Mick Darling's posterousAll my blogging in one spot. (mostly)Filed under: readerLast.fm Passwords Also Leaked; Change Yours Now [Security]
Yesterday it was LinkedIn and eHarmony accounts compromised; today it's Last.fm. The music streaming service is advising users to change their passwords immediately, as the company is currently investigating a leak of some Last.fm user passwords. More »
Artificial cells evolve proteins to structure semiconductors![]() A marine sponge that produces silicon dioxide fibers.
Scientists have applied genetic engineering to create proteins that can be used to create electronics. They've used the tools of molecular biology and principles of evolution to find proteins that can make new structures of silicon dioxide, commonly found in computer chips, and titanium dioxide, often used in solar cells. Traditional genetic engineering involves sticking a foreign gene into bacteria and using the bacteria as tiny factories to make the protein encoded by that gene. This approach wouldn’t work for all silica-binding proteins found in marine sponges. The minerals produced by these proteins, which the researchers want to study, can kill the cells. So Daniel Morse, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues looked to another protein making strategy: synthetic cells with a tiny plastic bead nucleus surrounded by a bubble of oil that acts as a cell membrane. Delivering B2B Social Media Value
Some B2B shops might be comforted to hear that the #2 reason for following brands is that the person is an existing customer and/or wants to show some loyalty to the company. That’s excellent fuel for building a community, which is incredibly important, but what if you want untapped business (prospects) to jump into your social circles as well? “No Deals” Doesn’t Mean “No Value” At the end of the day, value is what compels B2C “deal hunter” followers. People are willing to exchange their time, attention, and tweets (or whatever) for something they perceive to be getting in return. If you’re not saving them money on your product or service, you can be making them bigger, stronger, and faster with some insightful thought leadership. You can arm them with good, relevant content that they can share with their own networks. You can deliver them outstanding support and customer service, faster than any of your competitors. And yes, you can also include them in your tight-knit community where they feel like they have a voice and are part of something special. The list goes on and on. These value-adds are incredibly important to potential consumers – arguably more than your run-of-the-mill special offer, especially if you can provide these things consistently. Run your content through this kind of mental litmus test: is this piece the equivalent of a 20% discount? Round up the experts in your company to start blogging or to help create other forms of helpful digital content. Actively tie your support team into each appropriate social channel where they can make an impact (these suggestions deserve a post on their own). Select channels to engage your community of customers and funnel prospects into these channels as well (more on this below). Have a Purpose for Each of Your Channels Instead of just asking people to follow, like, or add you, give them a reason to. Use each of your social channels to add something unique to this greater value-adding scheme of yours. Here’s how we use ours at Brainshark:
Community Really Does Matter… …and not in just the flowery, “let’s hold hands” kind of way. Did you know that 60% of the average B2B purchase decision occurs before a prospect talks to a sales rep? People have grown accustomed to finding product information on their own, and a large part of it involves asking friends and other users for their opinions. By using social to foster a community around your brand, you’ll be arming your existing users (or followers) to recommend your products and services to those in need. No matter how attentive you are to the social web, there’s no way you can get to every single opportunity. If you successfully create an engaged community, no matter how large, you enable the members of that community to become ancillary social marketers for you. This way, you can actually contribute to that 60% of the decision-making process. This often occurs if you execute the last two suggestions properly. If followers begin relying on you for great content and find something useful and engaging on each of your channels, including real-time support, they’ll be happy to be stuck in your web and pull others into it as well. Create groups or other areas where prospects can easily find existing users of your service! The same can be said here for B2C firms (I believe there actually isn’t all that much difference between B2B and B2C when it comes to social media). Yet, it’s that much more important for B2B firms since they tend to have fewer customers – making each one all the more important. Gerry Praysman is the Buzz Marketer at Brainshark. You can follow him on Twitter @gpraysman, and visit the Brainshark Key Uses page to learn more about how video presentations can benefit your overall marketing