OS X: Back in the days before OS X, Apple created a notes app called Stickies to let you post little colored notes all over your screen. Despite a lack of updates for years, it's still widely used and a favorite among many. Nootes is an app that works similarly to Stickies but provides a number of additional features. If you've wished for a Stickies upgrade, you'll want to check this out. More »
  
from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5910153/nootes-is-a-great-upgrade-from-your-macs-built+...
The National Basketball Association became the first major sports league in the world to top 5 million Twitter followers on Monday morning.
And no other league is even close.
The next most popular sports organization, the NFL, clocks in around 3.3 million followers. Major League Baseball has just over 2 million, while the National Hockey League and World Wrestling Entertainment have about 1.1 million each. World soccer’s governing body, FIFA, has almost 800,000 followers.
“We are committed to delivering great content to our fans 24/7,” Melissa Rosenthal Brenner, the NBA’s vice president of marketing, told Mashable earlier this year. “More and more we’re using social media as the lens for that, so to speak.”
The NBA has long been at the forefront of using social media in the sports business world. Fans used Twitter to vote for this year’s Slam Dunk Contest winner, and in March the league began selling t-shirts featuring star players’ Twitter handles. Last month, it marked the beginning of playoff season by official launching Pinterest and Tumblr pages.
More than 350 current and former NBA players are on Twitter. Counting official league, team and player profiles, the league claims more than 260 million combined Facebook likes and Twitter follows.
SEE ALSO: Fear the Unibrow! NCAA Star’s Epic Eye Hair Dominates Internet [PICS]
While the NBA dominates as a league, soccer stars dominate Twitter’s sports section when it comes to individual accounts. Brazilian midfielder Kaka is the world’s most followed athlete, with more than 10 million followers.
His Real Madrid teammate Cristiano Ronaldo is also approaching the 10 million mark. LeBron James is the NBA’s most popular active player, with nearly 4.5 million followers, while the retired Shaquille O’Neal counts more than 5.5 million.
The NBA’s Twitter success and popularity of global soccer stars are just a couple reflections of the social network’s natural synergy with sports. Sports moments dominate Twitter’s list of most-tweets-per-second records, and the company is looking to hire a sports fan in an editorial role now. Twitter’s bird logo is even named after an NBA legend.
But athletics still have a long way to go to challenge pop music for Twitter dominance — Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry are the network’s three most popular users, with more than 65 million combined followers.
Why do you think Twitter and sports seem to go so well together? Let us know in the comments.
BONUS: 15 Hilarious Sports Parody Twitter Accounts
 NBA legend and hardcore Grateful Dead fan, Bill Walton is known for his sometimes curious verbiage and his philosophical take on the game of basketball. This account takes full advantage. Click here to view this gallery.
Thumbnail photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Link-creative
More About: NBA, sports, Twitter For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/14/nba-twitter-5-million/?utm_source=feedburner&u...
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday unveiled a digital map called Made in New York as a resource for job seekers.
The map, which plots the city’s tech startups, visualizes the commerce hubs within the city and connects jobs seekers with job listings.
“We expect this map to be another tool that helps propel our tech industry forward,” Bloomberg said at Internet Week New York. “The growth of the tech industry in New York City has been a critical part of weathering the nation’s economic downturn, far better than the rest of the country.”
At launch Made in New York features more than 500 local companies across the city’s five boroughs. Of those startups, more than 325 are presently hiring. You can sort the map by digital companies, investors, and co-working and incubator spaces.
The map plots companies by location, so job seekers can explore their desired neighborhoods. Entrepreneurs can also add their companies to the map.
SEE ALSO: Why Has New York Become a Paradise for Tech Startups?
Bloomberg explained that the city intends to continue making New York a place people want to live.
“Creative people want to be around other people and creativity is driving the tech industry,” Bloomberg said. “We are making concentrated efforts to support entrepreneurs and startups.”

New York is currently the second-highest ranked city in the U.S. for attracting venture capital dollars, ahead of Boston and trailing Silicon Valley. The Mayor also discussed how the city is positioning itself as an education hub for engineers, with the opening of the Cornell and Technion campus on Roosevelt Island.
