 am

  Now for a word on mobile in the enterprise. Altimeter’s mobile analyst, Chris Silva, is working on a report that explores how managers on the business-side – not the IT – side of the organization are increasingly leading the charge to bring mobility to their workforce. A key challenge is how to build the control and security foundation for a mobile business strategy. Chris and I will be hosting an open, no-cost webinar on Wed March 28th at 10am PT/1pm ET that will discuss the key elements of the mobile control layer, its importance, and how both the technologies and leadership…

• Report: Making The Business Case For Enterprise Social Networks

  Charlene Li

  22 Feb 2012 | 1:58 am

  In 2011, the US hit a milestone — more than half of all adults visit social networking sites at least once a month. But when it comes to using social-networking technologies inside organizations, many business leaders are at a loss to understand what value can be created from Facebook-like status updates within the enterprise. Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants. The problem: Most companies approach enterprise social networks as a technology deployment…

• New Report: “Make An App For That: Mobile Strategies For Retailers”

  Charlene Li

  7 Feb 2012 | 10:16 am

  When it comes to shopping, I have a love/hate relationship with my iPhone. Some apps are actually helpful, letting me explore products or buy something immediate. But the vast majority of the retailer apps litter my screens, sitting unused after an initial, disappointing whirl. My frustration is reflected in the findings of my colleague Chris Silva‘s new report, entitled “Make An App For That: Mobile Strategies For Retailers“. Of particular value is that Chris pivots the report around two major strategies retails can use when it comes to mobile: Enrich: These strategies are…

• Jerry Yang’s departure signals a New Day for Yahoo!, the passing of an era for Tech

  Charlene Li

  17 Jan 2012 | 4:30 pm

  My first reaction to the news that Jerry Yang is leaving Yahoo! was that this was the passing of an era. I first met Jerry in 1994 when he was still a PhD student at Stanford, before he and David Filo left to run Yahoo! full time. Through bubbles and two economic downturns, Jerry has always been omnipresent in Silicon Valley. But all good things come to pass. With the arrival of Scott Thompson as the new CEO of Yahoo!, it makes sense that Scott be given a clean slate upon which to write the future of Yahoo!. This is very much the norm for incoming CEOs, where founders are asked to take a…

• 

  CenterNetworks

• Shark Tank Recap – April 27

  Allen

  27 Apr 2012 | 6:00 pm

  Below is a recap of the April 27, 2012 episode of the ABC show Shark Tank. If you are unfamiliar with Shark Tank, the concept is simple – entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of investors and the investors have to provide at least the amount the entrepreneur is seeking for a deal to be completed. Tonight Barbara Corcoran was replaced by QVC product creator Lori Greiner. Other sharks include: Mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary, Damond John and Robert Herjavec. Don’t forget to check out our previous Shark Tank recaps. Pitch #1 – Duality Cosmetics First up into the Shark Tank was…

• Does Product Design Always Matter?

  Allen

  26 Apr 2012 | 7:20 pm

  While I don’t own many Apple products, I know the feeling that they give me when I use them. I like my Android tablet but for some reason the iPod Touch just seems to give me a better feeling when I use it. For years I’ve called it the, “white headphones effect”. There are lots of brands that provide the same feeling while you are using them. Another great example is Whole Foods. Here in Austin there is another healthy supermarket, Central Market. Both stores are excellent but, for me, there is just a better feeling walking around Whole Foods than there is when inside…

• Web Jobs – April 23

  Allen

  23 Apr 2012 | 5:46 am

  Check out some of the latest web technology and business jobs posted for April 23, 2012 on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you. Featured Jobs: Chief Operating Officer at Indochino Apparel Director of Software Engineering at Bloom Health Software Designer at Viddler More Jobs: Senior Web Software Engineer at Kareo Front End Developer at Soli Senior Software Engineer at OkCupid Labs Software Engineer at Causes Employers – Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs today –…

• Why I’m Using Facebook More Often

  Allen

  20 Apr 2012 | 4:52 pm

  I’ve never been a heavy Facebook user — I’ve had an account for a very long time but I mainly used it to share posts from CN and to “friend” people who request that I friend them. Over the years I’ve changed my personal settings to be able to see the different types of ads that are displayed. Up until this month I’ve never had a profile picture and have appeared as women and men of all different ages. Whenever I take a look at the main feed on Facebook, it’s mostly content imported from Twitter. I’ve written about this before and wish that…

• Tumblr is Invisible to the News, As These Charts Show. Why?