strategy. from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/delivering-b2b-social-media-value/Revolutionary Paper Scanner Folds Flat, Costs $15 on KickstarterThis portable smartphone-enabled scanner is on the verge of changing how we work. The Scanbox on Kickstarter is a foldable scanner that's easy to put together and snaps in place with magnetic buttons. The scanner, made from a high-quality laminated card, works with most smartphones with a back-facing camera. The Scanbox can digitize full-size documents and anything that fits into its dock. Watch the video above to see how the scanner works. The Scanbox has been 702% funded with 31 more days left on the crowdsourced funding platform. Backers can receive the scanner with a $15+ donation. The scanner will go into production once its Kickstarter de… Continue reading... More About: kickstarter, Tech, trending, Video Social TV: Social Marketing Practices That Translate Beyond TelevisionFor us marketers engaging in a dialogue with your key audience and cultivating that ongoing relationship is crucial to maintaining brand awareness and loyalty. Social TV is no exception. In the largely uncharted waters of social media, Social TV is an arena marketers can no longer afford to ignore. People are using this space at a rapidly growing rate, and certain television networks, like Discovery Communications LLC and USA Networks, are reaping the benefits. In this post, I’ll discuss what Social TV is reviving an industry, pronounced by many pundits as slowly dying. What can we as brand marketers learn from this Social TV revolution in media? Plenty. What exactly is Social TV? By now, I’m sure you’ve seen them on your favorite TV shows. Intruding ever so slightly, it’s there, on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, pulsing in and out of visibility: the hashtag. Those who are not well adverse in social media often dismiss or don’t even see it on the screen. But to an ever-increasing population, it signals a conversation going on that you don’t want to miss. Social TV is a term used to describe both the technology and processes that allow social interaction amongst fans, TV producers, and distributors…on the TV screen. Featured in The Social Media Monthly October 2011 issue, the article “The New Fall Season: Social TV poised to change how we find, purchase, and consume television,” by Carri Bugbee, boasts The MIT Technology Review listed Social TV as one of the “ten most important emerging technologies in 2010.” Television viewing has always been a social phenomenon, but the birth of Tivo, DVR and YouTube, has stagnated our “water cooler” moments – the “Who shot JR?” moment or the blackout ending of The Sopranos finale. Social TV has brought these moments back to us in a newer and re-imagined way with some impressive statistics:
It seems Social TV offers a place for fans to interact over favorite programs both in real-time and on a grand scale. This type of connectivity gives networks insight not only as to how people are watching and consuming media but also their degree of engagement, insights that were previously inaccessible. Emerging from the pack, Discovery Communications, LLC is creatively engaging in the conversation with viewers and building a growing network of fans. According to Gayle Weiswasser, Vice President, Social Media Communications at Discovery Communications, social media has made TV a social experience again. With its vast assortment of networks – from Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TLC– the company manages 70 Facebook Fan pages boasting 40 million fans, and 20 Twitter accounts with 2.4 million followers. Gayle shared that their philosophy on social media is “to use it as a platform that enhances the viewing experience and the relationship with the viewers”. Part of cultivating that relationship through blogposts, sneak peaks, photos from show talent and more, requires a kind of content producing powerhouse that goes above and beyond a show’s storyline or premise. For example, Discovery’s What Not To Wear Facebook Fan Page (over 800,000 fans at the time of writing this blogpost) links to articles about fall fashion trends, while the DC Cupcakes Facebook Fan Page features mouth-watering recipes (over 160,000 fans). Lauren Drell from Mashable quotes Weiswasser as saying “content may not have anything to do with the show, but it is relevant to our viewers.” Weiswasser attributes their success to four easy steps:
By far, the most successful social media campaign on Discovery’s resume is the Shark Week promotion. During the week of air in July 2011, there were more than 750,000 tweets mentioning Shark Week — an eight-fold increase over last year — and the handle @SharkWeek grew to close 60,000 followers. The Shark Week Photo Frenzy – a call for fans to submit photos of how they celebrate Shark Week, got 600,000 page views and more than 1,000 submissions, in addition to 80,000 views of the Photo Frenzy tab on Facebook (Drell). The Facebook Page accrued 30,000 fans in a single day (116,000 fans throughout the week). The result? 