With 1 iPhone Being Sold Every 15 Seconds by Users, Gazelle is Preparing for Record Numbers Today


Local re-commerce giant Gazelle is experiencing the new iPhone announcement buzz all the way up here in Boston in BIG ways. As of 9am this morning, someone has sold their iPhone every 15 seconds on Gazelle.com. Since I’ve been writing this article over 40 iPhones have been sold for cold hard cash as users ready their wallets for the new iPhone unveiling.

“Its unprecedented to see consumers sell their phone before the new one is announced… or even confirmed to exist for that matter. The flurry of early activity shows how excited people are about this phone. It’s more than just a new product, it’s become a pop culture event,” said Kristina Kennedy, Director Brand and Communications at Gazelle.

Gazelle has been ahead of the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4s announcement as well. They have already seen over 10,000 trades since the official press invite for the Apple event, 2,000 of those coming just yesterday. The company has also built an iPhone app that will actually let you sell your iPhone from your iPhone (got it?).

“We know that iPhone owners will want to get their hand on the latest model as soon as possible,” said Israel Ganot, co-founder and CEO of Gazelle. “We want to help them do that by providing a simple, trusted experience that will enable them to quickly get cash for their used phone that they can use to upgrade to the new one. We’re committed to doing so by creating the best experience through customer-centric innovation and support.”

At the time of this press release, Gazelle offered up to $284 for iPhone trades (AT&T white 32gb iPhone 4). Prices are expected to drop rapidly so please see gazelle.com/iphone for latest pricing.

If you are going to upgrade, ACT NOW!

After being founded in 2006, Gazelle has seen tremendous growth and has become leading player in the reCommerce™ space. Last year, the company achieved 155% growth and has lead over 200,000 Customers to trade in or recycle over 550,000 used electronics.

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2012 Election: 3 Digital Platforms Poised to Change the Conversation



While not as sexy as politician elbow jabbing, the race to develop winning political platforms for the 2012 U.S. election cycle is a hot contest among strategists and programmers.

Following its win in 2008, Blue State Digital is the shop to beat. The company built the dynamic My.BarackObama.com and enabled the president’s campaign to integrate CRM, fundraising, email and other communications, along with organizing tools for their field program. The historic results were so revolutionary that it has since been copied by other candidates, issue groups and consumer marketers, leading to the clogging of countless inboxes with three years worth of cookie-cutter calls to action.

Top BSD execs have returned to lead President Obama’s re-election digital strategy, but the market they face now has changed drastically. We’ve seen the country’s political atmosphere shift as Republicans ramp up, Tea Party organizers forge grassroots support, Independents search for post-partisan ground, and Democrats vacillate over campaign promises kept and broken. Consequently, the tools that fuel these political movements have adapted to serve a more complex electorate.

Across the political spectrum, creative solutions will have notable implications for the upcoming election, not to mention for issue-based organizers and lobbyists post-election. Digital strategists will incorporate social gaming tactics in order to mobilize casual activists, and will draw on the OK Cupid! matching system to circumvent partisan differences. They will build and leverage massive open source networks. The new tools currently being developed have the potential to establish a strengthened, more engaged public in the long term.

The question, once again, is how these tools will lead to a dramatic shift in the way politics is fundamentally practiced in the modern people-powered electorate.

One thing is certain: Hiring or emulating BSD this time around will not magically catapult a candidate to Barackstar status. Other groups have stepped up.

“Hats off to BSD. They have a product that’s used by massive numbers of people, and obviously won a consequential election in 2008,” says Patrick Ruffini, partner at Engage, one of Washington D.C.’s top conservative digital strategy firms, and a veteran of the past three presidential races. “Since then the web is becoming more social, as is activism online.”


1. Multiply


To serve the social web’s activists better, Ruffini and his team at Engage have developed a platform called Multiply, one of numerous competitors that will play a role in shaping the future of Republican digital organizing and certainly the upcoming election. Ruffini describes Multiply as a “platform based around social gaming.” By targeting existing networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, where communities of both dedicated and casual activists already exist, Multiply uses game mechanics to incentivize increasingly difficult actions. For example, in a test-drive this past summer, users were asked to do things ranging from the simple (sharing a news story in their feed) to the much heavier (making a donation or phone banking). Multiply awarded badges, points and exclusive rewards to these participants, who might otherwise never have provided their email addresses to a campaign website or taken an action beyond clicking Facebook’s “Like” button.

