Who’s going to win a Grammy on Sunday? Webtrends gives us a sneak preview, using Twitter as its crystal ball. Check out the prognostications in this exclusive infographic created fresh this morning using hot trending data from millions of tweets all over the world.
Webtrends, a digital marketing and analytics agency, uses the Twitter API to search for all kinds of data concerning the Grammys — for example, topical hashtags, artist names and twitter handles, and album and song names. They started collecting this stuff a week ago, and the data has been flowing fast and furiously at a rate of 7,000 – 10,000 tweets per hour.
So who’s going to win the top Grammy honors? Who’s going to be the best dressed? Check out this infographic and you’ll be the first to know.
By the way, if this data isn’t fresh enough for you, you can also see what’s happening at this exact moment. To do so, take a look at the Webtrends Live Interactive Dashboard, which lets you put your finger on the pulse of Grammy-watchers the world over.
If you want to see more Twitter predictions of the Grammys, here’s NM Incite’s stats from Friday, and don’t miss our own entertainment editor Christina Warren, who will be live-blogging the Grammys from the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday night.
How accurate do you think these predictions are? Let us know in the comments.
After graduating from Berklee College of Music in 2008, Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan took to YouTube, parodying Chris Brown’s hit “Look at Me Now” under the name Karmin. The video went viral, blowing up the blogosphere, and landed the duo on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Tonight, the two have been given the chance to perform on another show: Saturday Night Live, where they’ll be performing alongside Zoey Deschanel at 11:30 p.m.
Described by their alma mater as a “fresh-sounding combination of pop music and hip hop,” Karmin’s signed their own label with Epic Records and L.A. Reid, and has opened for Gym Class Heroes and Lady Gaga. They’ve also performed with big-name acts like Pitbull, LMFAO, Foster the People and Avril Lavigne.
The duo chatted with Rolling Stone earlier this week, talking about their upcoming nuptials and beginnings at Berklee. Six years ago, Noonan was studying jazz trombone and, at one point, was on stage with Herbie Hancock. Later, when the school had Noonan perform in a Stevie Wonder tribute concert, they called Heidemann to sing vocals. The two met on that stage, and everything blossomed from there.
MTV’s been keeping their eyes peeled on Heidemann, as well, suggesting that Busta Rhymes has been schooled by a girl, writing, “She’s supplied a mile-a-minute tongue-twister [...] that will have your eyes crossing in 10 seconds flat.” She’s certainly got skill, and I may or may not have a girl crush on her.
You can check out some of Karmin’s most popular covers below, as well as some of their latest originals. Be sure to keep them on your radar, because who knows what’s next? From YouTube stardom to SNL, their career’s already off to a superstar start.
During Apple's January education event, one thing that many Apple bloggers were waiting for never appeared -- a version of iBooks for Mac. While that was a surprising omission, at least there's a new and well-implemented Mac book reader app that handles the EPUB format of most iBooks with ease and grace. Bookle (US$9.99) is a collaboration of Take Control Books publisher Adam Engst and Australian developer Peter Lewis of Stairways Software.
Bookle, which is available in the Mac App Store, reads non-DRM versions of EPUB books from the iBookstore. This is one of my few concerns about the app at this point, as many iBooks are copy-protected by digital rights management encryption. As Engst points out in the Introduction of the "Take Control of Bookle (1.0)" ebook that ships with the app, the main goal of this version of the app was to "get a program out quickly that can help you read our ebooks in the here and now." He admits that they may not be able to add support for reading DRM-encrypted ebooks, since "Neither Apple nor Amazon will license their DRM systems, and while Adobe will license Adobe Digital Editions, it's a six-figure cost...".
Getting that out of the way, let's take a look at the app. Bookle's icon is gloriously and beautifully designed (see image at top), which gives you an idea of the attention to detail given to the entire app. Bookle stores the EPUB files in the Application Support directory due to the Mac App Store sandboxing requirements, and books are easy to add to the Bookle library. You can use File > Open, drag the EPUB file onto the Bookle icon in the Dock or Finder, or just double-click the EPUB file.
Once the EPUBs are in the Library, they appear in a sidebar on the left side of the app's window. The sidebar of Bookle displays the list of ebooks and the table of contents of the ebook being read. At the top of the window are buttons to go back and forth in your reading history or up or down in chapters. There are also controls for changing the ebook's font and the font size, as well as setting the background color of the page.
