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Fruux Synchronizes Your Contacts, Calendars, and To-Dos Across Systems, OSes, and Devices for Free [Organization]

If you're wedded to one platform, it's a good bet you already have a tool that keeps your life synchronized and organized pretty well. For those of us who have to deal with multiple platforms, multiple computers and mobile devices with multiple operating systems, and work with people who use different ones than we do, there's Fruux, a free service that keeps your to-dos, calendars, and contacts in sync on almost any platform. Think of it like iCloud for the rest of us. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5904251/fruux-synchronizes-your-contacts-calendars-and-...

Handmade particle accelerator unveiled at Milan Design Week, Higgs-Boson a no-show

Handmade particle accelerator unveiled in Milan, Higgs-Boson a no-show

When it comes to particle science, it's not all about huge winding tunnels and god particles. Super/collider, a group that aims to promote science through eye-catching creative methods, teamed up with designer Patrick Stevenson-Keating to craft this relatively simple -- but working-- particle accelerator for Milan Design week. The setup involves several hand-blown bulbs, with a vacuum inside them allowing electrons to rocket from side to side, lit in a purple haze thanks to a phosphorous screen at one end. The whole thing is fashioned from the relatively commonplace gear you see above, although a how-to guide still remains unfortunately non-existent.

Handmade particle accelerator unveiled at Milan Design Week, Higgs-Boson a no-show originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/18/handmade-particle-accelerator-unveiled-at-...

JockTalk Startup Looks to Boost Pro Athletes’ Social Media Leverage


Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have been a boon to pro athletes’ marketing and fan engagement abilities. But even those mega-platforms have limits to their rewards, say the creators of the new social network JockTalk.

JockTalk‘s goal is to enhance the branding leverage social networks have given athletes, and allow them to directly create income for themselves or charities through digital social interaction with fans. The site was co-founded by former Major League Baseball All-Star Shawn Green and entrepreneur Brendon Kensel.

“We saw there was a gap in the fact that athletes were jumping on social media in droves, but there wasn’t a bridge where revenue was being generated on social media sites for the athletes and their charities,” Green told Mashable.

JockTalk is launching in private beta this week. It’s already convinced an impressive roster of some 60 athletes from major American sports leagues to join. The list includes Kevin Love and Deron Williams from the NBA, the NFL’s Wes Welker, pro baseball player Heath Bell, and the NHL’s Logan Couture. On the back end, veteran CTO Monte Gibbs is designing the site’s architecture.

So how will Love, Welker and company use JockTalk to make money? Athletes will have profiles on the network, as will regular fans. The site will be monetized through ad hosting, member-generated content syndication and a sports-related e-commerce platform.

Athletes will get a cut of that revenue according to how active they are, will be able to decide how much goes to charities they support or how much they want to pocket themselves. They’ll also be able to host fundraisers and promotions on-site, as well as videos and other exclusive content.

Athletes’ JockTalk accounts will be linked to their mainstream social accounts. They’ll be able to send out the beginnings of 300-character posts (JockTalk’s maximum) via Twitter, for example, to take advantage of their large followings there and attract visitors back to the site for the full message.

“Players and fans will actually be using their Twitter names, so part of our objective is to create an integrated experience,” Kensel says. “We’re not asking athletes to change their behavior.”

That will be key to JockTalk becoming a success, as there’s no way a site a can simply replace the stage Twitter and Facebook have given pro athletes. But if players are able to use those established networks to actually draw significant numbers of their fans to JockTalk, even just for brief visits, Kensel and Green could really have something.

JockTalk is entirely self-funded for the time being, although in an interview with Mashable its co-founders sounded open to taking on investors. An iOS mobile app is expected in June, with an Android version to follow. The site will remain invitation-only for fans for the time being, but don’t expect much real barrier for entry.

“Playing pro ball for 16 years, I have a lot of relationships with players and former players,” Green says. “Players are very excited and the feedback I’m getting is that there’s a need for this sort of thing and the biggest factor for them is what it could mean for their charitable work.”

Do you think JockTalk can gain traction in the world of sports and social media? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Social Media, sports, Startups

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/jocktalk-startup/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_me...

Google TV's TV and Movies app gets to know you better with ratings, favorites and more

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At the center of the revamped Google TV experience that rolled out last fall is its TV & Movies app, which is a blended guide of content currently airing live on TV and available for streaming from the popular internet services (Netflix, Amazon, HBO Go). As Product Manager Rishi Chandra mentioned when we caught up with him at CES, personalization is something Google will be focusing on going forward and that's shown in the updated app being pushed out today. When it's first opened, users will login and be asked to rate a few movies and shows so it can get a sense of their tastes to know what to present, Netflix-style. There's more information displayed up front too, with expanded descriptions, and details below each show so viewers can find out about the episode that's on more easily. For a few more details on what's new and refreshed, check after the break.

Continue reading Google TV's TV and Movies app gets to know you better with ratings, favorites and more

Google TV's TV and Movies app gets to know you better with ratings, favorites and more originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/18/google-tv-tv-and-movies-app-update/

Whatever happened to Brightcove’s China ambitions?