“By gamifying the pieces, one of the things we found was increased engagement in the actions they were asked to do,” he says. “When prompted to take the next easiest action, we found a lot of people went through that process – up to the point where about 35% of users had completed all the actions.”

Tools like Multiply may allow Republicans to prove that they, too, can pack a digital punch in a presidential race. However, tools don’t operate in isolation. It wasn’t MyBO alone that made the 2008 Democratic party successful, but the way it facilitated spreading then-Senator Obama’s popular, hopeful message. Now that we’re faced with a terse, highly partisan and divided Congress, many of the first-time and moderate participants from 2008 have banded together in a deliberate effort to eschew party lines. They, too, have tools.


2. Ruck.us


One of the hotly anticipated launches of the political season, Ruck.us emerged Sept. 21 as an organizing platform designed for political independents, the apolitical, and bipartisan buddies. Co-founder and chief strategy officer Raymond Glendening says Ruck.us allows users to work directly on the issues they care about with like-minded individuals, whether they are liberal or conservative. Visitors to the site are prompted to respond to user-generated questions (yes, based on the OK Cupid! system) about their positions on a variety of issues. Subsequently they are placed in a “ruck” where they can communicate, organize and take action with others who share their views.

“You don’t have to be a slave to partisan labels,” Glendening says. “It’s crazy that with the growth of technology we still only have two choices for politics. It’s unnecessary to have to settle for black and white options. If we can change the culture of how people communicate and make this an extra outside-the-party thing, political discourse will get better.”

The site is just out of beta, so it’s too soon to predict if Ruck.us users will still align themselves along traditional party platforms, or whether this even matters. “There is a tendency among people to say, ‘Can’t we organize around non-partisan issues rather than through the party?’” says Ruffini. “It’s a delicate balancing act, because most people who are active are either one way or the other. Will social media change that? It’s a broader question.”

Veteran organizers who do believe in the essential nature of ideological party allegiances seem to be grappling with another strategically imperative question going into 2012: Are we really going to reinvent the wheel every election cycle under the auspices of a new candidate?

When Obama took office in 2008, he had a heady 13 million users in his network, which were turned over to the renamed Organizing for America as part of the Democratic National Committee. (For an exhaustive resource on this controversial move, see this TechPresident report.) Many have questioned whether these users would have been better served had they been funneled to groups that tackled specific issues, as opposed to being united around the re-election of a candidate.


3. Salsa Labs


Today, digital organizers are still grappling with the repercussions of the Obama network decision, and looking to avoid setting a precedent. Democrats divided over whether the Obama presidency has been a success will need to determine which tactics will rally voters to the ballot box next November. For example, climate or same-sex marriage activists could argue that Team Obama has dropped the ball on their issues. Therefore, they’ll need to communicate in a nuanced way to sell their bases on a second go-around.

In 2008, this was very expensive. Now it might not be.

April Pedersen is the co-founder of the progressive-leaning Salsa Labs, which just raised $5 million in funding to expand and develop its existing platform. The community now consists of more than 2,000 groups and reaches about 50 million people. Her organization’s objective is to find a way to drive down significant costs of models like BSD to be effective and scalable.

Salsa Labs seeks to accomplish that goal using Salsa Market, an open source developer’s resource that allows third parties to take advantage of apps and build new ones.

“It puts our users in the driver’s seat,” Pedersen says. “It takes the SalesForce app exchange model and applies it to our sectors. It allows for more advanced donor management, CRM and helps take organizing to next level.”

Some fantasize that progressive groups using the Salsa platform will be able to band together as necessary to take advantage of the full breadth of the network. However, Pedersen says there are some challenges to that vision since the user data belongs to the individual groups. The company is investigating how to move forward.


As with all tools, the substance of the candidates, dialogue, ideas and world events will be significant drivers behind the results. However, each of these approaches to user engagement offer a new way to empower voters and activists, making 2012 a cycle of tremendous potential.

Says Ruck.us’ Glendening: “In the long-range view, I hope we’re a piece of what changes the way politics is run in this country.”

