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OMG! AwesomenessTV closes $3.5M Series A round

Los Angeles-based digital video production company turned YouTube channel operator AwesomenessTV has announced the closure of a $3.5 million Series A round of funding.

The company, which courts a millennial audience with the now somewhat-expected assortment of cheap-to-make reality shows, received investment from MK Capital, which led the funding round.

Greycroft Venture Partners and New World Ventures contributed to the round, as did media and technology executives Dean Gilbert, Allen DeBevoise, Matt Coffin, Jeremy Zimmer and Michael Kassan.

AwesomenessTV is the brainchild of Brian Robbins, a former actor turned TV producer of youth-targeted shows (Smallville, One Tree Hill).

Also read: YouTube’s U.S. channels – “Forget Europe, show us the money”

Launching on YouTube in mid-June with 15 tween-fueled programs, the company’s channel — which is underwritten under Google’s premium video channel initiative — has garnered more than 10 million video views and 75,000 subscribers through Tuesday.

Programs on the channel include IMO, which is kind of like The View but for junior high and high school-aged viewers, starring young YouTube lumenaries Bethany Mota and Meaghan Dowling. Other offerings include That Was Awesome, a sports highlight show featuring Los Angeles Clippers basketball star Blake Griffin.

Also read: YouTube – “We are to cable what cable was to broadcast”

“Brian and his team have a demonstrated track record of attracting a hard-to-reach young audience,” said MK Capital partner Mark Terbeek, in a statement. “The way they have executed on the YouTube channel concept is very impressive, and this is just the first step.”

Added YouTube chief Robert Kyncl: “Investments like MK Capital’s in AwesomenessTV provide further validation around the growth and velocity of all the great original content coming online.”


from GigaOM http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/07/omg-awesomenesstv-closes-3-5m-series-a-roun...

Do Boston VC’s Need to Better Self-Promote?

A couple weeks back, The New York Times ran an article headlined ‘Venture Capital Firms, Once Discreet, Learn the Promotional Game’ about how Silicon Valley VC’s were cultivating their images. Here’s the gist:

It wasn’t so long ago that venture capitalists kept secrets. The young start-ups they backed certainly sought attention, but most venture capitalists operated under levels of secrecy typically reserved for Swiss banks.

…Now, Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley is one long parade route. Venture capitalists are hiring full-time public relations experts to tell bloggers and reporters of their investing prowess. They publicize their every doing and thought on Twitter and in blog posts.

The undisputed leader in all of this? Andreessen Horowitz.

Why are these efforts necessary? One might argue that they’re not, but the article calls it “a symptom of the stresses on the consolidating venture capital industry,” which is forcing firms to compete fiercely for LP’s.

But if the ramped up PR is done in service of competition between firms, it also helps to brand the region. When Andreessen Horowitz is profiled by Forbes and Wired in one month, it’s publicity not just for the firm, but for the Valley.

This is the time in the post when I’d implore Boston VC’s to talk themselves up more, but instead I want to use this as a moment to highlight the importance of the New England Venture Capital Association (NEVCA).

As NEVCA is becoming more and more active, it’s taking some of the burden off of individual firms to talk up the city of Boston. Take, for example, the video that NEVCA produced for BostonFest. While I can’t claim to have been involved, I love the points that it hits on.

What makes this effort great is the inclusion of the entrepreneurs. As NEVCA ramps up its promotional efforts, it’s centering on entrepreneurs, as well as VC’s.

None of this precludes learning from examples of companies that Boston missed, or even advise some entrepreneurs to head west. The other thing I liked about NEVCA’s video is that it recognized that the startup ecosystem isn’t the only criteria for picking a place to live. People come to, and stay in, Boston because they like it, for many reasons.

The branding of Boston remains a critical task, one that we think a lot about at BostInno. I’m glad to have NEVCA on it, as well.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/08/07/do-boston-vcs-need-to-better-self-promote/

How India’s favorite TV show uses data to change the world

Every Sunday morning, millions of people in India tune in to watch Bollywood star Aamir Khan host one of the country’s highest-rated television shows, Satyamev Jayate. Only unlike so many popular programs, Satyamev Jayate doesn’t involve a singing competition or a collection of volatile strangers living under the same roof. It’s a documentary program tackling some of the country’s most-sensitive topics, and it has the whole country — indeed, the whole world — talking. In order to funnel millions of messages a week into something valuable, the shows producers have turned to big data.

Aside from Khan’s star power, the show is so popular because of the types of issues it tackles — female feticide, caste discrimination, dowry deaths, child abuse and medical practice among them. According to one of the show’s producers, the amount of engagement and the number of responses from viewers is “completely unprecedented.” Here’s a sample of what we’re talking about, just 13 episodes into the show’s existence:

  • 400 million viewers on Indian television and across the world on YouTube.
  • More than 1.2 billion people have connected with Satyamev Jayate across its website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices.
  • More than 8 million people have contributed a total of more than 14 million responses to the show’s content via Facebook, web comments, text-message votes and a telephone hotline. More than 100,000 new people respond each week.

