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White House to startups: we want ‘badass innovators’

The country’s top tech talent may gravitate to Silicon Valley and New York, but the White House is making a hard push for them to consider a “tour of duty” in Washington, DC.

In launching the government’s new digital roadmap and Presidential Innovation Fellows program, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said Wednesday that the they’re looking for “badass innovators” to work for “a little startup called the United States of America.”

“We’re looking for a few good women and men to throw their hats in the ring,” he said. As part of the program, the White House will select 15 coders, designers and other innovators to head to DC for 6- to 12-month fellowships, starting in July. Park said the fellowship will focus on five areas: open data, health information, the online system MyGov, an RFP program targeting startups and a USAID campaign.

Importantly for startups, the open data initiative aims to stimulate innovation by releasing information in health, energy, public safety, the nonprofit sector and personal finance and making it machine-readable. Just as the private sector has used GPS, weather and health-related data to create apps and other products, Park said he hopes the liberation of new sets of data will lead to more entrepreneurship in new areas. As for the RFP project, Park said, “if you’re a startup who has ever tried to sell to the federal government, you know it’s a huge pain in the ass.” The goal of the new plan is to make it easier for the government to work with small, high-growth startups on tech solutions.

Park made the announcement with Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, during a presentation at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. On stage, the pair also announced details for the country’s new digital roadmap and pledged allegiance to innovation. The overall goal of the strategy is to get the government to use technology to deliver better services for citizens, but VanRoekel said some concrete mandates include getting every agency to create a developer page and convert two priority services to mobile. He also said that, aside from emergency situations, the government would not issue any more .gov domains.

They said the new digital strategy is based on the following tenets: open data is the new default; anywhere, anytime on any device; everything should be an API; make government data social; and change the meaning of social participation.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/05/23/white-house-to-startups-we-want-badass-innovator...

Does Social Media Marketing Really Work? [INFOGRAPHIC]

From Twitter to Facebook, to Google+, to YouTube, to Foursquare and more, social media use is the hottest thing in marketing. But does it really work?

Brands and businesses are certainly making a stronger push than ever on social media, which makes sense — that’s where the people are. Figuring out just how much social media marketing returns on investments of time and money, however, is harder to do.

Facebook marketing company Pagemodo recently pulled research from sources around the web to produce the infographic below, looking at just how much faith marketers have in social media. The aggregated data shows a sense of conservative optimism.

64% of business owners say social media marketing is a promising tactic and they believe it provides returns — but they aren’t willing to go all in with it just yet and favor a more cautious approach. 20% are more bullish on its potential, according to the same study, while just 6% are hardcore skeptics.

How do marketers and entrepreneurs measure whether social media marketing pays off? Most do so by measuring the accumulation of friends, likes, followers and other online connections. 39% look at shares of brand content, while 35% measure actual leads from social media. Just 18% measure success by overall brand awareness and favorability as gauged by consumer surveys.

Check out the infographic below for more on how much faith businesses put in social media as a marketing tool, and for tips on additional ways to maximize results and measure influence. Then let us know in the comments — do you think social media marketing provides real results?


Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, courtneyk

More About: infographics, Marketing, social media marketing

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from Mashable! http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/jCNSayMYvT4/

The 'Turn Anything Into A Game Controller/Keyboard' Kit

makey-makey-1.jpg The MaKey MaKey (rhymes with nakey nakey, eggs and bakey) is a little circuit board that can turn ANYTHING into a computer keyboard/controller by attaching alligator clips to the object. Hold on, let me copy/paste something that can explain it better than I can. Well, not BETTER than I can, just with way less effort on my part because I'm feeling a little under the weather today. I peed on myself last night, folks.
How Does it Work? Alligator Clip two objects to the MaKey MaKey board. For example, you and an apple. When you touch the apple, you make a connection, and MaKey MaKey sends the computer a keyboard message. The computer just thinks MaKey MaKey is a regular keyboard (or mouse). Therefore it works with all programs and webpages, because all programs and webpages take keyboard and mouse input. What materials work with MaKey Makey? Any material that can conduct at least a tiny bit of electricity will work (if it doesn't already work, just rub it with bananas, spray it with water, or apply copper tape). Here are some materials people have used in our workshops including Ketchup, Pencil Graphite, Finger Paint, Lemons, etc. Other materials that work great: Plants, Coins, Your Grandma, Silverware, Anything that is Wet, Most Foods, Cats and Dogs, Aluminum Foil, Rain, and hundreds more...
Pretty neat, right? There's a Kickstarter page for the project, which exceeded its $25,000 funding goal in a few days and is now over $200,000. Still, donating $35 will get you a kit when they're released. But the question remains: will it work on nipples? One blogger plans to find out! Also, what good is a peripheral that turns your cats into a controller if the B button always runs and hides under a bed? Hit the jump for a couple more pics of fun applications and a video explanation of the project.

from Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://www.geekologie.com/2012/05/the-turn-anything-into-a-game-controller.ph...

