There are some things that you just don't want to send through regular email: your credit card number, your Social Security Number (if you live in the USA), and other messages that you really don't want anyone else to read. A new service and accompanying iPhone app, OneShar.es (US$0.99) provides a way to send encrypted top-secret information. Using the OneShar.es service is simple: you either go to the website or fire up the app, type in your message of up to 1000 characters, and a one-time URL is created. You send that URL to your recipient, and once they read the message, it can never be retrieved again. HTTPS encryption is used between the OneShar.es servers and the app (or your web browser) to keep your message encrypted in transit. OneShar.es says that "No service is 100% secure. However, we do take security extremely seriously." They also admit that Google Analytics is used on their site for web analytics, but "we, unfortunately, do not know who you are although we bet our users are rather great people." It's an interesting service and at $0.99 for the iPhone app (free to use in a browser), it's worth a try if you occasionally need to send sensitive information. [Via One Thing Well] Oneshar.es: For those messages that need to stay secret originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/03/02/oneshar-es-for-those-messages-that-need-to-sta...

Facebook’s much anticipated and first ever Facebook Marketing Conference, fMC, kicked off at 1PM this afternoon in New York City. We were excited to have been invited to the event, and take a first look at new Facebook products aimed at courting large businesses looking for an online media channel with the scale currently offered by television. With 845 million users across the globe who are spending an increasingly larger portion of their time on the social network, Facebook certainly fits the bill.
The Keynote: Facebook’s Impact on Society, through Storytelling.

The keynote began with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg eloquently outlining the internet’s impact on society, and Facebook’s role in introducing a platform where individuals are connected to other people and entities — ultimately providing them a voice on the web.
“When the internet happened, it changed our lives. It changed our lives around the provision of information,” she shared. “Technology is powering us; it’s powering who we are. This is a shift – a shift to the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends. … History is filled with examples of when individuals had a voice and made a difference. The difference now is that people can have this voice at scale.”
She set this stage to then outline how the Facebook platform is helping marketers forge deeper connections with individuals. Sandberg first spoke to the gaming industry, and how social completely transformed how people experience games and how that industry monetized. She moved to music next, stating how putting people at the center of the listening experience is transforming the industry.
She then handed the stage off to Chris Cox, VP Product at Facebook. Continuing in Sandberg’s storytelling, he admitted he was skeptical of Facebook’s ability when he initially interviewed.
“There was no media, Like buttons or farms,” he joked. “If you think of Facebook as a blue and white college dating site, you’re wrong.”
After walking people through why he bought into the Facebook vision, he spoke to the opportunities to make the world more social. Television was his first example, outlining how strange it is that we each go home to individually sort through channels to find something good to watch, when your neighbors, friends, families and colleagues are doing the same. What instead if you turned your TV on and saw that 15 of your friends are watching Always Sunny, your Mom recorded 60 Minutes for you, and that you missed Meryl Streep’s speech at The Oscars that everyone is talking about.
After painting a picture of the future of social, he introduced Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business Marketing. Hofflinger spoke to the notion of how messaging people is changing from traditional ads into story-centric ads.
“Ads are good. But stories, it turns out, are better,” he stated. “One little story at a time brands are reaching consumers at scale [on Facebook].”
He then outlined Facebook’s three new announcements for marketers:
Pages are now rich, customizable Timeline experiences.
As Facebook reiterated throughout the afternoon, a brand’s Facebook Page is “mission control” for their identity, marketing and advertising on Facebook. The big announcement today was the release of Timeline for brands — functionality users currently enjoy on Facebook. Timelines offer a much more rich, and customizable canvas through which brands can communicate stories with their Fans. This is also the central point for turning post stories on a brand’s Page into ads (read on).
Reach Generator ensures a majority of your Fans see your Page posts.
Right now people see 16% of the engagement happening between people and other entities through their Facebook News Feeds; meaning, only a fraction of the posts brands make to their Pages actually get seen by their Fans. In order to ensure a majority of your Fans see your Page posts, Facebook has introduced Reach Generator. Facebook touts that Reach Generator will help brands reach 50% of their Fans in a week and 75% in a month.
