ESPN writer Bill Williamson wrote an innocent article Sunday about NFL quarterback Tim Tebow of the Denver Broncos, which has sparked an entirely unexpected viral backlash in its comments.
Tebow’s inconsistency as a passer has led to much derision from NFL fans, and was the topic of Williamson’s article. The story now receives what seems to be several comments per second. The post’s commenters have even sparked their own twitter hashtag, #occupytebow.
The comments follow a set rhythm, inserting things that are “better than” Tebow using the “fill-in-the-blank > Tebow” format. Some of the tech-related (and more politically correct) examples that have been posted include Netflix, Dial Up Modems, Rebecca Black’s singing carrer and asking for an RT from a Celebrity.
Tebow, who was only recently named starter of his NFL team, has already been in the public spotlight for several years. A former University of Florida standout, he led the Gators to two BCS National Championships, and was the first underclassman to win the Heisman trophy, which is awarded to the best College Football player in the country.
This is not the first time the player has created an Internet trend. During the 2009 BCS Championship Game, Tebow painted “John 3:16″ on his eye paint. As a result, 92 million people searched for the passage on Google during or shortly after the game.
More recently, his mid-game moments of prayer have generated an Internet meme, Tebowing. A popular Tumblr was created, which defines Tebowing (“to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different”) and gives people a place their own pictures.
People are in arms about a proposed bill they believe will let the government censor and control Internet content.
Citizens are petitioning the White House via We The People, the government’s official, crowdsourced petition site, to kill the Stop Online Piracy Act, informally known as the E-Parasites Act. The act would allow private parties to cut off ad dollars to sites they say are hosting pirated or trademarked material, while allowing the government to order search engines and ISPs to remove blacklisted sites from their results, Wired reports.
The magic number for We The People is 25,000 votes gathered within one month. If a petition hits the benchmark, the White House says it will give the petition serious thought and put it in front of top policy makers in the field.
The petitioners claim, “This bill is a direct assault on a free internet and a shameful attempt by copyright lobbyists to destroy net neutrality. Essentially it’s a censorship law that would end the Internet as we know it in America.”
That may be a grand claim, but it’s gaining serious traction. Started on Oct. 31, the petition currently has approximately 7,000 signatures. It has until Nov. 30 to gain an additional 18,000 to reach the level meriting official review. The E-Parasites Act is scheduled to be heard in the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 16, effectively halving the amount of time the petitioners have left to collect those signatures.
The question is, even if the petition receives 25,000 signatures, will the White House give it serious thought? There are a fair number of legitimate petitions on We The People, but for every serious one, there are petitions about recognizing an “Extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.” That petition missed its month window, but received nearly 12,000 signatures, more than the E-Parasites Act has so far.
When the White House launched We The People in late September, the administration wanted the public to speak its collective mind. Anybody can create a petition and if it receives enough digital signatures, the White House will review it and issue a personalized statement.
People are in arms about a proposed bill they believe will let the government censor and control Internet content.
Citizens are petitioning the White House via We The People, the government’s official, crowdsourced petition site, to kill the Stop Online Piracy Act, informally known as the E-Parasites Act. The act would allow private parties to cut off ad dollars to sites they say are hosting pirated or trademarked material, while allowing the government to order search engines and ISPs to remove blacklisted sites from their results, Wired reports.
The magic number for We The People is 25,000 votes gathered within one month. If a petition hits the benchmark, the White House says it will give the petition serious thought and put it in front of top policy makers in the field.
The petitioners claim, “This bill is a direct assault on a free internet and a shameful attempt by copyright lobbyists to destroy net neutrality. Essentially it’s a censorship law that would end the Internet as we know it in America.”
That may be a grand claim, but it’s gaining serious traction. Started on Oct. 31, the petition currently has approximately 7,000 signatures. It has until Nov. 30 to gain an additional 18,000 to reach the level meriting official review. The E-Parasites Act is scheduled to be heard in the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 16, effectively halving the amount of time the petitioners have left to collect those signatures.
The question is, even if the petition receives 25,000 signatures, will the White House give it serious thought? There are a fair number of legitimate petitions on We The People, but for every serious one, there are petitions about recognizing an “Extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race.” That petition missed its month window, but received nearly 12,000 signatures, more than the E-Parasite act has so far.
When the White House launched We The People in late September, the administration wanted the public to speak its collective mind. Anybody can create a petition and if it receives enough digital signatures, the White House will review it and issue a personalized statement.
Yahoo released four products Wednesday, and almost all of them were for iPad, Android and mobile.
The big news was Yahoo Livestand for iPad, a social newsstand app that competes directly with Flipboard. But Livestand wasn’t the only product that Team Yahoo released at its Product Runway Even at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The struggling digital media giant also released IntoNow for iPad. IntoNow, which Yahoo acquired earlier this year, has the ability to listen to a couple seconds of a TV show and determine what show you are watching. The new iPad app brings that functionality to the tablet, while surfacing related tweets, hashtags and other content. It’s designed to be the ultimate companion app to the TV.
The company also unveiled Yahoo Weather for Android, now available in 35 languages. The app is a simple way to get the weather anywhere in the world (via The Weather Channel), but it also lets users “see” the weather in that location via a mosaic of Flickr photos.
Lastly, Yahoo released a new HTML5 version of Yahoo Mail for the iPad. It provides a simple and clean interface for accessing, drafting, sending and managing emails. Its key feature though is the tile dashboard that gives users access to top stories, weather forecasts, Flickr photos and Yahoo videos.
The commitment to mobile is stark, but it isn’t a surprise. One of the core aspects of Yahoo’s strategy is “to be where the customer goes.” Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving argues that mobile is the key to reaching users.
“We believe innovation in this space is happening on mobile first,” Irving said.
Yahoo’s CPO explained that most people in the developing world won’t come to the Internet via PCs, but will instead access it via mobile devices. And because very few people have figured out consistent ways to generate revenue from mobile, “It becomes important to execute on mobile devices and tablets and do some experiments.”
The company has clearly committed to a “mobile first strategy” as it continues to ponder its fate, and mobile first is a smart strategy in a world where mobile growth continues to accelerate. The products Yahoo launched today are really quite elegant, but the company’s instability is a threat to its innovation pipeline.
Mr. Clean is poised to get a Facebook-driven facelift this month to celebrate Movember.
The 54-year-old icon will grow a mustache for the Movember initiative, which supports funding for prostate cancer. Mr. Clean’s ‘stache will grow in accordance with the number of Likes he gets, as measured by a “Stache-O-Meter” on his Facebook Page. The Procter & Gamble brand currently has about 166,000 Facebook fans.
Mr. Clean explained his thinking on the issue in an Oct. 29 blog post on Movember.com: “I’ve gone over 50 years without facial hair of any kind. Even the 70′s couldn’t make me grow a moustache. But for an important cause like this, I’m gonna grow the greatest mo’ ever illustrated.” So far, he’s only gotten $25 in pledges.
Though P&G says Mr. Clean is the only North American icon to become an ambassador for Movember, other brands, including Break Media and The Art of Shaving (which offered a free professional shave on Nov. 1), have also tied in to the cause.
The Venice, Calif.-based Movember Foundation has run a mustache-growing initiative since 2004 to raise awareness and funding for men’s health issues, including prostate cancer and depression.
But we’d like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable‘s job boards are a place for socially savvy companies to find people like you. This week and every week, Mashable features its coveted job board listings for a variety of positions on the web, social media space and beyond.
Have a look at what's good and new on our job boards:
Mashable‘s Job Board has a variety of web 2.0, application development, business development and social networking job opportunities available. Check them out here.
Got a job posting to share with our readers? Post a job to Mashable today ($99 for a 30 day listing) and get it highlighted every week on Mashable.com (in addition to exposure all day every day in the Mashable marketplace).
