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How to Securely Share a Password with Someone Using LastPass [Passwords]

Occasionally, you need to share a password with someone. Maybe it's a shared office-wide password, your family's Amazon login, or maybe you just want to share a Netflix account with your roommate. Rather than sharing it over email, you can more seamlessly and securely share passwords in just a few clicks with LastPass—and even prevent the person on the receiving end from ever seeing the password itself. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5909321/how-to-securely-share-a-password-with-someone-u...

Social and Content Should Work Together

There are many components that make up a robust online marketing campaign today. It’s not enough to just have a website. In order for that website to be found you need to participate in numerous online marketing tactics that need to be integrated together into one strategy. Two important parts of an online strategy are content marketing and social media.

Content marketing involves creating a variety of content (blog posts, articles, guest blog posts, videos, whitepapers, e-books, guides, webinars, etc.) that will attract target audience members. It’s a form of inbound marketing. Instead of forcing your product upon a potential client or customer in a pushy, traditional format (like advertising), content is created for people to find when they want to and on their terms. Creating quality content that is informative and provides target audience members with beneficial information or helps them solve a problem will help keep your company or brand top of mind. In addition, you will be viewed as a trusted source and a thought leader in the industry.

Social media serves a similar purpose. In order for a person to receive messages from a brand in social media, they need to opt-in and choose to Follow or to Like the brand. A social media “relationship” between a consumer and a brand can be beneficial for both parties. Consumers can share their comments, questions, and concerns and businesses can treat their social community like a focus group and gain valuable insights that can help guide business and product decisions.

While content marketing and social media are valuable marketing tactics on their own, they really thrive while working together. Keeping the content marketing and social media teams separate is a mistake. Without social media integration, how will your content be found? Without content marketing integration, what will you be sharing in social media?

It takes a lot of time and effort to develop good content marketing collateral. If you’re going to be spending all of that time and effort, don’t you want that content to be seen? What’s the point of creating a great whitepaper and then hiding it away on an interior page of your website? Social media is meant for sharing, so share away! Any content that you create should be shared with your followers in social media. After all, they have already expressed that they are interested in your business.

Social media is meant to be social and is about having a conversation with your followers, but without the content marketing piece what will facilitate that conversation? If you aren’t using social media to share anything with any real substance, you risk getting lost in the shuffle and just becoming another noisy part of the social media equation.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/social-and-content-should-work-together/

Microsoft Research's MirageTable brings some augmented reality to your tabletop

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We got a look at a holographic telepresence project from Microsoft Research earlier this week, but that's far from the only Kinect-enhanced rig it's working on these days. This setup dubbed a MirageTable was also shown off at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in Austin, Texas this week, offering a glimpse of one possible future where two people can interact with virtual objects on a table as if they were sitting across from each other (or simply do so on their own). To make that happen, the setup relies on a ceiling-mounted 3D projector to display the images on a curved surface, while a Kinect on each end of the connection both captures the person's image and tracks their gaze to ensure images are displayed with the proper perspective. You can check it out in action after the break, although some of the effect is lost without 3D glasses.

Continue reading Microsoft Research's MirageTable brings some augmented reality to your tabletop

Microsoft Research's MirageTable brings some augmented reality to your tabletop originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 May 2012 07:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/12/microsoft-researchs-miragetable-brings-som...

Sharing made simple: Dealing with tough sync scenarios

Recently, we put out a call asking all of you to help us with a problem: finding a way to sync and share calendars, task lists, and other data between different users across different platforms, simply and cheaply. We provided three hypothetical scenarios we were seeking to solve:

  • A married couple keeping track of kids' soccer practices, music lessons, and maintaining a family address book.
  • A four-person traveling sales team working on the road, mostly from smartphones and tablets.
  • A small office of a few dozen people who would like inter-office communication and project management to go smoothly.

You responded, and the answers you gave were both numerous and varied. We got suggestions for everything from command-line tools to home servers to dead-simple cloud products, and there were very few repeat answers among the 80 or so comments we received in the first 48 hours. We've evaluated your suggestions, and it’s time to share the best of what the Ars hive-mind came up with.

