Altoids Wants to Help You Tune Out Facebook “Noise”
August 26, 2010 by Laura
Filed under News/Events, On The Web
Altoids has announced the launch of Tune Out for Desktop, a free app allowing you to keep up with your favorite — and only your favorite — people on Facebook. Tune Out is a new way for to view and comment on recent updates from your favorites on a single, scrolling screen — so you’ll never miss out on the latest news, stories or photos you care most about. Say goodbye to unwanted updates and to grade school classmates yelling for attention on Facebook.
How It Works:
- When the app opens, you will be prompted to log into their Facebook account. Next, you’ll be presented with a full list of Facebook friends and can search for specific friends by name.
- You can then choose your favorites who will be added to the “Tuned In” option and appear in a grid. To keep the app manageable, the creators recommend no more than 16 favorites. Everyone else is “tuned out,” though consumers can always edit their selections and notify friends when they’ve been added to their “Tuned In” list.
- Starred profiles let consumers know at-a-glance the favorites who have updates to share. Simply click on a profile photo to view individual updates or click “Latest” to view all recent posts together on a single feed. From there, users can comment on any of the posts to stay connected.
- An added bonus, Tune Out works with Twitter as well.
All versions of the app, which became available on iPhone and Android earlier this year, can be demoed and downloaded at www.facebook.com/altoids.
ScuttlePad - A Social Network with Training Wheels
August 4, 2010 by Laura
Filed under News/Events, On The Web
ScuttlePad, which is designed to be the first social network for kids with a safe — and cool — environment to learn and truly interact online while building language skills was lauched recently. Whether adults like it or not, social networking has become an everyday part of a kid’s life. At a time when 27% of kids aged 9-17 are serious users of social media, ScuttlePad comes around to give them an environment to learn how to build a profile and share updates with friends.
ScuttlePad doesn’t clutter the experience with games and puzzles, but instead meets the specific needs of 6-11 year olds while helping them build language skills. With ScuttlePad, kids express themselves using guided communication to learn how to share information responsibly. ScuttlePad doesn’t connect to networks designed for adults, and kids can’t get into trouble by sharing too much or inappropriate information. Kids create status updates by clicking through pre-approved word lists to create sentences, which can result in silly statuses like, “I’m helping the radio,” but users can’t post anything offensive or too personal with ScuttlePad.
“ScuttlePad was built on the principle that guided communication helps kids avoid inappropriate online content,” explained ScuttlePad Founder and CEO Chad Perry. “We would never let our kids teach themselves how to cross a street, and the same is true for social networking. We need to show them how to be responsible.”
ScuttlePad is free, and signing up is simple. A parent or guardian must provide an email address to approve the creation of a user account. The adult receives an email to approve the membership and receive all the account passwords. Kids build a profile based only on their first name, hometown and state, and can upload a picture (all of which is manually reviewed by ScuttlePad). Once they’re a part of the ScuttlePad community, kids can connect with their friends. Kids then click through their pre-approved word lists to give status updates or comment on their friends’ news feeds.
For more information, log on to www.ScuttlePad.com.
MLB.TV Delivers New Features at a Lower Price
August 2, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News, News/Events, On The Web
As the 2010 Major League Baseball regular season enters the pennant race push, MLB.com is debuting a pair of new interactive features to its MLB.TV media player, natural sound audio selection and batter-by-batter highlight navigation, while lowering the prices for new subscribers.
Subscribers can utilize the current clickable linescore functionality to jump to any half inning of a live or on-demand game. This latest enhancement to the MLB.TV player allows users to navigate directly to any key at-bat in an easy- to-use scrollable batter-by-batter interface. In addition, subscribers now can choose to overlay alternate audio feeds over the live video, including only the ballpark’s natural sounds with the “Park” option.
Over the final two months of the regular season, MLB.TV Premium subscribers can watch live HD broadcasts of every game, subject to blackout restrictions, with access to home and away broadcast feeds, DVR functionality to pause or rewind live action and multi-game viewing options (quad view, p-i-p and split screen) as well as the standard set of MLB.TV features for a one-time fee of $44.95. MLB.TV, which is now $39.95, delivers up-to-the-minute statistical information, Twitter integration, in-game highlights, fantasy player tracker, full game archives, and portability to access their accounts through a variety of interactive media platforms, including Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, Sony PS3, Roku and Boxee.