The map was created in partnership between the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, Internet Week NY and the New York Tech Meetup.
Does this map look like a valuable tool? What else should New York do to propel its budding tech industry.
BONUS: Facebook Contest Finds 10 Best Shots of New York City
Robert Caputo
 Click here to view this gallery.
More About: maps, Michael Bloomberg, new york city, Startups For more Startups coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/15/made-in-new-york/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_me...
If you’ve ever seen that oft-passed-around LumaScapes slide on the display advertising landscape, you know it’s a crowded and fragmented industry. And that slide only includes a fraction of the companies operating in digital media today. (Luma Partners has seven slides more that break out players in video, gaming, commerce and other key sectors in digital.)
That growth indicates “a tremendous amount of innovation,” said Luma Partners CEO and founder Terence Kawaja. But he asked: “Is that a situation that can continue or does it need to change?”
In a presentation on digital advertising’s “state of the state” during Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit Monday, he said that there are 1,400 companies featured across his company’s eight sector-specific slides. Each of those companies, or at least the bigger ones, are building their own sales teams, business development plans and technology, to each sell their own unique solution that isn’t operable with others, Kawaja continued.
While the industry wouldn’t want to quash the innovation, he floated the idea of addressing what he called the “rationalization” issue through standardization. Just like mobile technology has its Android and iOS platforms, Kawaja said, digital advertising could have its own operating system.
“Many other industries have benefited greatly by having an operating system, a common platform upon which other companies can build their tools,” he said.
Another potential solution to this problem could come through consolidation. Over the past few years, merger and acquisition activity hasn’t only picked up, it’s attracted interest from a wider group of potential buyers. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo used to be the “usual suspects” in driving M&A in online media. But as the field has become more data-driven and scientific, it’s started to include new players from marketing, technology and commerce, he said.
Facebook’s upcoming IPO, he added, will “fundamentally change this industry from the perspective of M&A, rationalization and consolidation.” Not that Facebook itself is going to quickly pick off a bunch of new companies, Kawaja said, “but just their presence, their currency, their ability to grow organically.”
In addition to rationalization, he highlighted two other key themes: big data and automation. In 2009, programmatic media buying didn’t even in exist, he noted. But, according to IDC, in 2010 companies spent $352 million on real-time bidding. By the end of 2012, that is expected to reach $1.975 million and, in 2015, it’s projected to hit about $5 billion.
As for his highly-cited Lumascape slide, Kawaja said it’s been cited in six books and a Harvard Business School case study (not to mention countless conference presentations and sales decks). It’s also received more than 350,000 views online, from people in 116 countries.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/05/14/does-digital-advertising-need-its-own-operating-...

We’ve made the argument before that Twitter is effectively a media entity, distributing news and entertainment and other content to millions of readers in real time — although unlike traditional media entities, Twitter does this with anyone’s content rather than content it creates in-house. So far, the company has shied away describing itself as a media company, or exercising much editorial control over what it distributes, but there are some tantalizing signs that it may be moving in that direction. Could Twitter become a media player in its own right?
One element of Twitter’s potential mission appeared on Monday with the announcement of a weekly curated email that is designed to show users content they might be interested in from elsewhere in their social graph. The email is clearly an extension of the move towards curation that Twitter made when it acquired Summify earlier this year — and it both looks and sounds an awful lot like the missives that Summify sent out with similar highlighted content, a feature the company said was one of its most popular (News.me offers a similar type of daily newsletter).
Is Twitter hiring editors and producers to curate?
The second sign of what Twitter might have in mind came last week, when a job posting started making the rounds of journalism mailing lists and Twitter streams: namely, an opening for a “sports producer” who could help curate interesting news-related content around sports events. A Twitter spokeswoman suggested that the job was just another part of the media-evangelism task force that works with the company’s various potential media partners to highlight best practices — in other words, nothing special.
Still, it’s interesting to think about what might come next: Is Twitter planning to hire other types of editors in different fields? Does it want to try and create a BuzzFeed-type of offering, where it highlights interesting content being shared by users? The company isn’t saying, but it wouldn’t be a crazy idea — as we’ve discussed before, people desperately need better filters and curation to sift through the massive streams of information that are flowing past us all day every day, and Twitter is in a perfect position to provide them. But does it want to do that, or is it happy to leave that to others?

