Create stories using social media

There are several tools where you just enter a twitter handle and you can create a story or news hub.

We have storify (beta) that turns what people post on social media into stories.  Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

There is paper.li that creates sort of newspaper with just twitter handles and lists and even Facebook.  A different and nice way to discover new content…  See mine for example: http://paper.li/tokao

Celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011

We invite you to join tens of thousands of people coming together on bridges all over the world — from the Millennium Bridge in London, the Brooklyn Bridgein New York City, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, to the Grand Barriere Bridge joining Rwanda and Congo — to show your support for women’s causes and celebrate women’s achievements.

We also invite you to donate to one of the incredible

Find a bridge event near you and register, or create your own bridge event

Register to join a bridge event. Attend in person or virtually. Use the search box at the top of the map to find and select a bridge event near you. Or create your own bridge event: click the “Create new event” button at the top of the map and invite others to join using our Event Toolkit.

The Event Toolkit includes assets that you can take with you to the event such as hand held banners or use to promote it such as online banners or posters.

organizations that work to improve the lives of women worldwide. Support a cause you care about at the bottom of the page. See you on the bridge!

Support a cause that you care about

solowheel

Like a stripped-down Segway, Inventist‘s new Solowheel is geared for the mobile urbanite. The “self-balancing electric unicycle” operates through gyroscopic technology, which a 1000-watt rechargeable lithium-ion battery powers. On a full charge (which takes about 45 minutes), the Solowheel lasts two hours—but the battery actually recaptures energy when going downhill.

Weighing only 20 pounds and consisting of little more than a simple wheel with a fold-up foot platform on either side, you can easily throw it in your backpack or briefcase once you reach your destination, or carry it by its convenient handle.

Steve Jobs Doesn’t Want to Kill Publishers, But Apple’s Subscription Strategy Will

This guest post is by Tien Tzuo, founder of Zuora, a subscription billing company. Previously, he was chief strategy officer and employee No. 11 at Salesforce.com.

Publishers have been struggling for years. Now local newspapers, magazines and even the New York Times, that Grey Lady, are being treated like old ladies by Apple, stealing their pocketbooks while they’re trying to stay on a fixed income.

This week, Apple announced what the publishing industry has been clamoring for,subscriptions, in exchange for a whopping 30% cut. Clearly, paid subscriptions are a part of the future of all online media, whether tied to a print version or not. That’s what The Daily is all about and even AOL might one day go down that path (Tim Armstrong admitted as much on CNN). It’s part of the shift to the Subscription Economy that’s happening across not just media, but software, cloud computing, communications, consumer services, entertainment, you name it. In just the past year, as one example, my company, Zuora, has signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue.

But something very dangerous is happening. Apple is now calling the shots for the entire publishing industry’s digital strategy. Think about that for a minute. While Apple is prescient and makes great products, it’s hardly a publishing expert. Yet, Apple is setting up new rules that could bring the publishing industry to its knees. As if it weren’t already in that position.

It’s not that Apple can’t save publishers—which I don’t think it will with these financial terms. It’s that its model completely ignores the realities of the publishing business:

• The App Store and iTunes only offers one subscription pricing model. Will a single model work for the San Jose Mercury News, the Wichita Eagle and Runners World? The reality is that it’s likely going to be very different for different titles and subscribers.
• Apple has no way to bundle physical and digital goods. Do you want to give up home delivery forever? Or would you still like to get a Sunday paper every week or monthly glossy magazine along with your digital version? I bet most consumers would like some combination of both.
• With the Apple model, there’s not enough adequate ad revenue from tablet editions of magazines and newspapers. In particular, eliminating the Sunday delivery also means that local papers lose a huge advertising vehicle.
• Consumers won’t stand for one subscription through one device. People want to consume their news on whatever device they have at hand—whether it’s a Blackberry, an iPad or an Android phone. Amazon is showing us all the way with their “Kindle reader everywhere” strategy (with syncing bookmarks to boot), and Google has set a strong standard in its deal with Time Inc around Sports Illustrated subscriptions. Publishers also know that content ubiquity requires platform independence.
• As last week’s article from John Squires, former EVP for Time Inc, so rightly points out, access to customer data is truly the lifeblood of the publisher’s business model. In the Apple world, Apple is the one controlling this data.

