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How George Takei Went From Star Trek to Social Media Superstar


Actor and Internet sensation George Takei turned 75 on Friday.

For nearly 50 years, George Takei has been famous for his portrayal of Hikaru Sulu on the original ’60s television show Star Trek. Takei appeared as Sulu for three seasons and six subsequent movies.

After Star Trek, Takei continued to act and perform voice-overs. Yet, like many members of the cast, his identity remained synonymous with Star Trek. It wasn’t until Takei started his Facebook page on March 23, 2011 that his fame took on a whole new dimension.

Takei posts funny photos, memes and other positive content to Facebook multiple times a day, and these posts see massive engagement.  Many of his posts are submitted by readers. With 1,624,780 likes on Facebook and 348,019 Twitter followers, Takei has reinvented himself as social media celebrity. (For the record, his Star Trek co-star William Shatner has roughly 145,000 Facebook likes.) While Takei has amassed a sizable following on social media, his rate of engagement might be his most impressive digital achievement.

It’s not uncommon for one of Takei’s posts to receive up to 50,000 likes and 30,000 shares. There are very few celebrities who regularly see engagement numbers as high as Takei’s. Even Rihanna, the most liked person on Facebook, doesn’t hold a clear advantage over Takei when it comes to engagement.

Rihanna boasts 54 million Facebook likes — roughly 53 million more than Takei — yet her posts attract similar engagement numbers. Takei’s Facebook fans are an extremely responsive group.

Rihanna recently posted a clip from her new movie Battleship, which received roughly 20,000 likes and 1,800 shares. By comparison, a recent video from Takei doing a “Happy Dance” received 30,000 likes and 10,000 shares.


How Did George Takei Become a Social Media Superstar?


The simple answer is: Takei knows his audience very well.  While he has expanded his following through strong involvement in the gay rights movement (his It’s Ok to be Takei initiative, for instance) and Asian American groups (he is on the board of the Japanese American National Museum), his core fan-base consists of Star Trek fans who appreciate Takei for his self-aware humor.  Takei gives his audience exactly what they want, which regularly includes Star Trek jokes and other references from geek culture.

SEE ALSO: George Takei Brings Peace to Sci-Fi Geek Feud [VIDEO]
It has been established that positive posts are far more popular on Facebook than negative ones.  Takei seems to understand this. He puts a cheerful spin on his Facebook posts and tweets — and his audience is clearly responding.

@GeorgeTakei You make me smile everyday, thank you. Have a marvelous birthday Mr. Takei!

— Wendy C (@meeknowit) April 20, 2012

 

@GeorgeTakei Happy birthday, sir. Thank you for making me smile most days, and for disliking Twilight as much as I do.

— Nancy Clanton (@NancyClanton) April 20, 2012

 

Take a look at some of the best posts from George Takei.  Also, help us wish him a happy birthday below!


Bad Touch


"From a fan. Oh, myyy!"

Click here to view this gallery.


Wish George Takei a Happy 75th Birthday


  • Create a photo, meme or graphic to wish George Takei a happy birthday. Be creative and make your image embody the Takei style of humor.
  • Upload your photo to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram or the photo-sharing service of your choice, and drag and drop it in the picture widget below, OR
  • Tweet your photo to @mashablehq with the hashtag #MashTakei.
  • We will gather the entries and post them in a gallery for George Takei to see.

Use your own image or one of these to create your Takei birthday wish:


Thumbnail courtesy of Flickr, Gage Skidmore.

More About: features, George Takei, internet memes, memes, Star Trek, trending

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/george-takei-social-media/?utm_source=feedburn...

Band to Take Requests via Text During Upcoming Concert


Music acts nationwide are getting more creative with technology during live performances when they roll into town for concerts. Case in point: Rock jam band Umphrey’s Mcgee, which is gearing up for a digitally interactive concert event next week that allows audience members to engage with the band in real time via text messages.

Fans will be able to directly text the band song requests during the show, as well as answer questions posed by the group and even recommend when it’s time to switch up the instruments.

Called the UMBowl — “UM” for the band names’ initials — it’s modeled off of the Super Bowl with the inclusion of four quarters. But each quarter has its own interactive theme. Held in the band’s hometown of Chicago, the third-annual event will take place on Friday, April 27 at the Park West concert venue.

“We wanted to create an event that is collaborative, interactive and unlike any other concert people have been to before,” Umphrey’s McGee keyboardist Joel Cummins told Mashable. “People are always using their phones, so we wanted to include that as a part of the concert experience to facilitate voting for songs and interaction while we are playing.”

A screen on stage will display texts from fans, so Umphrey’s McGee can reference them to the audience or adjust the set list accordingly.

The first quarter is dubbed the “All Request Quarter,” where fans choose the set list and dictate instrument switches and solos. The band will also ask questions and fans can text in their responses.

