
Spanish-language television network Univision is enticing viewers to light up the web on July 19 for its superhero-themed Youth Awards show with an onslaught of social TV initiatives.
Dubbed Premios Juventud, the show honors Hispanic celebrities and offers several ways for fans' online activity to be featured on the live broadcast, affect who wins or see what's happening behind the scenes.
"What we've done, which some of the other awards shows haven't, is let the fans be part of the content part of show itself," David Beck, Univision's VP and general manager of social media, tells Mashable.
The July 19 social blitz begins on the blue carpet, the show's equivalent of the red c… Continue reading...
More About: Entertainment, Music, TV, celebrities, social tv, univision 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/13/univision-premios-juventud-youth-awards-show/?...
“Let’s make sure that the aerialist is cool with remote control sharks flying around during her act,” I typed into my phone. It was forty-eight hours before our fundraising event, and I was a wreck. We still needed liability insurance. We were short six volunteers. And I needed 1,000 party cups with a biohazard symbol printed on them ASAP.
I am not cut out for this sort of thing. I’m a user experience designer, not a party planner.
Yet, last month my cofounders at LIFFFT (a design-centric product studio) and I threw a fundraiser for Charity Water. Not only am I not an event producer, I’m not even a particularly good logistics person. You’re probably not either. But if you run (or work at) a startup, you’re eventually going to organize a product launch or marketing event. And your budget will probably be less than most high school pizza parties spend. This guide contains my best tips, tricks and hard-won lessons from throwing a last-minute party on a shoestring budget.
1. Find the cool kids and get on their calendar
If you’re using Facebook to promote your event, you have to get over that initial hurdle of “200 people invited … 0 attending.” (Facebook at least had the decency to not show the “declined” count on the event page.) Before I sent out a broader invite, I reached out to a few of my influential friends in the startup and design communities and asked them to respond to what was essentially a pre-invite list. Since Facebook doesn’t let you send a message along with an invitation, I added the following statement to the beginning of the event description:
*** You’re on the PRE-INVITE list ***
Why? We want you to attend. But we also want your help promoting.
Here’s how you can help:
1) RSVP as a “yes” even if you’re not 100% sure you can make it. RVSPs turn into momentum and will bring others on board.
2) We’re going to make it a public event later this week. When that happens, we’ll send around a link to share, encouraging people to donate to the campaign and register for the party. We’re hoping you can help us share that.
This was pretty effective. We got about 45 “yes” replies before sending the invitation to everyone else. When the majority of the invitees landed on the event page, they saw a bunch of “yeses” from cool people they know in real life or follow on Twitter. Instant social proof.
2. Eventbrite > Facebook
In hindsight, I screwed up. As the fundraiser grew in scope (and ambition), I began to realize that I should have used Eventbrite instead of Facebook. Unlike Facebook, Eventbrite shows you how many people actually saw the invite. Eventbrite also lets you send formal emails to attendees. When you want to message attendees on Facebook, they receive it as a Facebook message. Based on anecdotal feedback I received, emails communicate more seriousness than Facebook invites — people are more likely to click through, RSVP and ultimately attend.
Facebook does have one advantage over Eventbrite though — it owns your friends list. However, Facebook makes it really difficult to turn that list into a list of email addresses. Here’s a janky but totally workable five-minute solution:
- Open a Yahoo email account.
- Use its Facebook contact importer.
- Go back to Eventbrite and create a new invitation. In the recipients field, click “import your Yahoo contacts.”
- Voila. You imported your Facebook contacts into Eventbrite.
3. Find real time, collaborative project management tools
We use Asana for managing tasks at LIFFFT, so adding a Charity Water project was a no-brainer for us. Trello, Orchestra or a Google Doc would’ve worked perfectly fine as well. The important criteria is a central, collaborative workspace where everyone can grab tasks and keep them updated as planning progresses.
If you’re not already using a collaborative task management system, I would suggest trying Trello over Asana. Asana’s mobile app may be the worst app (slow/crippled) ever built by frighteningly smart people (and that’s saying something considering how bad Facebook’s app is). Since so much event planning happens on the go, a proper mobile client is absolutely critical. Choose carefully.
