Buried in the announcement revealing actor Samuel L. Jackson as the host for the 12th Annual BET Awards were brief descriptions of the ceremony’s first mobile app.
Mashable, however, got an early demo last week of the massively interactive app. It’s sprinkled with gaming elements tied to voting for the award show’s nominees or predicting the order of performers during the July 1 shindig.
The Black Entertainment Television Awards honors African-Americans in music, movies and sports. Last year, producers integrated social media heavily on air and on location through a star-studded “social media lounge.”
The slick, colorful app comes out in June and will reward users with prizes and online prestige such as displaying the high scorer’s Twitter handle prominently on one of the game’s main interfaces.
Aside from the gaming aspects, the app will feature a clickable timeline of the BET Awards, in-depth artist profiles, curated tweets and videos. A “Tweetmap,” meanwhile, will show where app users are tweeting from and let them zoom in to view user profiles and tweets. It resembles the network’s app for its 106 & Park show.
“We knew we wanted to make voting fun,” Brandon Lucas, BET’s VP of mobile, recently told Mashable, adding that production on the app began five months ago.
One game, Too Big to Pick, lets users vote for nominees by shooting disks into a moving goal with the slide of a finger. The more disks a user makes into the goal, the more votes that user will tally. Players can see how their Facebook friends fared in the game, too.
Another game, The Line-Up, is a fantasy sports-style game in which people predict the order of the show’s performers and then compare their lists with friends and celebrities.
Both games allow players to share their scores and line-ups to Facebook and Twitter.
SEE ALSO: BET Makes Social Media Blitz Ahead of 2011 BET Awards
On Tuesday, BET Networks also unveiled the first two confirmed performers: Nicki Minaj and Chris Brown.
“We have many more acts to come,” says Stephen Hill, president of music programming and specials at BET Networks. “The Shrine Auditorium will be shaking for the R&B stalwarts Maze featuring Frankie Beverly as they receive the Cadillac Lifetime Achievement Award. We’re just getting started and already the show is living up to its slogan: It’s too big to miss.”
Kanye West, who is no stranger to going on entertaining, multi-tweet tirades, snagged the most nominations with seven. Beyonce, who has been revamping and boosting her digital presence as of late, received six nominations.
Here is a full list of nominees for this year’s show:
Best Female R&B Artist
Marsha Ambrosius
Beyonce
Mary J. Blige
Melanie Fiona
Rihanna
Best Male R&B Artist
Chris Brown
Bruno Mars
Miguel
Trey Songz
Usher
Best Group
Bad Meets Evil
Diddy-Dirty Money
Maybach Music Group
Mindless Behavior
The Throne (Jay-Z & Kanye West)
Best Collaboration
Beyonce f/ J. Cole – “Party”
Big Sean f/ Kanye West & Roscoe Dash – “Marvin & Chardonnay”
DJ Khaled f/ Drake, Rick Ross & Lil Wayne – “I’m On One”
Drake f/ Lil Wayne & Tyga – “The Motto”
The Throne (Jay-Z & Kanye West) f/ Otis Redding – “Otis”
Wale f/ Miguel – “Lotus Flower Bomb”
Best Male Hip Hop Artist
Big Sean
Drake
J. Cole
Lil Wayne
Rick Ross
Young Jeezy
Best Female Hip Hop Artist
Diamond
Nicki Minaj
Brianna Perry
Trina
Video of the Year
Beyonce – “Countdown”
Beyonce – “Love On Top”
The Throne (Jay-Z & Kanye West) – “N***as in Paris”
The Throne (Jay-Z & Kanye West) f/ Otis Redding – “Otis”
Usher – “Climax”
Video Director of the Year
Beyonce & Alan Ferguson
Benny Boom
Chris Brown & Godfrey Tabarez
Kanye West
Hype Williams
Best New Artist
A$AP Rocky
Big Sean
Diggy
Future
Meek Mill
Best Gospel
Yolanda Adams
Kim Burrell
James Fortune & FIYA
Fred Hammond
Trin-I-Tee 5:7
Best Actress
Angela Bassett
Viola Davis
Taraji P. Henson
Regina King
Zoe Saldana
Best Actor
Don Cheadle
Common
Idris Elba
Kevin Hart
Denzel Washington
YoungStars Award
Astro
Diggy
Jacob Latimore
Keke Palmer
Willow Smith
Best Movie
Good Deeds
Jumping The Broom
Laugh At My Pain
Red Tails
The Help
Subway Sportswoman of the Year
Skylar Diggins
Brittney Griner
Candace Parker
Serena Williams
Venus Williams
Subway Sportsman of the Year
Carmelo Anthony
Kobe Bryant
Victor Cruz
Kevin Durant
LeBron James
Coca-Cola Viewer’s Choice Award
Beyonce – “Love On Top”