What ensures this reach? A new ad format and placement. The content and creative of the ad product is generated from a post on a brand’s Page. This story post is sponsored into an ad format — larger than what is currently available — and featured:
- On the right side of the News Feed (available before)
- Within the News Feed (new)
- Within the mobile News Feed (new)
- On logout screens (new, to be released in April)
These story posts could be any type of content: videos, links, photos, offers — you name it. Facebook will help brands determine which message is best for them to amplify into the four featured placements above, and reporting will occur post-campaign. Facebook touts the ads receive 5-10 times the clickthrough rates of their current ad offerings. As for success stories, Facebook shared that the premium placement helped Ben & Jerry’s reach 97% of their Fans and increased sales by a 3-to-1 ROI ratio.
Premium allows you to go mass market, beyond Fans.
But what about mass market — those who aren’t your Fans? Enter Facebook’s new premium offering, which takes a page post and promotes it (in the above placements) to a much broader audience, including those users who are not currently your Fans. Collectively these new premium Facebook capabilities allow big brands with large budgets the opportunity to benefit from the mass scale currently generated through television broadcast online, on Facebook.
After a fireside chat between Sheryl Sandberg and Ken Chenault of American Express about leadership and innovation within large companies, VP Sales Carolyn Everson took the stage and concluded the conference by getting back to Facebook’s vision for marketing:
“Our vision for marketing is that its content is as good as the content you see from a family or friend member … Let your Fans become the biggest, best advocates you have.”
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/live-from-fmc-facebook-courts-big-brands-positio...
 Ever wanted to use AirPlay mirroring to show the screen of your iPad 2 or iPhone 4/4S on your Mac? Just released, Reflection ($14.99 for a single license, $39.99 for a 5 pack) offers a well-featured mirroring receiver for OS X, ideal for education and demos -- and a great way to eliminate the Frankencable for iPad video capture. I've been beta-testing Reflection for several weeks. I watched as David Stanfill (developer of AirParrot, which I introduced a few weeks ago on TUAW) refined and stabilized this app. With Reflection, you can project app demos to your Mac in real time. This is a great feature for any developer or teacher, or even for business folk who would like to bring along their presentations on their phone. I first wrote about Reflection a few weeks back on TUAW, and it received quite the warm welcome -- many of our readers asked when it would debut, and how they could purchase a copy. At that point, the app was just in its initial alpha release. It barely supported multiple resolutions and provided few options. What you get today is full mirroring, including audio, with orientation updates and many video optimization features as well as pseudo-frames that make the video on your desktop look as if it's running on an iPhone or iPad -- just as it would with the Xcode iOS simulator. It's not quite at a bulletproof release, but for day-to-day use for those of you who need these features now and are willing to deal with the occasional crash, it's a great solution as-is. AirParrot ($9.99 for a single license, $29.99 for a 5 pack), the app that mirrors your OS X desktop to Apple TV, has also undergone major changes since I first wrote it up. In the latest release (approximately version 1.2.1), you can now use your Apple TV as an separate external monitor, not just for mirroring desktops. AirParrot also now supports audio mirroring and perceptual smoothing. These are great feature bumps to an already useful app. Correction: only the iPhone 4S is supported for mirroring, not the iPhone 4. Reflection app goes live, brings iOS screen mirroring to your Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
from TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/29/reflection-app-goes-live-brings-ios-screen-mir...
About a year and a half ago, the MIT Media Lab got a bunch of press for building a series of Bluetooth-enabled wallets designed to help promote responsible spending. One model, for instance, becomes physically harder to open as its user gets closer to the end of his or her monthly budget.
“We have trouble controlling our consumer impulses,” reads the project’s website, “and there’s a gap between our decision and the consequences.” Few consumers would argue with that. While the wallets are neat, the dawn of mobile payment technology promises to make them irrelevant. But, as our smartphones begin to double as wallets, the insight behind the Media Lab project – that technology can help us spend more wisely – will become more relevant than ever. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a whole slew of apps in the next few years in what I think of as the “good behavior” layer of mobile purchasing.
The fact is, we as consumers have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to how we spend our money. We buy junk food rather than nutritious meals; we spend too much on stuff and too little on experiences; we spring for a cup of coffee even though we swore we’d start making it at home; we don’t save nearly as much as we should, be it for retirement, education, or buying a house.
Pychologists and behavioral economists have studied the many ways in which we fail to optimize our financial decision-making, by succumbing to advertising or forming bad habits. But they’ve also prescribed things we can do to resist temptation.
