Mick Darling's posterousAll my blogging in one spot. (mostly)Filed under: readerHow to Supercharge Your Dropbox or Google Drive with Wappwolf [Automation]
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just drop a PDF in a folder and it would automatically show up on your Kindle? Or if imported photos automatically scaled themselves down to a smaller size? Or if your PDF documents automatically signed themselves? These are just a couple of examples of what Wappwolf can do along with your Dropbox or Google Drive account. Here's how to make the magic happen. More »
TV Now is the latest Internet-based DVR service to find courtroom troubleConsumers around the world want a hassle-free way to record free, over-the-air television and play it back on any Internet-connected device. But every time a company creates such a service, it gets sued by copyright holders. Last year we reported on ivi, an American firm that argued that it qualified for a compulsory licensing regime designed for cable companies. The courts didn't buy it. Another American company, Aereo, is still fighting in court about whether its "tiny antennas" service is legal. A similar fight has been happening in Australia. Optus, a major Australian telecom company, created a service called TV Now. Like ivi and Aereo, it acts as a virtual DVR, recording over-the-air television programs selected by individual customers and later streaming them to those same customers. Like its American counterparts, Optus quickly found itself in court facing charges of copyright infringement. On Friday, it suffered a major setback when an appeals court ruled the service was illegal. Read the comments on this post from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/overseas-courts-no-more-frien...Ask Engadget: best 'money is no object' laptop?We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadget inquiry is coming to us from Chris, who simply has too much money to blow on a super-laptop. If you're looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.
Quell your gnashing teeth, members of the 99 percent, he's done well for himself and now he needs our help. We were able to trick out an Alienware M18x to full capacity for $6,700 -- with an over-clocked 4GHz Intel Core i7 CPU, 32GB of RAM, two 2GB NVIDIA GTX 675M GPUs in SLI mode and 1.2TB of SSD RAID storage. That's the benchmark, folks: who out there can find something more powerful? Ask Engadget: best 'money is no object' laptop? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | | Email this | Comments from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/28/ask-engadget-best-money-no-object-laptop/MacBook Pros may get Ivy Bridge; whither the Mac Pros? The OpenForum speculatesEarlier this week we reported on the arrival of new quad-core mobile processors, which are part of Intel's new Ivy Bridge parts. There’s quite a bit of speculation going on about how those parts could be used for a refresh of the MacBook Pro machines. Read the comments on this post from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/macbook-pros-may-get-ivy-bridge-b...Social Networks: Are They Eroding Our Social Lives? [STUDY]Is the Connected Generation actually the Alienated Generation? Nearly 40% of Americans spend more time socializing via the Internet than in real life. Almost a quarter say they have missed out on important moments because they were, ironically, distracted by trying to share those moments on social networks. Nearly 20% say they actually prefer to communicate electronically via social network or text message than talk over the phone or face-to-face. This is all according to a recent study commissioned by the social discovery site Badoo. More than 6,000 people in the U.S., UK and Germany were queried about their social lives online and off. While 39% of Americans say they spend more time socializing online than off, the numbers are slightly lower in the UK and Germany — 36% and 35%, respectively. But Americans aren’t totally down on social networks. 84% say social networks are useful for staying in touch with far away friends, three-quarters say they’re great for reconnecting with old acquaintances and 83% say they help those who are shy and lonely meet new people. Other data from the survey can be interpreted as either positive or negative. One in three Americans say they are more likely to meet someone new online than in the real world, while 24% say they accept friend requests from people they don’t actually care about or even like. Social network users also appear to be becoming more cautious about what they are willing to put online. Nearly half of the Badoo study’s respondents say they have be more careful about what they share. How do social networks enhance your social life? Do they also detract from it? Is the Connected Generation actually the Alienated Generation because of social networks? Let us know in the comments. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, EricHood More About: Facebook, Social Media, social networking, trending, Twitter Drag-and-Drop To Automatically Encrypt Files in Google Drive Using Automator on Mac [Google Drive]
OS X: Google Drive is finally here, promising awesome Dropbox-like online storage and file syncing—but also the same security and privacy caveats that come with storing information on cloud servers. Macworld offers this handy file encryption tool that works with Google Drive for drag-and-drop encrypting on your desktop. More »
Social media not necessarily journalism’s panacea, news bosses say
