
Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about how Twitter was dipping its toes into the media business by hiring editors and producers to curate content, followed by the launch of a NASCAR media hub that made it obvious where the company’s intentions lay. Now it is about to jump into the global media game with both feet: as reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by us, Twitter will launch a landmark partnership with NBC Universalfor the Olympic Games later this week that will see a team of curators or editors producing a Twitter-based news hub — turning the service into what the Journal describes as “the official narrator” of the Games. The deal marks another step on Twitter’s path towards a media-based future, one in which it tries to navigate the grey zone between being a partner for media companies and being a competitor.
The Journal story describes what sounds like a fairly traditional editorial operation: a team of Twitter staff will be based in an office in Boulder, Colorado and will spend their days filtering through a never-ending stream of reports about the Olympics, picking out the interesting or newsworthy ones from participants, onlookers, officials and others. The only thing different in this case is that all of those editing and curating functions will be directed at the stream of tweets coming through Twitter — and the people doing it will be employed by Twitter, in concert with staff from the NBC Olympic team. Says the WSJ report:
“Twitter’s Olympics hub… is one of the first times Twitter will serve as an official narrator for a live event. NBC will tout the website with on-air promotions and links to athlete interviews or video clips.”
Twitter’s role as a media entity is increasing
This kind of operation, which Twitter confirmed it is launching later this week, seems like an obvious extension of the moves the company has been making recently to expand its media relationships — and in the process become more of a media entity in its own right. The tip-toeing started with the acquisition of Summify and the launch of a curated email for users based on Summify’s recommendation algorithms, and then progressed further with the hiring of a “sports producer” for the NASCAR partnership that Twitter ran in June. Along the way, Twitter has also announced new features such as expanded tweets that highlight content from media partners (while keeping that content contained within Twitter’s apps and website).
Much like the description of the Olympic offering provided by the Journal, the NASCAR arrangement involved a news hub for the event featuring curated and filtered content from a host of different Twitter streams, including those from drivers, official team accounts, fans and others. Although Twitter has downplayed the work involved in doing this — describing the producer’s function as simply reading the stream and “pinning” noteworthy tweets to the top of the NASCAR hub — it’s pretty clearly an editorial function, very similar to what news entities like NBC and the Journal do (or could do) with similar events.