To quote Steve Jobs himself, “A functioning media is vital to a functioning democracy.” I agree, and I think there’s a better way to use the genius of the iPad and other devices that enables publishers to control more of their destiny—and benefits everyone financially.

So what’s a publisher to do?

Take Matters Into Your Own Hands: Don’t be tempted by that juicy red apple called the iPad. You need to build your own online subscription commerce strategy, one that allows for lots of different ways to package up your content and sell it.

Not Your Father’s Subscriptions: The industry continues to see “subscriptions” in terms that are far too simplistic. Yes, consumers will never agree to switch to a full “subscription only” paywall, so you need to have flexible billing that can slice, dice and package content by the month, the article, by home delivery days, by online, and the list goes on.

Make It Easy: Provide customers single click convenience while providing a PCI-compliantpayment and billing process. You need to be able to bundle, cross-sell and rapidly deploy promotions to capture more readers than you ever could through a call center.

And as for Apple? Can you redeem yourself?

Customers with Benefits: If you want that 30% cut you have to let the publishers own the subscriber relationship. Share that data and you both win. Simply giving subscribers “the option” won’t cut it.

Freedom of Choice: You know consumers want both print and digital. This isn’t music. There’s no love lost for the CD. Most consumers want to keep home delivery, and publishers want to be free to work across platforms and devices. “Control” and “closed” are completely counter to the anti-Big Brother brand.

Help Them Help You: Selling publications is not the same as marketing the latest Black Eyed Peas song. Newspapers and magazine titles will get lost in the iTunes model. Just being part of the App Store isn’t enough. You need to deliver more merchandise value for a 30% cut.

The bottom line? The Subscription Economy is here, and Apple should be applauded for offering content via subscription. Unfortunately its model just scratches the surface. In the end, publishers should think twice before taking a bite of the Apple. This current plan will do more to hurt publishers then to help them make the shift to the online world.

(from techcrunch)

Evolution: Blogs to Microblogs to Twitter to Foursquare to Picplz and Instagram

Content is still the king.

In the past content was generated by a small elite of journalists, correspondents… big news agencies, or journalist with opinion and good writing.

This has been changing. They are struggling to find their place now. Traditional media is married to a physical support (paper) which is expensive to produce and distribute, it is not real time and the companies behind are not flexible and adaptable towards new models…. now we all have the tools to broadcast, write, publish our content.

Anyway, what I wanted to highlight in this blog post is that I have observed an evolution of the tools towards laziness and minimum effort.

We have the blogs, sure, and we will continue to have them, as we still have magazines and newspapers. We can build them around a topic we want or like, around our lives, our interests, our community… we can have it in isolation or being part of a blog community such as blogspot.

Then a new trend started. Not everybody has time or skills to write. In fact probably it is still a  minority. Other tools were more focused to the crowd: micro-blogs such as tumblr or posterous. Less writing. Just share something you see out there, a link a photo, …

Then twitter, with 140 characters, first in parallel with SMS, now twitter just twitter . Surprisingly it quickly became very very very popular.

Twitter is limited so a lot of complementary services were born around it: twitpic, yfrog… and even we have seen better twitter products that have ended up dieing. Products  like Buzz or Brightkite, not limited in space, handling location, photos, comments… for me far superior products… but I guess this is life. Beta was also superior to VHS and it was VHS who won.

So we have gone from Blogging to micro blogging to twittering, to twittering with location (foursquare, gowalla) to now a whole new wave of social media products:

Just take a photo with your phone, have your network, comment, like, push it to all the social media channels… no writing. Is this laziness?

Check out what is hot on this: Instagram and PicPlz

Of course they all coexist but I am curios to see how this evolves. I believe Brightkite was too early to be successful. Same with Buzz and even Wave.

In any case, everybody is in Facebook and facebook evolves and has everything: wall for short or long messages, link stories, videos, add comments, photos, checkins …  an ecosystem where everybody is and that offers everything.

Still the perception for the people is that is a closed ecosystem where all the friends are. Same for linkedin and your professional cloud.