Internet Explorer can no longer claim more than half of the web’s traffic, as of October, ending more than a decade of the default Microsoft browser’s reign.
Safari’s hold on 62.17% of mobile traffic has reduced IE’s overall share of web browsing, despite still claiming 52.63% of desktop traffic, according to Netmarketshare.com.
The Microsoft browser’s diminishing share reflects its near absence from the realms of mobile and tablet, which now make up 6% of web traffic. However, chances are, you gave up on IE long enough ago that this milestone makes you more curious as to who actually still uses the browser.
As of October, Firefox is the second most popular web browser, accounting for 21.20% of traffic, followed by Google Chrome and Safari, which account for 16.60% and 8.72% respectively.
As IE loses its edge on the competition, we’re curious to know which browser our readers prefer. Take our polls and tell us which are your browsers of choice for desktop and mobile.
Yahoo has officially launched Livestand, a social newsstand tablet app that presents a new challenge to Flipboard, AOL Editions and other magazine-style apps.
Livestand, now available for iPad, lets users consume news and content from Yahoo’s properties and a slew of partners. OMG!, Yahoo News, Yahoo Today and Yahoo Sports are prominently placed on the app, but that content is mixed with information from Consumer Reports, Forbes, Scientific American, the NFL and several others. Livestand boasts more than 100 content sources in total.
The key feature of Livestand is its ability to deliver a personalized stream of content, based on your Facebook activity and your reading habits. You can log in with a Yahoo or Facebook account, which quickly populates the app with a “Personal Mix” of news that you can check out at a glance.
“Its core technology is a key differentiator,” Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving stated at Yahoo’s Product Runway event at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. “The more you use Livestand, the more personalized it becomes.”
While the app is only launching for the iPad for now, it’s designed to be cross-platform. Most of the app is built in HTML5, including its slick animations and navigation. This includes the app’s advertisements, which are designed to be interactive and immersive.
“[Livestand] performs like a native application,” Irving said.
Does Livestand Stand Up to Flipboard?
My initial impression of Livestand is very positive. It’s slick and colorful. It’s clear that Yahoo has thought about the details. Animations are smooth, navigating the app is simple and easy-to-understand instructions appear to guide you through the app’s structure.
It’s also not lacking in content. Having the ability to grab Scientific American, Yahoo News and Forbes from the same application is definitely a big sell. You could spend hours reading content in the app. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to dig into the app’s ability to learn from your reading habits, but its initial stream of content seemed relevant enough.
Here’s the key question, though: Is Livestand better than AOL Editions and Flipboard, though? Does it have what it takes to compete in a tough but growing market?
It’s important to note that Flipboard takes a different approach to content than Livestand. Flipboard connects to your social accounts and pulls news from those accounts. Its fundamental approach is that social is the best way to discover content. Yahoo doesn’t take that approach. Instead, it pulls from a variety of partners, both traditional and non-traditional, and composes your content consumption experience based primarily on your reading habits.
The app is a good first step into the tablet realm, though. The app is a polished product with high-quality content. Whether Livestand is enough to bring Yahoo out of its run remains to be seen, though.
“The iOS app we launched today contained a bug with notifications,” read a tweet on the Gmail Twitter feed. “We have pulled the app to fix the problem. Sorry we messed up.”
When launched, the Gmail app displayed an error that read: “no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application." This error appeared to refer to push notifications, such as displaying the number of unread messages on the app icon.
The rest of the app functioned as intended, but many early users registered their disappointment. The app was not able to host email on the user’s device, and seemed little different from the interface you get when visiting Gmail on the Safari browser.
We’ve reached out to Google to find out why this much-delayed app was launched with buggy code and a lack of native email hosting. But in the meantime, let us know your thoughts in the comments.
If you were watching game seven of the World Series last Friday, you might have seen a new commercial for Chevrolet. It tugs at the heartstrings, is awash in American nostalgia, and if you’re a web culture aficionado, it probably felt familiar.
That’s because the popular blog Dear Photograph has been getting readers choked up with similar photo illustrations since May.
The site, founded and operated by Taylor Jones, has been growing its reach, and popularized the “picture in picture” concept that elicits nostalgia and family memories.
Of course, no content was taken from Dear Photograph for use in the Chevy ad, but the concept is almost note-for-note.
“When you look at it, there appears to be a lot of creative similarity, so I was hoping they would a least acknowledge that they were inspired by my site,” says Jones. “I didn’t invent the technique of taking a picture of a picture — but I did popularize it by creating a unique site that brings together the physical technique with deeply emotional reflections that are expressed as captions. My site receives submissions from around the world and has been seen by more than 10 million visitors [since launch].”
Jones tells Mashable that neither Chevy nor the agency that created the ad (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) has reached out to him, despite some criticism on the social web and a handful of negative comments on the video’s YouTube page.
But can a creative concept like this be protected as intellectual property?
“Copyright protects the expression, but not the underlying idea,” says Kevin Thompson, an attorney who specializes in trademarks, copyright and Internet law. “So, what Chevy is doing is not actionable, at least with regards to Dear Photograph.”
Thompson likens it to other legal issues where motifs are “borrowed” but no actual content is stolen. “There have been similar lawsuits with JK Rowling and the Harry Potter books. The idea of a young boy wizard facing trials during school was not protectable.”
Indeed, the idea was not wholly the province of Dear Photograph to begin with. It has been employed by artists before, notably Michael Hughes. But what it really comes down to for Chevy is sentiment. The execution is so close in feeling to Dear Photograph that some consumers have taken notice. And a social web scorned is never good for a brand.
Still, Jones is appreciative of the creative nod, even if he hasn’t been acknowledged publicly. “They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” he says. “Chevy is a iconic brand with a lot of talented people working on the business.”
Mashable reached out to the creators of the ad, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, but they declined to comment on the matter.
In the end, it will be left to the court of Internet opinion. What do you think? Did Chevy crib from Dear Photograph’s unique concept, or are pictures of photographs as old as photography itself? Have your say in the comments, and check out our selection of Dear Photographs below — used with permission, of course.
Dear Photograph, I want to know what you were like before the illness took over. I'd give anything to go back to this moment and spend the day with you. I hope you're proud of me. Love Always,Halle
Recognizing the limits of public chats and DMs on Twitter, a Boston startup has introduced a technology that lets you start private Twitter chats.
Blether Labs, which is also based in Dunfermline, Scotland, introduced the beta version of !blether on Tuesday. To start a private group chat, you need only type “!b” at the beginning of your tweet along with the Twitter handles of the people you want to “blether,” Scottish slang for “chat.” Then a clickable URL appears.
The idea, says President David Gerzof Richard, is to corral people on Twitter with whom you are having a conversation to a more accommodating space. “Twitter's a great platform for connecting with like-minded people, but if you ever get a group of people together, DM is kind of stuck at being just a singular conversation between two people,” he says, noting that public conversations can be confusing and hampered by Twitter’s 140-character limit.
Founder Kevin Bradshaw says !blether, which is based on the Zendit platform that received a $50,000 grant from Scottish Enterprise last year, will be financed by advertising at some point as well as a paid professional edition. At the moment, though, it’s free and ad-free.
Bradshaw, who founded online gaming platform i-Play and sold it in 2006, says there are some other companies taking “different approaches to the problem,” but none have !blether’s ease of use.
Like other developers using Twitter’s API, Blether Labs could also become an acquisition target for Twitter if it takes off. Bradshaw says that’s not necessarily the goal, but “I’d take [Twitter's] call.” On the other hand, a successful third-party service that leverages Twitter’s API could also risk obsolescence if Twitter should offer its own product that performed the same task — as it has been criticized for doing.
Rockstar Games has finally released the trailer for Grand Theft Auto V, an open-world, crime-based video game. The trailer reveals all kinds of juicy details about the upcoming sure-to-be blockbuster game.