  Dan Lewis

  18 Apr 2012 | 3:52 pm

  This post written by Dan Lewis – he wants you to learn something new every day. The news is behind the times. Look at the bottom graph of the top picture. Relative to Twitter, there’s been virtually no news pickup of Tumblr.  It’s a flat blue line.  On the other hand, search volume shows that Tumblr’s been a “thing,” relative to Twitter, for almost two years. The news is two years behind. The second picture is Tumblr v. Instagram.  Outside of the sale, Tumblr’s been crushing Instagram on search volume — steeper slope and everything.  And yet, until the sale, both…

• 

  SmartBrief on Social Media

• Study: More Brits contact brands via social media

  16 May 2012 | 9:28 am

  Up to 18 million Web users in the U.K.  -More- 

• Developer plans to build underwater hotel in Dubai

  16 May 2012 | 9:28 am

  A hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, will guarantee an ocean view to every guest -- because the hotel itself will built on -More- Bloomberg Government Marketing Analyst Bloomberg

• We still like Facebook, Ford exec says:

  16 May 2012 | 9:28 am

  Facebook is a "growing and critical part" of Ford's marketing, says Matt VanDyke, the automaker's director of marketing commu -More- 7 Whiteboard Sessions for every social strategist. Learn how to implement & scale a social program across your enterprise company with this 36-page framework by Spredfast by delivering good customer experience, adopting social media company-wide, gaining insight into your social customer, & showing an ROI on social. Download 7 Whiteboard Sessions.

• Does your company archive its social media activities?

  16 May 2012 | 9:28 am

   -More- 

• Analysis: Google+ needs to leverage search to catch Facebook

  16 May 2012 | 9:28 am

  If Google can harness an "integrated socially enhanced search engine," it has a shot of activating all those inorganically gr -More- 

• 

  chrisbrogan.com

• Create a Setting and Connect With Emotions

  ceb

  13 May 2012 | 10:26 pm

  I recently moved the delivery time of my beloved newsletter to be Sunday morning (well, that’s when it launches here, though my New Zealander and Australian friends all get it on Monday). In the process, I talked to people about sharing this information over breakfast, and with a “second cup of coffee” sometimes. I basically set a scene in the reader’s head that we were having a personal chat over breakfast. Ask yourself this: in trying to reach others for whatever your goal may be, is it facts or emotions that will win them over? Which do you think plays the bigger…

• Nobody Reads Agency Blogs- Or Why You Need Skin in the Game

  ceb

  7 May 2012 | 6:57 am

  Thanks to Jason Falls, I just read this post about how many marketing agencies are closing down their blogs and tweeting and Facebooking instead. “Nobody reads agency blogs, and there are so many out there it’s impossible for people to keep up anyway,” said Sam Weston, director of communications at digital agency Huge. Nobody Reads ANY Blogs- If They’re Boring I’ll tell you without even having to look why nobody reads a blog: because it’s boring. Because it’s poorly written. Because it’s utterly self-referential. Nobody has time to read junk. Why would you?

• Constraints

  ceb

  5 May 2012 | 9:43 am

  I was at a live performance the other night where Jacq sang and played with Girish, and I had a great conversation with Reggie, the drummer for the night. (I am SO sorry that I don’t know your last name, Reggie.) We talked about the fact that his typical drum kit for events is usually like 30 or so pieces, but that he decided to go minimal for the event. He had a kick drum, a snare, a tom, two cymbals, and a cowbell. What Reggie said was something like this, “I really enjoy this, because it means I really have to use what I have to get the expression I’m aiming for. I…

• Pattern Break

  ceb

  2 May 2012 | 9:17 pm

  When you wake up in the morning, you check your emails, probably from your phone. First thing. Yes? Why? There’s no good answer to why. Even brain surgeons can wait until they’ve done other things before checking in on the world outside of your immediate proximity. So why do you do it? Because it’s a habit, a pattern. Do you read the top tech and marketing blogs? Why? Why do you read this blog? Because you’re subscribed? Are you getting something from it? If no, then why are you still doing it? Twitter and Facebook are hugely pattern-driven. They thrive off the same…

