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Want better, not more connections? Check out Pipe

A few years back, when I was unwell, I took a vow that I would try and reach out to one person from my past and talk to them on the phone every day. I have done that for nearly four years, though given the size of my rolodex, I am yet to go through the list twice. These don’t include people I currently work or socialize with, or have established relationships in past 12 months. The experience that follows this one-on-one connection is quite rewarding — people are surprised that you remember or that you care to get in touch.

So, yesterday when I came across Pipe, I knew I had to share it with you guys. (Don’t confuse it with the file-sharing app that launched a few weeks ago. My colleague David Meyer wrote about them for GigaOM Europe.) The idea behind the app is basic and simple — it sifts through your social graph and encourages you to get in touch with one person on your list.

The app finds a person, shows some of their basic details, including their social networking identities and offers a plain and simple box to write and send them messages. You can email them, or send them messages via Twitter or LinkedIn. If you don’t want to connect with them today, you can tell the service to remind you later. Or you can simply ignore someone forever and the system will banish them to social networking hell. Pipe is working on Facebook integration, so for now you need a LinkedIn account to use it.

I sadly don’t have a LinkedIn account anymore, so I haven’t used the app. However, when they add Facebook support, I will use the app on a more regular basis. The Pipe app comes at an opportune time. As more and more networks proliferate, we are getting bogged down in frivolous updates but not really connecting with one another.

I must warn you, the app is very raw and the company is tiny and has few resources. At best it is in alpha-stage and currently works on both mobile and regular web browers. If you do end up trying, leave a comment or suggestion here. Also, please don’t judge them for what they don’t have, instead, think about it as a tool to make social networks what they are really meant for — for us being more social.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/06/04/want-better-not-more-connections-check-out-pipe/...

TwitchTV Announces First Game with Built-In Live Streaming


TwitchTV announced Monday the first game with built-in livestreaming, circumventing the difficult systems players would normally have to use to broadcast their games live.

TwitchTV will integrate streaming into The Showdown Effect, a PC game published by Paradox Interactive. A simple button on the game’s dashboard will allow players to begin streaming their gameplay to TwitchTV viewers.

The partnership represents lowering the barrier of entry to live streaming, according to Matthew DiPietro, Vice President of Marketing for Twitch TV. “We realize it’s not easy for all gamers to share their games, but we’re working on changing that,” DiPietro said, confirming that TwitchTV is working on additional integration partnerships to be announced at a later date.

The Showdown Effect is a shooter that attempts to simulate the over-the-top nature of action movies. According to the Paradox website, gamers will be able to use an arsenal of ridiculous weapons, including grenades, lightsabers and frying pans. Lead producer Shams Jorjani said elements like this will result in a satisfying game to watch and play.

“The game is made to be fun to play but also fun to watch — the two core components that make a game streamworthy. The game has a fair amount of depth, meaning that players will be able to string together outrageous moves and combos — prompting viewers to wonder, ‘how did you do that?!,’” Jorjani said. “Game rounds are short and sweet and the rich customization options give players the ability to craft a visual feast for viewers.”

Jorjani said the partnership with TwitchTV was a natural fit after learning how both Paradox and TwitchTV had similar ideas for fan engagement, and this new development would only increase engagement.

The Showdown Effect will be released later this year.

Are you excited about advancements in technology that make game streaming easier? Let us know in the comments.

More About: streaming, twitchtv

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/04/twitchtv-livestreaming-game/?utm_source=feedbu...

20 TV Shows With the Most Social Media Buzz This Week

Basketball, and soccer, and hockey — oh my! The social TV waves dribbled, dropkicked and fouled along with a handful of sports programming this past week. The NBA conference finals are in a dead-heat; each of the four remaining teams has won two games out of five, so we’ve entered a sudden death situation (Thunder vs. Spurs, Celtics vs. Heat). The former game airs Monday night at 9 p.m. ET. In entertainment news, the MTV Movie Awards aired Sunday night. Host Russell Brand welcomed viewers, proclaiming the two major film franchies of the night: Hunger Games and Twilight, the latter of which won Best Movie of the Year for Breaking Dawn. In particular, Twitter lit up when Johnny Dep… Continue reading...


from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/04/social-media-tv-chart-6-4/?utm_source=feedburn...

The backstory on the most frequently cited chart in digital media

When Terence Kawaja started working on a map of the digital advertising universe in 2009, it was never meant to see the light of day.

At the time, he worked at investment bank GCA Savvian and wanted a way to wrap his head around the mushrooming digital-media industry. As he updated and augmented the chart, he said, his colleagues would just roll their eyes.