GTA V is the latest game in the GTA series, which often follow the rise of a lowly criminal to the status of mob or gang boss. Most of the game is centered around driving missions with frequent breaks for over-the-shoulder shooting action. The trailer suggests that GTA V won’t drift too far from this formula.
After watching and rewatching the trailer, this is what we found:
The game takes place in and around California. The end screen shows the “Hollywood” sign as “Vinewood.”
Looks like there might be a mini-golf game.
More watercraft, like jet-skis, make an appearance.
Setting seems to be the discernible present.
The main character seems to be an older white man who heads into crime instead of retiring and being a “good guy.”
The main character also seems to have significant wealth.
Immigration and illegal workers may make an appearance.
Property ownership and management make a return.
Some of the game will involve homeless encampments.
There’s a brief shot of a fighter jet, although it’s unclear if it will be playable.
Note: All of these are our best guesses after watching the trailer. So take these predictions with a grain of salt. Better yet, let us know what you make you of the trailer. What will the new features be? Was the trailer kick-ass or a letdown? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Rockstar Games has finally released the trailer for Grand Theft Auto V, an open-world, crime-based video game. The trailer reveals all kinds of juicy details about the upcoming sure-to-be blockbuster game.
GTA V is the latest game in the GTA series, which often follow the rise of a lowly criminal to the status of mob or gang boss. Most of the game is centered around driving missions with frequent breaks for over-the-shoulder shooting action. The trailer suggests that GTA V won’t drift too far from this formula.
After watching and rewatching the trailer, this is what we found:
The game takes place in and around California. The end screen shows the “Hollywood” sign as “Vinewood.”
Looks like there might be a mini-golf game.
More watercraft, like jet-skis, make an appearance.
Setting seems to be the discernible present.
The main character seems to be an older white man who heads into crime instead of retiring and being a “good guy.”
The main character also seems to have significant wealth.
Immigration and illegal workers may make an appearance.
Property ownership and management make a return.
Some of the game will involve homeless encampments.
There’s a brief shot of a fighter jet, although it’s unclear if it will be playable.
Note: All of these are our best guesses after watching the trailer. So take these predictions with a grain of salt. Better yet, let us know what you make you of the trailer. What will the new features be? Was the trailer kick-ass or a letdown? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Google has finally released a native Gmail app for iOS, bringing its popular email service to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
UPDATE: Google has pulled the app and apologized for a bug with notifications. “Sorry we messed up,” the @gmail account tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
“We've combined your favorite features from the Gmail mobile web app and iOS into one app so you can be more productive on the go,” Gmail Product Manager Matthew Izatt announced in a blog post. “It's designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device.”
The app, which has been rumored for some time, focuses on speed, efficiency, touchscreen actions and iOS notifications. Google boasts that the app finds emails in a user’s inbox in seconds. It comes with email autocomplete and the ability to upload photos with the app’s attachment button. The iPad version also includes the familiar split-screen inbox and email view of its web app counterpart.
Gmail for iOS [iTunes link] includes most of the features one would expect. Users can star, label, archive and delete content. Users can access the Priority Inbox, one of Gmail’s key features. It also includes your standard touchscreen commands, such as pull down to refresh and swipe to scroll through emails.
We’ve noticed the app is missing support for multiple accounts, a key feature of Apple’s native Mail client. We’ve also noticed a frequent error message on startup: “no valid ‘aps-environment’ entitlement string found for application." This appears to mean push notifications are disabled, but the rest of the app is unaffected.
We’re testing the app now, but check it out and let us know in the comments your first impressions of Gmail for iOS.
Google has finally released a native Gmail app for iOS, bringing its popular email service to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
“We've combined your favorite features from the Gmail mobile web app and iOS into one app so you can be more productive on the go,” Gmail Product Manager Matthew Izatt announced in a blog post. “It's designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device.”
The app, which has been rumored for some time, focuses on speed, efficiency, touchscreen actions and iOS notifications. Google boasts that the app finds emails in a user’s inbox in seconds. It comes with email autocomplete and the ability to upload photos with the app’s attachment button. The iPad version also includes the familiar split-screen inbox and email view of its web app counterpart.
Gmail for iOS includes most of the features one would expect. Users can star, label, archive and delete content. Users can access the Priority Inbox, one of Gmail’s key features. It also includes your standard touchscreen commands, such as pull down to refresh and swipe to scroll through emails.
We’ve noticed the app is missing support for multiple accounts, a key feature of Apple’s native Mail client. We’re testing the app now, but check out the app and let us know in the comments your first impressions of Gmail for iOS.
Google has finally released a native Gmail app for iOS, bringing its popular email service to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
“We've combined your favorite features from the Gmail mobile web app and iOS into one app so you can be more productive on the go,” Gmail Product Manager Matthew Izatt announced in a blog post. “It's designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device.”
The app, which has been rumored for some time, focuses on speed, efficiency, touchscreen actions and iOS notifications.
Google has finally released a native Gmail app for iOS, bringing its popular email service to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
“We've combined your favorite features from the Gmail mobile web app and iOS into one app so you can be more productive on the go,” Gmail Product Manager Matthew Izatt announced in a blog post. “It's designed to be fast, efficient and take full advantage of the touchscreen and notification capabilities of your device.”
The app, which has been rumored for some time, focuses on speed, efficiency, touchscreen actions and iOS notifications. Google boasts that the app finds emails in a user’s inbox in seconds. It comes with email autocomplete and the ability to upload photos with the app’s attachment button. The iPad version also includes the familiar split-screen inbox and email view of its web app counterpart.
Gmail for iOS includes most of the features one would expect. Users can star, label, archive and delete content. Users can access the Priority Inbox, one of Gmail’s key features. It also includes your standard touchscreen commands, such as pull down to refresh and swipe to scroll through emails.
The app works with devices running iOS 4 or higher.
If YouTube views are any indication of who should win or be eliminated on the U.S. version of The X Factor, the show’s judges appear to agree with the online audience so far.
Last week, the judges eliminated five acts to determine the top 12 finalists. Those finalists will compete for the public’s vote for the first time tonight. The eliminated performers attracted the fewest numbers of views as of Nov. 2, while the acts who received the highest praise from the judges also netted the most views.
In the video gallery above, Mashable ranked the top 12 contestants (as well as the five eliminated semi-finalists) based on YouTube views for their Oct. 25 performances.
Drew Ryniewicz, Astro (Brian Bradley) and Melanie Amaro came out as the clear YouTube favorites for X Factor, which has recently sparked more social buzz than the majority of cable or broadcast shows on TV. Flip through the gallery or check out the list below to see how the finalists fared:
1. Drew Ryniewicz: 720,469 page views
2. Astro (Brian Bradley): 682,523
3. Melanie Amaro: 527,522
4. Rachel Crow: 357,274
5. Chris Rene: 327,582
6. Josh Krajcik: 313,974
7. Marcus Canty: 256,840
8. Stacy Francis: 254,766
9. Lakoda Rayne: 213,257
10. LeRoy Bell: 210,861
11. The Stereo Hogzz: 198,480
12. InTENsity: 196,162
ELIMINATED: Phillip Lomax: 187,166
ELIMINATED: Simone Battle: 179,820
ELIMINATED: Tiah Tolliver: 166,002
ELIMINATED: Dexter Haygood: 160,926
ELIMINATED: The Brewer Boys: 116,573
The X Factor doesn’t tally YouTube views as votes, but the stats still show which finalists are resonating with YouTube users, who often help the contestants get more exposure by sharing the videos on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.
For now, the show has five voting methods, including a new way to support their favorite performer: Twitter direct message-enabled voting.
Viewers also can vote by calling, texting, going to the show’s website or — if you’re a Verizon subscriber with an Android device — using The Xtra Factor App.
Who’s your favorite contestant so far? Do you track YouTube views to monitor which performers are the most popular? Sound off in the comments.
