
Social media is the news source of choice for Britain's under 25-year-olds residents.
According to the first Reuters Institute Digital Report, 43% of people between 16 and 24 get their news from social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, rather than search engines, such as Google, the Telegraph reports.
Over 45-year-olds' use of social media for getting news pales in comparison to the younger demographic -- just 11% say they get news from the social web. For 33% of British people over 45, search engines are the online method of choice.
Between different social networks, Facebook is the most popular place to share news. More than half (55%) of people share news on Facebook… Continue reading...
More About: connected generation, Media, News, Social Media 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/social-media-news-source/?utm_source=feedburne...

Nobody should have to stay glued to their computer screen. But what if you step away for a moment and miss that vital email? Is there a way to tell from across the room that it came in? How about checking on the weather, or the health of your laptop, or any other digital information you can imagine, without waking your computer?
Now you can do all of that with the help of blink(1), an LED creation (and Kickstarter project) launched Monday by San Francisco startup ThingM.
Blink(1), a tiny device you plug into your USB slot, is a red-green-blue LED that you can program to discreetly alert you to virtually anything.
Set the gizmo to watch for t… Continue reading...
More About: Gadget, kickstarter, LED light, startup, usb



from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/blink1-usb/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=f...
 LinkedIn stock as of July 7, 2012
For nearly a decade and a half, internet companies have been accorded nosebleed valuations by the stock markets. Despite shaky business fundamentals, internet companies have often gotten a premium in the markets.
Magister Advisors, an M&A advisory firm in a press release emailed earlier today noted that all these new companies are getting what it calls “faith multiples.”
Loose translation: public markets are valuing some of the new internet companies too generously, especially when compared to more established companies.
For example, next generation players such as LinkedIn and Facebook have price/earnings (PE) ratios many times higher than industry stalwarts Apple and Microsoft. LinkedIn has a PE ratio of 711 and Facebook has a PE ratio of more than 70. Apple has a PE ratio of 14.5 and Microsoft has a PE ratio of 11.
To put the overrating in context, if Apple, a business with enormous brand value and a world-class track record of execution, received the same valuation as a business like Facebook or LinkedIn, it would be valued at many trillions of dollars.
Victor Basta, managing director of Magister Advisors was pretty harsh in his assessment of the situation. This is how he summed it up
“Unproven future value is worth more than achievement. LinkedIn and Facebook are incredibly important next-generation internet businesses, but it is absurd to believe they are worth several times, or even several hundred times more than companies that already dominate their sectors.
Soon companies like Facebook will reach their own level of ‘saturation’ and this should already be priced in. We may be connected to every cousin or sales executive on the planet, but short of hiring someone or showing them a picture of our mother’s 80th birthday, we quickly run out of enough commercial meat to justify these premiums.
The technology industry has always over-valued the next big thing, and some of this ‘irrational exuberance’ is perhaps understandable. But where is the value for decades of performance? It is only in the technology industry that a bird in the bush is worth far more than a bird in the hand.”
 Groupon stock, July 9th, 2012
All good points. However, we should also not forget that at some point in their life, even Apple, Microsoft and Google were valued at jaw-dropping valuations, especially in the early years of their life. Since then they have grown into more mature and stable companies.
Facebook, could perhaps be the same kind of company. And in case of others who don’t quite match up to the hype, well the stock markets do have a darwin way of dealing with them. Groupon is a perfect example.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/whats-wrong-with-the-tech-valuations/?utm_source...
Getting around a social media site is not always easy. For some users, it's a matter of getting used to social media. For others, the issue is keeping up with constant updates and changes to features, privacy settings, and account specifications. This, of course, is why social media cheat sheets exist.
Cheat sheets are basically infographics that can give a user a simple rundown of various features and how to use them. Here's a roundup of great cheat sheets for the most popular social networking sites.
Google+ 1. Google+ Cheat Sheet by Simon Laustsen

This is a nice little cheat sheet that covers what most users are probably going to need. For example, you'll know how to crea… Continue reading...
More About: contributor, features, Marketing, online marketing, Social Media, trending 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/social-media-cheatsheets/?utm_source=feedburne...