For NBC, partnering with Twitter probably makes sense: the network and its staff understand the dynamics of the Twitter stream and can make sense of things more easily, and having real-time tweets appear on a branded news hub and on television during the Games probably still seems like a cool and geeky addition to the broadcaster’s coverage — in the same way that newscasters now seem to see reading celebrities’ tweets on the air as a necessary part of almost every news event.
What happens when Twitter no longer needs NBC?
The deal clearly makes sense for Twitter too, since it gets a big marketing boost from being associated with the Games, and that will likely translate into a bunch of advertising revenue. And there is probably also some Facebook-related jockeying going on as well: the giant social network has its own deal with NBC for the Olympics, in which the two have agreed to provide content to each other (no money is changing hands in either the Facebookor the Twitter partnership), so that NBC can show viewers what is being talked about on Facebook and the social network gets access to NBC videos and other material.
As I’ve tried to point out before, these kinds of deals are a natural extension of Twitter’s decision to become a media entity powered by advertising — something that has been the subject of much debate recently, and has led at least one entrepreneur to try and launch his own user-supported alternative to Twitter. But they are also a double-edged sword for traditional media companies: they get the benefit of access to curated streams of content, but they are also providing more fuel for Twitter’s own ambitions in the media department, as critics such as blogging pioneer Dave Winer have noted a number of times.
In a sense, Twitter doesn’t really need to partner with NBC to provide this kind of curated news content. It could hire staff and filter public tweets and create a news hub without the broadcaster’s help, just as it could with any other news event. For now, partnering with media outlets makes sense for the company, especially for a tightly controlled one-off event like the Olympics — but that might not always be the case. And Twitter’s ambitions are clearly growing.
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/23/twitter-as-media-its-ambitions-grow-with-nbc-oly...
This is from Nick Bilton, The New York Times‘ tech writer who moved from New York to San Francisco a year ago:
The money here is obscene. The newly minted rich are obsessed with outperforming their rivals. One industry party I attended had a jungle theme. This included a real, 600-pound tiger in a cage and a monkey that would pose for Instagram photos. A prominent Googler’s Christmas party in Palo Alto had mounds of snow in the yard to round out the festive spirit. It was 70 degrees outside. Sean Parker, a founder of Airtime, threw alavish, $1 million party that included models he hired to roam the room and a performance by Snoop Dogg.
Eat dinner with start-up founders and venture capitalists, and the conversation can quickly shift from industry banter about the latest billion-dollar acquisition to the type of private jet people own.
It’s not like that here in Boston, or at least it doesn’t feel like it to me. And that strikes me as a good thing. Bilton is writing about the bubble that envelopes the Valley, and I’m proud to say I don’t think such a bubble exists here in Boston, in part because of the diversity of the city’s strengths. I certainly bump into more entrepreneurs than I did in my previous home of D.C., but I also bump into more doctors, nurses, and academics. If LA is movies, D.C. is government, and San Francisco is tech, Boston is some mix of medicine, science, tech and academia. Perhaps I’m misguided, but I think this diversity helps us. Here’s Bilton again: This is where a select group in the Valley are oblivious to the rest of the world, ensconced in their own protective bubble. In the rest of America, where the unemployment rate is stuck above 8 percent, people are struggling to cover their mortgages or to find jobs that won’t be replaced by technology or sent overseas. In Silicon Valley, some people are worrying about which multimillion-dollar home they can buy — there are only so many available, after all — or whether their handcrafted jeans subtly signal that the wearer is more attuned to aesthetics, like, say, Steve Jobs was.
I haven’t spent much time in the Valley so perhaps Bilton’s description is unfair. But I think Boston’s prowess in medicine and academics helps buttress against this sort of a bubble. It’s why Boston entrepreneurs take such pride in solving hard problems. There’s undoubtedly still a lot about Silicon Valley that Boston still needs to work to replicate. But the bubble that Bilton describes isn’t one of them.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/07/22/there-is-no-bubble-in-boston/
 While we're watching our favorite shows in HD, it's easy to forget that they live and die by ratings, and those ratings aren't always collected with the latest technology. In an effort to improve the sample size and accuracy of ratings for local TV channels, Nielsen is starting to roll out a hybrid technology consisting of watermarks and return data from supporting pay-TV provider's set-top boxes, like DirecTV and Charter. The first three markets to get the upgrade are St. Louis, Dallas and Charlotte, with 17 yet to be announced markets to follow in 2013, and finally, the remaining 190 about two years after that. The system will work in parallel with the older Local People Meters and Diaries for three to six months and will lay the groundwork to collect ratings for online, tablets and other platforms. All the inside industry details and more are in the release after the break. Continue reading Nielsen to use watermarks to enhance local channel rating accuracy Nielsen to use watermarks to enhance local channel rating accuracy originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Jul 2012 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments
from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/22/nielsen-to-use-watermarks-to-enhance-local...
Most small kids can't handle a tall dresser for their clothing until reach double digits agewise. Chigo, a Japanese kids store, developed a stacking dresser tree for kids so that you get three two-drawer dressers that can later combine to form one six-drawer dresser. This item costs a cool grand (plus shipping from the Land of the Rising Sun) but you can take the one unique feature and add it to any two-drawer dresser. More »
  
from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5928037/stackable-dressers-maximize-storage-options
OS X: Droplings is a free menubar app for the Mac that makes it even easier to share files with friends and colleagues through Dropbox. Just drop a file on the menubar icon, and the app builds a preview page for the file, uploads them both to your Dropbox account, and then drops the URL for the page (with the file on it) in your clipboard. More »
  
from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5928178/droplings-uploads-files-and-folders-to-dropbox-...
Hulu's web video player got a major face-lift this weekend, and now features a completely chromeless player with hover-over controls, a newly organized home page that puts your favorite and most often-watched shows front and center, and a new 10 second rewind feature that skips back with a single click so you can catch up on a scene you may have missed. More »
  