You’ll also want a group messaging app for everyone on your core team. We use GroupMe, but iMessage or any number of the competitors would work perfectly fine. The key is application reliability and usage throughout the team. When you’re in the heat of vendor negotiations and need info from another team member, the latency on email is just too long.
In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share my advice on how to best motivate your network to get involved.
P.S. Want to see how the event turned out? Check out the gallery on Flickr.
Donald DeSantis is a user experience designer and partner at LIFFFT, a design-centric product studio focused on disruptive innovation.
Image courtesy of Flickr user thebigo.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/14/a-hackers-guide-to-throwing-a-kick-ass-party-par...
Dalton Caldwell, the man behind failed startups Imeem and PicPlz, recently ruminated on what he wished Twitter could have become. Now he’s moving ahead with his own paid alternative that promises to shun advertising and focus on customer trust.
Caldwell unveiled his big venture called App.net in a lengthy blog post Friday and kicked off a month-long Kickstarter-esque pledge campaign aimed at testing his theory about the need for just such a platform. He’s looking to raise $500,000 from 10,000 people, which he thinks will be enough money to get started and also validate his idea. App.net was originally envisioned as a paid service for mobile developers but has been repurposed to tackle this larger goal of creating a paid version of Twitter.
The product will offer a real-time feed and a social graph similar to Twitter available from a mobile application or website. Ultimately, App.net will support third-party apps built on top of the App.net ecosystem. Caldwell said the consumers aren’t given much choice right now in social startups, which are largely dependent on advertising for revenue. That leads to businesses that work to ultimately sell their users and their data to advertisers, he said. He believes there’s enough of a market for another business model that puts customer and their trust first.
Why isn’t there an opportunity to pay money to get an ad-free feed from a company where the product is something you pay for, not, well, you. To be clear: I’m glad there are ad-supported options, but why does that seem like the only option? For example, I have the option of buying a Mac if I don’t want to buy a crapware-infested PC, right? I have no interest in completely opting-out of the social web. But please, I want a real alternative to advertising hell… I would gladly pay for a service that treats me better. (Emphasis Caldwell’s)
App.net promises to never run ads or sell user data to advertisers. Users will be able to export, back-up or delete their data. The service will supposedly provide developers with a predictable business to build upon and will be focused on satisfying paying users and improving the experience.
Caldwell’s proposal follows a Kickstarter project from Penny Arcade, an online comics publisher, who is looking at replacing the revenue it currently gets from advertising with funding from fans. The two projects raise new questions about whether traditionally ad-supported services can build a viable model by charging users up front in exchange for a product that eschews ads.
I’d personally like to see new alternatives emerge though any competitor ultimately needs to get people in the door to work. 10,000 believers might be enough to get started but you have to recruit the masses to succeed and that can be hard when the experience on Twitter is still very positive for most people. People are increasingly aware that their “free” social networks are really making their money off users and their data. But for the most part, inertia, familiarity and data lock-in keep people from looking elsewhere. And App.net ultimately can’t just be an ad-free alternative, it will have to be better somehow, more compelling, with some kind of killer features or such a radically better design, to get people to switch.
So I’m not very optimistic about App.net’s chances. And the truth is, it may be hard for any big social network to become profitable, as Derek Powazek wrote today. But I’d like to see Caldwell take a stab at shaking up the current dependence on ad-supported services.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/13/are-you-ready-for-a-paid-twitter/?utm_source=fee...
We are thrilled to announce a brand new addition to our stack of deployment tools! You can now upload files directly from your Git and Subversion repositories to your Amazon S3 bucket, in addition to the already supported FTP, SFTP and SSH servers.

Amazon S3 is a perfect fit for hosting your site or application assets, such as images and CSS. And with multiple servers you can simultaneously deploy your application to your servers and your assets to Amazon S3.
Reduced Redundancy Storage Supported
We have also added support for the Reduced Redundancy Storage option when deploying to S3. It can save you money when deploying replaceable files that are not mission-critical.