• Where Should You Put Your Content?

  ceb

  30 Apr 2012 | 7:44 am

  I’ve been asked by subscribers of my personal newsletter how I decide what goes on my blog and what goes into my newsletter. I think the answer differs depending on your strategy, but I’m more than happy to tell you how I view it. I put information that sells on my blog, and information that nurtures in my newsletter. Information that Sells My job, because people seem confused these days as to what exactly it is I do or am selling, is to help mid-sized to larger companies build business (revenue and growth) by improving their use of the human digital channel (social media, email…

• 

  News from SMP

• How people spend time online

  7 May 2012 | 5:00 pm

  How people spend time onlineEver wondered how many people are online, where they hang out and what they do?  Well, this ‘How people spend their time online infographic’ by go-gulf takes a shot at cutting through the statistics.  Jammed p...

• Figaro Digital Social Media Marketing Conference April 2012 fast approaching

  2 Apr 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Figaro Digital Social Media Marketing Conference April 2012 fast approachingThese days, it seems there are more UK-based social media events that you can shake a stick at. As we approach the Easter weekend, Figaro Digital kicks off its Social Medi...

• Social Media World Forum (SMWF) Europe arrives in London

  26 Mar 2012 | 5:00 pm

  Social Media World Forum (SMWF) Europe arrives in LondonLondon welcomes the Social Media World Forum (SMWF) Europe for the next two days (27-28 March).  Pitched as the leading social media marketing event by it organisers Six Degrees, it's on...

• Updated Facebook Pages – How ready is your Timeline?

  5 Mar 2012 | 4:00 pm

  Updated Facebook Pages – How ready is your Timeline?In case you’ve been on holiday somewhere without access to the internet, you probably haven’t read the many stories about Facebook Pages being implemented.  30 March 2012 is the date to put ...

• SES London 2012 hits London next week

  15 Feb 2012 | 4:00 pm

  Search Engine Strategies: SES London 2012 hits London next weekThe four-day long search engine event SES London 2012 Conference and Exhibition hits London next week from 20-24 February.   Known for being primarily a search event, SES con...

• 

  Social Media Explorer

• Introducing The Rebel’s Guide To Email Marketing

  Jason Falls

  16 May 2012 | 10:20 am

  If you joined DJ Waldow and me today for our 22-minute webinar on five secrets to email marketing, you learned that one of the secrets was that he and I have written a book. I’m proud to tell all of you that The Rebel’s Guide To Email Marketing is now available for pre-order on Amazon and will be in your local book stores late this summer. This is my second book (thanks to all of you who have supported No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing) but DJ’s first. And if you know both me and DJ, you know he’s truly the subject…

• Social Media Sucks for Businesses and Here’s Why

  Adam Helweh

  16 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Let’s just get straight to the point… social media sucks. Plain and simple. For years it’s been “business as usual” and then suddenly everyone is bouncing around words like “social”, “engage”, “community” and all kinds of other blather. Some of the biggest companies in the world such as Ford, Starbucks, Dell, American Express and many others have fallen for the trap. I’m here to warn you before you do anything stupid. Social media sucks and here’s a few reasons why … Social media shifts the limelight from…

• Choosing and Weaving Social Within a Multichannel Marketing Program

  Jason Falls

  15 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Editor’s Note: Today’s post is of the guest variety and offered up by my friends Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston. Their new book, Marketing in the Round, is out and available. They are smart. It is good. Pay attention. The world of marketing in small and large businesses is a siloed one. Companies have ad campaigns, PR plans, social media strategies, and websites built independently and bolted together in a haphazard manner. It’s surprising how rarely these disciplines work together to achieve corporate objectives like establishing a second vertical for a product, or…