3.9 million viewers for opening night, the highest number in Shark Week history, coming in at a 2.8 for the 9-11pm time slot. Part of the high rating can also be attributed to a well-executed app that lets viewers participate in social conversations on their computers, iPhones and iPads. This balance between content generation and allowing fans to shape the course of content has proven to be a powerful exchange for Discovery Communications. Because of social media, Discovery and other networks can now listen to that social discourse, the “likes” and “dislikes,” and mold their content to drive ratings. “We want the content to speak for itself,” says Weiswasser. “If it’s compelling, people will want it — that’s how we got this footprint” (Drell). What can brand marketers learn from this? While Discovery Communications is not the only network finding success with social marketing campaigns, they provide a good example of how brands can market successfully with social media. For a network, the outreach – the blogs, photo campaigns, Twitter postings, Facebook engagement, etc. – becomes an extension of their storyline. Using the television show as the initial premise behind their social media marketing, they broaden those topics to deliver more relevant content for viewers with intent on keeping viewers coming back to the shows. Just as Old Spice became a phenomenon through a social TV lens, so can other brands. But it begins with good content – The Man Your Man Can Smell Like campaign wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without the right actor, a pithy, witty script, and the medium (YouTube in this case). The other key factor in making this campaign a huge success was singling out their key audience, in this case, women – but while still appealing to men. The initial commercial was not only funny but it drove home the point that real men don’t use women’s body wash and if you want your man to live up to his potential, he needs his own. These are definitely lessons we hear all the time – content is key, go beyond your initial product to further engagement — but what networks are discovering through Social TV is that their social outreach may be equal or even more important than the actual product of their shows. Old Spice followed up their initial commercial with several vignettes using the same actor and premise. The goal of their first commercial was to increase sales but they did more than creating one successful commercial. They personalized the brand, giving it dimension and a story arc that extends beyond its first inception. This three-pronged attack pushed the campaign from successful to legendary. Got a favorite TV show that keeps on living in the social realm? Using Social TV to engage fans and keep them coming? Share your insights, experiences and questions on this blog, Twitter: Facebook at: Awareness, Inc., Social Media Marketing Best Practices and Social Media Marketing Mavens pages, and in our LinkedIn Social Media Marketing Mavens Group. Mike Lewis @bostonmike from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/social-tv-social-marketing-practices-that-transl...How Easy is it to Obtain Starwood Stay and Night Credit on an Award Redeemed from Someone Else’s Account?My stay in Iguazu Falls at the Sheraton was on points, a reservation gifted to me by a friend with more Starwood points than he can shake a stick at. Points for incidentals at the hotel (e.g. my bar tab!) didn’t post automatically to my account, so I scanned a copy of the bill and sent it in for credit. The points were promptly added to my account. Strangely, though, my stay and night counter for elite status didn’t go up. Now, it doesn’t matter a great deal for me. I have Gold status through the American Express Platinum card. I’ll earn Gold status on my own, anyway. And I’m not expecting to hit Platinum as tempting as this year’s changes to the program make it to do so. But it’s the principle of the thing, plus it’s more nights towards lifetime status. So I followed up. No dice. I was told that since there were no room charges, I get no stay or night credit.
That’s wrong, of course, Starwood now counts award stays towards status. I know this because I broke the story and even posted an internal memo confirming it prior to the announcement. So I really do know this. I replied quite simply,
Now the problem becomes that my wife’s name appeared on the booking (at check-in we had to present both our passports, so she was registered to the room along with me).
Of course, nothing ever touched her account and neither Starwood nor the hotel ever had her account number. I admit, I was starting to show some frustration. And I let them know this.
Do you think that solved it? If it did, I probably wouldn’t be writing a blog post! Here’s the new hurdle I faced:
Oh boy. Now I’m really frustrated, because the agent isn’t just confused, they actually don’t understand the rules of the SPG program. So I had to explain to them that award nights count towards status for the person who actually stays in the room. And I admit, I’m not proud of my frustration here. I’m certain this person means well. They don’t deserve my snippiness. And yet as normally controlled as I am, I’m not sure my response was as measured as it should have been.
I guess once they finally ran out of objections it was ok to give me the credit. This last email seems to have done it.