The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles — it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.
The world is now inhabited by 7 billion individuals, and as you can imagine, we produce a lot of trash. In the U.S., each person produces 4.6 pounds of trash each day, and 132 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) were discarded in landfills in 2009. Just over 35% of that was recycled.
For context, here are some stats: Greece recycles about 10% of its waste, the UK about 17% and Austria about 60%. Back in 2008, the European parliament passed a measure to achieve a recycling rate of 50% for household waste and 70% for construction waste.
There are several ways to go about this improving recycling rates and reducing waste. On the island of Taiwan, the government has forgone curbside trash cans and established detailed and mandatory trash collection schedules in a quest to minimize waste, since there’s no room for landfills. In Germany, which leads the world in waste reduction, the Green Dot program’s strict rules dictate how citizens dispose of 30 million tons of garbage each year, helping the country reduce its waste by one million tons each year.
U.S. recycling from 1960 to 2009.
Landfilling is the easy way out, costing about one-third as much as a waste energy facility, says Bryan Staley, vice president of the Environmental Research and Education Foundation, a private, grant-making institution that supports solid waste research and education initiatives. But governments and waste management companies are looking for innovative ways to recycle more products, to make waste more sustainable and to incentivize people to pay attention to their waste output. Waste management is a $75 billion industry with 20,000 players. One tool they’re using is technology.
“Sit in the front of a garbage truck, and it literally looks like a cockpit of a 737,” says Staley. “It is amazing how complex the driver’s seat is for these garbage trucks.”
And it’s amazing what tech can do for our throwaways. Read on for four methods of high tech trash collection.
1. RFID Tracking
Staley says RFID technology allows for “nonhuman interaction of providing data related to solid waste pickup and collection activities” — the stats can’t be monkeyed around with. RFID technology has been around for several years, but its implementation in the waste management sector has boomed in the past five.
With an RFID tag on one’s trash cans and an RFID reader on the garbage truck, a city can verify where and when pickups are being done — there’s an electronic record of the truck’s route, along with a time stamp and geospatial stamp. If you use RFID on recycling bins, you can track participation rates and know who recycled, then at the end of a route, you can calculate how many recyclables are in the load and how many homes the items came from, thus yielding how many recyclables there are per household. This information can help analysts see what demographics are participating in recycling programs — you can easily compare a neighborhood with $1 million homes to a Section 8 housing neighborhood. In areas where participation is low, the city can create incentive programs.
Another system that can be implemented with RFID tags is Pay As You Throw — add a scale to the truck and you can figure out the weight of the garbage being tossed by each home. Charge by the pound (the customer’s account is linked to the RFID tag), and you’ll be incentivizing customers to minimize their waste.
This works in a perfect world, since “everybody starts perking up when you hit them in the wallet,” says Staley. But PAYT fails in dense urban areas, like New York City, where apartment buildings can house dozens of residents whose trashed gets lumped together, making it impossible to know who tossed what or how much. And the system is subject to abuses, where one could drop off a bag of trash at a nearby convenience store and evade the garbage fees. PAYT works best in middle- and upper-middle-income areas, where the cost per pound won’t leave a notable dent in the wallet.
If you’re in the park, and you’ve just finished up your bottle of water, do you throw it in a garbage can, or do you hold onto it until you finding a recycling bin? It’s certainly not convenient to hold on to it, but Staley says some people are socially and environmentally conscious enough to do just that, and an EREF grant is out to WeRecycle at the University of Georgia to analyze this very phenomenon — how human behavior influences recycling rates.
The research involves GPS-equipped readers on trash cans that send a signal conveying how many bottles have been thrown out in that can. All of the data from the study is wired up to a website, so you can click on a map and see where all the cans are and see the recycling rates at each one. The results will help determine where recycle bins should be placed in order to maximize recycling rates. WeRecycle also has an Android app that helps people find the nearest trash and recycling bins, which is especially useful at big events and parades.
In dense urban areas, only 20% of recyclable bottles are actually recycled, says Staley, suggesting that a few strategically placed bins could go a long way. He adds that most people consume bottled water when they’re on the go, and if there’s no recycling bin on the street or in a park, then that bottle is likely not going to get recycled.
“Human behavior plays a large role in recycling,” says Staley, adding that catering to human behavior could go a long way to increased recycling rates.
4. Gasification
What may be trash to you could be energy for someone else. A lot of energy, considering that only 2% of the energy potential in solid waste is used. Companies like Enerkem in Canada, Geoplasma in Florida and Ze-Gen in Boston are converting waste into biofuels through gasification technology. The process (Ze-Gen’s is shown above) generates clean, sustainable, low-cost synthesis gas — a “syngas” — comprised of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. Syngas is 50% of the density of natural gas, and has multiple uses: a replacement for fossil fuels, a building block for liquid fuel production, a way to refine crude oil, a catalyst for thermal ethanol production, and it can be processed into green diesel fuel.
Basically, these companies chemically recycle the carbon molecules from waste, creating products and transportation fuels, though each company has a slightly different pitch:
Enerkem transforms the syngas into “cellulosic ethanol” and methanol, which can be used to create a clean-burning fuel. Gasoline with ethanol has more oxygen, which helps it combust more completely, thus reducing emissions.
Ze-gen‘s gasification technology is used to convert ordinary waste into a reliable energy source. One ton of solid waste has the equivalent energy of 600kWh or a barrel of oil.
Geoplasma uses electricity and high-pressure air to create a super hot plasma that vaporizes waste and creates syngas, which is used to turn an electrical turbine. It currently processes 1,500 tons of garbage each day.
While gasification is a great conversion mechanism, it hasn’t been able to scale as a widespread solution.
Even in a perfect world, one in which everything that could be recycled is recycled, Staley says the maximum rate of recycling would be around 60% or 70% — with a realistic recycling rate around 50% or 60%. “We're going to lose a certain amount into a landfill regardless,” he says. But technology has already made — and will continue to make — great strides in improving recycling and waste management worldwide.
Do you pay as you throw? Are you a big recycler? What system does your neighborhood or country use? Let us know in the comments below.
Series Supported by BMW i
The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.
Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.
Pottermore, an interactive reading and retail site from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling in partnership with Sony, is staying in closed beta a little longer.
In a post on pottermore.com, an anonymous editor wrote the site’s team needs a little more time to incorporate feedback from its beta users before making Pottermore available to the public. Beginning Wednesday, the site will be going offline for three days while construction continues on the back end.
The site is said to provide an interactive, game-like reading experience of the Harry Potter books. Fans will also be able to buy audio books and, for the first time, Harry Potter novels as ebooks through a distribution agreement with Google.
Pottermore was scheduled to go live to the public in October. A new launch date has not been named. It seems we’ll have to content ourselves with the preview photos in the meantime.
Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.
Just a few weeks after Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment revealed that various versions of the hit game have been downloaded 400 million times, the Finnish company announced Wednesday an even bigger milestone: 500 million downloads.
Angry Birds came out in December 2009 and has since taken the world — and soon space — by storm.
According to the new video above, fans have played 266 billion levels, shot 400 billion birds and collected 44 billion stars. Combined, those gamers play 300 million minutes daily. That amounts to 109.5 billion minutes per year or 1.825 billion hours.
It features interviews with Steve Wozniak, Walt Mossberg, Ross Perot and original Apple co-founder, Ron Wayne. PBS boasts that One Last Thing features a never before broadcast interview with Jobs from 2004, a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.
The documentary follows in a flurry of tributes to the Apple co-founder. Last week, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Jobs’s official biographer, Walter Isaacson.
Isaacson’s bookSteve Jobs is already a runaway bestseller. Accoding to BookScan, Steve Jobs moved an impressive 379,000 copies in the U.S. its first week in release. It’s already the 18th best-selling book of the year, despite being released in late October. The book is already one of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in the UK.