Chili’s Joins the Fun on Foursquare
July 26, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News, News/Events, On The Web
Whether a ‘newbie’ or a ‘mayor,’ Chili’s Grill & Bar is giving something to everyone checking in at its restaurants on Foursquare, a location-based social media platform for smartphones. At participating locations nationwide for a limited time only, Foursquare subscribers who check in at Chili’s will receive a free order of chips and house-made salsa.
“With more than two million users and counting, Foursquare has given us a simple way to engage our tech-savvy brand fans,” said Nicole Cochran, marketing director for Chili’s Grill & Bar. “As social media trends continue to change the landscape of how we interact, Foursquare gives us an opportunity to connect with our guests while offering them this appetizer on the house.”
Chili’s is setting the trend as the first national casual dining chain to offer a free item with every check-in on Foursquare, regardless if someone is a first-time or experienced user of the social networking application. To unlock Chili’s chips and salsa offer with a coupon for instant redemption, guests simply check-in on Foursquare at participating Chili’s locations. Participating locations will be demarcated on Foursquare with a “special offer” flag whenever a guest is within 200 yards of the restaurant.
Rackspace Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA on OpenStack Project
July 26, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News, News/Events, On The Web
Rackspace Hosting has announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.
Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud hosting industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.
“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. “To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”
OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files. The next component planned for release later this year is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. Using these components, organisations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.
“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, president, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”
Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. Rackspace recently hosted an OpenStack Design Summit where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.
“OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability,” said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems. “As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products.”
YouTube Tests Flash, HTML5 Simultaneous Video Embeds
July 23, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News, News/Events, On The Web
YouTube today started testing a new form of embedding code that would support both Flash and HTML5. Using iframes, the site will either use the Flash plugin or switch to HTML5 depending on the browser and device. It will only force Flash when the video requires features HTML5 can’t yet handle, such as ad overlays.
The approach should lead to embedded videos working on any device with HTML5 video support, such as Android phones and iPhones.
Only developers currently have access to the code at present, but YouTube plans to roll out the hybrid embedding to its regular pages sometime in the future.
CouponMap.com Launches Coupon Alerts
July 22, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News/Events, On The Web
CouponMap.com recently launched a new feature to make it even easier for its users to get coupons and deals for merchants in their neighborhood.
Launched last summer, CouponMap.com enables users to enter their zip code, address or landmark to view a map of printable coupons for nearby merchants. CouponMap.com’s new alerts feature allows users to enter their email address to sign up to receive alerts when new coupons are added. They can even choose to customize their alerts for specific categories.
“We want to make it as easy as possible for people to save money,” said Scott Kluth, Founder and President of CouponMap.com. “Some merchants offer truly amazing coupons for a very short period of time. By signing up for our new coupon alerts, you’ll never miss out on these great deals!”
Users can also filter the coupons by category to find the coupons best suited for their needs. Furthermore, users can set the distance they are willing to travel so they’ll only see coupons for their selected area.
CouponMap.com currently offers more than 180,000 coupons for 90,000+ stores. Coupons are available in categories like health and beauty, home and garden, restaurants and much more.
Courting Apple Owners Is Good Business
July 20, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News/Events, On The Web
1.7 million consumers bought iPhone 4s in its first three days of sale, sending Apple more than $1 billion in revenue. Research from Yankee Group shows that those same consumers will be worth more than $1.8 billion to AT&T this year, and more than $9 billion to it over the next five years. “Why iPhones Matter,” a new report supported by data from the Yankee Group Anywhere Consumer Survey, outlines why Apple’s Anywhere consumers deserve attention from mobile operators.
“Apple iPhone owners shop more, buy more and remain more loyal to their phones than users of other devices,” says Carl Howe, Yankee Group research director and author of the report. “Our surveys tell us that Apple is the most popular choice of consumers shopping for a new smartphone. Because those subscribers will earn more revenue for operators, mobile operators worldwide should be courting them.”