Chris Brown – “Turn Up the Music”
Drake f/ Lil Wayne & Tyga – “The Motto”
Mindless Behavior – “Hello”
The Throne (Jay-Z & Kanye West) f/ Otis Redding – “Otis”
Wale f/ Miguel – “Lotus Flower Bomb”
Centric Award
Common
Estelle
Robert Glasper
Robin Thicke
Tyrese
Best International Act: Africa
Camp Mulla (Kenya)
Ice Prince (Nigeria)
Lira (South Africa)
Mokobe (Mali)
Sarkodie (Ghana)
Wizkid (Nigeria)
Best International Act: UK
Estelle
Labrinth
Emeli Sande
Sway
Wretch 32
BET Awards Social Media Lounge
 D'banj (@iamdbanj), who was winner of Artist of the Year at the MTV Africa Music Awards 2009. Click here to view this gallery.
More About: bet awards, BET Networks, celebrities, Entertainment, Music, social tv, TV 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/22/bet-awards-app-samuel-jackson/?utm_source=feed...
The Leaders in Digital Series is supported by Samsung. Follow Samsung USA on Google+ and Twitter, and like it on Facebook.
On Monday, Hulu revealed a slate of 10 original shows it plans to premiere on the site this summer.
The news followed a slew of announcements from the likes of Yahoo, AOL and other big media companies that are now developing original video content for the web — much of which looks much like traditional television (Mashable also recently premiered its first episodic series, Behind the Launch).
Earlier this month at Mashable Connect, we caught up with Wilson Cleveland, who is the creator and executive producer of Leap Year, a scripted series that debuted in 2011 and will go live with its second season in June. We chatted with Cleveland about what’s behind the sudden boom in premium web video content, why advertisers are jumping on board (Leap Year is funded by Hiscox insurance) and how audience consumption habits are changing.
Check out the interview above. You can also watch the first season of Leap Year on Mashable Video.
Series presented by Samsung
The Leaders in Digital Series is supported by Samsung. Follow Samsung USA on Google+ and Twitter, and like them on Facebook.
More About: features, leaders in digital series, mashable, mashable connect, mashable video, TV, web video For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/22/tv-web-video/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium...
President Obama’s 2008 campaign is seen by many as the first successful online campaign, and while his Republican rivals are certainly beginning to master the social side of campaigning, Obama’s 2012 team is doubling down on digital with a new platform being released Wednesday.
The new platform, called Dashboard, will attempt to bring nearly everything that a brick-and-mortar field office does into the digital space. Obama’s volunteers will be able to use the service to make calls to recruit others to join the team, organize campaign events such as voter registration drives, and communicate with leadership — all from their desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone devices, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Dashboard is our online field office — a hub for campaign volunteers and supporters to communicate with each other and become members of neighborhood teams,” Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, told Mashable.
Dashboard, which will feature a Facebook-style interface, introduces social and data-driven elements, reflective of the Obama campaign’s love affair with metrics. Obama volunteers will be able to use the platform to connect with other supporters and join local volunteer teams with specific missions, such as LGBT for Obama groups, which are tasked with reaching out to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters.
On the staff side, campaign leadership will be able to set and track specific goals for individual Obama supporters and volunteer groups. Those supporters and groups will engage in friendly competition with one another to achieve those goals — a hallmark of the 2008 Obama campaign.
“Supporters can use the tool to set goals, communicate those goals and see what other supporters are doing,” added Hogan. “Supporters who want to be engaged can go to Dashboard, message other supporters in their area and have a conversation about how to get started, it provides a good volunteer experience online that is directly tied to our field operation goals.”
