 It's on Apple's iPhone and iPad, but this is the ITV Player, not the rumored iTV supposedly under development in Cupertino. After initially launching last summer (along with an Android version) offering streaming video on-demand, the UK channel's iOS app has been updated to version 2.0 to offer a live streaming feed of its two channels. Other than just ITV1 and ITV2 over WiFi or 3G, if there's a live event being broadcast that isn't on either, you'll still be able to tune in via the app. Other new features include AirPlay Mirroring, easier switching between content, improved location detection (to determine what channels are available) and Retina Display quality graphics on the iPad. Unfortunately, The Digital Lifestyle points out catch-up access is still unavailable over 3G, but those with access should grab the new app from iTunes. ITV Player 2.0 brings live streams of the UK broadcaster's TV channels to iOS originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 May 2012 06:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink The Digital Lifestyle | iTunes | Email this | Comments
from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/31/itv-player-2-0-live-streaming-ipad-iphone/
Social Media Day is exactly one month away! On Saturday, June 30, digital enthusiasts will hold meetups across the globe to celebrate the one thing that unites us and keeps us in constant contact: social media.
Whether you’re an obsessed Instagram photographer, an endless Pinterest pinner or a ten-times-an-hour tweeter, Social Media Day is a time to recognize the digital revolution that has changed how we live.
How Will You Celebrate?
Social Media Day will be a truly international event. Mashable community organizers are already hard at work planning events in hundreds of cities worldwide.
The meetup in Swindon, U.K. will feature presentations about social media strategy as well as a speed networking session. Thousands of miles away in the United States, a celebration dedicated to startups will be held in Detroit.
We want to know: How are you celebrating Social Media Day? Will you organize a Foursquare scavenger hunt? Attend a fast-paced panel discussion about social media branding? Play Pinterest-inspired hopscotch? The possibilites are endless, and we want you to get creative!
Tell us what you’ve got planned for Social Media Day in the comments below. We look forward to hearing what you have in store!
Ways You Can Participate
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Check out the Social Media Day website for resources and more information.
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Sign up to attend or organize your own event on the Mashable Meetup Everywhere page.
- Use the #smday hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and any other social network of your choice.
- Find your Mashable Meetup community:
Image courtesy of flickr, ancawonka
Social Media Day 2012 Is Presented By Motorola Mobility
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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/30/social-media-day-june-30-2012/?utm_source=feed...
MTV’s extensive social and digital tactics for the MTV Movie Awards offer viewers new ways to engage before, during and after the June 3 live broadcast.
Building off its social success with the VMAs, MTV is looking to deeply integrate social elements into its other major awards show, the MTV Movie Awards.
For the first time, movie fans can vote using Twitter hashtags. The live social voting works only for the new “Best Hero” category, which already has attracted more than 60,000 votes since Tuesday. Registered MTV.com users, however, can still vote in other categories on the show’s website.
Vying for the “Best Hero” title are Harry Potter (#votepotter), Katniss Everdeen (from Hunger Games, #votekatniss), Thor (#votethor), Captain America (#votecaptain) and Jenko (from 21 Jump Street, #votejenko).
MTV told us that it knows from past live-voting initiatives that fans love to get the word out to promote their favorite stars and franchises. “They love to game the system and we look forward to helping them do just that,” MTV told us. As a result, expect a showdown for “Best Hero” between fans of The Hunger Games and Harry Potter to continue until Sunday night.
MTV also has these digital elements on tap for the awards show hosted by comedian Russell Brand:
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Twitter Tracker: Like MTV did during the Video Music Awards in August, it will dissect Twitter conversations in a visualization that displays popular moments and celebrities. The feature will allow users to view how many tweets per minute any moment is garnering and share photos of certain moments across social networks.
What’s different about this year’s implementation is that MTV will be providing context around what happens at the moment of a tweet. So instead of just seeing “Beyonce” as a trending topic, fans can see a clip or image from the show that correlates with the social activity taking place online.