• The Irony Of Measuring Marketing Now

  Jason Falls

  14 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  I once provided counsel for a company that had little confidence in social media marketing. It begrudgingly decided it would hire a consultant, go through some strategic exercises and probably prove that social media was bullshit and it would be better off sticking with its traditional guns. The brand’s insistence with my work, as is with most clients I’ve dealt with, was that we measure everything as infinitely as possible. Skeptics are like that. They want to know how many clicks, how many re-tweets, how many milliseconds the time-on-site number increases each month, even if…

• How To Engage In Online Forums For Your Brand

  Jason Falls

  11 May 2012 | 6:00 am

  Editor’s Note: In light of our recent affirmation that forums and message boards are a bountiful home for consumer interaction and engagement around brands and products, I thought it appropriate to invite some solid expertise here to help advise us on how to proceed in exploring online forums for marketing purposes. Today’s guest post is by the person I regard as the foremost expert on managing online forums in the U.S., if not the world, Patrick O’Keefe. I regularly find myself in the position of having to defend online forums, without actually wanting to be put into that…

• 

  Brian Solis

• The Fallacy of Information Overload

  Brian Solis

  15 May 2012 | 6:50 am

  Some of you know me through my work in studying how social media and disruptive technology impact business and culture. Others have worked with me in translating insights into action and change within the enterprise.  Every now and then, I share another side of myself that evokes the aspiring social scientist in me as I explore how all of this is affecting us as individuals and human beings. Not a day goes by when I’m not asked about whether or not the social media bubble will finally burst. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, this all has to be too much right? More…

• Music, Film, TV: How social media changed the entertainment experience

  Brian Solis

  10 May 2012 | 7:56 am

  Social media is more than a digital water cooler for TV and movies. The global conversation that takes place around events and the experiences people share based on what they watch teaches us about consumer preferences. More importantly, their activity influences behavior. Behavior counts for everything. Studying it is just the beginning of course. In order to understand and eventually steer behavior, we must translate activity into insights and in turn, translate insights into actionable strategies and programs. The Hollywood Reporter recently published an exclusive poll about social media…

• The future of TV is more than social, it’s a multi-screen experience that needs design

  Brian Solis

  7 May 2012 | 11:19 am

  The future of television is much more than social; much in the same way that the future of media is too, more than social. Social is a fabric; it connects the individual nodes that make up the human network. But, social however, is not a means to an end. And, as such, the same is true about the working theories driving Social TV. Understanding the role social plays in how viewers connect with programs and other people is essential to defining the future of television. Over the years, I’ve written much about my vision for the long overdue convergence of not only web and TV, but also how the…

• The Path from a Social Brand to a Social Business

  Brian Solis

  2 May 2012 | 9:17 am

  I’ve been a long-time supporter of MediaTemple’s (MT)Residence program along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel, and many others whom I respect. I wanted to share my “7 questions to answer to become a social business” with you here.. Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing. Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebook, but they’re hardly alone. Disney follows just behind with 29 million…

• Do Customers Really Matter to Your Business? Prove it.

  Brian Solis

  30 Apr 2012 | 8:21 am

  Frank Eliason and I have known each other for many years. We’ve shared the stage on many occasions, he’s made an appearance on Revolution, and most importantly, I’m proud to call him a personal friend. Frank has championed the adaption and transformation of customer service during his time at Comcast and at CITI. Never one to shy away from sharing his opinions, he’s certainly bullish on where service needs to be as a function and a philosophy versus where it is today. In fact, he’s gone so far as to call out social media customer service as being a…

• 

  Technosailor.com

• Crazy Christians and Bad Spam and Mailing List Management

  Aaron

  27 Apr 2012 | 2:24 pm

  I somehow got added to a mailing list recently unsolicited. It’s called Christian Report and I refuse to link to them. It is an arrogant, self-serving site that is plagued by guilt. There is therefore now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus. -Romans 8:1 What is seriously tragic about this site (aside from the content) is that I was added to this mailing list unknown. For God knows what reason. I mean, I’m used to getting spam and all, but at least a mailinglist has an unsubscribe, right? I am a user of Other Inbox, which has this neat “Unsubscribe”…

• Tech: We Need to Start Being Feminists. Stat!