Perception is key. Even if Facebook has attempted to change this, by trying to make things public and therefore creating a controversy on privacy issues, they are still perceived as a closed tool and the content you find there is thought as this: confidential for friends only.

There is also the fact that it is becoming too big, even at the point of threatening the Internet itself.

Are twitter and instagram and the others just for a minority of people who want to broadcast to everybody with the dream of being popular? marketing tools for individuals and companies?

A media for spreading news fast?

I’d like to read you in the comments.

today’s front pages of most newspapers

Newseum is a cool website that will allow you to see the front page of most of the newspapers published on paper.

Dynamics: Credit Cards of the Not-too-Distant Future

Credit card theft and fraud are two of the largest problems plaguing consumers, banks and businesses today. The problem is exacerbated by the ease at which criminals can steal credit card numbers – either by stealing data with a magnetic strip reader, or by copying a number down with pen and paper. A new revolution in credit card technology, however, looks to solve these problems by creating an ultra-secure smart credit card.

Dynamics Inc., a startup which recently raised $5.7M in series A funding (second in size in the financial sector only to Jack Dorsey’s mobile payment startup Square), announced its high-tech solution to credit card theft this week at DEMO in Santa Clara, California (see video embedded below). The company has developed electronic credit cards that provide users with both added functionality and security.

By creating thin and flexible electronics components, Dynamics’ credit cards can feature buttons, displays and – the killer app – automatically reprogrammable magnetic strips. One demo card features multiple accounts which the user can toggle with buttons on the card, and another has a display which hides and shows the card’s number behind a secure passcode.

The magnetic strip on the back of the card can be dynamically changed or erased, creating an amazing layer of security at the card level. The buttons, while credit card-thin, actually have tactile feedback and can feature small colored lights. The cards have a lithium polymer battery that can last a hefty 3 years, and have passed industry stress tests for durability, heat and water resistance.

Dynamics has been running stealth pilot test programs with many notable banks, and these cards should start appearing in the hands of customers in the near future.

Looking for a netbook?

Asus just released the new Eee PC 1015PME is the first 10 inch LED display netbook from Asus with a 1.5GHz dual core Intel Atom N550 processor,  a 320Gb Hard Drive, 1Gb or RAM and USB 3, wifi n, bluetooth… and 13 hours of battery life, and 500Gb of cloud storage…

If you are looking for a netbook that it is more a laptop, this could be the one… and only for $349.

The only think I don’t like is the 0.3Mpx camera… why not a better one?

Also windows 7 starter… but I don’t actually know the differences among different windows versions. Do you?

Anyway, I am going to seriously consider this to update my sony VAIO t series, now obsolete.

Skype introduces 10 way video calling for Windows

The second beta of Skype 5.0 brings a number of changes both outside and in – most importantly, you can now make group video calls with up to 10 people. It also welcomes in a fresh new look, as well as increased stability and better quality when making group video calls.

Make group video calls with up to 10 people

You can now use Skype to make group video calls* with up to 10 people – letting you bring even more of your family, friends or business together, even if you’re cities or continents apart.

Note that everyone in a group video call now needs to be running this version, so if your friends, family or colleagues are using Beta 1, they’ll have to upgrade before you can include them in group video calls.

A refreshed user interface

You’ll notice that the new-look Skype is sleeker, neater and crisper than before, and they’re proud of the work our interface designers have done to refine and mature the interface for this version. They have also added Skype Home, where you can follow your contacts’ mood messages, set your profile picture and mood message, receive account notifications and learn more about using Skype.

Better stability and quality

They have made improvements to call quality when making group video calls, as well as fixed a number of bugs affecting stability, so your calling experience should be smoother than before. This version also includes automatic call recovery, which should help automatically reconnect Skype calls that are interrupted due to network problems. They have also made a number of other housekeeping fixes since the first beta – but please bear in mind that this is still a beta version, and so there may be the odd bug remaining.

* Group video calling is currently available as a free trial. For group video calls, everyone in the group video call will need Skype 5.0 Beta 2 for Windows.

(from skype official blog)

First serious iPad competitor: Samsung Galaxy Tab

We have read and seen tons of promised for Android based tablets, all with all the features lacking in the iPad such as cameras, USB ports, you name it.