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Facebook Tracker: MTV will introduce a Facebook Tracker to keep tabs on the level of Likes and shares of Movie Awards moments shared on its Facebook page.
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All Access Live: The show’s second-screen experience for desktops and mobile devices will give viewers six camera angles (red carpet, dressing room, paparazzi, audience, balcony and MTV cut), sharing capabilities, a place to chat with fellow viewers and animated GIFs from celebrities on the red carpet. The GIFs will be posted on MTV’s Tumblr blog.
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Shazam: The ceremony will be Shazam-enabled, meaning viewers can use the app during the broadcast to buy performers’ music and watch social media interactions.
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Post-Show Features: MTV will have a red carpet galleries and interviews, backstage video highlights and editorial coverage of the show and winners.
A Launchpad for the Future
Some of the features that MTV is launching for the MTV Movie Awards might just find their way into the big show — the VMAs — later this summer.
In this way, the Movie Awards are a testbed of sorts for the future initiatives for the VMAs. “It just so happened that the Movie Awards are first,” MTV told us, noting that it plans to refine the most successful initiatives into its flagship awards show.
Understanding that virility is a major component to award shows, MTV wants to make it as easy as possible for fans to tag and share the best moments of the show across mobile and the desktop in as close to real-time as possible. The net result — as last year’s VMA ratings proved — is that socially engaged audiences tend to watch more.
To pump up the shareability factor even more, MTV will air exclusive footage of The Dark Knight Rises with director Christopher Nolan and actors Christian Bale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Gary Oldman on hand for the occasion at Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, California.
Christina Warren contributed to the reporting in this article.
More About: celebrities, Entertainment, Facebook, Film, GIFs, Movies, mtv, mtv movie awards, shazam, social tv, tumblr, TV, Twitter
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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/30/mtv-movie-awards-social-tv/?utm_source=feedbur...
Solariat Founder and CEO Jeffrey Davitz has a message for anyone trying to leverage social network data to make money: “The fundamental problem with social is yes, it’s big data, but it’s mostly big, sucky data.”
What he means, he explained during a recent interview, is that life isn’t too easy for social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where deciphering what users actually want means poring through a lot of extraneous information. Google is able to earn so much advertising revenue because its search users are expressly seeking information on a specific topic. They’re relatively likely to click on a sponsored link if it will answer their questions or connect them with the products they’re seeking.
The challenge on those other platforms — for both the platform providers trying to create targeted advertising models, and brands trying to engage with consumers on the platforms — is getting messages in front of users in a manner that’s “congruent” with what they’re already doing. Take Facebook and its advertising revenue woes, for example. If users are generally on Facebook with the intention of interacting with their peers, they might not notice or care about the display ads lining the page, no matter how much data they share via profiles, posts, Likes and other interactions with the platform.
Engage when and how consumers expect it
During a panel at last week’s Data Science Summit (in which Davitz also participated), Dan Neely from Networked Insights described this challenge as figuring out “how to he part of the distraction.” If a company is just guessing when and how to approach customers, the company is just another entity — along with instant messages, wall posts, other brands, etc. — competing for that users’ attention. And if users are there to do social networking, corporate messages are probably going to lose that fight.
Davitz thinks there’s a way for social platforms to overcome this problem by using techniques such as natural-language processing and machine learning to identify those instances where users really are expressing “query-like intent.” It will never be as clear as entering “best hiking shoes” into a search engine, but, for example, someone certainly might note in a wall post or a tweet that he’s going hiking and needs new shoes. He might specifically ask friends which shoes they prefer. If you sell hiking shoes, there’s your signal. Rather than simply peppering someone’s page with ads about hiking because he listed it as an interest, now he’s actually in the market for gear and might pay attention.