The responses take all sorts of forms, from votes on a weekly poll question to long, heartfelt letters explaining a viewer’s experience with an issue or how the show has changed their thinking on an issue. And although 95 percent of responses come from India, the show has received them from 5,000 locations in 165 countries, including as far away as northern Canada and Alaska. The show’s topics regularly rank among the top trends on Twitter shortly after each episode airs.

Surprisingly, the producer said, the India-created Satyamev Jayate has not received a single piece of hate mail from bitter geopolitical rival Pakistan. In fact, there have been numerous requests for an episode on India-Pakistan unity. (If you have 90 minutes, here’s an episode on human dignity.)

Parsing through millions of messages

In order keep up with all the messages, Satyamev Jayate turned to Persistent Systems, an Indian IT consultancy with offices around the world, which created a system for automating their analysis. Here’s how the process works.

About a day-and-a-half before each show, Satyamev Jayate’s production company tells Persistent what the issue will be and the two groups come up with a taxonomy that will help the system sort through messages based on what topics will be brought up during Sunday’s show. But it’s not by any means the definitive list. As activity ramps up on Twitter while the show airs (tweet rates are highest during commercials and immediately after it ends, by the way), the team gets a sense of what topics are resonating with viewers and what themes they can expect in the nearly million responses that will follow.

When the responses actually do start pouring in after lunch, they hit a system designed by Persistent to automatically tag them and score them based on interest level and sentiment. So, as Mukund Deshpande, head of business intelligence and analytics at Persistent, told me, a long message with an interesting story will be marked as higher quality, while a short, congratulatory note will be scored lower. Because so many viewers write in “Hinglish,” a combination of Hindi and English, an off-the-shelf system wouldn’t have been as accurate for processing these messages.

In the future, he’d like to train the system to recognize various gradients of emotion, too, beyond just simple sentiment. That means not just “positive” or “negative,” but also “happy,” “sad,” “angry” and any other way a viewer might be feeling.

The best messages are then sent to a team of trained analysts — often college students and graduates, along with some Persistent employees — who decide which ones are worth following up on for a Friday radio show Khan does, and for placement on Satyamev Jayate’s web site. These analysts try to ensure that the stories shared are truthful and that the messages don’t contain personal information that could get viewers in trouble or affect their privacy. Data visualizations about how many people have responded and where they come from is available on the Impact section of the show’s site, as well as on separate Impact pages for each episode.

Making a difference with data

Aamir Khan

All this feedback has an impact, both on the show itself and on India. Satyamev Jayate’s voting process, in particular, has yielded some impressive results. After the first episode about female feticide, or the selective abortion of female fetuses, 99.8 percent of viewers said they agreed with the idea of a fast-track court to prosecute doctors who perform such operations. When Khan presented the results to the Indian government, officials agreed almost immediately to amend the court system accordingly, the producer told me.

Sometimes, though, the results simply present an interesting — if not troubling — view into the Indian subconscious. Almost 32 percent of respondents, for example, voted in favor of the right of families to use force preventing the marriage of two willing adults (subsequent analysis uncovered some reasons why, including continuing opposition to inter-caste marriage), while almost 14 percent of respondents one week said that beating a woman is a sign of masculinity. And although women comprise only about 32 percent of the show’s audience, they have accounted for the majority of responses on shows addressing issues important to them.

The producer said his team also uses the data to inspire ideas for future shows and to populate a weekly radio show that Khan does with a local journalist. The Satyamev Jayate team analyzes the week’s messages in order to pick the most powerful and determine trends in viewers’ feelings, and Khan shares them during the interview. The second season, he said, will be shaped in part by how viewers responded to the format during the first season and the issues they want covered next.

Beyond just the next season, though — and the occasional political victory — the hope is that all the data Satyamev Jayate generates will have continuing utility. Deshpande said he’d like to see it used for ethnographic and social science research, because the dataset is larger than most academic studies could generate (something that’s already happening with crowdsourced medical research) and it’s very high quality because of the demographic and geographic information attached to it.

However, the producer with whom I spoke seems perfectly content right now with the way Satyamev Jayate is resonating with the public. For example, he said, viewers are reporting crimes they previously might not have considered too big a deal and are reaching out to disabled citizens. This is the first time many people are speaking openly about these issues, he said, and they’re able to track the effects because they’re able to ensure no message is left behind.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-indias-favorite-tv-show-uses-data-to-change-the-w...

DARPA's Captive Air Amphibious Transporter can drive on water, help during disaster relief (video)

DARPA's Captive Air Amphibious Transporter can drive on water, help during disaster relief video

A couple of months back, DARPA announced it'd been working on developing technologies to help during natural or "man-made" disasters, and this TEMP plan (Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform) included the addition of four key modular systems -- one of which was sea-delivery vehicles such as that monstrous one pictured above. Dubbed Captive Air Amphibious Transporters, or CAAT for short, the rugged wheeler gets its drive-on-agua powers from air-filled pontoons, with its main purpose being to carry "containers over water and directly onto shore." However, according to DARPA's program manager, Scott Littlefield, it is more about the big picture, saying, "To allow military ships and aircraft to focus on unique military missions they alone can fulfill, it makes sense to develop technologies to leverage standard commercial container ships." Thanks to a vid uploaded by DARPA itself, you can now get a feel for what CAAT's all about, so head over past the break -- where you'll find a quick preview of the ATV carrier in action.

