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Doctorow: the Coming War On General-Purpose Computing

GuerillaRadio writes "Cory Doctorow's keynote at 28C3 was about the upcoming war on general-purpose computing driven by increasingly futile regulation to appease big content. 'The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.'" If you don't have time for the entire 55-minute video, a transcript is available that you can probably finish more quickly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

from Slashdot http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/30/2159200/doctorow-the-coming-war-on-gen...

Dropbox Automator triggers monotonous tasks with uploading of a file

Dropbox Automater
There are plenty of tools and apps out there that automate the essential computing tasks that face us every day. Some are time consuming others are simply monotonous -- but they must be done. Dropbox Automator combines time-saving task mastery with perhaps our favorite cloud storage solution. The service watches a designated folder for uploads, when a new file is added an action is triggered -- everything from converting documents, to resizing an image or tweeting a link. And that's just scratching the surface. There are already plenty of automation scripts in the fledgling service's repertoire and devs can add there own by creating a SOAP webservice. Hit up the source link to get started now.

Dropbox Automator triggers monotonous tasks with uploading of a file originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/31/dropbox-automater-triggers-monotonous-task...

5 Steps for Finding New Customers


Ronald Brown is a successful startup CEO with an extensive background in technology and consumer marketing. His new book, Anticipate. The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success is available via iTunes, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

The subject of finding customers is one of the most mysterious in business development. I’m often asked how the most successful companies do it, maybe in the hope that there’s a secret or shortcut to success. Sorry to say, no silver bullet exists.

Even with large budgets, customer discovery is more art than science. Below are the five basic steps. The most important aspect of this process is to be very methodical in your approach. Knowing where you’ve been is the only way to improve and repeat successes. Pay close attention to the details and record everything in a consistent format.


1. Classification Structure


The first step is to decide on a classification structure, better known as segmentation. You might have a product in mind, or a general concept, but sometimes, you might just be fishing — looking for a problem to solve in a market that seems attractive. That’s OK. Market segmenters are detectives.

What makes a market attractive? Maybe you see alignment with your idea or product. Or, maybe something about a segment strikes a chord and gets your creative juices flowing, knowing what you know about your company’s capabilities. Also, segment size is important: Why waste time if long-term financial gains aren’t possible?

The segment selection process can be intuitive, based on personal experience, or it can be driven by highly sophisticated segmentation tools that carve up the total market into standardized groups. (Lots of companies start with Standard Industrial Classification codes (SIC codes), a system for tracking the entire economy, managed by the U.S. Census Bureau.) Either way, at this point, you are simply making educated guesses about which ones might be a fit. You have no idea if the fit will materialize.

In emerging industries, segmentation can evolve quickly. When the iPad was first introduced, tablets were tablets. Then ereaders became a distinct category vs. general purpose. Then pricing tiers emerged. Now, industry analysts are breaking the market up into broad stroke vertical applications — education, health care, etc. — which will get subdivided further very soon.


2. Hypothesis Testing


With your evaluation structure in place, you now need to determine, one segment at a time, if there is really an opportunity you can address. You dig deeper from a research standpoint, paying particular attention to competitive offerings. Again, there’s a range of tools you can use. A consumer products company might do a formal, quantitative study, and a company selling to enterprises might set up personal meetings with senior executives. Major consulting firms, like McKinsey & Co. or the Boston Consulting Group, rely heavily on in-depth, one-on-one interviews in all of their projects. I’m working on a project in the tablet business right now, and you’d be amazed at how much you can learn from resellers.

What are you looking for? You’re identifying customer problems. They should be big ones — “pain points.” If a problem isn’t urgent and important, it’ll be difficult to create a meaningful competitive advantage. At the same time, you’re looking to see how your solution solves the problem. Is it dramatically better? Is it “demonstrable” (a very helpful ingredient when it comes to being socialized)?