I’ll rarely ever give up. I almost always prefer to deal in writing, it helps avoid a moving target and also means I can forward previous correspondence especially if and when I don’t hear back as expected. Question, though: having had to go through back flips to get Starwood’s policies honored, should I be compensated with some Starpoints for the trouble? What say you? Update: I did email asking for points for the trouble. They haven’t replied, but posted 500 points to my account. Meh. WD TV adds streaming options, tunes televisions near and far to your SlingboxA raft of goodies has been tacked on to Western Digital's TV Live and TV Live Hub media players including new streams and Vudu movie downloading, but the addition of SlingPlayer might be the most intriguing. Depending on your region, you'll see new channels on the WD set-tops, including The AOL On Network, Red Bull TV, ABC iview (Australia), Acetrax Movies, Maxdome and BILD TV-App. Walmart's Vudu service will also be added, letting domestic and some foreign users buy or rent from a library of 70,000 downloadable films and TV shows. Finally, if you're a frequent traveler, you can pack your WD box and fire up the new SlingPlayer on your hotel TV to watch hometown broadcasts wherever you may be. Provided you've got a Slingbox back home, of course. To find out more and see what's available in your country, check the source or PR below. Show full PR text New International and Domestic Entertainment Options Complement WD TV(R) Live[TM] and WD TV(R) Live Hub[TM]'s 'Play Anything' Popularity IRVINE, Calif., June 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Western Digital(R) (NASDAQ: WDC), the world's leader in external storage solutions and maker of the popular WD TV(R) media player family, today introduced a variety of new entertainment options for the WD TV Live[TM] and WD TV Live Hub[TM] media players. Current and new users can now enjoy Red Bull TV[TM], ABC iview (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Acetrax[TM], Maxdome, the BILD TV-App, and the AOL On Network. They can also watch live and recorded TV with the new SlingPlayer(R) app and save their premium HD movies to the WD TV Live Hub's internal storage with VUDU. WD's new entertainment choices add to the WD TV media player family's prodigious ability to play personal content such as videos, photos and music by supporting a wide range of media formats. Users can watch content located on any networked PC or Mac(R) computer in the home, from a network drive such as WD's My Book(R) Live[TM] personal cloud storage, and from any directly connected digital camcorder, camera, or USB drive. WD TV Live Hub owners can also save and share pictures and videos from outside the home, using the WD Photos[TM] app for iPhone(R), iPad(R) and Android[TM] mobile devices. "WD continuously listens to its customers, and adds the content options they want," said Scott Vouri, vice president and general manager, WD connected home solutions. "With today's addition of hot international and domestic channels, live TV through SlingPlayer, and HD movie rentals, purchases and downloads through VUDU, the WD TV media players truly provide the most entertainment." The WD TV Live Hub is the only media player to offer direct HD movie download service for today's hottest new movie releases purchased from VUDU's large library of movies and TV shows. VUDU is a subscription-free, HD video streaming service, which offers more than 70,000 blockbuster titles including new releases, Hollywood classics, independent films, and TV shows. Because it has an integrated 1TB hard drive, the WD TV Live Hub can save and play back purchased digital content from VUDU, including the high-quality HDX[TM] video format that features 1080p Full HD and rich Dolby Digital Plus[TM] 7.1 audio. "By centralizing their entertainment on the WD TV Live Hub, our customers get high-performance full-HD movie playback without overloading their home network or cluttering up the hard drives of other PCs in the house," added Vouri. From "Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol" to "The Muppets" WD brings today's top movies to the WD TV Live Hub for a cinema-like experience at home through the available VUDU service. New Services[1] Now Available: SlingPlayer (worldwide) - With a Slingbox(R) connected in your home, the SlingPlayer app brings your living room TV experience to your connected device in any room - around the home or around the world. Availability The WD TV Live and WD TV Live Hub can be purchased at select retailers and online at wdstore.com. About WD WD, a storage industry pioneer and long-time leader, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company designs and produces reliable, high-performance hard drives and solid state drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. Its storage technologies serve a wide range of host applications including client and enterprise computing, embedded systems and consumer electronics, as well as its own storage systems. Its home entertainment products enable rich engagement with stored digital content. WD was founded in 1970. The company's products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital(R), WD(R) and HGST[TM] brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information. Western Digital, WD, the WD logo, WD TV, and My Book are registered trademarks in the U.S. and other countries; WD TV Live and My Book Live are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Other marks may be mentioned herein that belong to other companies. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. Not all products may be available in all regions of the world. All product and packaging specifications subject to change without notice. As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. Source: PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1dpR0) WD TV adds streaming options, tunes televisions near and far to your Slingbox originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jun 2012 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/06/wd-tv-streaming-vudu-slingplayer/Ex-Huffpo CTO launches RebelMouse, a social publishing platform
It’s like a flexible version of a Tumblr or WordPress site that is easy to configure, allowing users to create a very robust page out of existing and new content. It can serve as a more personal representation of a user, more than a Facebook, Pinterest or About.me page. RebelMouse users who sign-up for the waiting list today will soon be allowed to view the work of some early private beta testers. The site will open to the public in the next two to six weeks. Berry told me the idea behind the site came from people constantly asking him for advice on how to create their own site. He said that can be too much of a struggle for people, something he set about trying to solve after leaving HuffPo in February.