Disentangling the wave-particle duality in the double-slit experiment

Interference patterns produced by double-slit experiments.

The subtlest experiment in quantum mechanics is also one of the simplest: send a stream of particles through two openings in a barrier, and you'll produce an interference pattern because the particles act as waves. Amazingly, this also works if you send the particles through one at a time—the interference pattern builds up slowly as more particles go through. The double-slit experiment has been replicated with photons, electrons, atoms, and even entire molecules.

Typically, the particle nature and the wave nature have to be observed separately; if you track the particles through a single slit, the interference pattern vanishes. However, Ralf Menzel, Dirk Puhlmann, Axel Heuer, and Wolfgang P. Schleich entangled two photons and allowed one to pass through a barrier with two slits. The entanglement enabled them to determine which opening the photon went through, but a detector on the other side still picked up an interference pattern, demonstrating light's wave- and particle-like characteristics simultaneously.

The key to the experiment is the particular state in which the photons were produced. The researchers started with a laser in a configuration known as TEM01 mode, which means the electric (E) and magnetic (M) fields are perpendicular (or transverse, T) to the direction the photons travel. The "01" means there are two distinct points of maximum intensity.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/disentangling-the-wave-particle-dualit...

MIT’s LiquiGlide Solves Your Sticky Condiment Situations

Retrieving the final globs of ketchup from any Heinz bottle is a painstaking process. You can try and venture in there with a knife, luring out the tomato-ey goodness using nothing but sheer intimidation. You can smack that magical “57″ on the side of the bottle, or just violently shake the hunk of fructose-filled glass and pray.

Or, you can use LiquiGlide.

Developed by a team out of MIT — comprised of Dave Smith, Christopher Love, Brian Solomon, Adam Paxson, Rajeev Dhiman and Kripa Varanasi — LiquiGlide is a super slippery, edible coating that allows ketchup and other foods to glide easily out of their bottles.

The team won the $2,000 Audience Choice Award at this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. And after taking inventory of my fridge, and seeing all the remnants of condiments I have, just stuck clinging to the bottom of bottles, I give them my own Audience Choice Award.

Although condiments may sound like a narrow focus, the team claims just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market. As Smith told Fast Company, “If all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”

Here’s a look at what actually happens when you pour ketchup out of a bottle coated with LiquiGlide, courtesy of Fast Company.

LiquiGlide can be used with different types of packaging, whether it be glass or plastic, and can be applied just by spraying the coating onto the inside of bottles. One of the biggest challenges for the team was gaining FDA approval. “We had a limited amount of materials to pick from,” Smith told Fast Company. “I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it.”

If the ketchup wasn’t enough to win you over, here’s mayonnaise coming out of a LiquiGlide-coated bottle, and then a normal bottle.

The team will be working out of the MIT Founders’ Skills Accelerator this summer, so let’s hope LiquiGlide comes to a shelf near us soon.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/05/23/mits-liquiglide-solves-your-sticky-condiment-s...

Gantto

I am a self-employed writer who publishes a new book every 9 months and primarily works from home. For my first several books I struggled with time management and found I was constantly playing catch-up for the two months before my books were due. Then my engineer husband introduced me to the application he uses at work to organize his projects: Gantto.

For my last book I used Gantto to plan out my book publishing process, goals, and the milestones I needed to hit. Early schedule items consisted of writing so many words a week (with milestone markers for finishing a quarter of the book, half, etc.), middle items included submitting drafts and doing revisions, and latter marks included publishing house schedules and promotional items -- all ultimately leading to the release date of the book.  The great thing about Gantto is that I can visually see how all of those little steps lead to the final goal on one page, and if life events (illness, family trouble, etc.) crop up during the project, the whole timeline shifts to where end-goal estimation becomes far more accurate. Vacations can be added at any time for scheduling purposes.

For me, seeing the gantt chart really helped put my daily work in perspective, and I found I was much less likely to procrastinate.
gantt chart.png
There was still a bit of a crunch getting my last book out the door (unfortunately, the tool couldn't write the book for me), but my process was tighter and the last week was far less painful than submissions for previous books. I am definitely using Gantto for my next book.

The real time collaboration aspect is likely not as key for the self-employed business owner as it would be for a larger team/business, but I actually found it a fantastic feature. If you are collaborating between two writers or a writer and an assistant, both of you can go into the schedule (simultaneously) and make changes.