Key data from the report reveals iPhone users:
- Are younger and wealthier. IPhone users average 32 years of age with $100,000 of household income, compared with other smartphone users, who average 34 years of age with $85,000 of household income.
- Spend more time on the mobile Internet. The average mobile phone user spends 19 minutes a day browsing the mobile Internet. Smartphone users spend 32 minutes a day, while iPhone users top the scales at 37 minutes.
- Do more with their phones. The average iPhone customer downloaded nearly 13 apps during the past 90 days; other smartphone owners average less than half that. In addition, iPhone owners are more interested in mobile transactions and conduct more m-commerce than users of other smartphones and mobile phones.
- Deliver their carrier a higher five-year value than users of other smartphones. Despite the fact that iPhone owners incur more bandwidth costs to the carrier, iPhone owners represent $5,345 in net revenue after subtracting out subsidies and bandwidth costs over five years, compared with just $5,097 for other smartphone owners.
Apple Makes Gains, While Adobe and Google Fall, in Impact Value
July 20, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News/Events, On The Web
Media measurement technology firm, General Sentiment, has released its quarterly Top-20 report highlighting the brands that made the biggest media impact for the quarter. Apple topped General Sentiment’s Impact Value rankings this quarter on the strength of its groundbreaking product releases, the iPad and iPhone 4. Google fell to the number three spot despite generating record levels of discussion for the brand. This marks the fourth quarterly analysis of its kind by General Sentiment, whose premier report was for the third quarter of 2009.
General Sentiment also announced the launch of a new media value metric called Perception Value, which measures the brand with a greater emphasis on the quality of the content and exposure. For the first time, General Sentiment has produced a top-10 ranking of winners and losers based on Perception Value.
Perception Value isolates effects of the public sentiment on brand value by assigning positive value to positive mentions and negative value to negative mentions.
“It is probably no surprise this quarter that BP topped the list of biggest losers following the oil spill disaster in April,” notes Greg Artzt, chief executive officer of General Sentiment. “One surprise, however, is retailer Polo Ralph Lauren taking the winning ranking.
“We introduced Perception Value as a new and important form of media value that better tracks the real-world changes in a brand’s overall consumer sentiment,” Artzt adds. “We believe this is the closest metric to ‘true value’ for brands of a certain size and stature, where the old PR adage of ‘any news being good news’ doesn’t hold true.
“Some of the biggest surprises in the report include Apple taking the top Impact Value spot, and Adobe following BP as one of the biggest Perception Value losers of the quarter. Clearly the ‘flash compatibility’ battle has not worked in Adobe’s favor.”
To see the Q2 Global Brand MVR in its entirety, go to www.generalsentiment.com/Q2GlobalBrand2010.html.
MapQuest Embracing Open Source Mapping
July 12, 2010 by Doug
Filed under News, News/Events, On The Web, Software, Web Sites
MapQuest has announced plans to be the first large mapping company to embrace open-source mapping at scale. The AOL firm has launched a beta of http://open.mapquest.co.uk/ built on OpenStreetMap data for the UK. The beta platform will be a stand-alone offering and will live alongside MapQuest’s existing UK platform, which is based on commercially available map data.
“We launched a version of the newly redesigned MapQuest, but on open data provided by the OpenStreetMap community,” said Randy Meech, Head of Engineering for AOL Local and Mapping. “Not only is the map data open, but also this beta map stack uses popular open-source mapping software, including Mapnik for tile rendering, TileCache for caching, and Nominatim for geo-coding and search. We are now employing developers to contribute back to these projects for the benefit of the community.”
Meech continued, “We believe that open source is ultimately the future for AOL’s local and mapping applications. And we’re very excited about supporting OpenStreetMap, which powers the maps behind Patch, our local news and information platform. We believe community generated maps that are of high quality and accuracy will end up ultimately being the better mapping product for users. Allowing users to improve the areas they know and care about like streets in their neighborhood, in addition to hiking trails, parks and bike paths, we believe will lead to the best mapping experience for all users.”
Additionally, AOL announced a $1 million fund to support the growth of open-source mapping in the United States.
The new fund will support projects in specific communities over the next year to help expand and enhance the geographic data available to developers, designers and other users as part of AOL’s commitment to open-source technology.