Our pals over at Instructables are always having one cool contest or another, and have given away some fabulous maker dream-prizes in the past including four Epilog laser cutters, now, in a series of annual contests. But with their new Make It Real Challenge, they have truly outdone themselves: The grand prize is an Objet30 from Israel’s Objet Geometries, which manufactures some of the highest-performing and most sought-after 3D printing equipment in the world. It’s described as a “desktop” model, but it’s priced like a luxury car at $51,995. Here are the juicy technical deets straight from Objet’s website:
Net Build Size: 11.57 x 7.58 x 5.85 in (294 x 192.6 x 148.6 mm)
Tray Size: 11.81 x 7.87 x 5.9 in (300 x 200 x 150 mm)
Resolution: 600 x 600 x 900 dpi
No. of Print Heads: 1 modeling head, 1 support head
Weight: 205 lbs (93 kg)
Size: 32.28 x 24.4 x 23.22 in (82.5 x 62 x 59 cm)
As if that weren’t enough, each of ten first prize winners gets a $4,000 Up! 3D printer, and each of twenty runners up gets a coupon for a single 3D printed object costing up to $1,000. The challenge is to “post an Instructable that shows how to turn a virtual item into a tangible object,” and the deadline is April 30. Details here. [Thanks, Randy!]
Just as rumors indicated yesterday, Amazon has announced a new licensing deal with Viacom that will add TV shows from its networks -- MTV, Comedy Central, BET, VH1, Spike, Nickelodeon and the rest -- to the Prime Instant Video service. There's still no word on any potential spinning off of the all-you-can-eat video portion from the rest of Amazon's Prime membership program, but it does bring the count of movies and TV shows available to around 15,000, up from the 13,000 cited recently. The details are in the press release after the break, but it appears Amazon will have many of the same selections Netflix obtained in its earlier deals, from MTV favorites like RJ Berger and The Hills to kids shows like Yo Gabba Gabba and iCarly.
Virgin Media's school report for both last year and last quarter has been pretty positive for the Branson-Branded service. It pulled down £4 billion ($6.3 billion) in revenue for the year and made its first ever profit with a tidy £76 million ($120 million). In the last quarter alone, it added 273,000 TiVo subscribers, a figure that doubled its overall figure to 435,000. Favorite shows included Coronation Street, which was most caught-up with and The Vampire Diaries, which was the most binge-watched series. It's also clear that us Britons do love some super-fast broadband, 133,000 users plumped for speeds over 30MB in Q4. Flush with cash, it's going to buy back some shares and double consumers broadband speeds as it promised in January -- which we suppose is a fair way to spend your first profit, even if we'd have preferred to go to Disneyland.
Whether you just need a little help getting out of bed after a long night or a nap, or you just like the idea of a wake-up call in the morning, WakeupDialer will call you for free and play back one of 30 random messages recorded by Stephen Fry to coax you out of bed. More »
The design wizards at Twelve South have come up with another unique and useful accessory for Apple gear. This time, they're introducing the HoverBar (US$79.99), a mounting clamp and flexible bar that floats an iPad 2 (or several) next to your iMac or Apple monitor.
The HoverBar can be clamped onto the upright of an iMac or Apple display, to a tabletop, or any other surface up to an inch thick. Your iPad 2 sits in a plastic clip that's mounted on a swivel ball so it can be turned to any angle. In the video below, one idle youth taking time out from doing his homework uses the iPad / HoverBar combo as a steering wheel for Real Racing. That's a different use case!
Many people will want to use the HoverBar-mounted iPad as a communications device, displaying email or providing a way to do FaceTime conferencing without the dreaded "nose vision" view. Used with an app like Air Display ($9.99), you can even have a Mac window displayed on your iPad.
We hope to get a HoverBar soon for a full review. Until then, enjoy the video and visit the Twelve South website.
We’re just one month away from the first Web Innovators Group event of 2012 on Monday March 5th, which you can register for here. And in addition to our typical format, we have a couple additional sessions which will ensure this one is not to be missed! Our program for the evening will be a follows:
7pm – MAIN DISH DEMOS. We’re continuing with our typical format of startups presenting to the crowd as “Main Dishes” in the grand ballroom with the “Side Dishes” exhibiting in the skyline suites. If your early stage web or mobile startup is interested demo’ing as a Main or Side Dish, please reach out to me with the name of your company/site/product, a brief overview and description, and a link to a live site or password-protected beta demo site – or just complete the application form here on our website.
