Turn your Kinect hack into a startup with Microsoft's Accelerator program

Wanna turn your Kinect hack into, um, money? Microsoft can help you out, now that it's teamed up with TechStars to launch the Kinect Accelerator -- a program designed to turn Kinect-based ideas into real world startups. To participate, innovators must first apply to the Accelerator before the January 25th deadline. Ten applicants will then be accepted to a three-month incubation program, and rewarded with $20,000 in seed money. To participate, however, you'd have to relocate to Seattle for the duration of the program, scheduled to kick off this Spring. Plus, if you manage to bring your company to market, you'll have to set aside a six percent common stock stake for TechStars, which is both funding and spearheading the initiative. For more details on how to apply, hit up the source link below.

Turn your Kinect hack into a startup with Microsoft's Accelerator program originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 Nov 2011 05:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/20/turn-your-kinect-hack-into-a-startup-with-...

Facebook’s Real-Time Ticker to Show Sponsored Stories


Facebook will increase the distribution for Sponsored Stories by allowing them to run in the ticker across the site, ClickZ News has learned. Since the ticker — a lightweight newsfeed seen on the upper right-hand part of Facebook.com — was launched in August, the social context ads had been running only via the app ticker for Facebook games.

In an email earlier today, Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, said, “Starting on Monday, we are continuing to slowly roll out Sponsored Stories in [the] ticker across Facebook. Sponsored Stories help people see more relevant marketing on Facebook and they can be twice as engaging as ads on Facebook.”

The Palo Alto, CA-based digital giant launched Sponsored Stories during January, and the ad units have become an important focus of Facebook’s pitch to agencies, brands, and political marketers.

More About: Facebook, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/18/facebook-ticker-ads/?utm_source=feedburner&utm...

How Journalists Can Leverage Facebook’s New Features [VIDEO]

No doubt you’re already familiar with Facebook‘s new design. However, you’ll soon see journalists taking advantage of the social network’s tools in fresh, strategic ways.

Facebook’s journalist program manager, Vadim Lavrusik, sat down with Mashable‘s SVP of content and executive editor, Adam Ostrow, at the Mashable Media Summit to discuss the platform’s new features, and how journalists can take advantage of them. Overall, the changes mean journalists can more easily brand themselves, promote their content and report by crowdsourcing. Lavrusik also addressed advertising concerns and privacy issues on a larger scale, reassuring the audience that Facebook’s new overhaul has accounted for potential weaknesses.

SEE ALSO: What Facebook’s New Features Mean for Journalists

Take a look at the video, not only to discover how journalists are using Facebook, but also how to position yourself around your favorite publications and writers.


The Mashable Media Summit in Pictures



Media Summit 2011



The Mashable Media Summit on Nov. 4 at the Times Center in New York City attracted professionals in digital, tech, advertising, sales, marketing, mobile and publishing from all over the world.

Click here to view this gallery.


Presenting Sponsor: AT&T


More About: Facebook, features, journalism, mashable media summit, Video

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/18/facebook-features-journalists/?utm_source=feed...

3 New Takes On Personalized Web Video


The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable selects startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

This week we’ve focused on three personalized web video apps.

Rawporter helps you get credit and compensation for valuable images you snap during newsworthy moments. iBroadcast.TV makes creating a personalized channel for YouTube videos easy. Bambuser puts the power of live video in the hands of anyone with access to a smartphone.


Rawporter: An App For Selling Social Media to News Organizations


Quick Pitch: Rawporter helps you sell newsworthy mobile footage to news outlets.

Genius Idea: Rewarding accidental news reporting with cash.

Mashable’s Take: Photos and videos of newsworthy events posted on social networks often end up making the rounds in mainstream media, but there is no standard system for how their creators should be compensated or credited.

“They basically see it as a free source and they’re taking photographers’ and videographers’ jobs away,” says Janis Krums, who used his phone to snap footage when a plane safely executed an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009.

Rawporter is an app breaking news bystanders can use to make sure they’re paid for the images they capture. The app automatically tags videos with the time, date and location, and it markets them to local news outlets. Meanwhile, news outlets can push requests for specific content to Rawporter users near an event. The creator of the content collects a fee and gets on-screen credit if it is used.