  Aaron

  26 Apr 2012 | 12:42 pm

    Used under Creative Commons. Photo by Jay Morrison. This. That extends this I wrote about a few weeks ago. This is pissing me the hell off! All that. It all needs to stop. How are some of the brightest minds on the internet not seeing the harm in how we collectively perceive women, women in tech, women in our industry? How is it funny to send nude photos of women to a prospective boss and get hired as a result? How is it humorous to make jokes about “gangbang interviews” in a professional presentation? How is this okay? In the context of discussion around this…

• David Simon on Debate and Journalism

  Aaron

  26 Apr 2012 | 10:05 am

  It’s why I used to love a healthy newsroom, which I have described as a magical place where everyone disagrees with everything all of the time.  Arguments make the work better; when people stop arguing, or at least arguing intelligently, absent the usual half-assed, rhetorical cheating, the work invariably suffers. (Source: davidsimon.com)

• Scantily Clad Women are for the Bedroom, not the Showroom Floor.

  Aaron

  9 Apr 2012 | 10:00 am

  I love women. I love scantily clad women. I think the majority of men, and of course some women, would agree with me. Sexual attraction is inherently part of the human experience and part of the instinctual core that makes up who we are. The same goes for women with men. However, this is not okay. *This* is a glimpse inside Ad:Tech San Francisco. Maybe not all of Ad:Tech. Maybe not even most of Ad:Tech. But it’s certainly a representation of how at least a few people decided to capture it. And this is not directed toward the photographers, at least one of whom I am personally acquainted…

• Twitter as a Protocol

  Aaron

  1 Mar 2012 | 12:06 pm

  Image from Shawn Campbell. Used under Creative Commons Yesterday, I had lunch with a guy who was picking my brain about various topics. One of the conversations we ended up having was about the longevity of Twitter as a company. It hearkens back to conversations I had years ago when Twitter was barely making it as a service. It was down seemingly half the time, a problem they have long since solved. In those days of 2007 and 2008, Twitter was just beginning it’s conquest of communication mediums. It was nowhere near as big, influential or necessary as it is today. It was getting there…

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  PR-Squared - Social Media Marketing and Public Relations

• Seven Principles of Content Marketing

  Todd Defren

  14 May 2012 | 11:20 am

  Now that we’ve all agreed that “Content is King (Again),” and Content Marketing is all the rage, maybe it is time to think about some easy-to-follow tenets.  Let’s keep this simple. Follow a 70/30 Rule – 70% of content curated, 30% branded.  Why? Because the rest-of-the-world is at least 70% more interesting than your brand; and, promoting external content builds social capital, makes grateful fans of influencers. All content should be SHAREWORTHY.  Don’t publish junk.  Better to be quiet than to queer the signal-to-noise ratio. All content should benefit…

• Seriously, This Is Gonna Be Cool: The Corporate Social Media Summit

  Todd Defren

  4 May 2012 | 7:05 am

  Next month I’ll be moderating a panel at the Corporate Social Media Summit, which is being held June 13-14 at the New Yorker Hotel in NYC.  It’s gonna be a great time, with an impressive list of corporate attendees, including SHIFT clients such as McDonalds and H&R Block, among many others (Whole Foods! Dell! Lego! Mercedes!). I’ll be moderating the panel on “Reputation preservation and enhancement: Use social media to maximize the impact of your brand.”  I’ll be joined by McDonald’s Heather Oldani, Director of U.S.

• Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

  Todd Defren

  29 Apr 2012 | 5:22 am

• SHIFT Communications Named Digital/Social Agency of the Year

  Todd Defren

  24 Apr 2012 | 9:00 am

  Shameless self promotion time. Hang on. Wow, wow, wow. We are busting at the seams over here.  Today the Holmes Group named SHIFT Communications the 2012 Digital/Social Agency of the Year – with “honorable mentions” in the category going to behemoths like Edelman, Ogilvy and Weber Shandwick. This marks the 3rd time in the last few years that SHIFT has nabbed “agency of the year” honors.  We were the “Agency of the Year” according to the American Business Awards, and the “New Media Agency of the Year” (again via Holmes) back in 2008. Both times we were psyched.  But this…