Berry said the goal is to create something that’s fresh and social. So users can pick and choose what content they’ve shared through Facebook and Twitter and turn it into a post on a larger page. Or they can create an original post with their own media. There’s a bookmarklet for pulling in images from other sites, similar to Pinterest. And there’s analytics for each post so you can see how many people are reading it. What’s cool about RebelMouse is you can easily arrange the different posts and freeze specific posts to a location, while the rest of the content is updated around it. That allows users to get out of the reverse chronological order that is common on most blogging platforms. “Reverse chronological is very stone age,” Berry said. “It doesn’t represent how you’re thinking. There should be an element of recency but you should be able to highlight stuff you care about most.” RebelMouse, the second start-up out of Berry’s SoHo Tech Labs incubator, will be working through the feedback of its private beta testers and adding new features before it opens up. The site will soon have more discovery features to allow people to easily browse what other people are doing. And there will be more sources of content including Instagram, Tumblr, RSS and others. Berry said RebelMouse is also adding a commerce function so people can sell things directly on their RebelMouse pages. And they’re also working on finding a way to connect creators with brands, who might be interested in sponsoring posts. RebelMouse will be free to people who have their page hosted on the site. It will charge individuals $3 a month to power a domain. Bigger blogs and corporate pages will be charged $3 a week. For the notoriously impatient Berry, who hates creating anything in stealth mode, it’s a big milestone to finally start lifting the covers on RebelMouse. The goal now is to quickly set the service loose and see how viral and sticky it can get. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
The Huffington Post: Yet Another Fan of Content CurationMost of you likely visit the Huffington Post on a regular basis – and you aren’t the only one. The self-proclaimed “internet newspaper” boasts 28M monthly unique, influential viewers and is continually growing. What’s perhaps most interesting to us over here at Curata, is the recent buzz suggesting the news outlet is joining the content marketing club. According to articles in AdAge, Business Insider and Marketing Pilgrim, the HuffPo is kicking off a new service that will help brands and agencies build branded websites and assist in the creation, curation and distribution of content to brands’ key consumers. Already, HuffPo is in talks with a major consumer-goods advertiser to create its first such website. According to sources, the publisher will work with a team of social marketers from the ad company to generate new lifestyle-oriented content for the branded site and to curate existing material from The Huffington Post. What spurred the new offering? Execs at AOL Advertising (HuffPo is a subsidiary) say the news site wanted to keep up with the evolving marketplace where brands are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of producing and sharing strong content. It’s probably only a matter of time before more publishers begin to incorporate content creation and curation as a revenue stream- just look at the results of our latest Content Curation Adoption Survey which cites how 95 percent of marketers are curating. With a figure like that, content curation must be doing something right. Still, it’s awesome to see yet another major name get involved in the growing cause and work with others to both give and receive all of the benefits this type of marketing has to offer. Have you heard of any companies jumping on the content curation bandwagon? We’d love to hear what you think. Oh and we’re psyched that this is our first Bostinno channel post – we’re looking forward to “dropping knowledge”! from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/the-huffington-post-yet-another-fan-of-content-c...Gaikai-powered cloud gaming coming to Samsung Smart TVsAt this point, most people (in the tech world, at least) are quite familiar with Gaikai's cloud gaming platform, which lets users have a not-quite-console quality gaming experience on any device. The technology has found its way onto Facebook and in LG TVs, and now Gaikai's bringing gaming to Samsung TVs, too. Called Samsung Cloud Gaming (SCG), it'll be available via the Smart Hub on Samsung 7000 series and up Smart TVs in the US this summer. The technology powering SCG is the same as what's behind LG's service, but Sammy's customized the UI to suit its sensibilities. We got a chance to speak with Gaikai CEO David Perry about his company's latest partnership, so join us after the break for more. Continue reading Gaikai-powered cloud gaming coming to Samsung Smart TVs Gaikai-powered cloud gaming coming to Samsung Smart TVs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/05/gaikai-powered-cloud-gaming-coming-to-sams... |
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