The second quarter is devoted to different themes, scenes and concepts that fans can request through texts. Quarter number three — which comes after a brief intermission — is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” round, where the band will poll fans on what they should do next and the final act is dedicated to improvisational songs that can be swayed by text requests, such as “let’s hear more drums.”

There is a 15 to 20 minute intermission between each quarter.

The band prides itself as staying tech-savvy on and off the stage.

“We are also very active on social media sites, especially Twitter,” Cummins said. “About 20 years ago, musicians were up on a pedestal and in a fortress somewhere else, but now artists can interact with fans on a personal level anytime, anywhere. We love that. Technology can help create a more intimate experience and also make for more dedicated fans.”

Umphrey’s McGee also hopes to stream its live shows online in the future.

“You are only reaching a small portion of the population when doing a concert,” Cummins said. “When a concert is online and you’re going into people’s homes, you increase your audience tenfold.”

Although Umphrey’s McGee has been touring to promote their latest album “Death By Stereo” — and will be also appear at upcoming festivals including Bonnaroo in Tennessee and the Catalpa Music Festival in New York City alongside Black Keys and Snoop Dogg — the band will be holding a five-day summer music camp in the Catskill Mountains to instruct and jam with 150 fans.

Do you think more artists should incorporate technology into live performances? Is this the future of seeing your favorite band in concert? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Entertainment, Music, smartphones, Social Media

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from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/umphreys-mcgee-umbowl/?utm_source=feedburner&u...

Forget Dollar Shave Club; Buy the Same High Quality Razors for a Third of the Price [Video]

Remember Dollar Shave Club? It's the service that delivers fresh razors to your doorstep, monthly, for a fraction of the cost of the grocery-store equivalent. They had a killer viral video (above), but their high quality razors? Looks like they come from an online store called Dorco, and guess what: Buying directly from Dorco, you get the same great razors for about a third of the cost of Dollar Shave Club. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-the-same-high-quali...

US Small-Scale Nuclear Reactor Industry Gains Traction In Missouri

trichard writes with this quote from an AP report: "Ameren Missouri is vying to be the first utility in the country to seek a construction and operating license for a small-scale nuclear reactor, a technology that's appealing to utilities because of the smaller upfront costs and shorter development lead times. The small reactors, about a fourth or less the capacity of full-size nuclear units, are appealing to the nuclear industry because they could be manufactured at a central plant and shipped around the world. By contrast, building nuclear reactors today is a more cumbersome process that must be done largely on site and takes years."

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from Slashdot http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/04/20/1726208/us-small-scale-nuclear-re...

Worried you’ll outgrow the cloud? You’re not alone.

If you think about it, Netflix’s metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is truly remarkable. It’s a very large company with a very large IT operation and, presumably, a rather large bill in the mail every month from Amazon Web Services. Engineering effort aside, the fact that Netflix has decided it’s worth it to pay the cloud computing premium is the most amazing part. With many companies, the bigger they get, the faster they come down from the clouds.

Case in point: Yottaa. The web-optimization startup, which also launched its own CDN service in March, is transitioning its network into a hybrid model of cloud-based and physical servers after launching in the cloud exclusively. It’s a significant shift considering the company was actually a finalist in the 2010 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge and touted its cloud-based approach when the company launched last April.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud-only model has served Yottaa well. Its network is actually spread across multiple providers, including AWS, Microsoft and Voxel, and that distribution helped the company reroute traffic to avoid any major downtime during last year’s four-day AWS outage. And even as it moves to a hybrid model, the cloud still has benefits. “We can literally scale to hundreds of thousands of machines in a matter of hours,” said Yottaa Founder and CEO Coach Wei.

As the company grew, however, cost, performance and security issues meant Yottaa had to decrease its cloud dependency:

  • Cost: According Wei, it’s easy to get started in the cloud — you can spin up only as many servers as you need at any given time and don’t have to invest in 100,000 physical servers to match Akamai’s architecture — but “when you get to a certain scale, it’s actually not cost-effective anymore.” For Yottaa, which is serving 100 million unique visitors across its network every month for more than 80,000 web sites, that time has already come. Actually, Wei said, Yottaa always planned to move to a hybrid architecture, but even still he was surprised at how much the cloud could cost. Before he started Yottaa, he’d never thought about paying a million dollars a year to AWS.
  • Performance: The performance trade-offs in the cloud can be problematic, too. Wei said network performance is the biggest problem for Yottaa, as it’s typically about 50 percent slower in the cloud and variable at that. You never know what type of performance you’ll get at any given time. If someone else is using a lot of bandwidth, your service might suffer. And while some cloud providers throttle bandwidth at 100 Mbps per user, Wei said, “at the high end of the scale, that’s just way too low.”
  • Security: Wei notes all sorts of security problems with cloud computing, but the major one is the inability to use tried-and-true physical appliances for security. Not only do physical appliances provide a lot in terms of traffic-monitoring and load-balancing, but they can store thousands of IP addresses for SSL certificates on a single box. A cloud provider, Wei said, might only give you a handful of IP addresses.