Preview from One Last Thing
In this clip from the PBS documentary, journalist David Sheff recalls how the original Macintosh was able to attract the attention of Andy Warhol. Warhol famously shilled for the Commodore Amiga, but it seems like the Mac was his first introduction to the concept of digital paint.
Despite an 8% increase in global advertising sales, AOL‘s revenue was down 6% for the third quarter compared to last year. In a followup earnings call, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong alluded to a new social networking tool the company plans to unveil in the coming weeks, although he didn’t release any details on the product.
Total revenue amounted to $532 million, down from $564 in the third quarter of 2010. Net losses amounted to $2.6 million, compared to a profit of $171.6 million a year ago.
The 8% increase in ad revenue — the company’s second consecutive quarterly gain since 2008 — was driven largely by a 28% increase in ads sold through third-party networks such as advertising.com. Display revenue from ads run on AOL’s growing portfolio of web properties was up 15% compared to the year previous.
Revenue from AOL’s dwindling Internet subscription service continued to drag on profits, bringing in only $87 million in revenue, about half what it brought in a year ago.
On the followup call, Armstrong also noted that no major acquisitions were on the horizon.
The UK High Court has ruled WikiLeaks founder and CEO Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden over charges of sexual assault, Reuters reports.
The decision comes after the court rejected Assange’s appeal to the original decision. Now, Assange’s only chance to avoid extradition is to appeal to the UK Supreme Court, but the High Court won’t consider the matter unless it deems it especially important to Britain’s public interest.
Julian Assange is accused of sexually assaulting two women he met in Sweden in August 2010. Assange has denied the allegations against him, claiming that the sexual assault charges are a part of a smear campaign to discredit him. He surrendered to the police in December 2010, was arrested in London, and has since been fighting against extradition to Sweden.
WikiLeaks has been a thorn in the side of many of the world’s governments, especially after the site started publishing secret US diplomatic cables.
Assange’s problems with the law in Sweden aren’t the only issues WikiLeaks is facing. Assange recently said WikiLeaks would stop publishing leaks due to lack of funding, which, Assange claims, is mainly due to the financial blockade from major financial institutions, including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. WikiLeaks is now asking for donations to keep the site going.
I finally understand why Microsoft killed its innovative Courier Tablet project. It didn't die in a hail of dramatic criticism or even amidst the maelstrom of a major shake-up at Microsoft. No, as a telling and rather in-depth report at CNET explains, Courier simply crumbled under the weight of standard Microsoft product development and strategic policy.
Not that there wasn't any drama. Courier, a two-screen tablet that captured the imagination of the tech press in 2009, was far more than a bunch of stylish concept renderings. It was a real product—or more precisely, a bunch of prototypes which featured many of the signature elements that would become part of the final, shipping Courier product.
According to the two-part report, the Windows-code-driven Courier slammed right up against a developing strategy for Windows 8, which, as we know now, will also run on ARM-CPU-based tablets. Courier was a project born from the mind of Microsoft's consumer electronics maverick J. Allard. His big success: The Xbox 360. His biggest flop: The Zune. On the Windows side, Steven Sinofsky, the sometimes prickly leader of Windows 7 and Windows 8. Both men had been with Microsoft for well over a decade. Allard has since left the company, but Sinofsky continues to drive Microsoft's core product.
It's fascinating to learn that the Courier was still, in fact, a Windows product. The CNet report notes that the Courier had Windows code, but none of the Windows Shell—that had been replaced with a completely new touch- and pen-friendly interface. The hardware for Courier wasn't even going to come from one of Microsoft's go-to OEMs, like HP or Dell. Instead, Allard turned to Samsung.
The Courier tablet could have shipped shortly after Apple launched the now-market leading Apple iPad, but it was not meant to be. Microsoft was, the report notes, unsure about a not-quite Windows tablet and company CEO Steve Ballmer could not decide whose vision: Allard's or Sinofsky's to back. Ultimately, they took the Courier idea to Microsoft founder, chairman and former CEO Bill Gates.
What Gates saw was a product that did not fit neatly into the Microsoft Windows- and Office Suite-centric- world. It didn't even have email. The report notes that this wasn't a flaw, but a design choice. The Courier was designed to complement the PC, not replace it. Gates didn't get it and soon after Courier was shuttered.
It's a fascinating, and up-close look at the demise of one Microsoft idea, but also some real insight into how Microsoft works. Reading the story only made me wish that Microsoft had stuck with the Courier. That Windows layer underneath surely would have let it work smoothly with other fully-Windows devices. The design and interface were unlike anything we've seen on the market before or since. Instead, we have Windows 8. The OS update, expected sometime in 2012, looks good, but is also confusing because it's actually two interfaces: one for standard desktops and laptops and one for tablets (the "metro" interface). It ends up feeling like a platform at war with itself. Still, this is Sinofsky's vision for the future of Windows and with Allard and his boss Robbie Bach gone, it's also, for better or worse, the future of Microsoft Windows tablets.
Time Out New York is the latest publication to partner with Foursquare, with the creation of the King of New York badge for checking in at the magazine’s suggested locations.
To unlock the badge, you need to check in to three of the 50 venues highlighted in the magazine’s annual “Best of New York City” list. The magazine has also launched a Best of NYC Leaderboard that lets users compete over the “King of New York” title. The magazine is also promoting the tie-in on its cover this week, which highlights the badge.
Time Out New York was previously behind the Happy Hour badge and sibling publication Time Out Chicago has a Bar Hunter badge.
The Time Out New York initiative is the most recent attempt by a publication to harness Foursquare’s 10 million-plus network. In April 2010, The Wall Street Journal began a partnership with Foursquare which includes three badges: a Banker Badge for three checkins in New York’s financial district, a Lunch Box badge for checking in at two WSJ-reviewed restaurants and an Urban Adventurer badge for checking in to each of the city’s five boroughs.
Prior to that, The New York Timeslaunched a Foursquare program around the 2010 Winter Olympics that offered NYT recommendations for restaurants, attractions, shopping and nightlife in Vancouver, Whistler and Squamish, where the competition took place.
Other media companies that have tied in with Foursquare include Zagat and The History Channel.
What do you think Time Out New York gains from a Foursquare partnership? Let us know in the comments.
As fashion brands continue to pour resources into developing large, engaged fanbases on Facebook, many are now experimenting with methods for converting those fans into customers directly through the social network.
The most recent of these comes from the house of Oscar de la Renta, which began selling a cocktail-sized, flower-shaped perfume ring exclusively on its Facebook Page Wednesday. The $65 ring encases a solid concentration of a fragrance Oscar de la Renta’s fans are already familiar with through a Facebook sampling campaign the company conducted last spring.
In an interview with Mashable in September, Oscar de la Renta CEO Alex Bolen said he expects Facebook “will become a major channel of commerce” for many brands. “Whether [Facebook] becomes one of ours depends on us developing products that are right for our brand and that channel of our commerce,” he added.
Although $65 is at the very low end for a product bearing the Oscar de la Renta name, Bolen still expressed “some reservations” about whether a $65 item would sell well on Facebook.
Oscar de la Renta isn’t the first fashion or luxury brand to experiment with F-commerce in this way. Earlier this year, Diane von Furstenberg began offering a different $345 wrap-style exclusively through Facebook every month. Elsewhere, brands and retailers have created shopping tabs on their respective Facebook Pages, allowing users to browse and complete purchases without leaving the social network, while others have created apps that allow fans to customize products they can then purchase on Facebook or their websites.
Although these efforts have generated a fair amount of PR buzz, most of these companies are losing money on these efforts, says Maureen Mullen, director of research and advisory services at luxury research and consulting firm L2. As the cost of developing these initiatives comes down and Facebook’s marketing vehicles become more effective, she believes this trend will reverse, however. Perhaps Oscar de la Renta will be the first to reverse it.