If it really wanted to, Twitter could not only use its own algorithms to generate aggregated content in interesting ways, it could start to accumulate a suite of tools that allow users and even journalists to do the same — whether it’s something like Storify or Storyful (which has a paid-for Pro version that helps media companies verify and fact-check the content they are collecting) or another curation/discovery service like Prismatic or Percolate, or even a consumption and recommendation app like Flipboard.
Being a platform is good — but Twitter may want more
At the moment, Twitter seems to be trying to walk a tightrope of sorts between being a media entity and being a platform that is used by other media players. Being a platform or a tool is good, because it means that the company can form all kinds of valuable partnerships with traditional media entities such as broadcasters and TV networks and movie studios — the kind that Chloe Sladden, head of Twitter’s media group, has gotten a lot of attention for. But platforms don’t always generate large amounts of revenue.
Part of the sales job for the media deals it strikes with broadcasters is that Twitter makes a great “second screen” experience for things like the Olympics, etc. So media conglomerates can incorporate Twitter into shows like The X Factor, and it increases the engagement between the audience and the content, and everybody wins. If Twitter were to start looking and acting too much like a media company itself — producing content or curating it in such a way that it added a lot of value — some media partners might theoretically see it as competition rather than a platform partner.
In a sense, this is the same kind of tightrope that YouTube has had to negotiate: it used to be just a carrier of content, and most of it was user-generated and of little interest to major media players — the only time they cared about YouTube was when it infringed on their copyright and they could launch a lawsuit. But then the network started creating its own channels and content, at the same time as it was trying to sell the networks and studios on its value as a place for long-form video.
Obviously, Twitter isn’t likely to suddenly start producing movies or books based on tweets, so the competitive aspect at least for TV networks is minimal (which could be why that was the first place Twitter started looking for media partnerships). But when it comes to the kind of content that newspapers and magazines are interested in, Twitter looks more like a potential competitor — especially if it gets really good at either aggregating/curating information in real time and/or recommending it.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/05/14/twitter-tiptoes-further-into-the-media-business/...
Youtoo, which bills itself as the world’s first Social TV Network, has just released a new Facebook app that allows users to be on TV.
Youtoo launched in 2011 and is a cable network with a social twist. Users can record their own video responses to on-air cues and see themselves on TV. Users can also post their text comments about a show for on-air inclusion.
To date, the network has broadcast more than 90,000 viewer videos. Realty TV God Mark Burnett is an investor in Youtoo and sees huge potential in bridging the gap between TV viewers and on-air content.
Youtoo already has mobile apps for iOS and Android that allow users to record 15-seconds of video and share them with the network. Now, the company is adding the ability for users to upload video directly from Facebook.
Users can respond to a question posed by the television program and Youtoo app and then record their response directly from Facebook. That response then shows up on the user’s Timeline.
If approved and scheduled to air, Youtoo will send the user a message with the date and time of their TV appearance. For users who might miss their moment in the spotlight — or want to share it with others — Youtoo also creates, air checks and recorded video of the live showing, which is shareable via Facebook.
In essence, Youtoo is kind of like Viddy or SocialCam, but with the ability to share those clips on TV.
Youtoo Technology is Coming to More Shows and Networks
Although Youtoo is available in more than 15 million cable households, CEO Chris Wyatt really sees the network and the website as a way to test new products and technologies. Youtoo then works with television producers and networks to integrate those technologies into the shows themselves.
“Youtoo is a software company that just happens to have a TV network as its testbed,” Wyatt says. The goal is to develop technology that others can then whitelabel and customize for their own uses.
This is important — because while Youtoo’s current programming structure includes shows that can benefit from direct fan interaction, the real power is with shows that can integrate the functionality at a more granular level.
Youtoo’s style of social interaction — especially with video prompts, could be a great fit for talk shows and courtroom shows. That way instead of asking users to sound off on Facebook at the end of a Judge Joe Brown segment, the announcer could also show text from viewers or video reactions.