• What’s Old is New Again: Earned Media Can Be Your Hub

  Todd Defren

  23 Apr 2012 | 6:17 am

  I was catching up with a former client recently.  We launched their company a coupla years ago, and by almost any measure, it is now considered a hot commodity.  They have tons of social media fans, lots of inbound media requests, do a lot of great content marketing, etc. We originally parted ways, very amicably, because they had reached a degree of success that no longer warranted as much proactive effort (and, being a startup, they were wisely watching their burn rate). During our catch-up session, this company representative described a newfound fever within the company to get more…

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  Jon Burg's Future Visions

• Succeeding Through Social Media's Trough Of Disillusionment

  Jonathan Burg

  15 May 2012 | 11:16 pm

  In Gartner's Hype Cycle, the Peak of Inflated Expectations is followed by the Trough of Disillusionment.  While Social Media as a business practice is hitting that crest, I don't believe this spells doom for the industry.  And it's all going to come down to one word: value. How Did We Get Inflated Expectations? Social Media is regularly being misunderstood and misreported.  The digital social dynamic is in it's formative young teen years, and in the interest of growing business and driving investment we as a society may have over-promised.  And as an industry, I cannot say that we have…

• Are Marketers Evil Scumbags?

  Jonathan Burg

  12 May 2012 | 1:29 pm

  Before you read this post, please read The Verge's investigational peice on internet scammers.  It's a great peice and the driver of this post. Dear Popular Culture and The General Public, Marketers are not evil.  Internet marketers are not evil.  TV advertising as an industry is not evil.  Bad people do bad things, and unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things.  But they aren't marketing and they aren’t marketers, they are scammers. If a fraudster poses as a physician and harms an unsuspecting community, we do not blame doctors.  We do not blame the broader practice of medicine.

• What Are We REALLY Looking For In A CEO?

  Jonathan Burg

  9 May 2012 | 6:54 am

  Is the purpose of a CEO to lead a company or to lead investors?  Is the purpose of a CEO to manage public perception or lead internal direction?  Must a high level position like CEO demand a deep technical knowledge of the details of the worker-bee side of the business?  Must the CEO of Kraft Foods be able to bake?  Can the CEO of Brooks Brothers wear Levis jeans on vacation?  Would it ever be acceptable for the CEO of Baskin Robbins to be lactose intolerant?   Over the past week Yahoo! and Facebook have both been called out by the press for their CEO-related dramas.  And both of these…

• Modern Relevancy In Aging Tragedy

  Jonathan Burg

  18 Apr 2012 | 12:21 pm

  How should we, the third generation, commemorate The Holocaust?  Nobody wants to remember or contemplate massive death, atrocity and desperation.  There are few alive who can still personally recall and mourn for the millions of individuals lost to this tragedy.  So how are we to carry the torch? A few short hours ago my newfound homeland began 24 hours of national mourning over the 6 million Jewish souls lost in the Holocaust.  Radio stations stopped blasting their normal music, TV stations halted their regularly scheduled programming, restaurants and health clubs closed up early and…

• Outstanding Kickstarter Success Is A Liability

  Jonathan Burg

  18 Apr 2012 | 4:15 am

  Kickstarter is a brilliant concept.  But a runaway success may be their all-to-soon undoing. What Is Kickstarter? Visionaries post their ideas and the general public gets to contribute towards funding these ideas.  In addition to donating towards what the micro-investor considers to be smart innovation, investors will often receive a nominal return such as early access to the theoretical finished product, recognition as a contributor in the finished video project and occasionally even an actual physical product once it's produced.  Kickstarter is to investing as Kiva is to banking - making…

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  Elevator View

• Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, 5:20PM

  Stewart Mader

  14 May 2012 | 12:54 pm

  Photographed from the 18th floor of 80 Fifth Avenue (Dailymotion).

• 4 & 7 Times Square, 1 Bryant Park, and New Yorker Hotel, 6:07PM

  Stewart Mader

  8 May 2012 | 12:45 pm

  Photographed from the 14th floor of 545 West 25th Street (The Glass Houses at Chelsea Arts Tower).

• W Union Square, 5:36PM

  Stewart Mader

  7 May 2012 | 9:05 am

  Photographed from the 18th floor of 80 Fifth Avenue (Dailymotion).