CloudFront Invalidation Built-in
And to seal the deal we also implemented support for automatic CloudFront invalidation. When setting up S3 deployments in Beanstalk you can specify the ID of your CloudFront distribution and Beanstalk will make sure to invalidate your deployed files in it after every deployment. One less thing for you to worry about.
You can read more about S3 deployments in our help article. Create your first S3 server in Beanstalk today and let us know how it went, we would love to hear from you.
from Beanstalk http://blog.beanstalkapp.com/post/26978752035/beanstalk-gets-deployments-to-a...
The Intelligent.ly campus recently welcomed back Christopher O’Donnell for an encore appearance following his May class around product management. You better believe he delivered big again, this time with The Ultimate Landing Page Workshop! This class was heavily example-driven, and students were even given the opportunity prior to the class to send in their own landing pages to be judged. For some it was a pedestal. For others, a guillotine. One landing page in particular had several flaws that Christopher was quick to correct and offer advice on—good thing they came to class…
Having a successful landing page is all about give and take. The ultimate goal is obviously to secure and retain a customer. However, the smaller, sometimes underestimated exchanges in between is what can make the difference between building a customer base and chasing your customers away. Deliver Value Value. It’s one of the few things in this world that everyone wants. Valuable commodities, valuable information, valuable time. Your potential customers are no different. What does it take to make someone a lead? Simple. Offer them something of value. It might even be as bartering an eBook for an email address. Make them feel as though they’re getting something for not much at all. Once you get that small piece of contact info you’ve officially gotten a lead, which, with plenty of water and sunlight, should eventually become a customer. All you’ve given up is an eBook fresh off the press. Peg Your Personas Tip: Along with the email, ask “What best describes you?” to help peg your personas. Provide users with descriptive, straight-forward options in a dropdown box. This simple step allows your leads to organize themselves for you. Experiment with Tone There are four basic types of messaging you can employ in your landing page: Fear-based, Descriptive, Promise-based, and Social Proof. Here’s some examples of each.
- Fear-based: “Don’t let this happen to you!”
- Descriptive: “Light, fluffy, and straight from the oven.”
- Promise-based: “You’ll see your waist shrink four sizes, guaranteed.”
- Social Proof: “This class helped me get a promotion!”
Switch Your Lens Sometimes seeing your landing page through your visitors’ eyes is the best way to understand what you’re doing right and where you’re losing people. Some things to consider:
- How did they get there?
- What is their state of mind?
- How well do they know you?
- How well do they know what you’re offering?
- How motivated are they?
This is just a taste of what Christopher offered in class. For access to the slides he used in class, click here.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/the-ultimate-landing-page-guide/
Are you looking to really make your family and vacation photos stand out, but haven't been able to figure out the ropes of Photoshop?
Adobe's Photoshop is a difficult program to master, but it puts very powerful tools in your hands. By learning the tricks of the trade, you can do just about anything with Photoshop. It has the ability to do simple tasks, like lightening and color-correction, in addition to the ability to rewrite history by adding someone to a photo -- or deleting him from one!
We've rounded up eight great tutorials from YouTube's collective of artists. They all explain -- step-by-step -- how to easily master a Photoshop technique, and they don't move too fast. The t… Continue reading...
More About: Documenting Your Life Series, adobe photoshop, features, mashable, photo editing, photography 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/photoshop-tutorial-videos/?utm_source=feedburn...
Every month, it seems players in the mobile payment market try to outdo each other, offering merchants a slightly lower transaction fee in a game of one-upmanship. LevelUp, a Boston-based loyalty and payment startup, has played that game to some extent, pushing down its fee to 2 percent. But now, it’s laying down the gauntlet to competitors by doing away with processing fees forever in what it calls a bid to achieve “Interchange Zero.”
LevelUp said it will not charge its 3,000 merchants interchange fees to process credit card payments and will swallow the cost. The company said instead of passing on interchange fees to move money over existing payment networks, it will look to make its money from merchants by helping them bring in new and existing customers. In essence, LevelUp feels like it can make more money by providing offers, loyalty and analytics than by facilitating pure payments.