As with many Lion apps, Bookle supports full-screen mode. I found this to be overkill on a 27" iMac, but it works very nicely on a smaller screen such as that on an 11" MacBook Air. If you close a window or quit the app, Bookle brings you right back to the last page you were reading when you open the book again. Bookle also has support for multi-touch gestures. Swiping two fingers left or right changes chapters when using a trackpad. There's also support for text-to-speech, so if you'd prefer to have an ebook read to you by your Mac, that's easy to do.
If you want to do side-by-side reading of two texts, all you need to do with Bookle is open each book in a separate window. I found this to be useful while making a comparison of two editions of one ebook, and I think it could also be very helpful if you're reading an ebook in one window and an explanatory text in the other window.
I mentioned earlier that I had a few concerns about Bookle -- one glaring omission is the inability to search a book for a specific word or phrase. I'd also like to see the ability to add bookmarks and make notations included in future versions of the app.
I'm sure that some TUAW readers will balk at Bookle's $10 price tag when Calibre is available for free. Frankly, I find Calibre to be a bloated (210.8 MB compared to Bookle's 4.1 MB) and poorly-implemented app that's horrible to use, and for reading ebooks it actually launches a separate ebook app called E-book Viewer. Bookle looks good, and is an excellent 1.0 implementation of a Mac ebook reader. I can't wait to see what the team of Lewis and Engst is able to add to Bookle in future versions.
Raising money is one of the hardest tasks when trying to start a company. It takes an incredible amount of both time and effort, and there are no short cuts. Second to raising money is creating a valuable board for your company. Boards can be incredibly helpful or be the demise of your company from the beginning. BoardProspects, which has just raised $650k in seed capital, is aiming to transform how boards are created. Think of it as a hyper-focused LinkedIn aimed at bridging the gap between companies and potential board prospects (hence the name). BoardProspects will also provide educational resources and tools enhancing communication between boards and prospects to improve boardroom transparency, diversity, and service.
Angel investors who participated in the seed round include Mike Verrochi (managing partner at Blue Rock Ventures), Brendan McCarthy (managing director of Goldman Sachs) and Paul Sullivan (partner of Sullivan Tire).
“BoardProspects will help solve the challenges of building, joining and running effective boards by providing an online community for boards and prospects to make connections, and by providing an unmatched level of expert content, best practices, and educational resources for both individuals and organizations,” said Mark Rogers, BoardProspects Founder and CEO. “It is our intention to develop BoardProspects into the premier destination for boards and prospects to publicly and privately exchange their expertise, skills, and qualifications. With this round of funding, we now have the resources to accelerate product development and enhance the site’s functionality to make this vision a reality.”
The market which they are going after is apparently huge and one that I’m sure none of you have even considered.
There are more than 60,000 publicly traded companies in the United States that are required by law to have a board of directors. In the Fortune 1,000 alone, there are more than 1,100 directors currently serving that are over 70 years old, according to GMI Research, the leading independent provider of global corporate governance, ESG and accounting risk ratings and research. The number of vacancies for the nearly 1.6 million non-profit organizations in the United States is exponentially larger, with more than 1.8 million of these seats turning over each year. These dramatic numbers do not include the hundreds of thousands of private companies that could benefit from building a board of directors or an advisory board, recruiting valuable members, or applying best practices to improve board performance.
In addition to the funding announcement, Braintree based BoardProspects is giving BostInno readers a special treat. The first 250 people, who sign up here, will be part of their beta community and receive free admission to their exclusive launch party. The event will be at Space with a Soul on May 10th and will include a band, open bar.
OS X has a neat text-to-speech engine that'll read back what you write. You can start and stop TTS from the contextual menu or launch it using a keystroke that you set up in the Speech section of the System Preferences. Most of the settings for TTS are buried in the System Preferences which is inconvenient when you want to change a setting on the fly. If you need more flexibility than what OS X offers, you should take a look at Text2Speech. Text2Speech is a no-frills utility that uses OS X's underlying engine to read your text back to you.
The app gives you fine control over OS X's TTS engine in an easy-to-use UI. Once you paste your text into the app, you can change the voice that's speaking, change the speaking rate in small increments, and toggle the speech on and off with ease. It also tells you the character count of the passage, which is useful if you're writing a paragraph for a character-limited text box.
Text2Speech works well, with one caveat. When you start the TTS, it always starts at the beginning which is a minor annoyance. It would be useful if the app would let you choose the starting position. It would also be helpful if it remembered your position when you stop it in mid-passage. Despite these drawbacks, I still use Text2Speech every day. I find the convenience of being able to change settings on the fly outweighs these detractors.
If you want to try it yourself, Text2Speech is available for free in the Mac App Store. There's also a Pro version for US$3.99 that'll export your text to iTunes as an audio track or to your drive as an MP3 or AIFF file.
