Filed under: reader

JavaScript package offers a smarter way to serve hi-res images

Given enough time, all simple, previously solved problems of the web eventually rear their ugly heads again.

Remember when limited bandwidth was a huge problem? Then bandwidth was infinite. Now it’s a problem again. And that means serving up images is once again a complex problem with no elegant solution. Its seems simple—Websites should serve the right image to the right screen, high-resolution images to high-resolution devices and low res to the rest. But of course it’s not that simple. Factors like bandwidth as well as screen size and orientation complicate the matter considerably.

Arguably the best solution right now is to send low-res images to every device. Sure, your images might look terrible on high-res screens, but at least you aren’t wasting people’s time or worse, costing them money.

Read the rest of this article...

Read the comments on this post

from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/javascript-package-offers-a-smar...

How Social Media Gave the UFC a Fighting Chance [INFOGRAPHIC]

The UFC 145 combat contest happens Saturday night — and is one of the mixed martial arts company’s most-hyped fights since it was founded in the early 1990s.

But the company wouldn’t be where it is today without having aggressively adopted social media over the past several years. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook helped the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — as both the company and its signature events are known — transform itself from violent sideshow to relatively mainstream entertainment.

In an illustration of the UFC’s disproportional strength on social media the company’s president, Dana White, has more than 2 million Twitter followers — far outpacing the commissioners of other sports leagues with more widespread recognition. For instance, Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League, has about 250,000 followers. Sepp Blatter, president of world soccer’s governing body, claims approximately 240,000.

Some of its fighters rival NBA stars in Twitter followers, and the company as a whole counts nearly 3 million more Facebook “likes” than the NFL.

How has the UFC achieved such social media success? “It’s because we’re real,” Kristin Adams, the UFC’s social media manager, told Mashable in an email. “These other sports put together these rules and fines and penalties to scare their athletes.”

In 2011, the UFC instituted a Twitter bonus program, offering quarterly cash rewards to the fighters who most effectively added followers, tweeted creatively and engaged fans.

“We want to reach people where they want to spend time and our fans love it,” Adams wrote.

For UFC 145 in Atlanta, the company has bought its first Promoted Trend on Twitter, which Adams says will help as the UFC tries to expand beyond its core fans base. In another move that appears targeted at new demographics, the UFC recently launched a Pinterest page as well, with boards themed around inspirational shots, party pictures and healthy living.

Adams says that, just as social media helped the UFC rise from obscurity over the past several years, digital networks will remain essential to its success in the future.

“Social media is very important to us moving forward,” she wrote in an email. “You can reach anyone, anywhere in the world and we have fans everywhere. The more we grow and go international, the more people we’re going to want to connect with and keep up-to-date on the cool stuff going on with UFC.”

Which professional sports companies do you think are best at using social media? Let us know in the comments.

To promote UFC 145, the company produced the infographic below. Scroll down to the bottom half to see some more of its social media stats.


Thumbnail image courtesy UFC.com

More About: Facebook, Social Media, sports, trending, Twitter

For more Entertainment coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/21/ufc-social-media/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_me...

Gmail Meter brings detailed analytics to your inbox

Gmail Meter brings detailed analytics to your inbox

Just in case a constantly increasing unread messages counter isn't providing enough details about the flow of messages to your inbox, the Official Gmail Blog has pointed out the Gmail Meter tool for detailed monthly activity breakdowns. A Google Apps script developed by Romain Vialard, it can show you stats on volume, daily traffic, traffic pattern, email categories, time before first response, word count and thread lengths; providing an even deeper dive than Google's own Account Activity dashboard. Setting this up on one's account requires setting up a Google docs spreadsheet and then installing the script on it and requesting a report, there's a YouTube video embedded after the break and a tutorial linked below to help you along. On the plus side, now when someone asks "why haven't you responded to my email yet?", you can show them they're still well within the average time before first response window.

Continue reading Gmail Meter brings detailed analytics to your inbox

Gmail Meter brings detailed analytics to your inbox originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceOfficial Gmail Blog, Tutorial  | Email this | Comments

from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/19/gmail-meter-brings-detailed-analytics-to-y...