Lunch-stealing?“Facebook will make north of $3 billion in advertising this year,” FT.com MD Rob Grimshaw told the Paley Center For Media’s international council in Madrid on Thursday ”This is not doing anything good for journalism – in fact, it’s destroying it.” Many news publishers now pipe stories through Facebook, which has also become an important referrer. Guardian.co.uk has made itself available inside a Facebook app. Grimshaw was not criticising such journalism efforts. “We have to engage with social media,” he said. But Grimshaw is concerned that Facebook is beginning to gobble advertising money from news publishers. “I don’t blame Facebook, but I do blame the publishing industry for being very naive about some of these fact,” he told the gathering of digital news bosses in Madrid. “Not all distribution is good distribution,” Grimshaw said. “We have to bring people back to FT.com, where we can generate revenue from them. It works very well, we’ve built a profitable model. The idea FT journalism could be freely consumed across all media platforms is not a panacae. The nauseum of crowds?Some leading news organisations have also concluded efforts to engage readers in journalism may not be all they’re cracked up to be. Even The Guardian appears disappointed by Open News List, its effort to involve readers in story planning. “It’s great that people read it, but they don’t really contribute to it as much as we hoped,” Guardian deputy editor Katharine Viner told the Paley’s assembly. “How much time and effort do people really want to put in to deciding and running their own news agenda?,” BBC News director Helen Boaden asked, suggesting only unemployed people really have the time to engage in that way. “A lot of people are very happy for an ‘evil’ news editor to run it and to have someone else tell them what’s important in the world that day.” And Wall Street Journal Europe deputy editor Neil McIntosh agreed, dismissing the call Google and Facebook made at the same conference to invent a better means of communicating news than the traditional narrative story. “Our readers need us to sift,” McIntosh said. Readers are often crying out for less, not more. They’re still looking for the nut graf and the sort of stories I was taught to bash out 20 years ago.” WSJ has, however, recently introduced Streaming Stories, a way of presenting live-updating material alongside conventional narrative. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Nielsen: Women more likely to visit a social networking site while watching TV
Not surprisingly, the report found that people aged 18-34 are the most active with social networking. Those same people are also watching less TV than the older generation. This seems to suggest that younger people are swapping TV screens for their mobile devices, which is further supported by data that shows the time spent on live primetime TV every day increases with age. The Nielsen report looks at demographic trends in U.S. media usage, comparing differences in the usage of primetime TV, online video, social media, and tablets. Chart courtesy of Nielsen. Image courtesy of Shutterstock user [Mehmet Dilsiz]. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
The 10 Companies Behind All the Brands You LoveMost people know that the corporate world is heavily concentrated, with a shockingly small number of massive parent companies owning a huge share of the world. But it’s hard to keep track of who is who and who owns what. The graphic below is a nice visualization of that dynamic for consumer brands: Just how concentrated is the business world? One analysis of 37 million companies found that the top 147 owned 40% of the total wealth. That’s nuts. Just think about Cadbury. If you’re like me, you associate them with chocolate eggs and that’s about it. But they apparently own Dentyne, Sour Patch Kids and a bunch more and are in turn owned by Kraft. In some sense it’s a testament to the power of brands that most of us never consider this. Kraft wants you to associate certain feelings with Dentyne, and they don’t want those feelings to have anything to do with macaroni and cheese. And the media world is no exception, as the infographic from a few months back (via FastCompany) shows: from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/04/27/the-10-companies-behind-all-the-brands-you-love/How Social Media Is Changing Sports [INFOGRAPHIC]Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are having a tremendous impact on the sports world for fans, players, teams and sponsors alike. We try to stay on top of that here at Mashable, bringing you stories on great sports memes, moments of unexpected discovery, sophisticated marketing strategies and more. But sometimes a stellar infographic is needed to put things in perspective. This one, from the sports medicine company KT Tape, shows the different ways social media has changed sports during the past few years. More than 80% of sports fans monitor social media sites while watching games on TV, and more than 60% do so while watching live events. Players have capitalized on social media and fueled massive buzz as well. More than 9,000 people per second tweeted about Tim Tebow after he threw an unexpected touchdown pass in last season’s NFL Playoffs. Jeremy Lin gained more than 550,000 followers in a single month while taking the NBA by storm earlier this year. And soccer stars Kaka and Ronaldo have leveraged their sport’s global reach to become Twitter’s two most-followed athletes. KT Tape pulled research from The Wall Street Journal, ESPN.com, CBSSports.com and other sources to compile these facts and much more. Check out the infographic below for the full picture, then tell us in the comments — how is social media changing your sports experience? More About: Facebook, infographics, sports, Twitter For more Entertainment coverage:
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