With its new hybrid model, Yottaa still leverages the cloud when necessary — like when it would be faster serving an Australian end-user through a cloud provider there than a physical server in the United States — but it targets physical resources whenever possible. Its network now includes cloud and/or physical servers in 24 cities across the globe.

Yottaa isn’t alone in its transition to a hybrid architecture after a cloud-heavy beginning. Zynga, for one, famously reversed its AWS-to-internal-cloud usage ratio from 80-20 to 20-80. Fellow gaming startup Digital Chocolate also moved a good portion of its operations back onto internal infrastructure. At a larger scale, you see similar requirements of cost, performance and customization driving web platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to build their own data centers.

Of course, for every company (or several companies) that decides to switch from a cloud-centric architecture, there’s a Netflix or Animoto that decides to stay all in the cloud. It’s really a matter of knowing what’s best for your business. We’ll talk all about ideal infrastructure choices at our Structure conference in June, which includes top executives from Zynga, Amazon and Netflix among others.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Claveirole.

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from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/worried-youll-outgrow-the-cloud-youre-not-alone/?utm_...

Is The Race For the White House Being Fought on Wikipedia? [INFOGRAPHIC]

The war for the White House is being waged on an unlikely battlefield — Wikipedia.

Mitt Romney’s Wikipedia page alone has been edited hundreds of times since the Republican primaries began.

The most-often edited topics? “Bain,” the name of the company where Romney was once CEO, “Massachusetts,” where Romney was governor, and “business,” where Romney’s career has lied outside of politics.

Some of the edits made to Romney’s page have to do with contentious issues, including the story of Romney’s dog, Seamus. In 1983, Romney put Seamus on the roof rack of his car during a family vacation — a move that’s drawn criticism from animal rights groups and Romney’s political opponents.

The peak frequency of edits to Romney’s page occurred just as the Florida primaries were underway. That’s a sign that edits are being made to sway public opinion of Romney in certain directions. Wikipedia is a common destination for citizens seeking information on candidates, giving it a role in forming voters’ opinions.

Editing of contentious pages isn’t an entirely uncommon occurrence — the article on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance, has been edited at least 500 times in the past year alone. Wikipedia works as an open encyclopedia — anyone can make changes, but editors work to ensure accuracy and prevent bias.

For more, check out this infographic below, based on data from Yahoo.


More About: 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, Politics, US, wikipedia

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/race-for-white-house-wikipedia/?utm_source=fee...

Top 10 Clever Tricks Built Right Into Gmail [Lifehacker Top 10]

Gmail is amazing. It's chock full of more shortcuts, settings, and features than you could shake a stick at. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail ninja, though, there are quite a few tricks you might not know about (and some that Google didn't even intend). Here are our top 10 clever tricks built right into Gmail. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5903974/top-10-clever-tricks-built-right-into-gmail

Study shows more people watch TV on tablets than computers, still nothing on

Study shows more people watch TV on tablets than computers, still nothing on

Is your notebook still your preferred second TV? Well, it seems you're now in the minority. The hip new way of consuming the drug of the nation -- after the 'ole tube itself -- is on a tablet, according to a recent Viacom study. Over 2,500 people were polled nationwide, and the results show a shift away from computers and smartphones to slates. Tabs made up 15 percent of full-length TV show viewings, with the increase of streaming services and companion apps being cited as contributing factors to the trend. We don't know what the fuss is about, we watch all our telly on a tablet.

Continue reading Study shows more people watch TV on tablets than computers, still nothing on

Study shows more people watch TV on tablets than computers, still nothing on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/21/study-shows-more-people-watch-tv-on-tablet...

Cablevision's Optimum Online live TV streaming now available on Windows and Mac

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It's been a little over a year since Cablevision launched Optimum for iPad with live streaming of all of its channels to the tablet, and now subscribers can experience the same thing on their computer with the Optimum for Laptops app. Available for Mac or PC it has a brand new interface and searchable guide, as well as the ability to manage DVR recordings and change the channel on cable boxes in the house. According to Cablevision its iOS app has been downloaded over a million times, we'll see how popular this followup is -- and if it spurs any new lawsuits from channel owners.

Continue reading Cablevision's Optimum Online live TV streaming now available on Windows and Mac

Cablevision's Optimum Online live TV streaming now available on Windows and Mac originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/21/cablevisions-optimum-online-live-tv-stream...