In theory, the app is an easy guarantee content won’t be hijacked. But it launched just last week, and it has yet to establish itself as a source for news outlets and bloggers.


iBroadcast.TV: A Personal Television Channel For Every User


Quick Pitch: iBroadcast.TV is a social video site for creating and watching personal video channels.

Genius Idea: A simple, easy-to-use interface.

Mashable’s Take: iBroadcast.TV is a minimalist approach to personalized video channels on the web. It does two things: broadcasts videos queued up by friends and queues up your own. That’s it.

It does not, like Shelby.TV, automatically pull videos posted by social media friends into one channel. Nor does it, like VHX, allow users to use it as an “Instapaper for video” by providing a handy bookmarklet. If you want to post your channel on a homepage or blog as you can with Panejea, you are also out of luck. Adding videos that aren’t on YouTube? Sorry.

Simplicity, however, does have its advantages. There are few tools on the web where one can queue up video channels to play continuously without bothering to incorporate other social actions. If that’s all you’re planning to do, iBroadcast.TV should suffice nicely.


Bambuser: A Mobile Broadcasting App


Quick Pitch: Bambuser lets anyone broadcast live from anywhere.

Genius Idea: Making mobile live broadcasting interactive and accessible to anyone.

Live broadcasts once required equipment only television stations owned. Bambuser transferred the capability to a tool that, according to the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union, 90% of the world’s population has access to: the mobile network.

Bambuser’s apps record video that can be watched online by anyone in real-time. They also have an interactive feature that lets the person who is recording view comments from viewers at the same time. Videos and their surrounding live conversations are archived and searchable on the Bambuser site.

The app has been a popular broadcasting tool among activists in the Middle East, and it was blocked by the Egyptian government along with Twitter and other websites during the January uprising. It has also been favored among those with more frivolous intentions. One man, for instance, recorded his 28-day journey driving across Finland in a mini digger.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, narvikk


Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: Bambuser, bizspark, bizspark weekend roundup, iBroadcast.TV, Rawporter

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/19/3-new-takes-on-personalized-web-video/?utm_sou...

How to use Siri for voice dictation on a Mac with Mobile Mouse

By now just about everyone knows that you can use Siri to take dictation on an iPhone 4S, but what you may not know is that you can also use it on a Mac. If you have an app on your iPhone that allows you to access your Mac's keyboard functions remotely, you can use Siri's dictation feature on the iPhone 4S to dictate text to your Mac.

One example of an iPhone app that you can use to dictate to your Mac is Mobile Mouse. The app already allows you to control your keyboard and mouse from your iPhone, but using the new dictation button on the keyboard, you can also dictate text to your Mac. (Reader Amalesh Panse pointed out, via Twitter, that Magic Mouse works fine with Windows too.) So long as you have a cursor inserted into a text field, you can use the dictation button on your iPhone's keyboard to use Siri to dictate texts directly to your Mac using Mobile Mouse or a similar app. Conversion into text happens rather quickly, almost as quickly as it does on the iPhone's native interface.

In practice the dictation is actually quite accurate; it does make mistakes, but I managed to dictate almost all of this post using Siri via Mobile Mouse with only a few adjustments. Apart from being an extremely cool trick, this feature could also allow you to bypass paying upwards of $50 for a product like Dragon Express, which does essentially the same thing (perhaps better).

The best part is, there are no settings that you need to tweak in order to get this to work. If you already have Mobile Mouse installed on your iPhone (and Mobile Mouse Server on your Mac), you're already able to use Siri to dictate text to your computer. Seeing words I've spoken into my phone appear on my Mac's screen as if by magic is one of those whiz-bang things that totally reminds me we're living in the future.

Thanks for the tip Rohan!