When online video platform provider Brightcove filed for its IPO earlier this year, it spent a great deal talking about its international business. “We have established a global presence,” the company’s S-1 filing read, touting deals in Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. Notably absent from the filing was any mention of China. Which is odd, considering that the company until recently maintained an office in Beijing, and was actively looking to hire in the country. So whatever happened to Brightcove’s China business?

A staff of two dozen – or no operations at all?

“Do we have a China strategy? The answer is no.” Brightcove President & COO David Mendels

Ask Brightcove about China, and you’ll get a rather tight-lipped answer. “We don’t have significant operations in China,” I was told a few weeks ago by Brightcove President and COO David Mendels, who added: “We never made a decision to enter China as a market.” Mendels wasn’t very keen on talking about the subject at all, but to his credit, answered some of my questions anyway. His key point: There is no story about Brightcove in China. “Do we have a China strategy? The answer is no,” he told me.

That may be true today, but Brightcove’s past dealings in China were a lot less black and white. The company had a significant R&D staff in the country starting in 2006, which I’ve been told by someone with knowledge of the operation consisted of up to two dozen people. It tried to hire additional staff as late as March 2010 – only to shut down its entire operation in Beijing and completely pull out of China by the end of that same year. Most of the Chinese staff was let go at that time, and only a few made the transition to Brightcove’s corporate headquarter in Cambridge. (Medels and a Brightcove spokesperson didn’t want to comment on the company’s R&D efforts in the country.)

So why did Brightcove leave China? The company apparently told its Chinese staff that it wasn’t able to grow the team fast enough – but that seems an unlikely reason, given that many other U.S. companies maintain successful R&D operations in the country. The decision may at least in part been motivated by Brightcove wanting to take things further and sign up Chinese clients – only to realize that China is a tough market for outsiders.

China’s unique challenges

Mendels talked a little bit about this during our conversation as well. “It’s an interesting place,” he said, without specifically referring to anything Brightcove has done in the country. And he cautioned: “It’s a tricky place to do business in.”

That’s especially true for anyone in the online video space. China has a complicated regulatory environment for online video companies, which forces them to get multiple licenses for things that don’t require any dealings with the government at all in most other countries. Want to stream videos from a website to a desktop? Then you need to become licensed as an online video platform. Want to deliver the same video over the same network to a set-top box? That makes you a TV network, which means you need a different license.

Adding to this are unique infrastructure challenges. China’s Internet population is growing rapidly, but most users access the network with comparably slow connections, which is why local players oftentimes optimize streams for 500 Kbps to 1 Mbps. Servicing Chinese clients requires to adapt to these challenges, which can take time. Brightcove may have felt that it didn’t have this time, especially as it was trying to ramp up its internatinal business elsewhere, and prepared for an IPO.

Brightcove’s team is still there

The irony of Brightcove leaving China is that its former staff is now proving the company wrong: Most of Brightcove’s employees have since been hired by Video-TX, a local video platform provider that openly references its Brightcove heritage on its website.

The company, which received a strategic investment from the Chinese CDN Chinacache soon after Brightcove left the country, has been offering Chinese customers what Brightcove could have offered – and was able to sign up a number of high-profile clients including the Shanghai Media Group, the large newspaper China Daily and state TV network CNTV. I’ve been told that there is no ill will against the former employer amongst the team, but there is an acute sense that this could have been done by Brightcove as well. Said one person involved in both efforts: “We didn’t set out to build our own company. We set out to build Brightcove China.”

This isn’t to say that Brightcove made a terrible mistake leaving China. Rather, Brightcove’s adventure in China goes to prove that the country can be a lot more nuanced than it is perceived in the U.S. Stories about U.S. companies doing business in China often fall into two categories: Either, they describe a gold-rush-like opportunity – or a repressive regime that companies should avoid entirely. Brightcove’s experience is much closer to the actual experience many have when doing business in China: It’s a complicated market that requires a long-term commitment – and not everyone has the stomach to stick around.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/brightcove-china/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=fe...

Amazon launches cloud app store (and eats ecosystem?)

Amazon Web Services has launched an app store that promises users one-click deployment of their favorite software programs and applications. While it’s a great move by AWS and likely good news for customers, the aptly named AWS Marketplace isn’t necessarily good news for the myriad startups that host their PaaS and SaaS offerings atop AWS.

From Amazon’s perspective it’s easy to see why the marketplace idea was so appealing. Letting users launch fully configured versions of popular products in a single click is a compelling feature, especially for complex software that isn’t easily deployed in the cloud (or at all). For its software-vendor partners, AWS Marketplace represents an opportunity to do SaaS without having to build a SaaS business or infrastructure. Presently, the AWS Marketplace claims as options a variety of commercial and open source products, including 10gen, CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, Drupal, IBM,  MediaWiki, Microsoft, SAP, WordPress and Zend.