“Especially when I said this is going to be really, really important for us. They didn’t agree with that,” said Kawaja, who now advises digital media executives and brokers deals through his own company Luma Partners (when he isn’t lampooning the industry with funny videos and commentary at conferences). “I was like the crazy guy with the slide.”

Three years later, he’s still the guy with the slide. But it would be hard to argue that his pursuit was a crazy one. In fact, just this week he introduced a similar slide on the exploding gaming industry.

Since unveiling his chart of the online advertising landscape at a conference in 2010, it has flown around the Web, ending up in powerpoint presentations, business school case studies, and cubicles industrywide. And Kawaja, himself, has brokered some of the biggest deals in the digital ad business in the past couple of years, including Yahoo’s purchase of InterClick and Google’s Admeld acquisition.

To date, versions of his slide have received more than 350,000 views online, from people in 116 countries. Sure, compared to YouTube videos of cute babies and cats that rack up millions of views in a matter of days, 350,000 is quite small. But given the obscure nature of the material (a chart full of ad tech acronyms “SSPs,” “DSPs” and “DMPs”) it’s a fairly impressive number.

The slides have also prompted “hundreds, if not thousands” of requests from marketing and PR departments that their companies be included in the slide or given a different location on the slide, he said. Fitting an industry of more than 400 companies on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper means that by default it’s wrong, he said, acknowledging that there are differences among companies in any given category, just as there are companies that operate across several categories. “[They] are merely snapshots of some version of the present,” Kawaja said. “Simply a conversation starter.”

When companies complain about their placement or absence on the slide, he tends not to adapt it (he just advises them to download it and annotate it for their own marketing materials). But he has tweaked the slide for another reason: copycats.

Catching the copycats

By December 2010, Kawaja had split with Savvian to create his own strategic advisory and investment banking shop Luma Partners. But he noticed that several rival investment banks were plainly taking his slide and passing it off as theirs. “I chuckled at that and said ‘I’m going to try something,’” he said.

Kawaja went to logomaker.com to create a logo for the fake company Ad Pro (“with a swish and everything,” he said) and added it to his slide. Then he sat back and waited to see who would take the bait. Sure enough, within a matter of months, at least three firms had attached their names to charts that included the non-existent company, he said.

When Luma Partners updated the online display slide in June 2011 — and added five more slides to the series for categories like social, search and mobile — Kawaja decided to solve the ownership issue for once and for all by calling the media landscapes “Lumascapes.”

The branding seems to have worked. The blatant copying has ceased and, as Ad Age has noted, the Lumascapes are recognized industrywide as Luma Partners’ “calling card.”

So when did Kawaja know that he might be onto something with the slide? When he saw how the investment bankers around him were reacting. “I’m of the view that, as you go through life, think about what an investment banker would do and do the opposite,” he said.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/06/05/the-backstory-on-the-most-frequently-cited-chart...

Buddy Media CEO Makes Unforgettable ‘We Got Bought’ Video

Buddy Media is not a brand most consumers would recognize, but in the halls of social media and marketing, it’s a king. It connects major brands with their customers throughout all the major social media networks. Now, thanks to a $689 million acquisition, it’s set to become part of cloud computing and CRM giant Salesforce.com (the deal should close later this summer). Still, it’s this incredible video that could make Buddy Media and its cofounder and CEO Michael Lazerow a household name.

As Lazerow explains in the text accompanying the YouTube video, the clip is raw and emotional. However, throughout it, Lazerow doesn’t speak a single word. Instead, he tells his own remarkable story and a bit about the acquisition, via a keynote slideshow on his iPad. Lazerow, who has had a life-long heart condition is smiling during most of it, but he’s also clearly wiping away a tear or two as he reacts to some of what he’s sharing.

His main message, though, is not so much about the acquisition or his heart, but about fear and whether it’s holding you back. It’s clearly not hindering Lazerow.

What do you think of the Buddy Media CEO’s sentiment? Is now the right time to share something so deeply personal or was this the perfect way to celebrate the deal and make his point? Share your thoughts in the comments.

More About: Buddy Media, Salesforce, trending, YouTube


from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/04/buddy-media-ceo-makes-video/?utm_source=feedbu...

Twitter shows when we tweet and explains why its search sucks

Is is possible that Twitter’s users, rather than Twitter itself, are to blame for the micro-blogging platform’s relatively useless search engine? Perhaps. According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. So while the world bemoans Twitter search as useless, maybe we’re doing so through last generation’s Google-colored glasses that don’t let us see Twitter for what it is and the challenges it faces.