How to use Siri for voice dictation on a Mac with Mobile Mouse originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 10:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2011/11/19/how-to-use-siri-for-voice-dictation-on-a-mac/

TV broadcasters hope to dominate the second screen with ConnecTV

ConnecTV on an iPad
No one has quite figured it out yet, but there seems to be little doubt that tablet devices have their place on the couch to serve as a second screen while American's enjoy their favorite past time -- watching TV. In addition to many independent startups we've discussed in the past, the old guard, that already owns most of broadcast TV stateside, has a startup of its own called ConnecTV. In development for two years already, ConnecTV is currently in beta and has the hopes to go live in January. The idea is of course to put what you might want to see on your second screen while you watch the main action on the big screen. This includes sports scores, statistics, as well as what your friends may or may-not be saying on Twitter or Facebook -- and of course advertising. We'd be shocked if most tablet owners weren't already using their slate in front of the TV and can imagine how many more might if there was a great app that brought it all together.

TV broadcasters hope to dominate the second screen with ConnecTV originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Nov 2011 05:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/19/tv-broadcasters-hope-to-dominate-the-secon...

12 Steps to Writing Better Web Code

I know that Chris and our team have been long-time admirer’s of Joel’s work at Fog Creek, and in a recent job post (we’re hiring a sysadmin!) I happened to notice that we score a healthy 11/12 on Joel’s Test as a software company ourselves.

Kelly Sutton, who Chris and I met several years ago at FOWA Miami while he was creating HackCollege, has his own version of these 12 steps that he’s written based on his recent experiences with building and launching LayerVault. He suggests that these are supplemental to Joel’s list, not a replacement, and we really like where he’s headed.

  1. Do you only deploy from one branch?
  2. Do you have a bootstrap script?
  3. Do all employees deploy code on their first day?
  4. Does each bug get a failing test?
  5. Is your bus factor greater than n/2, where n is the number of engineers?
  6. Can you spin up ad-hoc development and staging environments with one command?
  7. Does your team work around features, and not around sprints?
  8. Does all work get done on a branch?
  9. Do you actively remove deprecated code?
  10. Do bugs only exist in one place?
  11. Do you discourage the use of IDEs?
  12. Are discrepancies in process addressed before more code is written?

Kelly takes the time to expound on each of these questions on his post. How do you score? What would you like to be doing better? Are you using Beanstalk to achieve any of these goals? Let us know in the comments!

&post[three]=

from Beanstalk http://blog.beanstalkapp.com/post/12887092196/12-steps-to-writing-better-web-...

Hulu, Livestream and Vevo Content Come to Chill, the Turntable for Video


Chill.com, known as the “Turntable.fm for video,” relaunched on Wednesday as a social platform for watching live events, TV shows and music videos.

While there are still portions of the site where “VJs” can earn points from others in the room for spinning YouTube videos, its focus has shifted to social viewing of content from sites such as Hulu, Vevo, Livestream, Ustream and Justin.tv.

Now users can go to Chill.com in order to, for instance, watch Glee with company. While the show plays, their avatars can talk to others in the room through a public group chat or private chat.

“There’s a lot in it for the publishers,” Chill.com founder Brian Norgard says. “They want to get social…just posting it on YouTube isn’t enough anymore.”

Social screenings of Internet TV mean that a group of viewers need to start the video at the same time. To clear this hurdle, Chill.com has set up several viewing times a day for Hulu’s television shows. Users can sign up to be reminded before a show starts. They can similarly sign up to be notified when upcoming live events start and can subscribe to be notified when their favorite live steaming hosts are broadcasting.

In Chill.com’s heyday — after its much buzzed about launch in August — Norgard says that up to 4,000 VJs would be in a room at once. Pairing with a wider range of content sites expands Chill.com’s revenue options, but will it also expand this audience?

One of the perks of watching television online is being able to do it on your own schedule. Adding specific watch times might not be appealing to the online TV crowd. On the other hand, viewers have long been clamoring for social TV, and live-streamed events run on a specific schedule regardless of whether there’s an opportunity to chat with other viewers.

Norgard sees Chill.com becoming the social home for premium web content.

“There have been a lot of people doing interesting things around social TV, but what people really want is an integrated solutions.”

More About: Chill, Chill.com, hulu, justin-tv, livestream, trending, turntable.fm, ustream, vevo, Video

For more Entertainment coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/11/16/chill-hulu-livestream-vevo/?utm_source=feedbur...