There is a Colorado serial Web entrepreneur, Andrew Hyde, who sold all his possessions and took a year off of work to see the world. He decided to put everything into a single backpack. His laptop didn't fit in.
So his alternative was the iPad.
It is lighter, it is replaceable if stolen and the battery life is good.
In places with little or no Wi-Fi, this traveler visits Internet cafes to blog.
Using the free service Posterous.com he posted entries to his blog (built on Wordpress) and updates to his social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr...). After copying and pasting the photos, he emailed flick+Facebook@posterous.com.
For longer posts, Andrew is using a bluetooth keyboard.
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And by the way, if you wanna be totally cool I suggest you this case keyboard-ready on sale on Amazon. It is $99.
Here is a practical check-list that we suggest you follow when releasing online video. We've collected 12 useful tips:
Increase your reach and brand awareness integrating embed codes and sharing controls on your video player. It will make it possible for your viewers to act as your advocates by sharing the content around the web.
For additional brand exposure when your video is seen away from your site, insert a pre-roll at the beginning of all your video.
Include a call to action and make sure it's easy for viewers to click through to your video during and/or after the viewing.
In this sense, use in-video adverts. People are much likely to click an advert that is related to the content. For example, 'drop into basket', 'donate now' o 'download product spec'
Use good analytics software to measure the performance of your video. You need to know how many people have watched each film, where they are, where they saw it, how much of it they watched and if they are sharing it. After knowing all this, adjust call to actions for maximum impact.
Use playlists to give viewers acccess to a great range of content.
Allow viewers to engage in a conversation. Comments are key in social media landscape.
Check your video encoding settings. Make sure that your video supports non-flash devices like iPhone and iPad. (The iPhone accounts 60 % of mobile browsing.)
Make sure everyone can access the content. Close captioning and transcripts are key.
Achieve the exposure and branding syndicating your content across bustiling social media platforms and video sharing communities.
Follow a consistent Video SEO (search engine optimization) strategy.
Use the Google's Video Sitemaps service so your online videos can be included in search results.
In our view, these are some best practises when implementing an effective video marketing strategy.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook and America's youngest billionaire at 26, gave away part of his estimated $6.9 billion fortune. He has donated a $100 million grant aimed at improving public education in Newark, New Jersey.
He announced it on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" (see above's video). During the broadcast, Oprah showed Zuckerberg's unremarkable rented house in Palo Alto where he lives with his longtime girlfriend Pricilla Chan. The Facebook's creator drives just an Acura, and unlike many other technology mogul does not own a private plane.
Oprah made him something of a hero.
All this happened days before the release of the film "The Social Network", a fictionalized story of Facebook's founding that paints him as a backstabbing college student who betrayed friends and partners to get control over Facebook.
What do you think?
In my view, the fact of donating $100 million in their 20s is truly remarkable and speaks by itself.
The YouTube Vacationer is a new channel, sponsored by the Norwegian Cruise Line, that includes travel ideas, tips and advice videos from experts at Lonely Planet, National Geographic, Travel Channel and Howcast, among others.
It has an interactive feature called "Vacation You", that enables users to create their own vacation videos –a customize 60-90 second montage after selecting footage from a huge library of video content. Then they can share the interactive video through email, Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.
This is one of YouTube's first efforts in building a branded channel, and one more way that it can monetize existing video assets on the site. Now YouTube only monetizes about 14 percent of the videos that are available.
Internet users are encountering a much different search results page thanks to Google’s new Web indexing system, Caffeine.
Caffeine is a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It enables index updates on a continuous basis rather than every few weeks.
The idea is that Google crawls the web constantly, producing an index in real-time, rather than a version that could be up to two weeks old.
This new search index impacts heavily on Internet businesses. It forces Web professionals to step up content development creation and their social media creativity. There is no other way to stay ahead of the competition.
“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”
“People's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”
“To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we've built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:
“We've built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it's a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come”.
Google handles more than 400 million search queries a day. Its job is to find out what people meant, not what they asked for. They try to understand users and content and match the two. As they say, world is not web pages –it is entities and things.
The copy protection of the HDCP protocolwas broken this week and someone leaked this secret key online. Intel confirmed that HDCP 'master key' is real.