How 3 Mashable Readers Landed Jobs Via Social Media


At Mashable, we believe that our community is our biggest asset. We love it when you tell us your success stories. Part of our mission is to empower people through social and digital media.

As Alyssa Milano wrote in her TIME 100 article on Pete Cashmore, Mashable “gives voice to millions who are trying to make their lives better through digital innovation.”

When digital innovation and real lives combine, that’s where inspiration happens — specifically, your inspiration. Here are three fantastic tales from our readers about how digital media helped each land a job or launch a career.


Starting Up on Social Media Day


Last year, Desiree Ford organized the Phoenix Social Media Day Meetup, an informal networking event for more than 500 people. But it wasn’t her first time engaging with Social Media Day. She wrote to tell us that the year before, she founded her business, Pink Media, on the inaugural Social Media Day.

“I had been a long time user of Twitter and Facebook as well as a freelance designer,” she wrote. “I started networking in Phoenix, which lead me to helping people understand how to use Facebook and other social media.

“A lot of people told me to make it into a business, but it wasn’t until I started seeing all the posts and buzz around #SMDay on Twitter that I really thought I could turn it into a business. On June 29, I bought the domain, got the social media name, made a logo and sent out an email on June 30, declaring myself as a business.

“I then went down to the LLC office and made it official.”

Pink Media is still going strong and will celebrate the two-year anniversary of Ford’s business on Social Media Day this year.


From Canada to India, via Twitter


Blair Henatyzen wrote us last year to tell us that an article we’d written helped him land a job. Blair wasn’t looking for a new position, but after learning how to use advanced Twitter search to find a job, he performed a quick search out of curiosity.

He wound up finding a job in an exotic, far-flung location: Bangalore, India.

He wrote: “I found the opportunity literally within minutes of reading the article. I applied and went from there. There was no plan to move anywhere. No plan to try anything else. I was happy with what I was doing.

“The scenario just kinda popped up and I thought why not? The job is similar to what I was doing in Canada. However, this gave me the chance to travel and see a part of the world I had never seen before.”

We’re thrilled to hear that a post we wrote about Twitter quickly and efficiently made a positive impact on one of our reader’s lives.


Not Just a Fan Anymore


In December we told you about two NBA fans who had started up Twitter accounts to help drum up support for the Philadelphia 76ers mascot contest. Only, the 76ers reacted with legal threats, and the two turned over their accounts.

Jerry Rizzo, one of the two fans, reached out to us to tell his story. At first, it seemed an organization had misunderstood the power of its fans. But the story took a better turn. Rizzo was ultimately offered a job as a social media coordinator for the team, an opportunity that he described as “kind of like a dream job.”


Got a story to tell us? We’d love to hear it. Let us know in the comments, or tweet us @mashableHQ. We’d love to hear how social media and digital innovation is making your life better.

And if you think we’re doing a good job, please vote for us in the Webby Awards — we’re nominated in the Websites category for best business blog.

There are two honors for each category: the Webby Award and the Webby People’s Voice Award. Members of the academy will select the winners of the Webby Awards, and the public will determine the winners of The People’s Voice.

You can help us win the People’s Voice Award by voting here! Polls are open from now until April 26.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, JulNichols

More About: community, digital media, jobs, Social Media

For more Business coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/mashable-readers-jobs-through-digital-media/?u...

How Social Media Will Change the Olympics [INFOGRAPHIC]

This year’s Olympics are being branded by organizers as the world’s “first social Games,” and it’s not hard to see why. Social media has narrowed the divide between athlete and fan over the past few years, with new and unexpected connections happening every day.

That’s why the International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched an online hub this week.

Sixteen years after the Olympics first launched a dedicated website, the portal will offer a directory of verified accounts, gamification rewards for active fans and exclusive content.

It may not seem like a huge step for the organization, but consider these stats. When the last Summer Olympics began in 2008, Facebook was a relative baby, at just 100 million users. When the 2012 Games kick off in London this summer, Mark Zuckerberg’s empire will boast more than 845 million members.

Likewise, Twitter had 6 million users in 2008; today the network is more than 20 times larger, at 140 million users.