In a Twitter Engineering blog post explaining its findings, analytics research scientist Jimmy Lin explains the problem of ranking tweets by relevance as partly being a problem of time. In the case of breaking news, the system is simply overwhelmed by tweets and queries on that topic, which means Twitter’s relevancy models can’t always keep up to determine which ones you probably want to see. While it’s relatively easy to build a simple search algorithm utilizing the concept of “term frequency-inverse document frequency weight” when the overall corpus of documents is fairly static, it’s a lot harder when terms suddenly surge in popularity and a system has to constantly re-process the dataset in real time.

These numbers from Twitter’s research help explain the problem:

  • Examining all search queries from October 2011, we see that, on average, about 17% of the top 1000 query terms from one hour are no longer in the top 1000 during the next hour. In other words, 17% of the top 1000 query terms “churn over” on an hourly basis.
  • Repeating this at a granularity of days instead of hours, we still find that about 13% of the top 1000 query terms from one day are no longer in the top 1000 during the next day.
  • During major events, the frequency of queries spike dramatically. For example, on October 5, immediately following news of the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the query “steve jobs” spiked from a negligible fraction of query volume to 15% of the query stream — almost one in six of all queries issued! Check it out: the query volume is literally off the charts! Notice that related queries such as “apple” and “stay foolish” spiked as well.

Of course, this particular phenomenon doesn’t explain why Twitter’s search doesn’t go back further in time, or why its algorithms for ranking tweets based on source or the number of time they’ve been retweeted don’t appear too accurate. Even if relevancy improves, there’s still a lot to be desired in terms of getting Twitter to return the types of results users have come to expect.

Lin’s post also highlights another piece of research from Twitter that’s less noteworthy to individual users but probably more telling about the world as a whole. A visualization of Twitter usage patterns in New York City, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Istanbul creates a picture of cultural and seasonal differences at play.

Twitter users in Tokyo, we see, tweet a lot less during the work day and also go to bed and wake up at about the same times throughout the year. Elsewhere, users show pretty distinct differences in activity as the seasons change. Lin also points out the afternoon lull in Sao Paulo. It’s difficult to discern the exact reason from looking at this chart, but the lull does coincide with Sao Paulo’s winter season and a generally later beginning to the tweeting day.

I’d love to see these results analyzed against other cultural datasets, or even just against a knowledge base of local customs and behaviors, to see how Twitter — and web use, generally — use comports or doesn’t comport with a region’s typical norms.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/twitter-shows-when-we-tweet-and-explains-why-its-sear...

How Social Media Is Changing the Sports Ticketing Market [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social media hasn’t only revolutionized sports fans’ experiences at the game — it’s also changed how they get there in the first place.

One in five fans use social networks to invite friends to games, according to a recent report by the Sports Business Journal. Nearly 15% of ticket buyers say their purchases have been influenced by Facebook posts.

And engaging fans on social media doesn’t just help sports teams reach potential buyers — it literally pays off. According to the same research, fans who buy tickets through social media links pay more than one-and-a-half times as much on average compared to all buyers. Why? They typically make their purchases farther in advance.

The flash deals site for sports tickets Crowd Seats recently pulled research from Ticketmaster, the Sports Business Journal and the marketing firm Burson-Marsteller to produce the infographic below.

Crowd Seats is no stranger to social media’s impact on the ticketing business, either — a full third of its sales come through social media and CEO Justin Cener is speaking this week at the Sports Business Journal‘s ticketing symposium.

SEE ALSO: How Social Media Is Changing Sports [INFOGRAPHIC]

Check out the full infographic below for more on how social media has impacted the sports ticket market, and how Major League Baseball teams are leveraging social media this season to put butts in their seats.

Have you ever bought tickets to a sporting event through social media? Would you do it again? Share with us in the comments.


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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/04/social-media-sports-tickets-infographic/?utm_s...

5 Ways Social Media Is Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition



Social Media Conversation Sajjad Masud is co-founder & CEO of Simplicant, a cloud-based social recruiting platform transforming talent acquisition and making enterprise-level recruiting technology accessible to companies of all sizes. Connect with Sajjad and the Simplicant team on Twitter and Facebook.

The way we communicate with each other has evolved rapidly over the last decade. Social media has further intensified the departure from traditional communication methods to redefine how people and businesses interact with each other.

