Every day while researching the latest trends for clients or finding stories for the blog, I come across some brilliant reads that I bookmark and keep for myself to read when I have a bit of spare time. Rather than being selfish and keeping all that great content to myself, I decided to start a feature here where I share ten must-read social media and technology stories of the day. Most of these will go beyond breaking news and will be insightful posts, articles or videos that are worth starting your day with.
Zynga is now one of the biggest companies in the social web space and their founder Mark Pincus is hailed as a huge success. However, in this brilliant interview, he explains how he has failed in the past before making it big. How to Fail: Mark Pincus
We all spend so much time on our computers, smartphones and social networks these days and this excellent piece asks us the question if Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Possibly a little over the top but good reading.
Will Data Monopolies Paralyze the Internet? With all of us pouring more and more of our personal and professional data into the social web, Jon Bruner looks at where all this data will take us in the future and wonders about the large corporations controlling it all.
Much of the focus in the smartphone market these days centers around Apple and the iPhone, but one of the biggest battles over the last couple of years has been between Samsung and Nokia. This fantastic piece paints a picture of how Samsung beat Nokia.
So video is fast becoming a great way to convert visitors into sales on your website or blog, and this guest post over on Problogger gives a good run down of what does and doesn’t work. Use Video Testimonials to Increase Conversions
So Apple usually get a ton of praise from everybody in the tech press, but this is a good balanced look at why they might need a fresh start when it comes to their operating system. iOS Needs a Fresh Start
So Ze Frank, one of the most creative people on the internet over the last number of years is back and most people seem to be seriously happy. The guys over on Copy Blogger have a look at what you can learn from his creative side
These guys are brilliant at marketing themselves as they trick a whole shopping mall in to thinking that one of their friends is famous. It goes as far as one of the guys even getting a date out of it.
Every day while researching the latest trends for clients or finding stories for the blog, I come across some brilliant reads that I bookmark and keep for myself to read when I have a bit of spare time. Rather than being selfish and keeping all that great content to myself, I decided to start a feature here where I share ten must-read social media and technology stories of the day. Most of these will go beyond breaking news and will be insightful posts, articles or videos that are worth starting your day with.
Many people reading this blog (built on WordPress) will be thinking about starting their own blog and wondering that platform to choose. A new study just released shows that the top 100 blogs in the world are mostly built on WordPress.
All the talk in the last couple of days has been about Facebook acquiring Instagram, but is there a reason why acquisitions always work so well for the social network? This insightful piece looks at the personal touch that Mark Zuckerberg adds when courting a company they are after.
Yesterday was all about the U.S. government taking a case against Apple because of their pricing in the eBook market and this excellent piece wonders: Who is less evil, Amazon or book publishers?
Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out. The New York Times take a look at the biggest social media story of the year so far from a more non-tech stand point and the comments on this story are also well worth reading to help you judge the mood around the sale.
Another story about Apple and this time talking about their music offering and how it’s time for iTunes to right the syncing ship. It is a product that has been around for over ten years now and although it has huge success, it could be time for something different as the music industry starts to evolve.
If you are keen on spending a bit of time over on the newly designed Google+ and are using it for business, you might want to check out this handy list… 5 Top Google+ Tools and Apps for Marketing Pros
There has been a lot of bad press around the Foxconn factory where Apple makes many of its products and this video has just been released showing the process that goes into making an iPad.
With the growth of mobile phones over the last ten/fifteen years, the one major casualty has been the humble phone booth. Falling out of relevance with the majority of people, a lot of them have been left to decay or have been dismantled as less people use them. That said, they still have one more use if a new pilot scheme from New York City comes to fruition.
Next month, the city is planning to unveil 32-inch ‘smartscreens’ with internet connections inside 250 old phone booths throughout the five boroughs, according to the New York Post. Currently there are over 12,800 outdoor pay phones in the city, whose contracts with the city expire in October 2014.
The free touchscreens, which will be waterproof and dustproof, will display local neighborhood information such as nearby restaurants, traffic updates, landmark information, safety alerts and store sales in the area – all in multiple languages. Pressing an on-screen icon will link users to 311 online, the city’s government information service, to file complaints or request city information.