Of course, it’s not all positive news — the Olympic organization has also seen branding-related troubles that have been denounced by some observers. Still, that controversy will only increase the level of social media chatter around the games.

Check out this IOC-produced infographic illustrates how social media has contributed to the changes in the Summer Olympics experience for fans and athletes. Check it out to see how coverage has evolved since the first modern Games in 1896, and find out the most popular athletes on Facebook and Twitter.

What role will social media play in your Olympics experience this summer? Let us know in the comments.


More About: Facebook, olympics, sports, trending, Twitter

For more Entertainment coverage:

from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/social-media-olympics-infographic/?utm_source=...

London LeWeb: Faster Than Real Time

I’ll be at LeWeb London with brands, and the agencies and software vendors who serve them as a keynote and co-host on the social track, I hope you’ll join us!

I’m pleased to attend LeWeb this June in London (new venue, new date, same quality show) it’s one of the highest production conferences in our space at scale. One of the fantastic things of the high-production global show is the focus on the future of how the web is moving the world, business, and ourselves forward.

I’m glad that Loic has selected the theme “Faster Than Real Time” based on Altimeter’s research themes (Adaptive Org), which will stem the many speeches at the event, and I’ll be there to speak with brands on stage, and conduct research live from these sessions.

What does Faster Than Real Time mean? It means predicting what people want –based on signals, data, and computing.

The amount of data being shared by consumers, and objects around the world is staggering. From body data from Nike+ and Nike Fuel Band, to checkins from consumers on Foursquare to the data rendered in Instagram pictures from mobile devices everything is being captured and shared. Even non-digital items and goods will soon have a digital signature as Google roles out Goggles that allow us to overlay data on everything and anything.

As a result, this data can be processed by machines, allowing us to anticipate and eventually predict what people will want and do, giving rise to an incredible opportunity for brands, governments, and peers to serve up needs before you actually know you need it. For example, Target’s recent example of predicting a young gal was pregnant before her farther actually knew is a bellwether of this future change.

See you at LeWeb, London, June.


Screen shot 2012-04-19 at 5.33.58 PM

ps: If you’ve my business card you’ll find the back says “For organizations, real time is not fast enough”

from Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2012/04/19/london-leweb-june-faster-than-r...

Google Cloud Print can now "print" to an Android device or local FedEx store

Although modern computing devices and software offer much richer ways to consume, manipulate, and share content, there are still people who prefer to put their documents and images on slices of dead tree. Google introduced a service called Cloud Print in 2010 with the aim of helping said people print physical copies of their files from smartphones and Chromebooks.

Google Cloud Print got an update today with several new features, including improved Android integration and the ability to print a file to a local FedEx office. Google also announced that Canon has joined the lineup of hardware vendors who natively support the service.

Google Cloud Print allows users to associate their Google account with a printer, making it remotely accessible over the Internet. This feature works out of the box with “cloud-aware” printers that support Google’s protocol. It can also be used with “legacy” printers by using a software intermediary that runs on a computer. Canon, Epson, Kodak, and HP support the feature on some models.

Google has introduced a new “Print to FedEx Office” option in Google Cloud Print. This feature will relay the specified file to FedEx and give the user a retrieval code they can tap into a Print & Go machine at a local FedEx Office store. The machine will print the user’s file on the spot. This feature has been available for about a year with HP’s ePrint service, but FedEx is now extending it to support Google Cloud Print.

In addition to adding the FedEx printing option, Google has also added support for “printing” to an Android 4 device that has Chrome for Android installed. When the user associates such a device with their Google account, it will show up in the Google Cloud Print list as a printing destination. Printing to an Android device will generate a PDF that automatically opens in Chrome for Android.

Read the comments on this post

from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/google-cloud-print-can-now-print...

Sort Gmail Messages by Size and Get Rid of Data Hogs [Gmail]

Is your Gmail account nearly full? If it is you can either purchase more space or go through and individually delete every cat picture attachment. Alternately, you can use a clever Google Docs trick shared by tech blog Digital Inspiration to sort your Gmail messages by size and quickly delete space-hogging junk. More »


from Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/5903372/sort-gmail-messages-by-size-and-get-rid-of-data...