AT&T will soon release two smartphones — HTC Vivid and Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket — with support for LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology, which enables very fast mobile data transfer.
The two new Android smartphones will be available in AT&T stores on Nov. 6, AT&T announced.
Both devices run Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, and both have a 4.5-inch screen, with the Skyrocket’s Super AMOLED Plus sporting a 800×480 pixel resolution, while the Vivid has a 960×540 pixel resolution.
The Skyrocket, however, is a bit beefier on the specifications front. It comes with a 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU, 16 GB of storage memory (expandable via microSD cards), an 8-megapixel back camera, as well as a 2-megapixel camera on the front for video calls.
The Vivid has a 1.2 GHz dual-core CPU, 16 GB of storage memory, microSD memory card support and an 8-megapixel back camera. Its front-facing camera only has a 1.3-megapixel resolution.
AT&T will also launch its LTE service to four new markets on Nov. 6: Boston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Athens, Ga. This brings the total number of markets with AT&T LTE coverage to nine, and the total number of Android devices launched by the company in 2011 to 22.
AT&T has promised to launch at least 12 Android devices this year and has far exceeded that number with two months to go before year’s end. The company’s Q3 financial report shows that it was a good move for AT&T to diversify its smartphone portfolio, as about half of smartphone sales in the quarter were sales of Android and other smartphones besides the iPhone.
The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket will cost $249, and the HTC Vivid will cost $199, both with a two-year contract.
Captchas, those sometimes-illegible code words designed to foil spammers, can be easily decoded by bots, a Stanford University research team has found.
The Stanford team has created Decaptcha, software that makes captchas readable by computers by cleaning up the text and rendering them in legible letters and numbers. The tool decodes captchas most, but not all the time.
The team was able to decode 66% of Visa’s Authorize.net’s captchas, 70% of Blizzard Entertainment’s and 73% of captcha.com’s captchas. The software’s success with other sites was less convincing. It cracked just 43% of eBay’s captchas and 24% of Reddit’s. Though Stanford is the latest to introduce captcha-cracking software, others have attempted the same thing, sometimes using the same name.
A paper published by the team points out that another downside of captchas is that they are hard for people to decode. “Analysis of the resulting data reveals that captchas are often difficult for humans, with audio captchas being particularly problematic,” the team wrote.
The captcha, an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” was introduced in the early 2000s by search engine Alta Vista, which was looking for a way to discourage the automatic submission of URLs.
Since that time there have been a number of captcha variants. As Elie Bursztein, one of the Standford researchers writes, there are geometric captchas, math captchas and even a “sexy” captcha. There are also advertising captchas.
However, since captchas are often frustrating for users, some have looked into alternatives, including simple questions like “What is the second letter of the English alphabet?” or easy tasks like “Uncheck the box if you’re human,” or verification via SMS.
While still at Facebook, Asana co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein developed a prototype task manager that helps groups cut down on email chains and meetings. After watching the prototype take off within Facebook, they left the giant social network that Moskovitz helped found and continued developing what would become Asana. Now they’re introducing that collaboration tool to the world by opening it to the public for the first time.
Asana, which has been in private beta for about a year, is a free, single-shared task list for groups. It helps everybody on a team keep track of what they and others are working on without what the startup has termed “work about work,” or unnecessary logistical conversations.
“People ask us, ‘Is this a to do list?’” Rosenstein says. “We're like ‘No, this is the to do list.’”
What sets Asana apart from dozens of other task manager programs, he says, is real-time updates, flexibility to fit any project’s work flow and simplicity that makes updating Asana quicker than updating a Word document. That, and the fact that Asana wants to be seen more like email than corporate software: a go-to organization method for everything from class projects to small companies.
A tangle of startups have attempted to streamline project communications — corporate or otherwise — but haven’t breached mainstream adoption. That doesn’t seem to faze Moskovitz and Rosenstein.
“The reason there are a million of these out there is the same reason that before Facebook, there were a million social networks and before Google, there were a million search engines,” Moskovitz says.
In other words, despite an environment of email overload that demands an efficient group collaboration product, nobody has delivered the right one yet.
For Facebook, the Asana prototype turned out to be just right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein say the social network is still using Asana to manage projects.
Since becoming Asana, the same idea that inspired that prototype has become a full product, transformed from something focused on power users to something that anybody can pick up in a few minutes and spawned a complementary mobile site. It’s not something that’s designed for a large company like Facebook — though the startup says that such a premium product is on the roadmap.
The second company that Moskovitz co-founded could transform the workspace with a task-oriented product the same way that his first transformed the social space with a people-oriented one.
Or, it could become one more to-do list program that managers pressure employees to update weekly — a Friendster rather than a Facebook.
Welcome to this morning’s edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world. We're keeping our eyes on six particular stories of interest today.
iPhone Coming to 14 More Countries Nov. 11
The iPhone 4S will go on sale in 14 additional countries — Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea — as well as Hong Kong on November 11.
First AT&T LTE Phones Arrive Sunday
AT&T has announced that the HTC Vivid and Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket, which will be the first to run on its 4G LTE network, arrive in stores Sunday.
AOL Posts Third Quarter Loss
AOL brought in $532 million in revenue in Q3 2011, down 6% from the same period a year ago despite an 8% increase in ad revenue, the company disclosed in its third quarter earnings statement Wednesday.
Hackers have used a security flaw in Microsoft's Windows operating system to infect computers with the the Duqu virus, Microsoft has admitted.
Thousands Petition to Block E-Parasites Act
Nearly 7,000 people have signed a petition on the White House petition site against the Stop Online Piracy Act, also known as the "E-Parasites Act," which would increase the government's ability to shut down alleged trademark- and copyright-infringing websites.
Further News
The launch of J.K Rowling’s forthcoming Harry Potter-themed site Pottermore has been delayed.
Hackers have used a security flaw in Microsoft’s Windows operating system to infect computers with the the Duqu virus, Microsoft has admitted.
"We are working diligently to address this issue and will release a security update for customers," Microsoft said in a statement.
The Duqu virus, which was discovered in October by Symantec, is thought by some experts to be the next big cyber security threat. It shares some of the code with Stuxnet, a malicious worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program, but Duqu is specifically created for gathering intelligence data from agencies and corporations.
Microsoft’s statement did not include any additional details, but Symantec discovered that Duqu was initially infecting systems through a compromised Microsoft Word document which installs the malicious software after it’s opened.
Duqu infections have currently been confirmed in several countries, including France, Netherlands, Switzerland, India, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan and Vietnam.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Customized subscriptions to staple items such as Pantyhose, tampons and deodorant.
Genius Idea: Marrying a subscription service with practical products to save women time.
Even women who fit the shopohalic stereotype are unlikely to find much thrill in a deodorant purchase. The same goes for the pantyhose, tampons, condoms and beauty products that they keep stocked. Instead of taking time from their days to purchase these items, Hoseanna gives women the option to have them automatically shipped to their homes every two or three months.
Subscription products for women aren’t a new idea, but the company that popularized it, Birchbox, focuses on samples of high-end beauty products. Birchbox is more about fun than practicality.
"We're not fashion, we're not luxury,” says Hoseanna co-founder Tracey Solomon. “Our luxury, if you will, is convenience."
Solomon and her co-founder Katrina Carroll-Foster, who went to the same Canadian high school together, both have a history of demanding jobs that limit their time more than their discretionary spending. Like an increasing number of women, they’re likely to pay for the convenience of services like Fresh Direct, laundry delivery and dog walkers.
Companies such as Soap.com have already tapped into this trend by offering delivery on household products and cosmetics. Hoseanna has taken it a step further by adding a Birchbox-like subscription model.