Davitz claims proof that this approach works. His company, Solariat, is experimenting with a publishing industry partner to place content in front of Twitter users when they express interest in areas on which the publisher has an existing body of information (Solariat has done the same thing with companies that task a community manager with monitoring social media). Clickthrough rates are “astonishingly high,” he said — over 20 percent — and even users who don’t click aren’t marking the tweets as spam. Because the users getting replies are actively seeking information on a topic, even if they’ve only implicitly acknowledged as much, a pointer to that information is either welcome or, at least, seems natural.
Balancing effectiveness and creepiness
As with many big data efforts, though, the obvious concern with this approach is perceived privacy violations. “People might find it a little creepy if you had an overactive agent that was responding every time you say something,” Davitz acknowledged. In that case, companies might be better off gathering signals about users and targeting them with messages only at ideal times, which likely will vary based on the types of platforms and content involved.
For example, Davitz, an artificial intelligence expert, first got interested in social media engagement while working on a closed network within the U.S. military. In that case, personnel were ordered to sign up and had very low privacy expectations, which meant they expected to be monitored and regularly presented with additional information. That type of situation certainly had its advantages in the dynamic Iraq theatre of war, Davitz said, because soldiers posting about heading to a particular region, for example, would automatically receive the latest information on what was going on there and what to look out for.
Davitz thinks public platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as ecosystem players such as Buddy Media and Vitrue, could learn a thing or two from how the military used social media as a channel for conveying information. If revenue is the goal, social networks have to be more than passive places where people just meet and interact relatively free from any corporate messaging, he said. They also need to look past ads as the only way of reaching consumers and perhaps find more natural and appealing ways to provide information.
A military-level of interaction might never be welcome on public platform, Davitz said, but “the thinking [on public networks] is really quite primitive compared to the thinking I saw in the military.”
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user FuzzBones.
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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/monetizing-social-media-means-navigating-big-sucky-da...
Online video accounted for more than half of all Internet traffic in 2011, and it’s only going to grow: Cisco estimates that we will consume three trillion Internet video minutes worldwide per month by 2016. That means that the world will watch the equivalent of 833 days of video every single second!
The number of people using online video services will also grow dramatically. Worldwide, 792 million people used online video last year. By 2016, that number will roughly double, to 1.5 billion users.
Cisco released these projections Wednesday as part of its annual Visual Networking Index forecast, which also concluded that the world’s data consumption will reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016 (for more details on that staggering number, check out Stacey Higginbotham’s write-up). But most intriguing about all that data, and the role video is playing, are the devices that are causing it.
TVs and game consoles make us watch longer
There are two major factors for online video’s huge growth potential: Online video is finding its way to the living room TV set, and people are watching more videos on tablets. Cisco’s forecast shows that especially those HD streams to the TV will have a huge impact going forward. The amount of Internet video delivered to TVs already doubled in 2011, and its expected to grow sixfold by 2016. By 2016, online video delivered to TVs will make up for six percent of all worldwide consumer Internet traffic.
Some additional data released by Ooyala today explains quite nicely why TV traffic is growing that much: Once online video reaches the TV, viewers start to stick around much longer. Completion rates for videos longer than 6 minutes are over 50 percent on connected TVs, but only around 25 percent on PCs.

Even more astonishing: 88 percent of all content consumed on connected TVs is longer than 10 minutes.

More devices will cause more traffic
At the same time, we are going to watch a lot more video on mobile phones and tablets. Mobile video traffic will grow 18-fold from 2011 to 2016, and the number of worldwide mobile users will reach 1.6 billion, a six-fold increase over 2011 levels. Altogether, nearly a third of all Internet traffic will come from devices other than the PC in 2016.
Of course, all of that wouldn’t be possible if we all didn’t have more and more devices to watch all those videos. Cisco estimates that the number of connected devices per U.S. household is going to grow from 5.5 connected devices (excluding cell phones and anything accessing mobile phone networks) to 8.5 devices by 2016.
Disclosure: GigaOM has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Phillie Casablanca.