• Steelcase WorkLife Center, 8:00PM

  Stewart Mader

  4 May 2012 | 7:24 am

  Photographed from the 7th floor of 4 Columbus Circle (Steelcase WorkLife Center).

• Manhattan from Williamsburg, 5:30PM

  Stewart Mader

  3 May 2012 | 7:03 am

  Photographed from the roof deck of 440 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn (Schaefer Landing North).

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  Posts about Social Media from the Econsultancy blog

• 18m UK consumers have used social media for customer service

  David Moth

  16 May 2012 | 3:17 am

  More than a third of UK consumers (36%) have engaged with brands through social media, according to a survey from Fishburn Hedges. This has doubled from 19% since August 2011 and equates to around 18m people. The increased interaction appears to be driven by the widespread belief among respondents (40%) that social media improves customer service, compared to only 7% who feared it would harm service. In fact 68% of those who have engaged with brands through social media believe that it “allowed them to find their voice.”More than two-thirds (65%) also believe that it is a better…

• GM ditching paid Facebook ads: report

  Patricio Robles

  16 May 2012 | 1:11 am

  Facebook apparently hasn't experienced any problems convincing investors to put their money into its IPO, but while the social network focuses its attention on Wall Street, it might do well to pay more attention to a nearby street: Madison Avenue.That's because, according to a Wall Street Journal report, GM, the world's largest car maker, apparently isn't hot on Facebook's paid ads.In fact, it's so unimpressed that the Wall Street Journal's sources say that the once-troubled automaker "plans to stop advertising on Facebook after the company's marketing executives determined their paid ads had…

• Twitter hits 10m UK users, 80% use mobile

  Patricio Robles

  15 May 2012 | 12:42 pm

  Facebook may be the subject of all of the headlines with its public debut looming this Friday, but another major player in the social networking space is reminding the world that it's still growing too. Twitter, which has built a company that one day might go public too on the back of 140 character messages, has waived its hands in the air by announcing that it has surpassed 140m users worldwide.As reported by The Guardian, 10m of those users are in the UK. That's good enough to make the UK Twitter's fourth largest audience behind the US, Brazil and Japan, and explains why the company has a…

• Facebook's vulnerability could make it the most interesting IPO ever

  Patricio Robles

  15 May 2012 | 8:24 am

  In what may be the most anticipated IPO ever, Facebook, will go public this Friday. Mark Zuckerberg, the hoodie-wearing 28 year-old CEO of the world's largest social network won't be in New York to ring the NASDAQ opening bell. Instead, he'll be at his company's Menlo Park headquarters ringing it in virtually.When Facebook goes public on Friday, it will be selling 50.6m shares more than it originally planned to, and at $34 to $38 per share, the company's stock will debut in a higher-than-anticipated price range. All told, Facebook could raise nearly $15bn in its offering and hit the…

• Start Me Up! A profile of Achoo

  Graham Charlton

  15 May 2012 | 5:06 am

  Achoo is a social network which allows its users to brag about their achievements and build up a profile which will help attract future employers.  The site was launched by Andrus Purde, and I've been asking him about Achoo, its business model, the challenges of launching, and his future plans. In one sentence, what is Achoo? A professional social network where marketers and other professionals can build their network, share their accomplishments and find new opportunities. What problems does Achoo solve? The traditional résumé and services built around it,…

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  GigaOM

• The newest phone app teens will hate but parents will love

  Kevin C. Tofel

  16 May 2012 | 12:22 pm

  With 11 teens killed while texting and driving per day, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that parents are turning towards apps to limit their kids’ phone use behind the wheel. The sad statistic comes from Chris Holbert, CEO of SecuraFone, which offers an app for iPhone and Android handsets that diables some phone features when moving 5 mph or more. SecuraFone doesn’t stop there though: It also allows parents to monitor where their kids are driving and how fast they’re going. SecuraFone was one of several safety apps featured on NBC’s Nightly News with Brian…

• Google launches Schemer app for the iPhone

  Janko Roettgers

  16 May 2012 | 12:05 pm

  Google’s social team has had a lot of love for iOS lately: Just days after rolling out a revamped iPhone app for Google+, the company now released an iOS app for its social activity service Schemer. The app mimics Schemer’s Android app in form and functionality, allowing users to tell the world what they’re plans are – and then join with friends for group activities. Schemer has been an interesting initiative for Google. The service launched under the radar a few months back, then opened up to the public in April. Schemer is using a separate branding, but it’s tied closely…