If you’ve found a pain point in a large market you can address and there are no competitors (yes, it happens), you’ve stumbled upon an “unmet need,” one of the holy grails of new product development.

Segment by segment, you are testing a hypothesis related to fit or alignment: that you have something of value to offer a customer group. You are not just collecting information.

You’ll discover all kinds of things at this point, from a particular segment being a complete miss, to essential product features that must be added. Hypothesis testing never stops, even after you introduce your product. In fact, the best is yet to come. Once a product is in the market, learning based on actual usage will flow in. That’s why many in the new products field go to market with a “minimally viable product.”


3. Nuance Testing


Here’s the step that’s easy to overlook. All problems have context. In other words, when customers solve problems, they are affected by circumstances associated with timing and physical surroundings, and by the nature of the task itself. As a marketer, you won’t understand context by doing a survey, conducting a focus group, or talking to senior executives.

You understand context by experiencing customer problem solving yourself. To do that, you turn to customer immersion techniques. Did you know dairy farmers use tablets? To elegantly solve their problems, you better be willing to get up at 3 a.m. on a freezing morning. Some consumer goods companies even live with customers in their homes for a short period of time. Procter & Gamble, considered one of the best marketers in the world, uses such an immersion program called “Living It.”


4. Customer Stories


Hypothesis and nuance testing findings get captured as stories. They’re much more descriptive than use cases in that they focus heavily on problem/solution decision making.


5. Solution Iteration


Tight product alignment with a customer is a matter of iteration. You put something out there (an idea, a prototype, an actual product), and you get feedback, and you go away and improve and refine. Your customer stories get more refined as well.

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll identify a pain point and address it perfectly in one fell swoop. In fact, to even try is highly risky, especially if you’re building hardware.

Most of the time and money wasted in new product development is related to late-stage rework, but you can avoid it by developing in small steps, ever tightening the alignment. This is what agile development is all about, and why it’s gaining so much in popularity in and outside Silicon Valley.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pixdeluxe

More About: Business, contributor, customers, features, Small Business

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/30/new-customer-tips/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_m...

Facebook 2012: What the Future Holds for the Social Media Powerhouse


What do you do after your site grows to 800 million users and expands to 1 trillion pageviews per month? Why, plan a $100 billion IPO, of course!

Going public is clearly the biggest thing on tap for Facebook in 2012, but the world’s most populated social network and its users have a lot to look forward to over the coming year. From the maturation of Mark Zuckerberg as a leader to Facebook’s growth as a media platform to a looming collision with the world’s biggest tech companies, 2012 is poised to be one of the most important years in the company’s short history.

Read on for our predictions for Facebook’s upcoming year, and be sure to add your ideas in the comments.


The IPO


It’s safe to say that Facebook’s long-rumored IPO will be the biggest public offering of 2012. It could also potentially be the biggest of the current decade, if rumors of a reported $100 billion valuation and $10 billion raise are accurate. That would put Facebook in the top-three American IPOs for highest amounts raised.

Of course, an astronomical target does not mean a guaranteed blockbuster IPO for Facebook. Zynga’s unspectacular debut on the public markets in December has some investor’s worried that social media IPOs will generate less enthusiasm going forward, and that could affect Facebook in 2012. “It’s a very telltale sign of how people feel about social media IPOs in general,” Jeffrey Sica, owner of Sica Wealth Management in Morristown, N.J., told Mashable. “[Investors] have become very shortsighted. There’s a lot of fear in the market right now.”

Furthermore, today’s tech companies are raising larger rounds of private money more frequently before going to IPO, and are allowing private investors to trade shares prior to going public. That’s adding up to less opportunity for public investors once the offering hits the market. This is another reason why there was lower-than-expected interest from retail investors for Zynga, and could also be indicative of a lackluster future debut for Facebook, which has raised a whopping $2.3 billion from private investors.