Dashboard, which has been in development for nearly a year, builds upon similar software and MyBarackObama.com, which was used during Obama’s 2008 run to help volunteers perform some tasks, such as phone banking, from the comfort of their own home.
SEE ALSO: Republicans Launch Facebook App to Defeat Obama
Keya Dannenbaum, founder of ElectNext, welcomes the new platform.
“[The Obama campaign] is making political advocacy social and mobile and that is a move that can only expand the pool of people who will get engaged and involved, and that’s great,” said Dannenbaum. “I would fully expect something similar from the Romney campaign.”
Mitt Romney’s digital team is indeed doing something similar: they’re using “MyMitt,” a similar in-house social network that lets Romney supporters connect with one another and volunteer for the campaign. Republicans as a whole, meanwhile, are engaging their supporters on Facebook with the Social Victory Center, a Facebook app that allows right-leaning voters to connect with one another directly on the popular social network.
Zachary Green, a political Twitter consultant, noted something missing from the new service.
‘Social media actions are curiously absent from the Dashboard, and Obama’s campaign has never quite done it right,” said Green. “They have built a page to Tweet your Representative, as though anyone in D.C. would change their vote based on a Twitter feed.”
Would you use a presidential campaign’s social network to get involved with politics? Sound off in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PeterPhoto
More About: 2012 presidential campaign, barack obama, Politics, trending, US 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/23/obama-online-tool/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_m...
Dish Network has partnered with Roku to launch a new, streaming-only service that will be sold to customers across the U.S., regardless of whether they’re subscribers of Dish’s pay TV offering or not, both companies announced Wednesday morning.
DISHWorld, as the service is called, will offer a number of international packages that bundle Brazilian, Arabic, Hindi and other foreign language content. Bundles go for as little as $5 a month, and all the way up to $44.99, but customers have to mix and match bundles to spend at least $19.99 per month.
Some of the bundles simply offer foreign news stations, while others include movie channels and music TV. Among the networks included in the various bundles are Sony Entertainment Television India, Al Jazeera, Willow Cricket and BBC Arabic. Viewers have access to live TV and can catch up on any of the shows that aired within the last 48 hours on any of the networks they subscribe to.
A press release also hinted at additional offerings targeting other expats in the future, and it suggested that Roku decided against becoming its own operator, partnering with Dish instead:
“Additionally, Roku selected Dish to manage the launch and expansion of future foreign language channels and content on the Roku platform.”
The partnership is a big deal for Roku; the set-top-box has been offering subscription access to a number of foreign channels and packages for some time. But in most cases, these are sold separately by smaller companies, some of which reside outside of the U.S.. Having Dish as a trusted brand to manage and promote these kinds of subscriptions could give Roku a big boost.
But it’s also a remarkable deal for the pay TV world in general. Over the last few months, there have been many rumors that one of the big pay TV providers would eventually decide to go online and target Internet users located outside of its local market with streaming-only packages — an idea that folks in the industry have been dubbing a virtual cable company. Today, this kind of virtual pay TV future became reality — for folks speaking Hindi, Arabic or any other of the targeted languages, anyway.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/roku-dishworld-expat-tv/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_me...
The country’s top tech talent may gravitate to Silicon Valley and New York, but the White House is making a hard push for them to consider a “tour of duty” in Washington, DC.
In launching the government’s new digital roadmap and Presidential Innovation Fellows program, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said Wednesday that the they’re looking for “badass innovators” to work for “a little startup called the United States of America.”
“We’re looking for a few good women and men to throw their hats in the ring,” he said. As part of the program, the White House will select 15 coders, designers and other innovators to head to DC for 6- to 12-month fellowships, starting in July. Park said the fellowship will focus on five areas: open data, health information, the online system MyGov, an RFP program targeting startups and a USAID campaign.
Importantly for startups, the open data initiative aims to stimulate innovation by releasing information in health, energy, public safety, the nonprofit sector and personal finance and making it machine-readable. Just as the private sector has used GPS, weather and health-related data to create apps and other products, Park said he hopes the liberation of new sets of data will lead to more entrepreneurship in new areas. As for the RFP project, Park said, “if you’re a startup who has ever tried to sell to the federal government, you know it’s a huge pain in the ass.” The goal of the new plan is to make it easier for the government to work with small, high-growth startups on tech solutions.