• ISwifter’s TheWorx iPad app recreates Facebook, but with games

  Ryan Kim

  16 May 2012 | 11:33 am

  Just days before Facebook’s big IPO, the company is getting a lesson from another Silicon Valley startup on how to improve its iPad app. ISwifter is showing how it can create a full-fledged Facebook app that also includes Flash gaming. TheWorx iPad app, a Facebook application that is set to go live next month, will provide users with access to status updates, their news feed and photos. But the kicker is that it will also give iPad users access to Facebook’s Flash-based games through an App Hub. Currently, iSwifter’s iPad app allows people to play thousands of Facebook…

• Calvin: A fast, cheap database that isn’t a database at all

  Derrick Harris

  16 May 2012 | 11:12 am

  Yale researchers Daniel Abadi and Alexander Thomson think they have developed the cure for Oracle and IBM dominance in the world of database performance, and it isn’t even technically a database. In a blog post Wednesday morning (and in a related research paper), the two researchers detail Calvin, a “transaction scheduling and replication coordination service” that they think can level the playing field between high-cost distributed relational databases and less-expensive, but limited, NoSQL and NewSQL databases. Abadi and Thomson aren’t dismissing either NoSQL or…

• Bloglovin, a prettier take on RSS and Tumblr, gets Betaworks investment

  Ki Mae Heussner

  16 May 2012 | 10:59 am

  When Mattias Swenson, Patrik Ring and their three co-founders first decided to launch a startup out of high school, the plan was to work on it for a year and then move on with their lives. Growing up in Stockholm, they said, they didn’t know of anyone else who gave up university for entrepreneurship. But more than five years later, they’re still at it. And their startup Bloglovin, which is something like a visual RSS reader meets  Tumblr for the entire blogosphere, is poised for a new level of growth. New York-based Internet company Betaworks is announcing today that it, along with…

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  Direct Marketing Observations

• How Do We Get Duped By SEO [Infographic]

  marc meyer

  14 May 2012 | 8:54 am

  It all starts with a title. The better the title, the stickier the title, the more likely you’ll suck us in.

• How Digital is Changing the Consumer Experience

  marc meyer

  2 May 2012 | 2:02 pm

  Let me give you a few real world examples that happen every day.  You’re at a stop light for all of 30 seconds and you start to get antsy because the light hasn’t changed.  You are going to make a right on red and there is someone in front of you who does not turn right away, and you lay on the horn.  You’re in line at the store waiting to check out and it’s taking forever.  Forever being about 3-4 minutes. Why are we so impatient? Maybe these examples will help. You’re surfing the web and a page doesn’t load quick enough so you try another website.  You want to buy a product…

• Social Media and The Olympics

  marc meyer

  20 Apr 2012 | 1:44 pm

  Two things for you to check out. First check out the infographic below and second, check out this link: http://hub.olympic.org/

• A Need to Redefine Brand Lift

  marc meyer

  13 Apr 2012 | 6:22 am

  According to a recent survey published by eMarketer, four in five North American brand marketers considered brand lift to be the most important metric for evaluating the success of their online branding efforts.  But is brand lift the right metric at all?  Vizu which partnered with DIGIDAY on the survey defines brand lift as the following: Brand Lift is defined as the percentage increase in the primary marketing objective of a brand advertising campaign But does that definition correlate to digital correctly?  Should it?  Marketers consider it to be the one worthy metric.  Given its pure…

• On Social Media Tools, Noise, and Experience

  marc meyer

  12 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am

  I was driving through the Florida Everglades last week when I thought, “How in the hell does someone survive and get around out here in this vast expanse of nothingness?”  Which made me immediately draw a relation to the water that surrounds the glades being the internet so to speak, and the wispy reeds of sea grass or whatever the hell it is, being your customers or users of the internet.  I then thought, “There’s a lot of noise out there now, was it, or is it now because of social media?  Did social media create the noise?”  Is social responsible for this?