The search capabilities on the tables will be protected and controlled so the opportunity to use them as your own free computer is limited. The screens will cost the city nothing and will eventually generate revenue through advertising, the city will get a 36 per cent cut out of all ad revenue generated when the scheme becomes official. Currently, pay phones generate around $18 million for New York City, a city spokesperson told the New York Post, but there is no estimate regarding how much revenue this scheme will generate in comparison.
The city is also rolling out computer kiosks to replace pay phones located underground, such as in subway stations. the 22-inch underground touchscreens will be equipped with cameras for video applications, as well as electrical outlets so users can charge their phones while buying access to the Internet, email and apps.
Every once in a while technology will get to a certain stage where you think it can’t possibly advance much further which is where I thought we were at with video recently given the fact that we are all walking around with 1080p full HD cameras in our pockets on our phones. Just when you thought we had reached the nirvana of video technology along comes this stunning video featuring of all things a simple tea party that is shot in a whopping 6900 frames per second and that shows what might be possible with a video camera in the future. As the guys who made the video themselves say
A super slow motion video of exploding eggs and smashing glass filmed by the Phantom Flex camera….not your typical tea party.The frame rate was anywhere between 3,200 to 6,900 frames per second.
Now this technology is obviously not in the hands of regular punters just yet and that is something that is probably a few years off but with the pace at which personal video technology is evolving you could see us all walking around with something like this on our phones in the future. Sit back and pop the video in to 1080p and enjoy this breath taking piece of video.
Last September, Youtube launched a beta feature which allows users to convert their videos into 3D through a single click. Since the company claim that hundreds of thousands of videos have been converted into 3D since then and today, they’re expanding the beta to the general public so that anyone can convert their videos into 3D. However, the only catch is that they must be short-form videos (anything under three minutes) and they must be uploaded in 1080p.
Announcing it on the Youtube blog, once those criteria are met, users can select 3D viewing in the Quality settings below (the gear icon) on the Youtube player. After that, just pop on your 3D glasses (assuming you have ones handy) and see Nyan cat and other hits in a new light. Here’s one of the examples Youtube provided on its blog.
Basically how it works is that the video conversion technology used to convert from 2D to 3D notices the different video characteristics used such as colour, spatial layout and motion to estimate a depth map for each frame of a video sequence.
Also through machine learning, they can figure out video depth characteristics and apply them in depth estimation from the number of true 3D videos uploaded onto the site. Ultimately, the generated depth map and the original monoscopic frame creates a stereo 3D left-right pair, that a stereo display system needs to display a video as 3D.
After acquiring this knowledge of 3D conversion, they then apply cloud computing scalability to make the conversion possible across the different videos on Youtube. They achieve this by breaking up the video into tiny chunks of data and processing them in parallel on Google’s cloud infrastructure lets them process these videos.
While it’s not going to set the world alight, (seriously how many people have 3D glasses handy when they’re using a computer), it’s a pretty cool feature and we could see different brands using it for future campaigns. The first campaign that comes to mind is the Skittles Touch campaign which requires you to place your finger on the screen. What other video campaigns could benefit from this feature?
We keep hearing about how each browser, with their latest updates and newer versions, delivers the fastest experience yet or performs better than their competitors. However, if everyone is claiming this, then it obviously means that they all can’t be right, but which ones are worth considering?
New Relic, a company that specialises in cloud application performance management, ran a study focusing on browser speed and performance for the most popular desktop and mobile browsers. Focusing on speed and usage for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Windows Internet Explorer (IE) and Apple Safari, they analysed data from its Real User Monitoring feature which monitors over 5 billion page views a week.
Their findings may surprise some people, the global average for page load speed is 5.5 seconds, which was only a slight improvement of last year’s average of 6 seconds suggesting that while wireless speeds have improved over time, the majority of browsers used aren’t able to keep up with this
When it came to browser speed on Windows and Mac, IE9 surpassed Chrome for speed on Windows platforms, loading web pages in under 3 seconds. For Mac users, Chrome 13 offers the fastest overall browsing experience loading web pages in just 2.4 seconds.
With they analysed the popularity of browser on Windows, IE was still the most popular choice at 40 per cent due to its status as the default browser. However Chrome is catching up with 33 per cent of the market share while Firefox holds 24 per cent.For Mac users the market share is even more lopsided with Safari having an overwhelming majority of 59 per cent. The two closest competitors Firefox and Chrome only have 21 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. The news will be encouraging for IE whose campaign ‘The browser you loved to hate‘ is spearheading the release of its new browser IE9, which has been receiving positive reviews and comments.
