You connect it to your home Wi-Fi network and, once it is connected to the Internet, you can print from anywhere by emailing something to your printer's email address.
There is an app for everything... even for confession.
American entrepreneurs with the help of two priest and the blessing of a bishop have developed an interesting app, that is being sold on iTunes for two bucks.
It is called "Confession: a Roman Catholic App".
It features a questionnaire of sins and it presents seven different acts of contrition. It supports password protected accounts.
Its only problem: the Vatican says that an app cannot replace confession with a real priest. You are not allowed to do confession by iPhone or iPad.
Startups bring wealth and play a critical role in job creation. No doubt about it. What is new is that Governments fiercely embrace that idea.
I saw the new Obama Administration initiative Startup America, aimed to "celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation." The goal is to support new startups and small businesses.
"This coordinated public/private effort brings together an alliance of the country's most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other leaders..."
It's great that politicians –starting with President Obama and his innovation strategy– notice the importance of entrepreneurship as a source of competitive advantage.
As columnist Greg Sterling said, the defeat of the human Jeopardy champions by IBM's Watson has been a brilliantly engineered commercial for IBM.
The company has already received contracts from Nuance and others after the win.
In a way, IBM's Watson is the perfect search engine Google has been talking about. This "question answering machine" is big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans.
IBM researchers and executives have acknowledged that the machine had benefited from the “buzzer factor.”
According to eMarketer, Twitter -with 200 million users, $360 million in venture capital and a valuation of $3.7 billion- will earn $150 million in advertising revenue this year, tripling last year's income.
It means that the ads perform well, believe it o nor not.
Advertisers can buy Promoted Tweets, which show up at the top when people search Twitter for certain keywords. They can also buy Promoted Account, so Twitter suggests that relevant users follow their accounts. And Promoted Trends, so their topic of choice shows up in Twitter's list of trending topics. Ads on Twitter are part of the content, not separate from it.
(There are researches saying that technology intensify our desire to switch tasks and be constantly stimulated... I don't see how that might be a bad thing).
The Huffington Post's skill at using SEO (Search engine optimization) tactics to increase readership and revenues was one of the ways it made itself worth $315 million to AOL –wrote this week Claire Can Miller in The New York Times ("Web words that lure the readers").
The Huff Post excels, yes, getting search engine users. At least 35 percent of its visits in January came from search engines, compared to 20 percent for CNN.com.
See a type of headline they post: Watch: Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem.
Using these tactics –that a lot of news organizations don't like–, The Huffington Post started making money, building up an audience and ultimately selling to AOL.
Producing content based on what people click on include at least these strategies:
Choose story topics based on popular searches
Fill articles with keywords that people might search for
Write teaser headlines and tags that people click on
Include copious links to other stories on the same site
Follow social media optimization techniques: find readers on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Best way to get links on Twitter is to write a story people want to share with friends.
Run Twitter posts about breaking news alongside the articles.
Going beyond The Huffington Post, there are publishers called content farms, like Demand Media, Yahoo's Associated Content and AOL's Seed that use software that looks at activity on search engines, Facebook and Twitter, and generate headlines and decide content based on it. They assigns freelancers to write corresponding pieces.
However, this approach might not be so effective for long. Google, who has being criticized for listing these articles as top results, said it is working on a variety of algorithms to address that problem and push such links lower in search results.
Google blocks or penalizes sites that violate its guidelines, like including hidden text or loading up pages with irrelevant keywords, practices known as black hat S.E.O. (as opposed to the white hat variety). Google's advice to publishers is to concentrate on content creation. Chase after the best interpretation of what users want, don't chase after Google's algorithm.
Another advice is to be more social.
Lewis Dvorkin, chief product officer at Forbes, which recently redesigned its Web site to make it more social, said in the NYT.
“Search is, in my mind, yesterday’s story. You’re finding that today’s audience is much more interested in the filter of their colleagues and friends who they trust than an algorithm produced by someone else.”
At Nokia, some employees call Apple "The California Fruit Company".
The "engineer-driven culture" of Nokia, along with its bureaucracy, is putting this company in major trouble.
In the smartphone market, the Finland-based firm is so lost that last week announced that it will join forces with Microsoft, discarding its own cellphone operating system in favor of software made by Microsoft. (Above in the picture, Nokia and Microsoft's chiefs)
In my view, Nokia hasn't noticed yet that it is all about user interface and design. It is like auto industry: when you buy a car, you don't review first the engine under hood.
Nokia engineers might laugh on Apple's iPhone and iPad. But the Steve Job's boys have the user in mind.
If you fail to adapt to the new times, you are dead. Nokia and Microsoft... super-cool team!
She is part of the Ad.ly advertising network, a Los Angeles-based agency who pays celebrities to promote products through Twitter. This phenomenon is called "micro-endorsement".
Since its launch in September 2009, Ad.ly has crafted more than 20,000 endorsements for more than 150 brands, including Sony, Best Buy and Old Navy.
This agency aligns the brand with a list of actors, athletes, musicians and entrepreneurs it handles. Celebrities earn a fee per tweet than ranges from $1K to mid-five figures, according to experts quoted by Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine.
For now the Federal Trade Commission requires advertisers to add a small label indicating they're ads. But frankly it is not easy to detect.
In other words, welcome to the new social media sponsored landscape. In the near future, you will subscribe to a celeb Twitter, Facebook or blog and you won't know if you are receiving honest stories or sponsored news.
Above is the behind the scenes video about the Google Art team capturing high resolution images inside museums.
Yes, Google is creating the Art Project, a virtual view of 17 major art museums, including the Metropolitan and MoMA in New York and the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, among others. Over 1,000 artworks painted by 400 artists can be seen.
The project is housed at GoogleArtProject.com. People can move from room to room within the virtual space and travel through a museum's interior.
The artworks are documented using an extremely high resolution technology, gigapixel, which allows people to zoom into the images to see details. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than an average digital camera. (See the video below.)
He noticed that the articles in The Daily were also online, visible to search engines and easy shareable on social network. Only missing piece was a main homepage making those articles accessible to people who were not using the iPad app.
This programmer built that index page... in just 20 minutes. Cheers!
(And here is the News Corp's reaction... They are not against to create mirror HTML pages; they understand that people sharing content on the web is convenient for the business).
If you want to be a lot more engaging with your Twitter followers, you should consider posting up videos, or even better, "micro-videos", that is, typically 10 - 30 second clips.
I believe that creating "micro-videos" is a very effective video marketing strategy for the twitter crowd.
An easy video sharing tool for Twitter (but also for Facebook, YouTube and MySpace) is TwitVid.
This service allows you to share video both from your desktop and mobile device, either uploading pre-recorded video or recording it right in the TwitVid platform or app.
TwitVid's co-founder, Mo Adham, explains that "any business that use TwitVid to upload videos get higher engagement; they get more followers on Twitter; they got people commenting on their videos, and every comment is actually a "tweet", so you get a lot of "@" replies; it's a very positive thing to do for your brand."
Above's video shows up how the new Twitter video-functionality performs.
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