Hoseanna customers can either buy items for just one time, or set a delivery schedule for individual products on a two- or three-month schedule. They receive a confirmation e-mail ten days before each shipment so that they have time to cancel, and their credit cards aren’t charged until the box ships.
The New York City-based startup has been shipping since August 2010, when it launched in private with just Pantyhose. Even though it ended up being one of the hottest sumemrs on record and few women were wearing pantyhose, sales were high enough to encourage the co-founders to add other products in August 2011.
Aside from shipping fees on orders less than $30, there’s no charge for using the service. Hoseanna’s profits are baked into the price of its products — just like a brick and mortar store. Solomon says that the startup has been doubling its number of sales every month since it expanded beyond Panythose in August. Because the company is just getting started and won’t talk specifics, however, it’s hard to say whether this is an impressive as it sounds.
If the company does indeed sustain its traction, it will be proving the effectiveness of a mantra that could easily carry over into other genres of products:
“We want to give women back five minutes of their days," Solomon says.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
Apple has updated its GarageBand for iOS app to support the iPhone and iPod touch.
Apple released GarageBand for iPad back in March, coinciding with the launch of the iPad 2. GarageBand for iOS 1.1 [iTunes link] adds support for smaller devices as well as a few new features and tweaks.
If you already own GarageBand for iPad, you can download the iPhone or iPod touch version for free. The interface is now optimized to use the smaller screen of the iPhone or iPod touch, but the app is largely the same from a functionality standpoint.
This is a good thing. GarageBand for iOS is a tremendous accomplishment. Apple has managed to take many of the best parts of the GarageBand for Mac app and bring them to touch screen devices. Plus, using the headphone jack on your iPhone or iPad, you can plug in an electric guitar into a device and use the app as an amp.
You can mix up to eight tracks together and as we’ve seen in the past, the results are quite stunning.
In addition to iPhone and iPod touch support, GarageBand 1.1 also includes:
Support for 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
Ability to set export settings at AAC or export uncompressed as AIFF files
Adjustable velocity settings for touch instruments
Custom chords for Smart Instruments
GarageBand for iOS is $4.99 and available in the App Store. If you make a cool song, share it with us in the comments!
Each day, Mashable highlights one noteworthy YouTube video. Check out all our viral video picks.
The gang at Twelve South, the company responsible for iPhone cases like the BookBook and stands for the iPad and MacBook Pro, has just unveiled their newest creation, an ingenious iPad/iPhone charger that seamlessly connects to a standard MacBook Air or MacBook Pro AC adapter.
Twelve South sent us a sample unit, dubbed the PlugBug and we’re in love.
It’s a simple idea with a winning premise of helping frequent travelers or those cramped for outlet space eliminate the need to carry a MacBook charger and a separate charger for a phone or iPad.
Here’s how it works: Attach the PlugBug to the normal duck cover on any MagSafe power brick (which includes the MacBook, MacBook Pro and Macbook Air). The PlugBug contains a two prong outlet and its own powered 10w USB port. What this means is that you can charge your iPhone or iPad without having to plug it into your laptop, all while also charging your laptop battery.
Why is this better than just using the USB port on your Mac to charge your device? Well, the reason is twofold:
First: That takes up an extra USB port. If you are using a MacBook Air, that might mean the device has to vie for space with other components.
Second: It can take a lot more time to charge an iPad via your MacBook or MacBook Pro than through a wall connection. In fact, if your USB port isn’t powered, charging the iPad can take a ton of time.
Third: For business travelers, this eliminates the need to pack the external phone or iPad charger alongside the laptop charger.
At $34.95, this is a slick and relatively cheap device. It also doubles as a standard iPad charger — and considering Apple sells those for $29.99 (granted, the Apple model also includes a 6′ extension cord), we think this is a good deal.
What I really like about this device is that it is styled to match the look and feel of the regular Apple adapter. Aside from its red cover, you would think this was a regular Apple dongle. It fits on the power port without adding much bulk, and the extra functionality of a powered USB port is great.
Apple has announced that the iPhone 4S will make its debut in Hong Kong and 14 other countries on November 11.
In addition to Hong Kong, the new iPhone will make its debut on the same day in Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea. The device will be available for pre-order in most of these countries on November 4.
The iPhone 4S is already available in 29 countries, but Apple promises that 70 countries will have the phone by the end of the year.
Apple is looking to do more to tap into the massive Chinese market. Currently only one service provider, China Unicom, officially has the phone, but Apple is hoping to strike a deal with China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier. 9.5 million people already use the iPhone on China Mobile, despite the fact that China Mobile’s network doesn’t currently support 3G for the iPhone.
Apple also has yet to translate Siri, the flagship feature of the iPhone 4S, for Catonese and Mandarin.
Apple has announced that the iPhone 4S will make its debut in Hong Kong and 14 other countries on Nov. 11.
In addition to Hong Kong, the new iPhone will make its debut on the same day in Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania and South Korea. The device will be available for pre-order in most of these countries on November 4.
The iPhone 4S is already available in 29 countries, but Apple promises that 70 countries will have the phone by the end of the year.
Apple is looking to do more to tap into the massive Chinese market. Currently only one service provider, China Unicom, officially has the phone, but Apple is hoping to strike a deal with China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier. Roughly 9.5 million people already use the iPhone on China Mobile, despite the fact that China Mobile’s network doesn’t currently support 3G for the iPhone.
Apple also has yet to translate Siri, the flagship feature of the iPhone 4S, for Catonese and Mandarin.
Social networks are an information gateway that allow people to share and connect in ways that were never previously possible. They can also be a pretty clever way to rob your neighbors.
Burglars are starting to realize the criminal possibilities of social media. For example, Foursquare or Facebook can show when somebody is away from their home or traveling for the weekend. What better time to ransack when your victim is in Aruba? Credit Sesame, a personal finance tool and website, conducted a survey of 50 ex-burglars in the UK Nearly 80% of them said they had used Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to target which properties to rob. Another 73% said they used Google Street View to scope out neighborhoods ahead of time.
Of course, the pendulum swings both ways. Home owners are getting crafty by using webcams and posting images to social networks to help identify criminals. There are also stories of busted computer criminals that were caught by remote picture-taking software.
The sample-size of the study may be small, but the high numbers do give some indication of the way social media can be used for ill intents.
Take a look at the infographic below, which has some of the dangers and solutions to creating a “socially safe” environment. Are fears about social media security entirely overblown are does it possess real danger? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
We thought it time to break down the stats in a new weekly chart. The best part? These charts dish the dirt — that is, a scale of positive sentiment. For instance, this week’s most socially influential cable show, Project Runway, saw a 62% increase in network chatter. Dare we say it was due to designer Anya’s controversial win?
The data below is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, checkins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV
Miami Heat owner Micky Arison has been fined $500,000 for venting on Twitter about the NBA lockout.
The fine — believed to be the largest ever levied against an owner by the NBA — came after Arison responded to a fan’s tweet. That original message read: “How’s it feel to be a part [sic] of ruining the best game in the world? NBA owners/players don’t give a damn about fans&and guess what? Fans provide all the money you’re fighting over&you greedy [expletive] pigs.”
In response, Arison tweeted that the fan was “barking at the wrong owner,” a reference to the divide between NBA chiefs, according to Yahoo Sports. Arison deleted the tweet an hour after he sent it Monday, but it still caught the league’s attention.
The NBA has barred team owners and coaches from discussing the lockout or any players during the work stoppage. Coaches and general managers also $1 million fine and a possible loss of draft picks for retweeting any players during the lockout.
Arison is now the third owner the NBA has fined. Wizards owner Ted Leonsis got a $100,000 fine last year for comments about possible changes to the league’s salary cap. Michael Jordan, owner of the Bobcats, also got a $100,000 fine for comments he made in August about the lockout.