8pm – FOUNDER EXTRAORDINAIRE STEVE PAPA. Steve Papa, Founder and Chairman ofEndeca, which was sold to Oracle for a rumored $1B+, will share his founding stories in an innovative “reverse panel” session where the audience asks questions. We will have more details to follow about how YOU can ask questions of Steve, who founded a small web startup in Kendall Square which grew into a monster company over the following decade.
9pm – ANGELHACK GRAND PRIZE AWARDS CEREMONY. AngelHack, the largest US hackathon with $50K in prizes, is coming to Boston. The weekend before there will be a 30 hour hackathon at the CIC, simultaneous with teams between in San Francisco. You can learn more and register to participate in the competition with a discount (code: ‘webinno’) on angelHack’s registration page. We at the Web Innovators Group will be co-hosting the Grand Prize Awards ceremony at the end of WebInno with a live feed in conjunction with teams and judges in other cities.
If you’re going to attend this unique WebInno33, don’t forget to register and tweet about the event.
The Super Bowl’s first-ever social media command center was an “enormous success,” according to Taulbee Jackson, who managed the host committee’s interactive communications hub.
A team of strategists, analysts and tech-savvy volunteers spent the past two weeks monitoring the digital fan conversation while working out of a 2,800-square-foot space in downtown Indianapolis just blocks from where Super Bowl XLVI was played Sunday. They chimed in as needed via Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.
“The number of people we were able to reach was through the roof, more than anyone on the committee expected,” Jackson said in an interview the day after the game.
With some 150,000 people expected to flood downtown Indianapolis for Super Bowl festivities, the command center functioned as an innovative way to keep football fans informed and under control.
Jackson says it had a direct reach of about 49,000 people in the Indianapolis area over Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and YouTube. Overall, the command center delivered some 1.8 million online impressions each day for the Indianapolis host committee.
Brad Carlson, the host committee’s vice president of marketing, told Mashable that he is “sure this trend will continue” as social media becomes increasingly widespread. The committee tapped Jackson’s digital marketing agency Raidious to run the operation, which Carlson said became a hot spot for tours by other event and civic organizations.
The team used advanced search tools and analytics to identify fans in need of help by indexing key words and phrases.
On Saturday afternoon, for example, a fan named Morgan Cooper tweeted to no one in particular that she was struggling to find somewhere to park. Less than half an hour later, someone at the command center located Cooper’s post and responded via the host committee’s official account with this message:
The link contained a map of more than 50 parking areas. That ability to directly respond to visitor concerns paid off — over the month preceding the game, fan sentiment about Indianapolis and the Super Bowl averaged a three-to-one positive ratio on social networks.
Excluding search engines, social media was the number-one referral source to the host committee’s homepage, ahead of the websites of the NFL and Indianapolis Star newspaper. The command center averaged more than 3,500 retweets and 2,500 Twitter “favorites” or Facebook “Likes” per day.
Jackson also said that, by monitoring the online fan conversation, his team was actually able to learn about several minor safety issues before even being notified by official organizations.
The two biggest operational surprises were an older and less nightlife-hungry audience than expected, according to Jackson. But the command center’s successes and surprises alike will be a boon to cities and organizations that look to set up similar operations.
“We’re really excited about what we were able to accomplish,” Jackson said. “A big part of our mission was to give this new idea a shot and establish a really good baseline that future committees and events can learn from.”
What other cities and events should establish social media command centers like this? Let us know in the comments.
Note: In case you don’t know Adam, he’s the CEO and Co-founder of Abroad101, one of Boston’s fastest-growing startups and a MassChallenge success story.
At first, I recruited by spending an hour of my time pitching Abroad101 to a candidate. Then, we’d go straight to an interview. Towards the end of the interview, we’d get to our technical questions, where almost every candidate failed.