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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/tablets-connected-tvs-video-consumption-data/?utm_sou...
Simple.tv began taking limited preorders of its DVR on Kickstarter Wednesday morning and also announced that it would start shipments and regular sales of the device in August. Simple.tv is a DVR geared towards the cord-cutting crowd, enabling users to record over-the-air shows and then stream them within their home network and beyond. It is just one of many hardware startups that has flocked to Kickstarter in recent months.
Simple.tv is a bare-bones DVR that can be hooked into one’s home network and connected to a regular over-the-air antenna. Users have to attach their own external hard drive and can then stream recorded programming to up to five devices. Simple.tv will have apps for the Roku, the iPad and a web app to watch TV via web browsers available at launch, and is working on extending the service to connected devices like the Boxee Box and Google TV.
Check out Simple.tv’s Kickstarter promo video, or continue reading below:
The company will sell their DVR device for around $150 when it goes on sale in August, which is slightly more than the current pricing on Kickstarter. Sales will initially be facilitated through Simple.tv’s website as well as Amazon.com. Simple.tv CEO Mark Ely told me during a phone conversation Thursday that he hopes to be in retail stores in time for the holiday season. People who buy the device will have the option to subscribe to a programming guide that brings TiVo-like recording functionality to Simple.tv for $5 a month, or schedule their programming manually for free.
Kickstarter: Great for CE startups
A number of consumer electronics startups have taken their wares to Kickstarter recently; one breakout example has been the Pebble smart watch, which booked more than 85,000 preorders and $10 million in revenue by the end of its Kickstarter campaign (for more on this, also read Om’s interview with Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen).
Ely said that his company didn’t initially plan to take its product to Kickstarter, but was swayed by some of these success stories. “There is a marketing aspect to Kickstarter,” he admitted. But he also argued that Kickstarter is about more than generating buzz and securing preorders. “For us, a way to quickly gather the level of sales we are going to get,” he told me.
That kind of data can be instrumental in ordering the right amount of devices, which can both bring down the production costs and help to avoid large quantities of unsold inventory. And a company can get feedback from its consumers before it has even shipped a product. “It gives us some additional insight into the audience,” said Ely.
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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/simple-tv-kickstarter-preorders/?utm_source=feedburne...
Last week, I had dinner with my friend who has a talent for branding and summarizing complex ideas into very simple terms. I was talking with him about my ongoing problem having difficulty explaining my multifaceted experience and work I do in terms people not familiar with my craft can understand. People who know me call me “the operations guy”, but this term does not mean much to the general public. This is a marketing problem so I turned to my friend to help me solve it.
In a stroke of his usual genius he exclaimed: “Apollo, you are a business hacker! You are the unholy union of a chief of staff and Mr. Wolf.” Since I am not a big of a fan of politics, I would replace chief of staff with Roy Disney, who turned Walt’s vision into a well-executed reality. And Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction definitely resonates with me, since I often have to help resolve and clean up some inevitably bad mistakes. Want to find out more about what a Business Hacker does? Follow to this post. 
from The Chief Business Hacker - Apolinaras "Apollo" Sinkevicius http://theoperationsguy.com/how-i-became-business-hacker?utm_source=feedburne...
New submitter nicoles writes with this quote from an AP report:
"The Romney and Obama campaigns are spending heavily on television ads and other traditional tools to convey their messages. But strategists say the most important breakthrough this year is the campaigns' use of online data to raise money, share information and persuade supporters to vote. The practice, known as 'microtargeting,' has been a staple of product marketing. Now it's facing the greatest test of its political impact in the race for the White House. ... The Romney team spent nearly $1 million on digital consulting in April and Obama at least $300,000. ... Campaigns use microtargeting to identify potential supporters or donors using data gleaned from a range of sources, especially their Internet browsing history. A digital profile of each person is then created, allowing the campaigns to find them online and solicit them for money and support." Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
from Slashdot http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/2254229/political-campaigns-minin...
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