Continue reading DARPA's Captive Air Amphibious Transporter can drive on water, help during disaster relief (video)

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DARPA's Captive Air Amphibious Transporter can drive on water, help during disaster relief (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/11/darpa-captive-air-amphibious-transporter/

How to Aggregate and Use Multiple Audio Inputs and Outputs in OS X [Audio]

OS X has a neat feature you might not know about: it can create an aggregate set of audio devices so you can use multiple inputs and outputs in any application, allowing you to configure custom surround sound setups, record from more than one audio interface at a time, and more. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5933282/how-to-aggregate-and-use-multiple-audio-inputs-...

Log your social life with Hazel, Day One and IFTTT

TUAW's own Brett Terpstra has created a new tool called Slogger to help you log your online social life. Slogger, a shortened name for social logger, pulls down updates from your Twitter account, grabs posts from your RSS feeds, gathers links to your daily Github Gists and saves your last.fm playlists and loved tracks for the day. It also uses IFTTT along with Hazel to grab new images from Instagram, Flickr, and Facebook. All this information in then stored in Day One, a journaling app available on the Mac, iPad and iPhone.

The script-based system is designed to run once a day so you can have a daily snapshot of your online social activity. You can read more about the technical side of how this system works and grab the scripts from Brett's website.

Continue reading Log your social life with Hazel, Day One and IFTTT

Log your social life with Hazel, Day One and IFTTT originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/08/07/log-your-social-life-with-hazel-day-one-and-if...

One More Way to Use GitHub as a Recruiter: Notifications and Stars

In a recent post, we delved into the top 5 ways to use GitHub as a recruiter. Just this week, Github released two new features called Notifications and Stars.

Stars

At first glance, these features are unassuming and its not entirely clear that they’re particularly helpful to you as a recruiter. Admittedly, Stars is a little less useful for a recruiter, but is handy because it allows you to keep track of the major repositories that your company or clients use the most in one tidy place.

The real power comes from using Notifications. With Notifications, when you “watch” a repository, you will receive notifications for all discussions on that repository.

So, if there’s a prospect that you find interesting that you know contributes to the Meteor repository that you want to keep tabs on, or you are actively filling a position for a backend developer that uses Redis and you want to know who is actively using and contributing to Redis, all you have to do is watch that repository to begin receiving notifications.

Happy GitHubbing!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, keep coming back every Wednesday around lunch time (EST). We will continue sharing tips and tricks on how to attract great talent every week, as well as share interesting data that we discover along the way to keep you ahead of the recruiting game!

 

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/one-more-way-to-use-github-as-a-recruiter-notifi...

Reality TV Voting App Crashed By Load

Please Stand ByPeople love reality TV. People also love an underdog story. So it it any wonder that viewing audiences flock to talent contest-esque shows that let them vote for their favorites? This phenomena is nothing new, but what was new a few years ago was the option to text your vote instead of sitting on an old fashioned phone line. What’s the next logical step after text-to-vote? Why, an app of course! Except apps require quite a bit more testing than the time-tested texting network. Unfortunately, a TV company in Britain didn’t take that into account. Here’s what happened (from Paid Content):

When UK commercial TV leader ITV announced it would take voting for its Britain’s Got Talent show via mobile app this May, it was supposed to herald the next step in the premium mobile TV participation phenomenon.

But insufficient testing meant the broadcaster could not process half of votes paid for by mobile users, and ITV had to abandon the app mid-series. In a complaint adjudication published by Ofcom on Monday, ITV said it had lost 51 percent of votes which came in via the mobile app.

A lack of load testing and insufficient network capacity was officially blamed for the blunder. ITV, the television network whose app failed mid-season, point-blank says the app’s creators did not perform enough testing before launch. It also announced that it will have more hands-on involvement with all future app testing (a good approach since it’s ultimately ITV that people will remember when they think of the disappointing app). Here’s their official statement:

The provider did not load-test the full infrastructure end-to-end and did not anticipate the firewall problem that occurred.

“ITV said that changes to the process will include enhanced overall project management, the requirement for ITV project managers to review all test data, and improved communication between developers and platform providers so that risks can be identified at an early stage.”

And as it turns out, this particular app provided has a history of not doing enough load testing. Read about the other instances at Paid Content >>>

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/reality-tv-voting-app-crashed-by-load/

Social Media Becoming Online Battlefield in Syria


Social media is often credited with helping spread the Arab Spring, as activists shared messages of discontent and organized protests using Facebook and Twitter. More than a year after the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, it has become a megaphone for propaganda from both sides of the struggle in conflict-ridden Syria.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are replete with propaganda from Syria -- government forces and rebels have been using the networks to spar for the attention and support of the outside world. The Syrian government even has a division, the Syrian Electronic Army, assigned to the task.

"It's not surprising that Syria has attempted to develop a cyber warfare capability," J…
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More About: Arab Spring, Facebook, Social Media, Syria, Twitter, World, YouTube

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/08/09/social-media-syria/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_...