Park made the announcement with Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, during a presentation at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. On stage, the pair also announced details for the country’s new digital roadmap and pledged allegiance to innovation. The overall goal of the strategy is to get the government to use technology to deliver better services for citizens, but VanRoekel said some concrete mandates include getting every agency to create a developer page and convert two priority services to mobile. He also said that, aside from emergency situations, the government would not issue any more .gov domains.
They said the new digital strategy is based on the following tenets: open data is the new default; anywhere, anytime on any device; everything should be an API; make government data social; and change the meaning of social participation.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/05/23/white-house-to-startups-we-want-badass-innovator...
From Twitter to Facebook, to Google+, to YouTube, to Foursquare and more, social media use is the hottest thing in marketing. But does it really work?
Brands and businesses are certainly making a stronger push than ever on social media, which makes sense — that’s where the people are. Figuring out just how much social media marketing returns on investments of time and money, however, is harder to do.
Facebook marketing company Pagemodo recently pulled research from sources around the web to produce the infographic below, looking at just how much faith marketers have in social media. The aggregated data shows a sense of conservative optimism.
64% of business owners say social media marketing is a promising tactic and they believe it provides returns — but they aren’t willing to go all in with it just yet and favor a more cautious approach. 20% are more bullish on its potential, according to the same study, while just 6% are hardcore skeptics.
How do marketers and entrepreneurs measure whether social media marketing pays off? Most do so by measuring the accumulation of friends, likes, followers and other online connections. 39% look at shares of brand content, while 35% measure actual leads from social media. Just 18% measure success by overall brand awareness and favorability as gauged by consumer surveys.
Check out the infographic below for more on how much faith businesses put in social media as a marketing tool, and for tips on additional ways to maximize results and measure influence. Then let us know in the comments — do you think social media marketing provides real results?
Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, courtneyk
More About: infographics, Marketing, social media marketing For more Business coverage: 
from Mashable! http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/jCNSayMYvT4/

The MaKey MaKey (rhymes with nakey nakey, eggs and bakey) is a little circuit board that can turn ANYTHING into a computer keyboard/controller by attaching alligator clips to the object. Hold on, let me copy/paste something that can explain it better than I can. Well, not BETTER than I can, just with way less effort on my part because I'm feeling a little under the weather today. I peed on myself last night, folks.
How Does it Work?
Alligator Clip two objects to the MaKey MaKey board. For example, you and an apple.
When you touch the apple, you make a connection, and MaKey MaKey sends the computer a keyboard message. The computer just thinks MaKey MaKey is a regular keyboard (or mouse). Therefore it works with all programs and webpages, because all programs and webpages take keyboard and mouse input.
What materials work with MaKey Makey?
Any material that can conduct at least a tiny bit of electricity will work (if it doesn't already work, just rub it with bananas, spray it with water, or apply copper tape). Here are some materials people have used in our workshops including Ketchup, Pencil Graphite, Finger Paint, Lemons, etc.
Other materials that work great: Plants, Coins, Your Grandma, Silverware, Anything that is Wet, Most Foods, Cats and Dogs, Aluminum Foil, Rain, and hundreds more...
Pretty neat, right? There's a Kickstarter page for the project, which exceeded its $25,000 funding goal in a few days and is now over $200,000. Still, donating $35 will get you a kit when they're released. But the question remains: will it work on nipples? One blogger plans to find out! Also, what good is a peripheral that turns your cats into a controller if the B button always runs and hides under a bed?
Hit the jump for a couple more pics of fun applications and a video explanation of the project. 
from Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://www.geekologie.com/2012/05/the-turn-anything-into-a-game-controller.ph...

Interference patterns produced by double-slit experiments.
The subtlest experiment in quantum mechanics is also one of the simplest: send a stream of particles through two openings in a barrier, and you'll produce an interference pattern because the particles act as waves. Amazingly, this also works if you send the particles through one at a time—the interference pattern builds up slowly as more particles go through. The double-slit experiment has been replicated with photons, electrons, atoms, and even entire molecules.