Wyatt tells us that Youtoo’s technology — including the new Facebook app — will be powering dozens of shows this fall.
More About: Facebook, social tv, social video, viddy, youtoo For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/15/youtoo-facebook-app/?utm_source=feedburner&utm...
Although the NBA Playoffs round two Lakers vs. Nuggets game earned over 2 million more social media mentions than The Voice, the latter’s season finale caused quite a large ripple in the social ocean.
People took to the socialverse last Tuesday to chat about and celebrate the reality show competition’s winner, Jermaine Paul. A former backup singer to Alicia Keys and Mary J. Blige, Paul finally earned his own celebrity bragging rights by wowing both judges and viewers.
The runners-up also performed their closing songs during the two-hour finale, and famous acts like Daryl Hall and John Oates entertained the audience alongside pop stars like Justin Bieber, who sang his new single, “Boyfriend.”
SEE ALSO: Counting Crows Singer Adam Duritz: Twitter Changed My Life
The data is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, check-ins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, subjug
More About: Entertainment, infographics, Social Media, social tv, social tv charts, Trendrr, TV For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/15/social-media-tv-chart-5-15/?utm_source=feedbur...
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.
Name: GiddyUp
Quick Pitch: GiddyUp is a new way to invite friends out to brunch, drinks after work or for any impromptu event.
Genius Idea: The mobile application lets party planners skip long emails and bypass lengthy event invites on social networks. Instead, Giddyup lets users send SMS invitations to their Apple and Android phone contacts.
GiddyUp is a mobile app created by friends Elliot Goldwater and John Zurbach who were looking for a better way to get friends together. Plans often were disrupted when Facebook invites would go unseen or when texts were lost.
“It really was an erosion of patience over time,” said GiddyUp co-founder Goldwater. “We got sick of text messages, emails and calling back and forth trying to get a few friends together. It’s a problem that resonated with everybody.”
Unlike other social-event platforms, GiddyUp uses the contacts list within your phone rather than integrating personal Facebook or Twitter friend lists, which are frequently incomplete. People generally carry the phone numbers of their closest friends and family, say the creators.
“We pull directly from your contacts list, which we think is your truest social network,” he said. “Those are the people you rely on, at the last minute, or on any given Friday to meet up with on a whim.”
Users may be wary about using their phone contacts within the app because of privacy concerns. However, that should be an issue, according to Goldwater. Contacts ultimately stay local to your phone and aren’t uploaded anywhere. All event information — such as your future whereabouts — are also guarded.
“All events and related data are stored safely on our database behind authorization walls,” Goldwater said. “We do not look at or parse through individual’s data.”
The simple phone interface has three tabs — Home, Create and FAQ. On the main page, users can view the events that they will attend and access the individual chat bar within the event invite. The recipients of the SMS invite do not need to download the app to access the details. However, you’ll need to download the app to access the chat feature within the invitation.

Generate a GiddyUp invite by selecting the recipients from the contact list in your Apple or Android phone. Users may include details such as location, date, time and notes.
The app launched two weeks ago after more than a year of development. The team has bootstrapped the project to this point and is now looking for investors.
GiddyUp distinguishes itself from other event-planning apps. The GiddyUp team wanted to build a platform that didn’t require extra time to sign in or download yet another app. As a startup, Goldwater wanted to make sure interested users were able to use the app without waiting for a large number of friends to sign on.
“We tried to lower the hurdles or barriers to user adoption,” Goldwater tells Mashable.
The developers also wanted to introduce the app onto the iOS and Android market at the same time. The creators noted most app developers typically devote time creating one market’s app and completely ignoring users on the other platform.
The team is focused on building their userbase. Future business models may revolve around in-app deals, contextual advertising and lending out the software for different applications in the event-planning field.
“Traditionally you think of Evite, Facebook events and Paperless Posts as the traditional medium for planning events — birthday parties, wedding showers and more formal things,” he said. “What we want to capture is everything from what’s happening later tonight, leading up and including those events.”
Image courtesy of Flickr, karramarro
Series Supported by 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: android, application, bizspark, iphone, Mobile For more Business coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/14/giddyup-app/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=...
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