It means that the copy protection scheme used in virtually all consumer HD video devices –from Blu-ray players and set-top boxes to game consoles– is gone, and therefore, anyone can copy any HD video content.
Let me explain it. The video signal traveling from your Blu-ray player, via HDMI, to your TV, which goes encrypted with HDCP, won't be anymore protected. The idea behind this was to prevent people from recording the HD signal.
Now expect a bunch of hardware HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) rippers (like Blu-ray copying devices or HDMI USB adapters) allowing users to copy uncompressed HD audio and video in perfect quality. However, it's unlikely that this breach will have any immediate impact on online piracy.
"The defeat of HDCP is yet another instance of supposedly unbreakable content protection schemes failing badly. Still, people in the industry are holding onto the illusion that there will one day be a secure architecture for digital content, despite of plenty of evidence to the contrary," says the prestigious NeeTeeVee.com blog.
Certainly the history is plenty of DRM failures over the years: Macrovision/Rovi, CSS, SDMI, BD+...
The video site YouTube Time Marchine is a randomized player that allows you to watch videos sorted by the year of launch. It streches from the year 2010 all the way back to 1860.
It has a scroll bar to select the video year, as well as the option to select specific categories (including video games, TV, commercials, current events, sports, movies and music).
For empowering this site the team manually searched for nearly 4,000 videos to create its database.
"Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing," says Wired magazine in a must-read article titled "The Web is dead".
"The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution".
Reason why: these dedicated smartphone platforms and apps often just work better or fit better into user's lives. Also for companies, it's easier to make money on these platforms.
As the graphic shows, today the content seen on browsers –largely HTML data delivered via the http protocol on port 80 – accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the Internet.
"As it moved from your desktop to your pocket, the nature of the Net changed. The delirious chaos of the open Web was an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now they’re doing what industrialists do best — finding choke points. And by the looks of it, we’re loving it."
"This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control," Wired says. Pure capitalism.
What is the salary of a social media director in the U.S.?
Jim Durbin, the creator of socialmediaheadhunter.com, says in a recent article in Bloomberg Business Week that "experienced social media director-business strategists capable of identifying a company's needs and solving them using social media tools- can command $120,000 a year and up."
"Further down, the ladder are community managers, who oversee a company's day-to-day social media operations and earn $60,000 to $80,000."
"Below them are cub Twitter managers, essentially copywriters with little business experience, who typically earn $30,000 to $50,000."
The higher-paid directors are often required to justify their salaries with progress reports to upper management and sometimes must fight for the respect and acknowledgement they feel they deserve, notes the magazine.
Metrics used to evaluate success in corporate social media might include:
number of Tweets and re-Tweets
customer recovery (when a civilian is successfully mollified
increase in the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers
Apple unveiled this week its updated and tiny TV set-top box, with streaming functionality and 99-cent TV rentals from ABC and Fox (other broadcasters have yet to commit to the service.)
Steve Jobs demonstrated a new iTunes-based social network for music called Ping, as well as an upgraded iPod line. The new iPod Touch includes FaceTime with its front- and back-facing cameras. (On-device editing and direct upload to YouTube will also be possible.)
The new Apple TV is a quarter of the size of the original box, with all-HD content, cloud storage and Netflix and YouTube access. The $229 price drops to $99, with pre-orders available. - - - Watch Steve Jobs' keynote here.
Social video and media apps have become a hot market.
These apps allow content distributors capture users' info and data associated with their TV and online viewing, since users can comment on and rate the video.
The last sample is Clicker. Its new iPhone app is available this week. The app will act as a companion to Clicker.com and Clicker.tv, enabling users to search for iPhone-ready video, share what they're watching with friends and create playlists of shows and videos they can save for later.
However, since the iPhone doesn't support Flash, there's not nearly as much video content that can be watched on the mobile device as on the web.
Other social video sites and app makers are Tunerfish, Miso and Philo.
Some smart video creators are pushing the boundaries of what YouTube's in-video annotations feature can do for content, creating multiple options for a story.
One of the best examples is Deliver Me To Hell, created to promote the New Zealand-based Hell Pizza franchise. Enjoy it.
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