from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5928177/hulu-updates-with-a-good+looking-new-web-player...
Android: Friday, a new personal assistant app for Android that keeps an eye on the things you do with your Android phone, collects and organizes them into a kind of "personal Wikipedia" that's all about you. It then uses that database to help you make smart decisions about who you call, where you go, and how you spend your time. You can ask Friday questions about your own life and activities, and Friday will have the answers for you. More »
  
from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5927914/friday-is-a-personal-assistant-that-learns-all-...
 While NBC has already shown off its official Olympics apps for mobile devices, Yahoo is readying an onscreen companion app for connected TVs built on its widgets. While smart TV platforms and boxes are practically everywhere, Yahoo's is built into HDTVs from several manufacturers, and the app is available for TVs from Sony, Vizio, Samsung and Toshiba. It gives users access to Yahoo Sports coverage with video, news and analysis including daily updates on the games and a real-time medal count. If you have a TV with the Yahoo Connected TV store, it should be just a few clicks of the remote away, and content updates are scheduled to start coming in early next week. We're still waiting to see the second screen action we previewed at CES put to use, but maybe this event is just the reminder the world needed that this is on more TVs than Google's effort and actually exists unlike the often-rumored Apple HDTV. Filed under: Home Entertainment Yahoo shows off Beyond Gold Olympics app for its connected HDTVs originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jul 2012 06:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Yahoo Connected TV Blog | Email this | Comments
from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/23/yahoo-shows-off-beyond-gold-olympics-app-f...
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS] sez, "Project Byzantium is a working group of the HacDC hackerspace, and is a live distribution of Linux for easily and rapidly deploying ad-hoc wireless mesh networks for the purpose of emergency communications. They presented last weekend in New York City at HOPE Number Nine and announced their second major release (v0.2a) on stage. They also gave away 500 copies on CD-ROM at the conference. They held workshops all weekend on how to use and test Byzantium Linux, and now they've released the .iso image of this release to the Internet.
(Thanks, The Doctor [412/724/301/703]!)
  
from Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/07/20/byzantium-a-bootable-linux-wi.html?utm_sourc...
With so much talk of “big data” disrupting industries, can it radically change venture capital? Technology Review had a piece recently on a new VC firm using algorithms to help it screen investments:
The $1.25 million was a follow-on investment from Correlation Ventures, which calls itself a “new breed of venture capital firm” — one driven by predictive analytics software built over the last six years by founder Coats and his partner Trevor Kienzle. The effort adds efficiency to the investment process. And for entrepreneurs, it means far faster answers: rejections come in as little time as two days.
To run its model, Correlation Ventures, which is based in San Diego and Palo Alto, California, asks startups to submit five basic planning, financial, and legal documents. It enters these into a program similar in function to credit rating software.
A top-ranked score leads to a 30-minute interview with both the startup CEO and the outside venture firm leading the investment, plus a quick legal review and background check. As a co-investor, Correlation Ventures always relies on some vetting by the primary investor.
The last time I wrote about something like this, I talked to VC’s who emphasized the importance of relationships in this process. Remember: the best entrepreneurs get to choose which VC’s they go with, and might not like being filtered by an algorithm. What I do like about this is how data is being used to improve, rather than replace, VC expertise. If the algorithm can act as a reliable filter, that frees up time for VC’s to do even better due diligence on the companies that are under consideration. The other thing I brought up in my previous post was that this kind of modeling could potentially be really useful in the crowdfunding space. As I wrote then: Someone is trying to bet $1,000 on a startup that the data indicates has an extremely low chance of making it to its next funding round according to the Compass’s modeling. That investment could be prohibited or, even better, just set off an alarm that raises the requirements for completing the investment. Want to invest in a company that the data suggests is about to fail? No problem, but you have to talk to a platform provided investment officer first to ensure you understand what you’re doing.
I’d love to see crowdfunding platforms seeking out partnerships to make this happen. Anyway, to sum up, I’m hopeful that data will [continue to] improve the ability of venture capitalists to do their jobs better. To supplement their abilities, if not replace them. As for total disruption, I doubt it.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/07/18/an-algorithm-to-decide-who-gets-a-meeting-with...
|