In his book Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Dan Ariely recommended a novel tactic to avoid impulsive credit card spending: put your credit card in a glass of water, then put the glass in your freezer. That way you’re unable to act immediately on your impulses; you’re forced to wait for your card to thaw before you can make any purchases. (This strategy was also employed by the main character in the 2009 film Confessions of a Shopaholic.) Ariely’s point in mentioning the “ice glass” method is not just to note the obvious – that we’re bad at sticking to our financial goals – but to suggest that we can employ tactics to help us save more, shop smarter, etc.
As wallets are replaced by smartphones, there’s no reason we can’t design apps to freeze our payments in just this way. Imagine if you could create a budget that would then be enforced by your phone. The software would simply not allow you to spend more than $X per month on shoes, or fast food, or whatever it was you wanted to cut down on. Or perhaps you wouldn’t “unlock” the ability to pay for dessert unless your phone recorded via GPS that you’d walked more than two miles that day (are you reading this RunKeeper?) Or before buying $200 worth of clothes at the mall, you have to watch a video of the tropical island that you’re saving up to visit. Still think you need all those shirts?
You could even self-impose your own personal “tax” on certain vices. Want to buy a cheeseburger? It’ll cost you an extra $5, which gets funneled directly to your IRA. The point is that the consumer would be empowered to set his or her own limits on spending in order to curb impulsive decision-making and meet financial goals.
All this might seem fanciful, but it really isn’t.
“The shift in consumer behavior with the rapid adoption of smartphones is undeniable,” Andrew Paradise, CEO of AisleBuyer, told me by email. AisleBuyer’s mobile technology lets shoppers scan items to learn more information about them before purchasing, and while much of the attention in this space is thus far around discounts, loyalty programs, and the like, there’s no reason the same technologies can’t be applied to improve consumer behavior.
Even with mobile payment in its infancy, there is one company here in Boston already focused on this space. Its name is ImpulseSave, and it allows users to transfer money from checkings into savings via text message, in an attempt to turn the idea of impulsive financial decision-making on its head.
“The entire world is designed to get you to spend more,” said Phil Fremont-Smith, co-founder and CEO of ImpulseSave. “Now we’re seeing, finally, the birth of a new generation of initiatives and products that are trying to level the playing field for the consumer.”
He believes that by simply making saving as easy as spending, consumers will begin to do it more.
“A great portion of the battle is the simplicity of literally making the act of doing something good with your money just as easy and accessible and present as the option to spend,” he told me.
We’ve already seen web tools that help people motivate themselves, like stikK, founded by Yale economists, that sells “Commitment Contracts” whereby users can incentivize themselves to reach their goals by putting some money on the line that they generally only recoup if the goal is met.
But even that is rudimentary compared to what mobile phones, and in particular mobile purchasing, makes possible. When your wallet is a computer, the limits of how it can help influence and even helpfully restrict what you buy are endless. All you need are apps designed to keep you on your best behavior.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/03/01/the-good-behavior-layer-how-mobile-can-save-us...
Those of you who know my writing will know that I don't use many analogies. Analogies have a very useful place in helping people understand difficult concepts, but they also have a tendency to be a end up strained beyond their limits. Now, imagine how I would react to a whole new field of physics that might be best described as "physics by analogy."
The whole field is based on the premise that, when two physically very different situations can be described using the same mathematical model, the conclusions drawn from one situation can be applied to the other. Unfortunately, this is usually applied in situations where the physics in one situation—black holes, for instance—are so extreme that it is difficult, if not impossible, to test any of the conclusions.
It appears I must adjust my attitude and admit that the field as a whole is not useless. I reached this conclusion after reading a paper that uses sound propagation in Bose Einstein condensates (BEC) to throw light on the origin of the largest discrepancy between two calculations ever seen.

Read the comments on this post
from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/cosmological-constant-in-a-bose-e...
A lot of sales organizations still use a feature-function-benefit or pre-defined “solution” approach to selling. This type of pitch assumes buyers are already familiar with sales people’s products. It also assumes that buyers know what they want and are ready to buy.
from Mass High Tech Newspaper | Mass High Tech: The Voice of New England Innovation http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2012/02/27/daily16-Ditch-the-Pitch-How-to...
Twitter has sold a bunch of old tweets to a firm called DataSift, which will analyze them for marketing purposes.
The Mail Online reports that DataSift is the first such company to get access to the tweets, which go back two years. Another 1,000-plus companies are on DataSift’s waiting list.