It’s a big move that could shake up the emerging mobile payments market. Competitors such as PayPal, Square, Google and Isis are adding more value-added services themselves but they’re still looking to profit from the payment transaction itself. But Seth Priebatsch, LevelUp’s chief ninja, said transactions are a commodity that won’t hold up over time.

“The fact that we can move money, that’s not interesting. The fact that we can drive new customers and track them when they come back, that’s real value,” said Priebatsch. “The amount of money we’re making on our campaigns is trending up and we stepped back and said if it’s stable right now we should just skip the middle part of this game and stop charging.”
For the last couple months, LevelUp has charged its merchants 35 cents on every dollar of credit provided to consumers during a campaign. So for instance, in a campaign to bring in 500 new customers, a merchant may offer $2 free credit for a first-time visitor. LevelUp will earn 70 cents for that transaction. Priebatsch said merchants typically bring in $18 for every dollar spent on a campaign. And of new customers who come in through LevelUp, 64 percent come back within 30 days and 40 percent of all new customers complete a loyalty progression with 30 days.
That’s how LevelUp believes it can be valuable enough to charge for these services. By letting merchants push offers to specific sets of customers and providing analytics that track how well the offer does and how often the user comes back, LevelUp is making enough money to support this new Interchange Zero approach. LevelUp, again, is paying the interchange fee but it’s acting like Google, which offers free search because it can make it up on advertising. For merchants, the removal of interchange fees means an average of $500 in savings a month, said Priebatsch.
But how can LevelUp afford to pay the existing interchange fee? Priebatsch said it is able to move money through interchange networks more efficiently using special algorithms and it has less fraud than competitors because of its barcode scanning and token payment system. The company is building out special relationships with banks to further decrease the cost of fees. Over time, Priebatsch said the cost of moving money over the interchange fees has also gone down, but the fees haven’t.
It will be interesting to see how competitors react. It’s still early in the race but merchants are hearing all kinds of pitches on payments, offers and loyalty programs. A service that does away with processing fees and only charges based on real business performance could stand out in the market. Merchants may feel more confident about trying LevelUp because they will only be paying to drive in customers and sales.
This fits into the larger discussion about mobile payment business, which many are realizing is much about about the services around payments than the action itself. Providing an alternative to credit cards or cash has limited appeal to consumers and merchants because the current methods of paying aren’t terribly broken. It’s really in the extra features where payment systems are able to sell themselves.
This will have an impact on not just payment providers, but also new offers and loyalty-focused startups. The reality is that these businesses are all coming together and competitors will need to be able to offer all these elements plus analytics, customer relationship management and other business services as well. LevelUp is showing that in this local scrum, the real value proposition may be in leading first with offers and loyalty and just throwing in payments for free.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/12/levelup-declares-payment-war-kills-interchange-f...
Twilio, a cloud communication platform, is finally offering its most requested feature: global SMS support. Now, developers will be able to enable their apps and services to send and receive SMS text messages from the U.S. and Canada to more than 150 countries around the world, increasing Twilio’s SMS reach to billions of people.
Twilio will now be able to handle messages in dozens of languages including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Russian. Previously, Twilio allowed customers to send text messages to just the U.S., Canada and UK.
The San Francisco-based company already supports international voice calls and had hoped offering SMS around the world would be as easy as voice. But extending text messaging support proved to be a lot harder than first imagined, said Patrick Malatack, product manager for Twilio.
He said the voice industry is more mature and requires fewer carrier relationships to connect calls. But with SMS service, Twilio had to increase its carrier support from dozens to more than 1,000 operators. The company also had to come up with its own routing logic to find the most efficient route for text messages.
Malatack said SMS support will help a lot of existing customers including messaging services and companies that use Twilio for business processes. He said users will now be able to send text messages just as easily as they make calls. Pricing varies by country but generally, many SMS messages can be sent for one cent per message.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/12/twilio-turns-on-global-sms-service/?utm_source=f...
|