Typically, the particle nature and the wave nature have to be observed separately; if you track the particles through a single slit, the interference pattern vanishes. However, Ralf Menzel, Dirk Puhlmann, Axel Heuer, and Wolfgang P. Schleich entangled two photons and allowed one to pass through a barrier with two slits. The entanglement enabled them to determine which opening the photon went through, but a detector on the other side still picked up an interference pattern, demonstrating light's wave- and particle-like characteristics simultaneously.
The key to the experiment is the particular state in which the photons were produced. The researchers started with a laser in a configuration known as TEM01 mode, which means the electric (E) and magnetic (M) fields are perpendicular (or transverse, T) to the direction the photons travel. The "01" means there are two distinct points of maximum intensity. Read more | Comments
from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/disentangling-the-wave-particle-dualit...
Retrieving the final globs of ketchup from any Heinz bottle is a painstaking process. You can try and venture in there with a knife, luring out the tomato-ey goodness using nothing but sheer intimidation. You can smack that magical “57″ on the side of the bottle, or just violently shake the hunk of fructose-filled glass and pray.
Or, you can use LiquiGlide. Developed by a team out of MIT — comprised of Dave Smith, Christopher Love, Brian Solomon, Adam Paxson, Rajeev Dhiman and Kripa Varanasi — LiquiGlide is a super slippery, edible coating that allows ketchup and other foods to glide easily out of their bottles. The team won the $2,000 Audience Choice Award at this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. And after taking inventory of my fridge, and seeing all the remnants of condiments I have, just stuck clinging to the bottom of bottles, I give them my own Audience Choice Award. Although condiments may sound like a narrow focus, the team claims just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market. As Smith told Fast Company, “If all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.” Here’s a look at what actually happens when you pour ketchup out of a bottle coated with LiquiGlide, courtesy of Fast Company. LiquiGlide can be used with different types of packaging, whether it be glass or plastic, and can be applied just by spraying the coating onto the inside of bottles. One of the biggest challenges for the team was gaining FDA approval. “We had a limited amount of materials to pick from,” Smith told Fast Company. “I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it.” If the ketchup wasn’t enough to win you over, here’s mayonnaise coming out of a LiquiGlide-coated bottle, and then a normal bottle. The team will be working out of the MIT Founders’ Skills Accelerator this summer, so let’s hope LiquiGlide comes to a shelf near us soon.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/05/23/mits-liquiglide-solves-your-sticky-condiment-s...
 I am a self-employed writer who publishes a new book every 9 months and primarily works from home. For my first several books I struggled with time management and found I was constantly playing catch-up for the two months before my books were due. Then my engineer husband introduced me to the application he uses at work to organize his projects: Gantto.
For my last book I used Gantto to plan out my book publishing process, goals, and the milestones I needed to hit. Early schedule items consisted of writing so many words a week (with milestone markers for finishing a quarter of the book, half, etc.), middle items included submitting drafts and doing revisions, and latter marks included publishing house schedules and promotional items -- all ultimately leading to the release date of the book. The great thing about Gantto is that I can visually see how all of those little steps lead to the final goal on one page, and if life events (illness, family trouble, etc.) crop up during the project, the whole timeline shifts to where end-goal estimation becomes far more accurate. Vacations can be added at any time for scheduling purposes.
For me, seeing the gantt chart really helped put my daily work in perspective, and I found I was much less likely to procrastinate.

There was still a bit of a crunch getting my last book out the door (unfortunately, the tool couldn't write the book for me), but my process was tighter and the last week was far less painful than submissions for previous books. I am definitely using Gantto for my next book.
The real time collaboration aspect is likely not as key for the self-employed business owner as it would be for a larger team/business, but I actually found it a fantastic feature. If you are collaborating between two writers or a writer and an assistant, both of you can go into the schedule (simultaneously) and make changes.
As someone who has used spreadsheets in the past to track projects, the ability to shift an entire schedule of events with one click is mind-blowingly great. Add that to the price (free for one month, with subscriptions starting at $5 a month) and I am delighted with this tool.
-- Anne Mallory
Gantto http://gantto.com/
$5/month 
from Cool Tools http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/006207.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_med...
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