DataSift confirmed the report to Mashable, but Twitter could not be reached for comment. The former has launched a product called DataSift Historics, which lets companies extract insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion, a rep says. DataSift will analyze public tweets, not private ones. If you delete a tweet, it’s deleted from DataSift’s archives.
Selling old tweets would be one way to monetize Twitter’s archive. So far, Twitter’s focus has been on building revenues by advertising to its 100 million or so active monthly members rather than selling its data.
Twitter makes the bulk of its revenues through advertising. A private company, Twitter doesn’t disclose its finances. However, eMarketer estimates that Twitter will earn about $259.9 million this year and $399.5 million in 2013.
The latest revelation is sure to rankle privacy advocates, who have so far focused on Google and Facebook. Both of these companies have been accused of having too free a hand with consumer data.
What do you think? Do you care what Twitter does with your old tweets? Sound off in the comments.
Image courtesy of Flickr, eldh
More About: privacy, trending, Twitter For more Social Media coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/02/28/twitter-is-selling-old-tweets/?utm_source=feed...
 Is online video the future of the startup pitch?
In the startup world we talk a lot about “the Pitch”—either to investors, team members, or potential customers about why your business/product is awesome. I’d like to propose a startup pitch competition that results in a listing on a dedicated Vimeo Channel, where the prize is a professionally made video illustration/animation of the entrepreneur’s concept.
Online video has changed many things, but the greatest success until a few years ago has been making meme masters of babies and cats. More recently, we are seeing the true transformative power of online video with Skillshare, OpenCourseWare for education, and even Kickstarter to help communicate potential products. It may also be an essential tool in the next generation of crowdfunding.
In 2007, I participated in the MIT Elevator Pitch Contest. This is a great event for a number of reasons. It forces you to boil your idea down to 30 seconds, and work up the courage to stand up in front of a large room of people. In most cases this is not the full investor pitch; the first audience consists of other future team members. Afterwards, the judges provide feedback on how your presentation could have been improved… but the most rewarding feedback you can get is from somebody in the crowd who says, “I’m inspired by what you said and I have some skills that might be useful for realizing your idea.”
The tradeoff with university campus-based pitch events is that they may exclude external collaborators. The campus is great for community building, but there can also be substantial benefits in collaboration with those from different campuses, or with individuals outside of the community. However, it may be difficult to get all potential collaborators to the same event. Pitch events with online video mean that the collaborator pool can be greatly expanded.
Early ideators often worry that somebody might steal their idea, so it is important to frame the pitch in the context of who the person is, what problem they are trying to solve, and a hint at the methodology…without giving too much away. This is possible even in a longer format 2-minute video.
Here is a potential framework for an open video pitch competition:
1. Event space is set up with video recording, lighting, and sound capabilities to make a quality online video.
2. Applicants complete a short application including name and qualifications.
3. People apply for a 1-minute time slot to present their idea, and get a high quality recording of their pitch.
4. Non-attending users can also submit their pitch videos, which are then voted up by audience members.
5. The winners receive a working session with an animation and video production group to do a full video of their solution design for promotion.
For this model to work, initial pitches should be in a highly standardized format for the videos to allow for quick review. The final product, however, can be very different and need not be specifically structured. Take this video from SolSolution for example. The product video can ultimately help in a number of different ways. It could assist team formation, or even be a launch video for a website or a Kickstarter project.
Entrepreneurs: would you be interested in a competition like this? Investors: would you find it helpful to see these more standardized video pitch formats proliferate? Let us know in the comments.
Jeff McAulay is a Manager of TechBridge at Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems and a BostInno contributor.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/02/29/the-future-of-business-plan-competitions-onlin...
While it only earned one-third the social media chatter as the Super Bowl, this year’s Oscars broke serious records. According to Trendrr, the 2012 Academy Awards earned 4.2 million social media mentions, more than double what it earned last year.
And that’s not even counting the red carpet chatter, which topped 3.9 million social media activities. Celebrities in attendance certainly helped inspire the content, whether it was Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest red carpet stunt, Angelina Jolie’s legbomb or Octavia Spencer’s touching acceptance speech.
SEE ALSO: Oscars 2012: Who Won the Award for Most Social Buzz? [STATS]
The data below is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, checkins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, narvikk
More About: features, Social Media, social tv, social tv charts, Trendrr, TV For more Entertainment coverage: 
from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/02/27/social-tv-chart-2-27/?utm_source=feedburner&ut...
|