As someone who has used spreadsheets in the past to track projects, the ability to shift an entire schedule of events with one click is mind-blowingly great. Add that to the price (free for one month, with subscriptions starting at $5 a month) and I am delighted with this tool.

-- Anne Mallory

Gantto
http://gantto.com/
$5/month

from Cool Tools http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/006207.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_med...

Coda 2 for Mac, Diet Coda for iPad available May 24

Coda is Panic's legendary Mac app for editing HTML and other web files, and today Panic has announced the followup to Coda, called (surprise) Coda 2. As you might expect, the hugemongous feature list over on the Coda site has web developers frothed up into a frenzy of anticipation. In addition to the usual suspects like a better editor, UI improvements, and compatibility with FTP, iCloud, and other services, Coda 2 will also include a built-in MySQL editor, code-folding to get code you don't need to see out of the way, and an active path bar to let you find any file you need right away. It looks like the premiere tool for working with web code -- Coda 2 -- will be available on May 24.

And that's not all. Panic is also releasing Diet Coda for the iPad on the App Store that day as well. Diet Coda is a version of the editor engineered for the iPad itself, and not only brings the best of Coda's features to Apple's tablet, but also works with a Coda 2 installation for "AirPreview": Make changes in Coda 2, see them live on your iPad right away. Diet Coda will be $9.99.

Coda 2 for Mac, Diet Coda for iPad available May 24 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 21 May 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/05/21/coda-2-for-mac-diet-coda-for-ipad-available-ma...

Sidecar App Aims to Revive the Humble Phone Call


Smartphones may function as music players, cameras and grocery lists, but the calling experience they provide remains the same as their bolted-to-the-wall counterparts.

Sidecar wants to change that by making smartphone capabilities part of phone calls.

The app, which launched for iOS and Android on Tuesday, makes it easy for users share live video, photos, locations and contacts during voice conversations.

While it’s already possible to send a photo or contact while talking on the phone, with Sidecar, it only takes a couple of taps. When a call participant lifts the phone from his or her ear to look at the extra content, the phone automatically switches to speakerphone in order to avoid an awkward break.

Making calls through Sidecar is free whether the person you’re dialing has the app or not, but you can only use the extra functions if the other person has downloaded it as well. If not, he or she receives a text message prompt to do so after you hang up.

The startup plans to eventually charge for some communication services such as long-distance, but its grand scheme is a bit broader.

Over the last five years or so, the revenue that mobile network operators bring in from voice calls has been tanking. Sidecar wants reverse the trend by making phone calls cool again.

“Long-term,” CEO Rob Williams tells Mashable, “our goal is to define calling experience that reclaims the declining voice revenue for the industry.”

Would you make more voice calls if you could easily share content during them? Let us know in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, TravelingLauo

More About: apps, Sidecar

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/22/sidecar/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed...

GitHub branches out, releases Windows client

GitHub branches out, releases Windows client

GitHub, the version tracking and collaboration platform for developers, has proven quite popular, especially with the open source crowd. There's been one glaring issue with the dev hub, though -- lack of an easy to use Windows client. Sure, app creators could sync their changes though command line tools and SSH, but Mac devs have had a slick desktop app to call their own for sometime. Now Microsoft users get the same benefits, including the ability to merge branches and roll back changes, wrapped in pretty Metro-friendly package. You'll find more info and a download link at the source.

GitHub branches out, releases Windows client originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 06:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/22/github-windows-client/

Hands-on: GitHub for Windows takes the pain out of using git

GitHub uses the git distributed version control system originally created by Linus Torvalds to help manage Linux's development as its backbone. It provides project hosting, bug tracking, and more, all wrapped up in a powerful Web interface. GitHub's most important feature is perhaps its trivial ability to fork projects. It takes just a few clicks to create your own version of a project to hack on and develop. Thanks to these features, GitHub has become the go-to place for collaborative open source software development. It's the home of projects such as Ruby on Rails and Node.js.

However, one developer community has found GitHub harder to use than others. Though the situation has improved, git and Windows are not the best of friends. After all, git was developed for Linux; Windows isn't anything like Linux. But that's where GitHub's new application, GitHub for Windows, comes in. GitHub for Windows provides a simple way to install and start using git on Windows, along with neat integration with GitHub's hosting and forking infrastructure.

The application, released on Monday, is an attractive, Metro-styled application. In addition to the GitHub for Windows application itself, it includes a self-contained version of git, the bash command-line shell, and the posh-git extension for PowerShell. You don't even have to manage any of these individual pieces yourself. The application uses a ClickOnce installer so it keeps all the bits and pieces up-to-date automatically.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/hands-on-github-for-win...