Facebook is teaming up with CNN to socialize coverage of the 2012 election, as the social network aims to become a "second screen" for political coverage.
The new experience, "America's Choice 2012," will encourage Facebook's 160 million U.S. users to share their political views through an app, buzz measurements and surveys. The two companies will aggregate users' sentiment and CNN will incorporate the findings into its coverage.
"Each campaign cycle brings new technologies that enhance the way that important connections between citizens and their elected representatives are made," said Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of U.S. public polic… Continue reading...
More About: cnn, election 2012, elections, Facebook, mashable video, Politics 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/facebook-cnn-election/?utm_source=feedburner&u...
As a continuation from last week’s post, Essential Tips to Make your Life Easier in Excel, we are excited to share tips for basic Excel formulas!
 To reiterate our proposal, we will help you with a series of great tips on Excel in the next several weeks. Since our community has answered more than 1,000,000 questions in the Smarterer Excel test, we want to help you by cutting through the clutter and drill down on the most important techniques in Excel. For part 3 of this series, here are of the most frequently used formulas that anyone should learn: Basic Excel Formulas:Excel is a prerequisite for most professions today: accounting, finance, sales etc. For almost any job, you will have a bunch of data points to analyze. Here are basic formulas you won’t escape from:
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Sum(range): Adds the numerical value of all cells within a range. Text are ignored.
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Average(range): Obtains the arithmetic average of all cells within a range.
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Median(range): Obtains the middle value all cells within a range.
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Round(range), number of decimal places): Round the value to the specified decimal place.
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Min(range): Obtains the lowest value of all cells within a range.
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Max(range): Obtains the highest value of all cells within a range.
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Count(range, value): Counts the number of cells that contain numbers that are not in a contiguous row or column.
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Countif(range, criteria): Counts the occurrence of a value within a range.
Fancy & Powerful Excel Formulas:When you have a large dataset with thousands of categories and data points, how do you go about your project? Thanks to Excel, many analyses today much easier to execute comparing to the old days, saving thousands of hours of mundane, manual labor. Here, we recommend 3 formulas that you must master to get to the next level: Sumif(range, criteria, sum-range): Suppose you are a real estate agent and wants to know your commission based on different value of properties that you sell: For the total sum of the commissions for property values over 160,000, use this formula =SUMIF(A2:A5,”>160000″,B2:B5). Explanation: The A2:A5 defines the range. “>160000” is the criteria that Excel should search for, and B2:B5 is the range/column where Excel look for the values to sum up.
Vlookup(value to lookup, range, number of column, exact match): Suppose you are a scientist and you have the following data: 
In this example, your goal is to find the Temprature when Density is 1.09. Explanation: Using VLOOKUP(1.09,A2:C10,3,FALSE), Excel first searchs the Density column (within range A2:C10) and finds the row that matches 1.09. It then finds the corresponding value in the Temperature within the same row, by counting the number of columns from left to right (e.g. Viscosity column would be 2, and Temperature column would be 3). The “FALSE” property at the end specifies that you would like an exact match for 1.09 in column A. If(criteria, do this, else do this): For many beginners, if statements look intimidating at first. But once you get used to the syntax, it is actually very straightforward. For example, you’re a financial analyst with a budget of $100. For this year’s budget, you have $50 in cell A1. To generate a simple report for management, you want cell B1 to display the words “Within budget”: To do this, you simply input into cell B1 this formula: IF(A1<100,”Within budget”,”Over budget”). Explanation: the formula first looks at cell A1 and see if the value is less than 100. If it is, then it will display the words “Within budget” (note that in order to display text, you must wrap the value in quotation marks). Otherwise, if cell A1 is greater than $100, cell B1 should display “Over budget”. As you might expect, you can combine various formulas to perform very sophisticated analysis in Excel. But before jumping the gun, it’s important to achieve mastery of individual formulas first. In Part #3 next week, we will show you how to combine these techniques to propel your productivity. Follow us on Twitter @smarterer to stay tuned for Part #3: Complex Techniques with Formulas. In the meantime, why not test your current knowledge of Excel with our test? 
The post Tips for an Easier Life in Excel, Part #2: Formulas appeared first on The “…er” Blog.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/tips-for-an-easier-life-in-excel-part-2-formulas/