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CostinT

More About: 2012 election, contributor, features, platform, Politics, Social Media

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Backup and Sync Your iPhones and iPads in Anticipation of iOS 5 [In Brief]


Whether or not Apple will officially release iOS 5 at their special event tomorrow is still unclear, but in the event they do and you want to upgrade it's prudent to get everything backed up in anticipation. Why? In general, it's good practice to back up your iDevices before an update but iOS 5 also brings plenty of new wireless syncing options that could go horribly wrong. You can now sync with iTunes over Wi-Fi or to the cloud with iCloud. Additionally, iTunes Match—the feature that matches your iTunes Library with online copies for easy proliferation throughout your many machines and portable devices—could come with potential bugs and wipe out songs (or the entirety of) your music collection. It's unlikely that anything will go wrong and there's certainly no need to panic, but this is new technology we're talking about and it never hurts to be prepared in case something does happen. If you're looking forward to upgrading ASAP, spend a little time tonight getting ready so you'll be able to recover swiftly in the event of a problem. More »


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PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi


Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.

PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework for building applications with standards-based Web technologies. The project provides a cross-platform Web runtime that allows application developers to reach multiple mobile operating systems with a single code base. It includes a custom API stack that enables platform integration and exposes device capabilities.

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TED Starts Search for Ads Worth Spreading



Can a compelling advertisement be as powerful as a remarkable idea? TED believes so. For the second year running, the idea-spreading non-profit is seeking the top 10 most fascinating advertisements worth spreading.

TED launched the “Ads Worth Spreading” challenge Monday and is inviting agencies, brands, producers and people to submit “work that expresses a clever, compelling or infectious idea” between Oct. 15 and Dec. 31.

The top spots will win online distribution in the form of air play on TED.com and YouTube. They’ll also be showcased to TED attendees. Plus, each finalist will receive a one day pass, complete with travel and lodging, to TED2012.

To ensure the highest quality submissions, TED has paired one TED speaker with one advertising industry expert to create six teams that will find and nominate dynamic ads in areas ranging from social good to storytelling.

“In our brave new interconnected world, the rules of marketing are changing fast,” explains Chris Anderson, TED Curator. “Ambush advertising is broken. We think there’s a better way based on sharing powerful ideas.”

TED will once again be teaming up with YouTube on the initiative. YouTube will feature the ad selections and create an art installation for TED2012, the non-profit’s annual prestigious conference to be held in March of 2012 in Long Beach, Calif.

Image courtesy of Flickr, PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

More About: Ads Worth Spreading, Advertising, TED

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Startup Provides Platform For Smart Political Debate, with a Secretary of State



Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has contributed opinion pieces to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Now you’ll find her in a less established forum, defending a recent op-ed on a brand new online debate platform called PolicyMic.

The site, which co-founders Christopher Altchek and Jake Horowitz launched in June, aims to give people — twentysomethings especially — a place for intelligent discussion of current events.

“After you leave college, there’s not a good place to debate current events,” Altchek says. “We started thinking about how everybody gets their current events from news sites, but nobody actually engages there … [Twitter and Facebook] are both great platforms, but they’re not built for meaningful exchange of ideas. On Twitter you are very restricted, and Facebook is hard to have back-and-forth debates that don’t get lost.”

PolicyMic removes discussions about the news away from news sites — where commenters are not exactly known for their insightful comments — and into a community that is somewhat self-curated. When a user first signs up, he or she is limited to 300 characters for their articles. Receiving more “Mics” (the equivalent of a Facebook “Like”) on his or her comments moves the user up the character-count-allotment totem poll. After 150 Mics, the user becomes a “pundit” and can publish articles of any length on the site. Pundits can also challenge other users to debates. So far, 450 of 1500 users have reached this level.

The site also brings in professors and other thought leaders to write guest articles. Sometimes these authors host “office hours” in which they discuss their articles with users. In Rice’s case, she responded to one question regarding the op-ed she published in the New York Times.

PolicyMic is not the only startup that’s set out to create a platform for intelligent discussion. TwoSides, Debate.org and Debatewise.com are just a few others. The general tone of the conversation on most of these sites, however, makes it unlikely that Rice will make an appearance.

PolicyMic has a big advantage: Its co-founders are well connected to thought leaders and intelligent young people who are aligned with both sides of the political aisle. Altcheck used to work for the Bush administration. Horowitz, who shares an alma mater (Stanford) with Rice, was a reporter for left-leaning advocacy site Change.org.

Together they’ve recruited the sort of community that will vote insightful comments to the top of the site and push down the crazies — producing quality free commentary. The question is whether such a system can scale.

“We do get the random crazy people who sign up for our site,” Altchek says, “but they get really frustrated because they have a small comment limit and nobody is giving them mics and allowing them to move up. They usually stop commenting.”

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

More About: Condoleezza Rice, PolicyMic

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