In fact, more than half of companies on social media fail to have a social media strategy and in doing so, risk ignoring an increasingly dynamic and expanding audience. Recent social media stats show that more than 60% of adults are connected to one or more social networks, while 23% of online time is spent entirely on social networking activities.

While social media has seen rapid growth at the consumer level, the gap between consumer and corporate adoption is widening. Businesses are continuing to figure out optimal ways to harness the reach of social media and translate its usefulness into results.

One area where the benefits are already beginning to outshine older methods is talent acquisition and recruiting. The sheer number of active users on sites such as Facebook have made social recruiting extremely advantageous. With so many people using social media, especially for employment opportunities, companies are expected to use social media to recruit for more than 80% of job openings in 2012.

So just how does social media benefit the environment of talent acquisition? Here are five shifts that are taking place now.


1. It’s Personal


Hiring has always been concerned with people, and the relationships formed through social media between candidates and employers are even more imperative.

While candidates can reach out to key recruiters, companies form entire networks or talent communities to connect and engage with candidates. Social media is a tool that caters to sharing interests and engaging in conversation, making it easier to find a suitable candidate early on. After all, we do it so much everyday that it becomes a natural process.


2. It’s Transparent


Social media users tend to be self-aware of their brand because of how visible their activity and interests can be. Because of this, we must always anticipate some sort of reaction or feedback. No longer are your strategies and tactics a secret from those outside the company — they are fair game for criticism, even by the candidates themselves.

Though your recruiting activities can open a Pandora’s box of negative comments, it’s still a good way to find new perspective on what you may be doing wrong and how it can be better.


3. It’s No Longer Just For HR


Social media talent acquisition allows for entrepreneurs and CEOs alike to find candidates directly, quickly and with a reduced cost-per-hire — especially for startups that lack traditional HR personnel or funds for a recruiter. However, social recruiting is not to be taken lightly; just because you can find candidates on Facebook doesn’t mean you should throw away the rule book.


4. It’s Marketing


digital-marketing-600

A solid plan, a target audience, metrics and data are all required for effective social recruiting. With the introduction of Brand Pages on Facebook, your organization isn’t any different from those selling a product — instead, you’re advertising a place of work.

Through brand management, content creation and engagement, candidates and employers alike see the value of social interaction for talent acquisition. It’s instantly measurable and targeted to something that older processes simply can’t match.


5. It’s Being Shared


Employees on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are contributing to the efforts of recruiting through their own posts and tweets. Not only are open positions getting distributed as pieces of content to vast networks of people, but it’s also facilitating the use of social referrals — one of the best sources of quality candidates. Job seekers are finding ways to take advantage of social referrals by keeping in contact and engaging with key members of companies.


Conclusion


Social media doesn’t need to be the absolute center of your recruitment strategy, but it would be ill-advised to ignore the trend completely. These five factors are changing and advancing the ways we approach finding the best talent and taking it to a more personal, open and collaborative experience.

What do you think? Does using social media mean less work for recruiting, or just more effective implementation of traditional ideas?


Social Media Job Listings


Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, chris_lemmens, alengo

More About: features, job recruiting, job search series, mashable, online recruiting

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/06/03/talent-acquisition-social/?utm_source=feedburn...

Another Step Forward In Small Scale Electrical Generators

NicknamesAreStupid writes "Product Design & Development reports another breakthrough in small scale solid oxide fuel cells. This methane-fueled cell achieves about 50% efficiency at around 2kW, enough to power an average home. It does so by efficiently recycling its heat to perpetuate the process. Of course, this is not practical for most homes, which only have natural gas that contains nearly one fifth impurities. However, that could change if gas suppliers refined their product."

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from Slashdot http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/03/1845208/another-step-forward-in-small...

Online Social Networks Can Be Tipped By Less Than 1% of Their Population

An anonymous reader writes "A new algorithm developed by researchers at West Point seems to break new ground for viral marketing practices in online social networks. Assuming a trend or behavior that spreads in an online social network based on the classic 'tipping' model from sociology (based on the work of Thomas Schelling and Mark Granovetter), the new West Point algorithm can find a set of individuals in the network that can initiate a social cascade – a progressive series of 'tipping' incidents — which leads to everyone in the social network adopting the new behavior. The good news for viral marketers is that this set of individuals is often very small – a sample of the Friendster social network can be influenced when only 0.8% of the initial population is seeded. The trick is finding the seed set. The algorithm is described in a paper to be presented later this summer at the prestigious IEEE ASONAM conference."

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from Slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/04/1710206/online-social-networks-can...