GitHub is ready to take a huge step forward. After successfully bootstrapping its operation since 2008, the open-source code hosting site is set to announce Monday that it has accepted $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz in order to improve and expand a platform that has become an industry standard for managing and finding code on the web.
The investment is the single largest by legendary venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz to date, and is the first source of external funding that GitHub has accepted since it launched in 2008. Peter Levine, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will join GitHub’s board.
The startup will use the funding to hire additional employees and expand to new platforms such as mobile. CEO Tom Preston-Werner said the company hopes to develop new features but also improve existing ones, such as web applications for different operating systems. The idea is to make GitHub useful for a broad range of clients, from individual hackers to large enterprises, and from software developers to designers or authors.
In a blog post, Levine wrote that “it’s the largest investment we’ve ever made,” and explained why the firm decided to invest in GitHub:
They had a vision for a new way to develop software and created a new kind of company to pursue it. With only a handful of people in sales and marketing, the four grew the company to over 100 people, while growing revenue at nearly 300% annually—and profitably nearly the entire way.
GitHub’s site holds more than 3 million software repositories (co-founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath once described it as “the Wikipedia for programmers”) and counts more than 1.7 million developers as users. On an average day, 80,000 repositories are updated and 7,000 individuals push their first repository to GitHub’s site, according to the company. Its open-source platform allows developers to work collaboratively on projects without losing any overlapping work, and look at code others are writing that has been posted to the site.
The funding marks a significant change for GitHub, which has prided itself on funding entirely through customers. In March, Wanstrath explained in an interview with GigaOM how this was important to the company’s mission:
“We’ve never raised any outside capital, so everything is bootstrapped. We started charging three months after our beta, so the whole time that GitHub has been alive, it’s been funded by its customers,” he says. “We really believe that the most important thing is making GitHub high quality. It has to be something that people are willing to pay for, because if they pay for it, we can keep working on awesome stuff.”
But Preston-Werner, who took over from Wanstrath as CEO a few weeks ago to lead the company’s new growth and let Wanstrath focus on product development, said the additional money will not change how GitHub operates, it will just allow them to hire the best programmers and develop ideas they already had in the works:
“In general, the money will allow us to take everything that’s already good about Github and crank it up to another level,” he said.
Barb Darrow has written for GigaOM how GitHub has become hugely popular among programmers or individuals looking for open source code online, allowing programmers to take advantage of existing code to create more efficient projects:
In the open source world, instead of writing everything from scratch, developers can mash up applications using code snippets that are already written and tested. That’s great from a productivity standpoint. And cloud computing eases deployment and distribution of those applications. Win, win.
Om has noted that GitHub has changed how programmers get hired, as the site provides an online platform for them to display what they know and how good their code is, a critical development as the war for programming talent in Silicon Valley grows:
I know of a dozen startup founders who regularly spend time on GitHub, looking for engineers and programmers they can add to their team.
GitHub is headquartered in San Francisco, but its workforce is distributed, with many of the company’s employees based around the world, Wanstrath explained to GigaOM in an interview in March:
“For designers and developers building a new creative product, we don’t believe that an assembly-type nine to five really makes any sense,” Wanstrath said. “We built a lot of GitHub at 1 a.m., so why should anyone here be different? It’s all about having high morale. We think that makes better products. If people are enjoying their work, they’re going to be more creative. They’re going to be thinking about it in the shower and it’s going to be a better end result for the people using it.”
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/07/09/github-finally-raises-funding-100m-from-andreess...
Reality television sensation Big Brother returns for its 14th season on Thursday with a new interactive initiative that promises to up the show's social and addictive ante.
Big Brother Connect will aggregate live social streams, feature hashtag-driven polls and will give über fans the chance to see their tweets live during Thursday night broadcasts.
"Big Brother has an insatiable fan base on-air, online and across coil platforms," said Marc DeBevoise, Sr. Vice President and GM of Entertainment at CBS Interactive. "This season, we wanted to give Big Brother fans a true second-screen, social experience, offering even more ways for them to find and interact with not only each other, but… Continue reading...
More About: big brother, big brother connect, cbs, Connect, Entertainment, social tv, TV



from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/big-brother-social-tv/?utm_source=feedburner&u...
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