It’s unclear what this trend of raising mega-sized rounds of private equity means for public capital markets long term. However, it is clear that entrepreneurs and early employees of the few tech companies attracting this sort of attention are reaping the benefits. And aftermarket stock sales have allowed some early employees and investors to cash in, pre-IPO. Facebook has already minted a number of on-paper billionaires that way. If the company’s IPO in 2012 is as successful at the rumored $100 billion valuation, Reuter’s estimates that Facebook will be home to at least 1,000 new millionaires.


The Next Steve Jobs?


Shortly after Apple’s iconic co-founder Steve Jobs died in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook profile, “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

Mashable executive editor Adam Ostrow wrote following Jobs’s death, “Although Apple and Facebook have had a contentious relationship, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Jobs and Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of college and founded their iconic companies in their early twenties.”

Indeed, even before Jobs died, there was a sense that his retirement from Apple as CEO was a symbolic passing of the mantle to unofficial Innovator in Chief in Silicon Valley, and to the tech world in general. But to whom? Many pundits have prognosticated on that question and the answer usually comes down to one of four choices: someone we haven’t heard of yet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg.

When people ask, “Who is the next Steve Jobs?” they mean, from where will the next giant of the tech industry emerge? Who will be the next larger-than-life figure to drive innovation in tech, design and business for the next few decades? It might not necessarily be anyone from the current crop of big company tech CEOs, but of the candidates, a good case could be made for Zuckerberg. That has a lot less to do with Zuckerberg’s potential as a Jobs impersonator (though he is getting better at channeling Jobs’ confidence on stage), and more to do with his place among the next generation’s influencers.

Zuckerberg’s performance at the f8 Developer Conference this year, which included an on-stage lampooning from Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg, illustrates Zuckberg’s generational advantage. Even though he clearly tries to match Steve Jobs’s charisma, his style is clearly not a one-to-one emulation — and that’s okay. In fact, that’s exactly why Zuckerberg might be the next Jobs: He understands his consumers in ways that competitors have yet to grasp, and that edge has helped him to win the innovation war in social networking thus far.


Facebook vs. The World


Facebook has been on a collision course with the world’s biggest tech companies for a long time, and that could all come to a head in 2012.

The company will fight Apple in the mobile space, where a focus on HTML5 and a recent acquisition of mobile platform developer Strobe (makers of SproutCore) is positioning Facebook to be a powerhouse in the mobile space, ideally by delivering a rich user experience across hardware platforms. One big advantage Facebook can offer that other platforms can’t? Massive amounts of social data and one of the biggest installed user bases on the planet.

Facebook will fight Amazon and eBay in the consumer space, with the continued expansion of Facebook Credits, which are already being used to sell all sorts of digital content, from in-game items to movie downloads. For now, Credits can’t be used in the purchase or sale of physical goods, but as retailers like Amazon expand their footprint into digital, they’ll start start to bump into Facebook. And Facebook credits are already sold in stores. Therefore, using them for physical purchases might not be far behind, especially as they get added to mobile payment systems.

And they’ll fight Google on virtually all fronts. Both Facebook and Google are advertising-driven businesses, but Facebook’s revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to Google’s. That could significantly start to change in 2012, as Facebook rolls out new ad formats and more agencies shift traditional media buys to online advertising. Yet Facebook does face an uphill battle when it comes to convincing big brands to pay for advertising products when they’re accustomed to free Facebook Pages .


Facebook Becomes the Media


Somewhat lost amidst Facebook’s new Timeline buzz, three other developments in 2011 fueled Facebook’s aspiration to become the destination for all media. First, Facebook launched an update to its Open Graph protocol called Gestures, which essentially allows users to [verb] any [noun]. Or in other words, websites are no longer constrained to just allowing users to Like items. Now users can read, watch, listen or perform any other action around the web.

Second, Facebook launched a new Subscribe feature, allowing users to let fans follow their public updates (and it’s coming soon for websites).