Why the Social Learning Approach Goes Beyond Social Media

There’s no denying that Web 2.0 technologies have forever changed the way organizations look at corporate training. As a result, we now have a host of buzz words and phrases out there to describe these “new” flavors of learning.

We’ve heard terms like formal and informal learning, Learning 2.0, eLearning, mobile learning, on-demand training, and of course, social learning.

The last example is particularly interesting, since believe it or not, social learning is hardly a new concept. It was back in the early 1960s when now renowned psychologist Albert Bandura began putting together the components of his Social Learning theory, which tackled the ways people learn within social settings. Since then, many have described “social learning” as simply something that occurrs through person-to-person interactions, often in a collaborative (sometimes even formal) setting.

These days, of course, the term social learning is immediately aligned with social media specifically, which isn’t surprising. (Quick side note: In a blog post about social learning, consultant and speaker Jane Hart rather hilariously noted that adding “social” to the beginning of a word has now replaced putting “2.0” at the end of words as the trendy way to describe Web-based concepts. Can’t say she’s wrong there.)

As a result of this, many companies hear the term social learning and are immediately left wondering how they can integrate social media into their learning and development programs. But if you look at the original definition, chances are there’s already a component of social training and collaboration within their programs. Heck, things like group projects and live Q&A sessions could all technically be considered social learning, and none of them are anything new.

Getting a little more current, you could also classify live chat rooms, wikis, blog comments, IMs, emails, and screen sharing as falling under the social learning umbrella.

Now obviously, social platforms and networks are beginning to play a role in corporate training as well, especially as more professionals build networks on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But in some cases, sites like YouTube and Wikipedia could become even more appropriate for social learning. As Hart writes in a more recent article for E-Learning Council, these are tools that not only support the sharing of content, but the creation and co-creation of it. Hart adds that “workers are now using similar approaches in their organizations to co-create and share their own content within their own work teams.”

Wikis and internal blogs are some of the simplest ways to help employees create and share content socially, while simple solutions for creating on-demand videos has put engaging, multimedia content within reach for pretty much anyone. Some up and coming institutions have already made use of this.

These are things worth keeping in mind when developing an L&D strategy for your company, as social learning easily goes beyond platforms like Facebook or even Chatter. As content creation becomes a more in-demand part of collaborative learning, companies would be wise to implement those types of tools into their social learning strategies − rather than forcing social networking platforms just because they have “social” in their name.

For more on social learning for businesses, check out some of these additional resources:

Brendan Cournoyer is a Content Marketing Manager with Brainshark. You can follow him on Twitter @brencournoyer, and visit the Brainshark Key Uses page to learn more about how video presentations can benefit your overall marketing strategy.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/why-the-social-learning-approach-goes-beyond-soc...

Netflix to Release All 10 Upcoming ‘Arrested Development’ Shows at Once

arrested development images


Netflix is planning to simultaneously release the entire fourth season of Arrested Development “sometime next year,” the company announced at an event in Las Vegas Tuesday evening.

The streaming video subscription service is developing 10 episodes of the series, which was cancelled for poor performance in 2006, in partnership with Fox and Imagine Television.

Each episode will center around one character, the show’s creator, Mitchell Hurwitz, said from the stage. He added that the new shows will be similar to the previous ones, but declined to go into further specifics about the format or storyline.

Hurwitz also expressed hope that he and his team could go on to produce fourth and fifth seasons of the show for Netflix, should the first 10 episodes prove successful.

Netflix revealed in November that it had signed a deal to revive the beloved sitcom, which it would bring exclusively to its U.S. subscribers in the first half of 2013. The company now appears to be less certain about the timing of the release, but did say on Tuesday that episode production would begin this summer.

This isn’t the first time that Netflix has released an entire season of an original show at once. The company’s first original series, Lilyhammer, premiered its initial eight episodes all on Feb. 6, and is planning to bring the show back for a second season.

More About: arrested development, netflix

For more Entertainment coverage:


from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/04/18/netflix-to-release-all-10-upcoming-arrested-de...