But the AWS Marketplace might be a double-edged sword for software vendors and, especially, companies offering services built atop AWS. Companies such as Acquia, BitNami and OpenLogic, for example, already exist and offer this preconfigured app experience using AWS for the infrastructure, and they’re part of the marketplace. Maybe they see the AWS Marketplace as just more exposure. That AWS handles the billing and other administrative work doesn’t hurt either.

Elsewhere, though, RightScale offers its own library of preconfigured software bundles and there are numerous database-as-a-service and other application- or stack-specific offerings available. RightScale’s efforts appear directly affected, while for the others it’s get on board with the AWS Marketplace or risk being buried. Their services might be more thorough — providing more than just infrastructure — and the specialization level might be higher, but competition is competition. Maybe they don’t want to play by AWS’s rules in hosting services in the marketplace.

I spoke recently with one cloud service provider that has moved off of AWS for just this reason. It sees AWS impeding on its space already, and poised to do so even more.

Of course, AWS has done this type of thing before and faced the same criticism, and hasn’t been affected too negatively. Whether it was a management interface or monitoring or a relational database service, someone in the AWS ecosystem is always hurt by AWS’s moves up the stack from its initial IaaS offering. Yet, AWS is still the cloud champion, and its broad swatch of features is part of the reason. And with the marketplace, there’s always the argument that AWS is only helping the little guy.

At this point, though, AWS is the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud space, and it can’t make a move without stepping on some toes and taking some criticism. If you want to hear more about where cloud computing is headed — and where AWS and its ecosystem might be headed next — attend our Structure Conference in June. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will be speaking, as will dozens of other thought leaders working on the next big things.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/amazon-launches-cloud-app-store-and-eats-ecosystem/?u...

Shazam For TV can go large with ITV ad sales deal

Shazam has won a significant deal in its curious effort to diversify in to audio-tagging TV ads.

UK commercial TV leader ITV’s ad sales team, ITV Commercial, will offer the functionality to its advertisers.

Mobile app Shazam has long let users identify music around them using pattern recognition. Recently, it trained that technology toward Shazam For TV, with which users of the same app can unlock features of TV advertisements by listening to those ads. The mobile phone becomes a key to advertisers’ websites, a hyperlink generator.

Shazam For TV has been somewhat experimental, leveraged through partnerships with individual shows and directly with advertisers.

But now it can go large across a whole broadcast network. ITV is a powerhouse which sold £1.5 billion in advertising in 2011 across its six linear channels and its ITV Player catch-up service.

How excited should those advertisers be? Reporting early results last year, Shazam claimed: “0.3 percent of (viewers) Shazam’d the commercial, three times the average online click-through of 0.1 percent. 27 percent of the people who Shazam’d the ad either shopped, downloaded the song featured in the ad or viewed additional content.”

ITV and Shazam are calling this a “UK exclusive”, so don’t expect to see Shazamable ads on Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky channels or elsewhere in the country; ITV was keen to keep the ability to sell these ads all for itself.

Under commercial MD Fru Hazlitt, ITV, in turnaround after years of online decay, has been searching for new technologies to improve its core ad sales offering to advertisers, and is increasingly enamoured with the second-screen phenomenon.

The kind of scale ITV is giving Shazam is also being achieved by Zeebox, the second-screen social mobile TV engagement app, via its investment from BSkyB, which will both sell its TV advertisers Zeebox tags and use Zeebox’s underlying technology to thread similar features in to Sky’s upcoming own-brand applications.

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from GigaOM http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/19/shazam-for-tv-can-go-large-with-itv-ad-sale...

Otters Chase Adorable Little Girl [VIDEO]

This little girl has committed a crime! We hold her guilty for being way too cute.

These otters at the Philadelphia Zoo must feel threatened by how adorable she is because they won’t stop chasing her across the aquarium. Keep watching as the otters crash into each other when they reach the end of the tank.

More About: Video, viral, viral videos, YouTube

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/little-girl-chased-by-otters/?utm_source=feedb...

NAB 2012 wrap-up

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/19/nab-2012-wrap-up/

"That's a wrap!" Finally, an appropriate use for that industry cliché, since, ya know, we really are at a motion picture / television conference. As our first trip to the National Association of Broadcasters' annual event in Las Vegas fires its last frame, we're going to roll to the credits, honoring all those products that enabled us to justify spending a week in Sin City on the company dime. From Canon's 4K-capable 1D C (that'll sadly run you far more than $4k) to RED's Dragon sensor upgrade set to render "obsolescence obsolete," there's plenty to look forward to in the world of cinematography. We also happened upon a few consumer-facing gadgets, including Ceton's new DVR companion apps for Android and iOS, that Lenscaster SLR lens mount for iPad and a new Dolby 3D standard that could help propel glasses-free 3D into mass production. That's but a small sampling of the gadgets at NAB 2012, however, so jump past the break for all our hands-ons from the show.

Gallery: NAB 2012 wrap-up

Continue reading NAB 2012 wrap-up

NAB 2012 wrap-up originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/19/nab-2012-wrap-up/