The New York Times released its 2012 Election App for iPhone and iPod touch Thursday, which it calls a one-stop resource for political coverage and campaign news. The app integrates Web content with Times editorial coverage.
Curated by a Times editor, the app’s news feed (its central feature) includes articles, blog posts, videos and tweets from external sources. The company says its syndicated political Op-Eds, editorials and blogs, such as The Caucus and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, will make the app an essential mobile destination for politics buffs.
Election 2012 is free to download, but only Times digital subscribers have access to all the app’s content, such as the Election Guide. As a non-digital subscriber, you can just see the top six stories. You can also access the app’s content from a desktop browser, here.
“Our goal is for the Election 2012 App to be the destination for people turning to their phones to stay on top of the most important campaign stories of the moment,” Fiona Spruill, New York Times editor of emerging platforms, said in a statement. “There is a mountain of political news and information out there. We’re trying to make it easier for people by pairing The Times’s distinguished political coverage with a curated take on the best stories from around the Web and the social-media universe.”
Like the “highlighted stories first” feature of Facebook‘s News Feed, users see the most important stories since their last visit when they open the app.
The app, which requires iOS 4.0 or later, also features an Election Guide, a database of candidate profiles, poll results, tweets, state profiles, past primary results, delegate rules and a primary calendar. On primary nights, it will provide live updates of race results.
Does this app sound like a good mobile politics resource? Do you use any other election apps?
We’re giving away amazing kits from our new Make: Ultimate Kit Guide EVERY DAY — thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, including MakerBots!
To celebrate the release of our latest publication, the Make: Ultimate Kit Guide 2012 (and its companion website), we’re giving away at least one of the cool kits reviewed in the issue each day during the holiday season.
Today’s giveaway is for a ProtoSnap Pro Mini Arduino development board. Here is MAKE Engineering Intern Tyler Moskowite’s review from the issue:
The ProtoSnap Pro Mini is one of the more interesting Arduino kits. Manufactured on a single PCB, it includes a preassembled Arduino Pro Mini (0.7″×1.3″) and snap-off accessory boards like an FTDI Basic Breakout board, buzzer, RGB LED, light sensor, pushbutton, and a general-purpose
protoboard for wiring up your own custom components. Snap off each piece, and you’ll see there are holes to solder pins, wires, or however it needs to connect. Then you can load your project’s sketch onto the Pro Mini immediately to start testing. Finally, the documentation is concise, for those just getting started with Arduino, and even enjoyable to read. This is a great kit for Arduino lovers of all experience levels.
To be eligible for today’s giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment below in this post. The entry period for today’s prize will be until 11:59pm PST tonight. We’ll choose one person at random, you’ll be notified by email, and you’ll have 48 hours to respond. The Winners List is kept on the Giveaway landing page. That’s it! No purchase necessary or anything else to do. Please leave only one comment per post. You can enter as many giveaways as you like until you win. This giveaway is for US residents only. You also must be 18 years old to enter (Kids: Ask your parents to enter). See the Kit-A-Day Giveaway landing page for full sweepstakes details and Official Rules.
Important Note: If you enter this drawing, when it’s over, please check the place where you registered to comment (eg. Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter). Some people are winning these kits and then not responding when we send them a message using the available means of contacting them. We want to make sure you get your giveaway!
An anonymous reader writes "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."
One of the hallmarks of humanity is our predilection for philosophical thought: wondering just what we are, why we're here, and what's going to happen next is one of the biggest markers that separates us from simpler animals. And despite the massive pile of predictions for the future that have all missed the mark entirely, every once in awhile one is right or close enough to right that we go ahead and count it; and the fact is, it's just fun to prognosticate. And it's in that spirit that the New York Times is asking readers to compile a future timeline of human achievements and world events, starting next year...
Of course you might want to refresh yourself on human history, first.
Simply mouse-over the events (categorized as advances in Computation, Artificial Intelligence, Transportation & Lifestyle, and Communication) to read a quick blurb explaining what titles like "A.I. Government" or "Robot Wars" mean, see the year people predict it will happen, and then with the click of a button move the prediction forward or backward in time a few years.
Notice there's no entry for "You finally meet someone who loves you."
You can even make your own prediction, and while we certainly couldn't in good conscience ask you to spam their calendar with things like "Woot Becomes Largest Global Retailer" or "SmartPost Delivers First Package in Timely Fashion" or "Mortimer & Monte Dolls Become Self Aware, Thousands Dead," we don't know of any way they could stop you.
And speaking of Woot future events, take to the comments and give us YOUR predictions for the future of Woot. Tell us a year, an event, and if you're so inclined a brief explanation of your future-gibberish.
An email from Twitter sales to prospective advertisers today revealed what brands have been paying for followers on the platform. The memo included cost-per-follower (CPF) rates for Promoted Accounts and cost-per-engagement (CPE) for Promoted Tweets.
The CPF runs between $2.50 and $4, while the listed CPE rates come in from $0.75 to $2.50. For CPE, “engagement” refers to clicks, favorites, retweets and “@Replies.”
As has been the case for a while, Twitter advertisers must commit to three months at a minimum spend of $15,000.