Just as Netflix is nearly ubiquitous on media streaming platforms in the US, BBC's iPlayer is pretty much a default app in the UK so it's no surprise to see it show up on Roku's boxes just as they start shipping across the Atlantic. As detailed in the press release after the break, those shiny new Roku LT and Roku 2 XS hockey pucks are well on their way to punters who've shelled out £50 / £100, respectively, with over 40 available channels. Unfortunately, that announcement doesn't extend to global iPlayer support outside the UK and Republic of Ireland, so we'll have to catch up on Inside Men some other way.
An anonymous reader writes "A mild electrical shock to the brain before learning a new task may enhance memory, researchers reported on Wednesday. A team of neuroscientists demonstrated that electrical stimulation to a critical junction in the brain appeared to boost memory in a few patients with epilepsy, a surprising finding that have implications for Alzheimer's disease treatment."
Ann Smarty is a search marketer and full-time web entrepreneur. Ann blogs on search and social media tools. Her newest project, My Blog Guest, is a free platform for guest bloggers and blog owners. Follow Ann on Twitter @seosmarty.
Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You’ll find quite a few smart social media monitoring tools, but what if you can’t afford them?
That’s why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives. Here, we’ll share a few ready-made spreadsheets you can copy (navigate File + Make a copy) and use for social media analytics. They are free, highly customizable and extremely easy to use.
Most of the scripts that run the spreadsheets are “public,” meaning you can access them from the Tools + Script Gallery menu (this also means they were reviewed and approved by Google Spreadsheets team).
1. Fetch Twitter Search Results
GetTweets is a simple and fast Google Spreadsheet script that lets you quickly export Twitter search results into a spreadsheet. You can play with the spreadsheets in two ways.
Increase the number of results returned — up to 1,500. I managed to fetch about 1,300.
Twitter search operators can help you filter out links (search “-filter:links“) and find tweeted questions (search “?“). Check out this article on advanced social media search as well as this list for more search terms.
Like the previous spreadsheet, FacebookFans is a Google macro based on Facebook API. For any Facebook page ID, it fetches the number of fans. It also visualizes the data with a pretty pie chart. Track your as well as your competitors’ Pages using the script, and the numbers will update each time you open the spreadsheet — easy!
This spreadsheet not only generates Google search results for the term you provide, but also fetches Twitter and Facebook counts for each page returned. Anyone can easily run a search for his or her brand name and see how actively it’s being discussed in social media.
Try using a few search Google operators, for example:
["brand name" -intitle:"brand name"] to find in-text brand mentions you are most likely to have missed.
[inurl:"guest * post" search term] to find recent guest blogging opportunities on the topic of your interest. Note: if you are getting a “too many connections” error, try another search to refresh the scripts. Or re-save the scripts from Tools + Script Manager.
This spreadsheet is the hardest to set up, but also has the most complex functionality. It lets you extract your friends and followers to easily search and filter your Twitter contacts.
The script requires your own Twitter API key (which is pretty easy to get), and provides easy-to-follow set up instructions. Try running the scripts a couple of times to get them working. Go to Tools + Script Manager and run Test script.
If you have done everything correctly, a Twitter Auth will pop up. Then, you’ll be able to authenticate your own application. After, go to Twitter + Get Followers and you should see the tool importing your following list. However, if you have large following, you likely won’t be able to import it all (for me, that meant about 5,000 recent followers).
Social Media Week 2012 begins on Monday, Feb. 13 and extends to 12 cities worldwide. Mashable staff members will once again be taking part in various panels across New York City.
Now in its fourth year, Social Media Week continues to grow, with 60,000 people attending events annually. Just like last year, we here at Mashable are excited to participate. You’ll find Mashable staff discussing a variety of topics throughout the week including nonprofits, startups, photography and marketing.
Below is a list of all the panels that Mashable staff will be a part of. A complete schedule of events worldwide can be found on the Social Media Week calendar.
Snapstream is an enterprise-level TV monitoring service. It's used mostly by news organizations and companies to keep an eye on what's happening on television every night, looking for a certain piece of video or bit of text or speech (the Daily Show famously uses it to keep track of all of that news footage John Stewart makes fun of every night). And despite its popularity, it's only been available on Windows -- until now.
Unfortunately, there's still not a dedicated Mac client, but there is a new web interface that Macs can access and use through the browser. The browser client will do everything the full client can, which means even users on Macs can search through TV broadcasts and find what they need.
Users can grab that video and transcode it on the server off to a more web-friendly format. If your company uses Snapstream (or has been thinking about using it), but was waiting for a Mac client, now's your chance.