Well none of them are in the market, except for the Samsung Galaxy Tab that can be seen on sale on Germany for nearly 1000 usd.

There was also a lot of talk about wepad, also in Germany but I don’t think it is there yet. What it is sure is that this is about to boom. The Samsung android tablet runs froyo 2.2, has 16 or 32Gb and cameras. And it is much samller than the iPad.

Take a look at the comercial. It looks very good:

New iPods and Apple TV

Steve Jobs announced a lot of updates and new products in its yesterday keynote:

• iOS 4.1 now and iO4 4.2 by November (free updates) also for iPad (so multitasking by November). It will include wireless printing from iPhones, iPods touch and iPads, and AirPlay, to stream your music videos and photos over wifi.
• New iPod touch: very flat, with retina display and HD video recording (2 cameras). Like an iPhone 4 (with facetime) but without the phone and very light and slim.
• New iPod Nano, running iOS… just a squared screen, small but awesome.
• New iPod Shuffle (back to the origins).
• New Apple TV. 1/4 of the size of the current one for $99. Running sort of iOS but no app store. No internal storage. A4 chip and connected to Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and mobileMe. You can buy  rent HD movies for $4.99 and shows for $0.99. Amazon has already responded with the same prices but for buying the stuff instead of renting it.
• iTunes 10. New logo (with no CD in it) and Ping, a sort of social thing for music. I don’t know if they want to kill MySpace… You can update you iTunes to 10 if you have jailbroken iPhone. No problem.

  

  

  
  

  

  

  
  

  

  
  

Facebook adds Location: Facebook Places

Finally Facebook has partnered with Gowalla and Foursquare to create Facebook Places.

They just updated the iPhone app but it is still not working. Nothing on the web yet.

A lot of questions though: How are they going to use Places? How are they going the manage check-ins? They said they were partnering with Gowalla and Foursquare but I cannot see how. Is Facebook going to kill this two successful startups?

TIME best blogs for 2010

• Zenhabits
• PostSecret
• Climate Progress
• HiLobrow
• Hipster Runoff
• Kottke.org
• Cake Wrecks
• The Oatmeal
• S___ My Kids Ruined
• Deadline Hollywood
• Everything Everywhere
• The Sartorialist
• Information Is Beautiful
• The Daily Kitten
• Shorpy
• Apartment Therapy
• Double X
• Strobist
• Roger Ebert’s Journal
• The Awl
• GeekDad
• Engadget
• The Washington Note
• The Consumerist
• Pitchfork

Essential Blogs

• The Daily Wh.at
• TechCrunch
• Gawker
• Politico’s Ben Smith
• Boing Boing

Overrated Blogs

• FAIL Blog
• The Big Lead
• Perez Hilton
• Mashable
• Daily Kos

Read more here.

CloudCourse: An Enterprise Application in the Cloud

From google official blog:

At Google we have experts on everything from Python to penguins. However, connecting our expert teachers to eager students around the globe can be a complicated business. To that end, we are excited to release our new internal learning platform, CloudCourse under an open source license. Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):

• Sync service – to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
• Room info service – to schedule classes in your locations
• User info service – to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse has been developed in Python, using the Django web application framework and the Closure Javascript library. Deploying CloudCourse on App Engine is a breeze, and should take less than 5 minutes.

We developed CloudCourse to:

• provide a course scheduling system fully integrated with Google services
• demonstrate what it takes to built an application using App Engine

By releasing CloudCourse as open source we hope to help developers who want to port or build enterprise applications on App Engine. Digging into the source code, you will find many examples of how we addressed challenges like long running processes, locking, synchronizing with external systems, high performance transactional workflows, and more.
All the techniques that we used can easily be applied to other applications.

CloudCourse is available for download now. If you would like to discuss the project or if you have any questions, please join the CloudCourse mailing list. Happy hacking!

The Future of News

Following with the series of Jeff Jarvis videos, here another video that discusses about the business of news which is changing radically. The old-time economics of supporting a big newsroom, printing the news on paper and getting it to people’s doorsteps seems increasingly unsupportable given the exodus of advertising dollars to internet sites.

If you have dedicated half an hour watching this video, then you should read this very interesting article.

Click here on the left to have it here.
Read more