When analysing mobile browsing speeds, the fastest experience was found when using Blackberry Opera Mini at 2.6 seconds, this was twice as fast as its closest competitor, Safari 5.1 on iPad which took 5 seconds to load a page.
The data for the study was compiled on March 22nd 2012 between the hours of 12pm and 3pm PT, where an average of 694,000 page views per minute was monitored.
After a lot of rumours and numerous Terminator references later, Google’s Project Glasses team has released concept images and a video on their Google+ page showing what people could expect when the eyewear is released to the market.
Google, who are working on other projects such as self-driving cars and Google TV, are still testing the glasses, which have been under development for the past two years.
The video is shot from the perspective of one person wearing the digital glasses. Making his way around New York City, the wearer sends messages, takes photos, get directions and making a video call, all activated via the user’s voice.
On its project page, Project Glass said: “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.”
Reuters report that the glasses will be tested in public by members of the Google team and that while there isn’t a release date for the glasses, Google’s philosophy is to develop technologies that can be used in a relatively short period of time, instead of dreaming up creations that won’t be possible for ten or more years.
That hasn’t stopped others from parodying the glasses, one has already gone up from a person named Tom Scott, which shows the potential pitfalls of Google’s project.
And while not a direct parody of Google Glasses, this video, created by Keiichi Matusuda two years ago, takes a satirical look at how augmented reality could end up affecting everything we do.
For a device that was originally created to challenge the Wii, Microsoft’s Kinect is getting a lot of love from developers and is inspiring them to bring gesture controls both to Kinect and other devices. The latest example is from a start up called Bot Square who have released an Mac app called Flutter. The app allows users to control both iTunes and Spotify using only simple hand gestures.
Bot Square say that Flutter was developed because they “hated using the keyboard and mouse for controlling music in the background or watching movies on [their] computers from a few feet away.” So the idea was born and let’s face it, the ability to control any music or videos without having to go near your computer is certainly an appealing one.
The app is still in alpha build so the list of commands that you can gesture are limited, yet more improvements and gestures will be added in due course. Flutter is currently available to download for free on their site.
Google Maps already has a feature which shows you exactly how good/bad traffic is in a particular area, but now they’ve added a new feature which highlights just how long it will take you to reach your destination by factoring in both live and historical traffic data.
Accessing it is just a matter of bringing up the directions feature on Google Maps, this time when you enter in your locations, alongside the estimated time it takes to travel from point A to B, there will be an estimate underneath it that factors in current traffic conditions. The information offered is regularly updated so that you can adjust your travel plans in due course.
The idea is that through this feature, you can estimate how long it will take to travel using different modes of transport and find the quickest method. So comparing driving to public transport or cycling may show that the latter option is the fastest if faced with current traffic conditions.
Google say that it’s available in specific areas for now, mainly in U.S. cities, but like all Google products, it’s only a matter of time before the service is expanded to other countries.
After originally announcing their self-driving car project in 2010 and doing numerous tests and experiments since then, Google has made real progress in making the project a reality. With more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving completed since then, the company has shared a preview video highlighting their progress so far through a test journey.
The video features a blind man named Steve Mahan who, through a pre-programmed route, is driven to a fast food outlet and to the dry cleaners before being dropped back home. While the car is carefully programmed to drive in a specific route, the cameras and sensors fitted into the car makes sure that it avoids any obstacles and doesn’t get into any unfortunate collisions.
While there’s clearly a lot of work to be done before such cars are made commercial – the lack of traffic in this video highlights that coping with the unpredictable nature that is human drivers is still beyond its capabilities – they’re fascinating experiments to watch and shows how far the technology has come.
While they won’t be available for a while, certain organisations are warming to the idea. For example, Nevada became the first U.S. state to allow the use of self-driving vehicles on its roadways after approving it back in February. Test vehicles will display a red license plate, and when the technology is approved for public use, these cars will carry a green license plate.
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Every day while researching the latest trends for clients or finding stories for the blog, I come across some brilliant reads that I bookmark and keep for myself to read when I have a bit of spare time. Rather than being selfish and keeping all that great content to myself, I decided to start a feature here where I share ten must-read social media and technology stories of the day. Most of these will go beyond breaking news and will be insightful posts, articles or videos that are worth starting your day with.