The email pitches advertisers on the benefits of targeting Twitter users who do not currently follow their brand accounts. It says that Twitter is “already seeing well over 15x the impression volume of Promoted Tweets targeted in search, with the same stellar engagement rates.”
Here’s the full sales letter:
Hello,
Thanks for reaching out to us to inquire about Twitter’s Advertising Products. We are happy to inform you that Twitter is preparing to roll out our next phase of beta testing, and we’d like to invite you to join us.
Please review the details of the program at the bottom of this email and reply to this email by COB (close of business), Thursday, 12/8 if your company meets the following qualifications and is interested in learning more. Once I have received your reply, I will follow up with you to set up a call and discuss next steps.
In the interim. I definitely recommend that you follow the @TwitterAds account and check out Twitter’s Advertising Blog here: http://advertising.twitter.com/.
>
Also wanted to take a moment to highlight that for the FIRST time in the history of Twitter advertisers are able to reach highly-relevant and targeted users on Twitter who are not currently following your account, with engaging and timely messages about your brand. At this time, the product is rolled out to only 25% of users on Twitter, and we’re already seeing well over 15x the impression volumeof Promoted Tweets targeted in search, with the same stellar engagement rates.
Why advertise with Twitter?
100+ million active users, over 250+ million tweets per day
Strong engagement rate for all Promoted Products
Access to Analytics Dashboards with tweet-level performance data
Verification of your company’s Twitter account
Promoted Products:
Promoted Accounts: (PAc)Build a critical mass of loyal followers
Target based on keywords, interest, and country
Cost Per Follower (CPF) Auction
Competitive CPF = $2.50-4
Promoted Tweets: (PTw)Amplify your message beyond your core followership
Established Twitter presence; at least 50 tweets per account • Previous experience running SEM, Adwords, or Facebook campaigns
Willingness to provide lots of feedback
Twitter’s IO, Ts&Cs
Expectations:
Beta test: Please remember that this program is still in a testing phase. We are looking forpartners who are tolerant, flexible, and committed to helping us perfect our offerings.
Account Management and Support: Expect live on boarding and training at initial launch, followed by an online help center and automated support throughout the program.
Dry-aged steak is fantastically tender and flavorful, but it's rare to find it outside of steakhouses or quality butcher shops, and it's pretty expensive. America's Test Kitchen shows you can dry age a supermarket steak yourself in your fridge. More »
Mac: Camtasia Studio was one of your favorite screencasting tools, and TechSmith, the company behind the app, updated the Mac version today to version 2.0, which includes new annotations for your screencasts and videos, blur effects so you can obscure sensitive information, visual effects to add some interest, and more. More »
Cable provider Cox Communications has a new app available for subscribers that makes it possible to watch live TV shows and movies in your home -- on an iPad.
The Cox TV Connect app (free, requires cable subscription) brings live shows from 35 different popular channels to the iPad. While that's just a fraction of the channel lineup carried by Cox, it's a start. A similar iPad app from Cablevision allows viewers to watch all channels available to them, but Cox VP of Video Strategy Steve Necessary told GigaOM that they're in the process of negotiating rights with TV networks to add more content to Cox TV Connect.
Some cable carriers such as Comcast only provide on-demand content to subscribers, while other operators like Cablevision and Time Warner Cable are also providing subscribers with live TV. Necessary noted that "A screen is a screen is a screen" in terms of allowing consumers to watch their favorite shows regardless of what device they're looking at. Cox expects to eventually blend the functionality of Cox TV Connect and another app (Cox Mobile Connect) that lets users browse content and program their DVRs from their iPads or iPhones.
A YouTube video of a poll worker casting a vote for an elderly lady went viral; arrested Russian bloggers uploaded a jubilant photo from the police bus on Twitter.
In Russia, a country with Europe’s highest Internet penetration, social media offers an alternative form of election coverage.
“These elections are for the first time taking place in a real situation of parallel information flows – the official one and the one of mass civic networks,” noted media specialist Anna Kachkaeva.
Two examples:
An elderly woman waves her hands in confusion at a ballot in a viral video about parliamentary election violations. A poll worker steps in to do it for her, casting a vote for the pro-Putin United Russia party. One viewer commented: “Our country is like that old woman – silly and silent.”
After complete results of the elections were announced Monday, thousands of protesters went to the streets. Bloggers posted and tweeted the gathering places of protesters.
Ilya Varlamov covered these events on his Twitter feed, his blog and at Ridus, a citizen journalism news agency. Police arrested prominent blogger Alexei Navalny and Iliya Yashin, an activist from the Solidarnodst movement, along with other protesters. He snapped a picture with his iPhone and uploaded it to Twitter. “Sitting with my lads on the police bus. They all say hi,” Navalny tweeted in Russian. (An hour later, he posted a group photo of those arrested in the Izmailovo precinct.
Today Navalny’s court trial was live-tweeted with photos from the courtroom. Both Yashin (in the earlier trial) and Navalny were sentenced to 15 days in jail.
This parallel information network is bound to grow: Russia currently has the highest number of internet users in Europe – 50.8 million people over 15 years old – overtaking Germany, according to recent ComScore data.
Windows has more antivirus programs than we can count, but we keep coming back to Microsoft's own offering, Security Essentials. It's easy to use, lightweight, and does everything in the background, so you rarely need to interact with it. More »