Because we were looking for simple and painless solutions, any suggestion requiring command line or scripting knowledge were disqualified (as interesting as some of your implementations sounded, we felt that was too much to throw at an average user). Complexity and cost also disqualified any answer that hinged on setting up your own server. And lastly, because of our cross-platform stipulations, we threw out solutions that only worked (or only worked best) with products from a specific company—though it sounds like many of you in the Apple and Microsoft camps are having success with iCloud and Windows Live Mesh, respectively.

Read more on Ars Technica…

from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/sharing-made-simple-dea...

Romney Team Goes on Digital Hiring Spree


Mitt Romney’s digital team is taking advantage of the unofficial end to the GOP primaries by ramping up its staff of web developers and data crunchers to compete in the general election. The move solidifies the fact that the 2012 presidential election is poised to be the most digitally sophisticated race ever – on both sides.

The general election is “a very, very different enterprise and endeavor than a contested primary that is moving from state to state very quickly,” said Romney campaign digital director Zac Moffatt, the first in-house digital director hired among the 2012 Republican primary campaigns. Moffatt has been part of the campaign staff for a year now.

Essentially, now that the campaign is no longer saddled with tough primary battles, budget can be allocated to general election infrastructure needs. “We are now able to find and supply the resources to be successful in that environment,” Moffatt said.

The Romney campaign site lists a handful of open positions such as a social media and email writer, data analyst, and software engineer. One position requires knowledge of Salesforce software and split testing for email and text messaging campaigns, for example. When asked how many people will be added to the digital team, Moffatt would only say, “a lot.” Most likely more digital boots on the ground across the country can be expected.

Many of the job ads listed feature the declaration, “The bar is rising in the political digital space.”

As media evolves, even those outside the digital staff are incorporating digital tools into their work. For instance, field organizers post photos online or use Twitter hashtags, noted Moffatt.

Some may see the digital push as merely a response to President Barack Obama’s digitally savvy campaign, but Moffatt begs to differ.

“I wouldn’t look at it in the political paradigm, as a reactive political maneuver,” he said. “I would look at it in the paradigm of what does an organization need to do in 2012 to be successful.”

The Romney camp will work as closely as possible with the Republican National Committee as the general election campaign gets into full swing. The RNC itself has enhanced its own digital capabilities with key digital hires. Execs from corporate tech and digital services firms including ShareThis and Rockfish have joined the staff to help the party vet technologies, make smarter use of data, amplify messages online, and assist the efforts of the communications, finance and politics teams.

Image courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Flickr

More About: 2012 presidential campaign, jobs, Mitt Romney


from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/10/romney-hiring-digital-staff/?utm_source=feedbu...

"Business Opportunities Are Like Buses; There’s Always Another One Coming." [Quotables]

This quotation comes from business magnate Richard Branson, who has certainly seen his share of business opportunities. When we want something, we can sometimes end up with a laser-like focus on that thing. Opportunities definitely fall into that category. It's important to remember that if one thing doesn't work out, we can get started on the next. If things aren't quite working out the way you'd hoped in one instance, just get ready for the next bus to come.

from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5909399/business-opportunities-are-like-buses-theres-al...

A near-future prognosis for television: surprisingly strong, driven by more control

Television remains at the center of American life, and whatever threats exist from outside the realm of the Great BoobTube, those threats (including the Internet) are not making huge dents in TV consumption patterns. In fact, technologies like the DVR and on-demand services appear to be gaining momentum, largely making up for declines in live TV consumption. 

This is hardly a surprise. Television isn't dying—it's continuing to post strong viewership numbers (and we know that Nielsen and the like capture only a portion of the real audience). The data we have, however, makes it clear that audiences are changing the way they relate to TV. Companies that figure out the best way to service viewers' various demands—better content, served up when they want it, and viewable where they want it—will reap the profits. 

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/a-near-future-prognosis-for-tele...