Third, Facebook offered an update to the News Feed called Ticker, that serves as a real-time feed of activity away from Facebook. Taken in tandem, these updates indicate Facebook’s growing desire to be to discovery what Google is to search — that is, the market leader for the new dominant form of currency on the web. In the previous decade, the link was the main way to pass information around on the Internet. Google figured out how to harness that information and turn it into a highly useful search engine. In today’s social media-driven world, the link is being replaced by the social recommendation (and more broadly, by the social action), and Facebook is attempting to build a discovery engine around that idea.

In other words, Facebook isn’t going to be a creator of media, but it will be the ultimate curator.


The Future of Timeline


Of course, that hoopla for Timeline was warranted. Facebook’s radical redesign of the profile page marked a huge departure from the traditional design, which in spite of numerous changes and updates, had maintained the same basic UI concept since Facebook launched.

The new Timeline is about storytelling. “Timeline is the story of your life,” said Zuckerberg at the f8 Conference. It’s a “new way to express who you are.”

That, of course, gets to the heart of Facebook’s oft-stated goal to make the world “more open and connected.” Here is a new profile that encourages you to share even more about your life by documenting and organizing everything you do. (Not coincidentally, that also plays right into Facebook’s advertising-fueled business model.)

What happens to Timeline in 2012 would be as difficult to predict as Timeline itself would have been this time last year, but it’s safe to assume that Facebook’s recent acquisition of Gowalla will have an impact on the future of the site’s profile design. With Gowalla, Facebook acquired a team of designers and developers that had created an unquestionably beautiful location-based social network with the stated purpose of helping users document their travel (both locally and abroad). Put another way, Gowalla was made for telling stories about the places you went.

Facebook didn’t specifically acquire the technology behind Gowalla, but it did say that it was “sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time.” Smart money is that parts of that “inspiration” will find its way into Facebook as improvements to the storytelling functionality of Facebook Timeline and Facebook’s mobile applications.

Special thanks to Brian Carter, author of “The Like Economy,” who helped me codify my thoughts about the future of Facebook.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Oxford, Flickr, Andrew Feinberg, Kewei SHANG

More About: Business, facebook ipo, facebook timeline, features, mark zuckerberg, trending

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/29/facebook-predictions-2012/?utm_source=feedburn...

Dropbox Automator Automatically Processes Images, Text, PDFs and Other Files in Your Dropbox Any Way You Choose [Web Apps]

Dropbox Automator is a powerful web app that connects to your Dropbox account and monitors folders of your choice, performing automated actions you define when new files are detected. This can be anything from converting a document to PDF, resizing images and uploading them to Facebook, plus a whole lot more. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5871755/dropbox-automator-automatically-processes-image...

Winter Wake-Up Automatically Wakes You Up Earlier If it Snows [Alarm Clocks]

iOS/Android: If you live in a location where you get a lot of snow, you know that employers and teachers don't accept the "I didn't know it snowed" excuse if you're running late. Winter Wake-Up is an alarm app that solves that problem by checking the weather and waking you up earlier if it snows. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5871811/winter-wake+up-automatically-wakes-your-up-earl...

Physics Are Fun: Large Hadron Collider Made In LEGO

lego-lhc-1.jpg This is a 1:50 scale replica of the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector recreated out of 9,500 LEGO pieces. 9,500 LEGO pieces that cost $2,590. That's 27-cents apiece! That's way too f***ing much!
[The piece was built by] Sasha Mehlhase, a physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Mehlhase has decided to help promote the LHC to students by taking the time to recreate a 1:50 scale model of it using Lego bricks. In total he spent 81 hours creating it, which was split between 48 hours of designing the model on his laptop, and a further 33 hours putting it together.
No word if this mini Large Hadron Collider will be powerful enough to malfunction and create a black hole large enough to swallow a dog, but Chloe kind of deserves it after last post's whole nipple fiasco. "Woof." Bullshit you thought it was a dried apricot -- YOU'RE A LIAR! Hit the jump for several more shots including some of the build.

from Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://www.geekologie.com/2011/12/physics-are-fun-large-hadron-collider-ma.php

Progressive Era Hacker Griefed Marconi Demonstration

nbauman writes "In June 1903, Gugliemo Marconi and his partner Ambrose Flemming were about to give the first demonstration of long-range wireless communication at the Royal Institution in London, which, Marconi said, could be sent in complete confidentiality with no fear of the messages being hijacked. Suddenly, the silence was broken by a huge mysterious wireless pulse strong enough to take over the carbon-arc projector and make it sputter messages in Morse Code. First, it repeated the word 'Rats' over and over again (abusive at that time). Then it tapped out, 'There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.' Further rude epithets followed. It was Nevil Maskelyne, a stage musician and inventor who was annoyed because Marconi's patents prevented him from using wireless. It was the first hacking, to demonstrate an insecure system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

from Slashdot http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/28/191202/progressive-era-hacker-griefed-m...

Dictate to Your Mac What to Do With Vocal


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: Vocal

Quick Pitch: Control and dictate to your Mac computer using your voice.

Genius Idea: Vocal responds to commands on Mac computers just like Siri does on the iPhone 4S.


Most people expect their Mac computers to do exactly what they want with just the click of a mouse, but a new iPhone app is taking a different approach.

Vocal, an app powered by a platform-agnostic commands engine, lets users control and dictate their Mac computers using their voice. You can use the app to dictate commands straight from your iPhone 4S.

The $1.99 app comes in two parts — commands and dictation. Similar to the iPhone 4S’s personal assistant Siri, commands lets you control your Mac by voicing commands such as play songs, open apps, search the web and compose new emails. Using Vocal to say commands such as “search Google” or “compose a new email” does exactly that, ensuring that Mac computers do exactly what you ask it to.

The second part, dictation, allows users to write text in an email or document using their voice. The text is automatically inserted into the user’s document as they speak the words. Users can even use Vocal to format text by saying “bold,” “italics” or “underline”.

To begin vocally controlling your Mac, download the Vocal app onto your iPhone 4S and download the companion app onto your Mac computer. Once the downloads are complete, you can begin dictating and commanding your Mac to do exactly what you want.

Vocal users can even add their own commands — just open the “custom bookmarks” menu in the Mac app, set the preferences for your favorite websites and add actions that you want Vocal to perform.

Advanced users can even write their own custom commands using URL schemes or dictate text with HTML tags by enabling HTML formatting in the “Advanced Menu.”

“Vocal uses the iPhone 4S to make using your Mac faster than ever before,” says Matthew Roberts, CEO of Vocal. “The Mac computer is just the start because Vocal’s platform makes it easy for the app to be available on other platforms that users may want.”

Air Dictate, a speech recognition app also available for the iPhone 4S, is similar to Vocal because it also enables users to enter text on their Mac’s by speaking into their iPhone 4S. Unlike Air Dictate however, Vocal does not require an iPhone 4S. The app provides a text box on the Mac computer which users can type their commands into using their keyboard.

Roberts is currently rewriting the application to use true natural language processing to ensure the app translates exactly what the user says. The new version is expected to be available in a few weeks.

Image courtesy of Vocal, Vocal


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: bizspark, iphone, iPhone 4S, iphone app

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2011/12/27/vocal/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&u...

General Catalyst Raises $500 Million for Sixth Venture Fund

No funding news happening this week, think again. Cambridge based General Catalyst has just raised $500 million for its sixth venture fund, according to peHub. General Catalyst currently focuses on early stage and growth equity investments principally in digital media, software, and cleantech companies. The firm currently has over $1.7 billion in capital under management across five funds.

Their portfolio consists of local companies such as, Brightcove, BzzAgent, BullHorn, Kayak, Visible Measures and more.

 

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2011/12/28/general-catalyst-raises-500-million-for-sixth-...