Then, I decided to flip the process around: start with a technical phone or video screen, and then go backwards, ending with pitching candidates on Abroad101. But that didn’t work, because the only people who were willing to do a technical screen without any initial conversation weren’t the right fit.
So how did I go from having three good candidates over the course of three months to having dozens of qualified candidates at once in two weeks?
I realized that recruitment is about understanding each individual. Does the person care most about the company’s financial prospects, the team, our challenges, or furthering their career goals, etc?
What I do now has enabled us to solve both problems I encountered before. Now we attract top candidates and then interest them in proving themselves to us so that we can then evaluate them.
Here’s my trick: Invite every qualified candidate to beer or a phone call; take just a few minutes to share our elevator pitch and exponentially growing metrics; spend up to few hours learning about the person on the other side of the table; pitch the opportunity to the candidate in the context of how it fits into his or her goals; do a classic interview, meet and great with the team, go out for drinks, etc.; make decision.
Syria has undoubtedly been swept up in the Arab Spring, popular uprisings against dictatorial rulers that have spread throughout the Middle East since early last year. The country, ruled by Bashar al-Assad since 2000, has also been the site of the most brutal crackdowns against protesters. With foreign press barred from entering the country, Syrians and the rest of the world have been watching video from a single source: YouTube.
Early uprisings against Assad’s rule began in January of last year. The following March, an anti-Assad protest in a southern city was met with a violent suppression from government forces. Within hours, graphic video of the event was posted on YouTube. Since then, protests have occurred across Syria as the opposition coalesces into a more formal fighting force.
Meanwhile, Syrians who witness confrontations between government forces and protesters are uploading new videos every day.
On Saturday, Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have called for Assad to step down. Earlier in the day, U.S. President Barack Obama personally urged Assad to step aside.
“Assad has no right to lead Syria, and has lost all legitimacy with his people and the international community,” said Obama.
Undeterred by calls to relinquish power, Assad’s government conducted a siege of the port city of Homs Monday, leaving approximately 29 civilians dead according to the AFP. Following the violence, the U.S. State Department announced the closing of its embassy in Syria’s capital.
As Syria teeters on the precipice of civil war, the world watches online. With foreign press agencies unable to send reporters or cameras, outsiders have been relying on video (along with telephone calls) recorded by Syrians on small camcorders and mobile devices and later uploaded to the web. These videos cannot be verified and they often include titles and descriptions with bias for their side of the conflict. But it’s difficult to ignore the raw visceral power of the footage.
Can these YouTube videos fill the media’s watchdog role in armed conflicts that are closed to the press? Clay Shirky, distinguished writer in residence at NYU Journalism, said that citizen journalism is a global trend not limited to autocratic societies experiencing tumult. He explained:
“There are three advantages to citizen video over what is produced by trained press. The first is that the first people on the scene of an event are usually citizens, so it is better for speed. The second is that there are more citizens than press, so it is better for coverage. The third is that it is harder to control citizens than press, so it is better for free speech.”
Shirky’s third point sticks out in reference to Syria. The video being uploaded by Syrians isn’t being subjected to any kind of government censorship. Shirky was, however, quick to point out that citizen journalism has limitations.
“The losses are image and sound quality, lack of access to military or political newsmakers, and lack of provenance (so policing fraud becomes more problematic),” he said.
The squashing of free speech and free press doesn’t only apply to autocratic regimes either.
“Reflect on the fact that the press was rendered toothless in covering the clearing out of the #OWS camp at Zuccotti, while the citizens were irreplaceable. In fact, one of my students who went down to cover the event brought his press pass, and realized that when he showed it, he got less access to the event, so he hid it and plunged into the crowd,” Shirky said.
We’ve included a gallery of footage from Syria throughout the uprising.
Do you think YouTube videos provide an acceptable replacement for press in Syria? Let us know in the comments below.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT We’ve left the descriptions intact, so that readers may better understand the intentions of the uploaders.
Syrian Revolution Damascus 15 March 2011
Syrian revolution rallies in Damascus on 15th March 2011
The Notification Center feature on iPhone's is a powerful tool to keep track of everything happening in your life, but it's not transparent how to use it to its full extent. We'll guide you through the basics of getting started with Notification Center and show you how to make it more useful with a few tweaks. More »