Players are under no such constraint and several, including Oklahoma City Thunder reserve center Nazr Mohammed, Detroit Pistons forward Tracy McGrady and Kyrie Irving, the top pick in the June amateur draft, have been using Twitter to express their discontent.
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New York Women in Communications, Inc. is the premier organization for communications professionals in the New York metropolitan area. The membership represents all facets of the communications industry, including print, broadcast and online journalism, public relations, marketing, corporate communications, advertising, digital media and book publishing. Membership is made up of students, professionals at entry levels, mid-career stages and top management, as well as growing numbers of entrepreneurs.
New York Women in Communications Foundation presents their 2011 Student Communications Career Conference. This year’s theme is: “Build Your Career Toolkit: Get the Expert Advice You Need to Succeed” Featuring Keynote Speaker, Ann Shoket, Editor-in-Chief, Seventeen magazine.
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The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) is an open forum where the best and brightest from every avenue of advertising gather to exchange ideas and research strategies. Together, we challenge conventional maxims, take on the latest issues, and discover new insights that benefit us all. This collaboration yields something invaluable: knowledge. Knowledge that is meaningful, actionable, and indispensable. Knowledge that empowers our members to have a true impact on their marketing programs and their organizations. Knowledge that changes perspective and changes the game.
Since 1936, our goal has been to lead our industry forward. As an open-minded, unbiased environment, free of partisan interests, The ARF facilitates a smarter, stronger, and more effective advertising community.
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The Community Managers Meetup is a place for community builders to connect and learn from one another. The meetup is open to NYC-area community managers, social strategists, social media marketers, and others working to build community online or off. We’re hoping to bring community managers together to share what they are learning and gather some best-practices while strengthening relationships between professionals in the space.
ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. Get ready for THE event for digital marketers! ad:tech New York starts November 8-10,2011. Discover the latest innovations in social media, mobile, search, e-mail, location-based marketing and much more. Find hundreds of the hottest digital marketing and advertising companies to network with and learn from. Use special code ADNY11MASHABLE to get $200 off a full conference pass. Just want to check out the expo? Use code ADNY11FPEKM for your free expo pass.
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New York Women in Communications, Inc. is the premier organization for communications professionals in the New York metropolitan area. The membership represents all facets of the communications industry, including print, broadcast and online journalism, public relations, marketing, corporate communications, advertising, digital media and book publishing. Membership is made up of students, professionals at entry levels, mid-career stages and top management, as well as growing numbers of entrepreneurs.
New York Women in Communications Foundation presents their 2011 Student Communications Career Conference. This year’s theme is: “Build Your Career Toolkit: Get the Expert Advice You Need to Succeed” Featuring Keynote Speaker, Ann Shoket, Editor-in-Chief, Seventeen magazine.
GarysGuide is the #1 Business Events Calendar in the world covering Technology, Media, Finance, Healthcare, Legal, Biotech, Cleantech & other events and listing a comprehensive collection of conferences, un-conferences, forums, workshops, seminars, meetups, tweetups, mixers, parties and more.
Guest of a Guest New York covers the People, Places & Parties of Gotham; from the ballrooms of the Upper East Side to the barrooms of Downtown and all the hotspots in between. So come along for the ride and be the guest of a guest as we bring you the pulse of the city that never sleeps.
The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) is an open forum where the best and brightest from every avenue of advertising gather to exchange ideas and research strategies. Together, we challenge conventional maxims, take on the latest issues, and discover new insights that benefit us all. This collaboration yields something invaluable: knowledge. Knowledge that is meaningful, actionable, and indispensable. Knowledge that empowers our members to have a true impact on their marketing programs and their organizations. Knowledge that changes perspective and changes the game.
Since 1936, our goal has been to lead our industry forward. As an open-minded, unbiased environment, free of partisan interests, The ARF facilitates a smarter, stronger, and more effective advertising community.
Girls in Tech (GIT) is a social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent and influential women in technology. As young women with the capacity to inspire, we made it our personal desire and passion to create and sustain an organization that focuses on the collaboration, promotion, growth and success of women in the technology sector.
The Community Managers Meetup is a place for community builders to connect and learn from one another. The meetup is open to NYC-area community managers, social strategists, social media marketers, and others working to build community online or off. We’re hoping to bring community managers together to share what they are learning and gather some best-practices while strengthening relationships between professionals in the space.
ad:tech is an interactive advertising and technology conference and exhibition. Get ready for THE event for digital marketers! ad:tech New York starts November 8-10,2011. Discover the latest innovations in social media, mobile, search, e-mail, location-based marketing and much more. Find hundreds of the hottest digital marketing and advertising companies to network with and learn from. Use special code ADNY11MASHABLE to get $200 off a full conference pass. Just want to check out the expo? Use code ADNY11FPEKM for your free expo pass.
Gorkana is the media database and portal for PRs and journalists. Gorkana UK, Gorkana U.S. and Gorkana EU provide a range of products and services to PRs and journalists to help them communicate with each other more effectively.
AllConferences.com is a global conference directory where you can find conferences, conventions, trade shows, exhibits, and events in any line of business or Interest occurring anywhere in the world.
From specialized scientific, medical and academic conferences to business and association meetings worldwide spanning all interests, AllConferences.com provides something for everyone.
Toyota unveiled four robots designed to accomplish ambitious objectives at a Tokyo event Tuesday: Help paralyzed patients walk or balance and help their caretakers gently transport them between locations. The company hopes to commercialize the products sometime after 2013.
One of Toyota’s new robots guides patients’ strides when sensors detect the intention to walk. The Walk Training Assist robot, shown at right, mounts onto a paralyzed leg and detects movement of the hips through sensors at the thigh and foot. It helps the knee swing forward and the leg move forward to facilitate walking.
Toyota also released the Independent Walk Assist, pictured at left, designed for walking training. In addition to guiding the leg to bend and move forward, the robot can support a patient’s weight. As the patient improves, it can be adjusted to progressively support less weight. The machine also monitors metrics such as joint angels so physicians can more easily track a patient’s progress.
The third product Toyota demoed Tuesday is also designed for rehabilitation training. The Balance Training Assist, pictured below, is a two-wheeled balancing game that looks something like a Segway. The machine displays one of three games (tennis, soccer or basketball) on a monitor and the patient makes moves in the game by shifting his or her weight on the robot.
Unlike its other new robots, the fourth robot at Toyota’s showcase is intended to assist caregivers as well as care recipients. The Patient Transfer Assist, shown at bottom, has weight-supporting arms and a mobile platform that helps move a patient, for instance, from bed to the toilet and back. A Toyota spokesperson said the machine is intentded to be gentle and create an experience similar to being carried by a person.
All four machines were developed in collaboration with Fujita Health University Hospital in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, which provided feedback on the needs of specialized medical facilities to incorporate in the robots’ designs.
While healthcare might not be the first industry consumers associate with Toyota, the company has been running a robotics department since 2005, when it started the “Partner Robot Division,” which it first announced publicly in 2007. The division, which employs about 200 people, concentrates on robot-based solutions for medical, manufacturing, short-distance personal transport and domestic chore problems. In the past, it has produced robots that play music or provide personal transportation.
Toyota isn’t the only company in the automotive industry making such investments. Honda, for instance, has created a robot called Asimo that can walk and dance like a human. It used technologies created during Asimo’s development to make a walking assist device that performs a similar function to Toyota’s newly unveiled independent Walk Assist robot.
When the app, an unofficial iOS client for Amazon’s Cloud Player service, disappeared from the App Store due to “legal reasons,” many assumed that the request came at the behest of Apple or the record labels.
After speaking with James Clancey, developer of aMusic (and its Google Music counterpart, gMusic), the reality of the situation is a bit different.
“aMusic was actually pulled by me at the request of Amazon, not Apple. Apple never seemed to have a problem with aMusic,” Clancey says.
The reason for the removal? Clancey says Amazon hasn’t signed all the agreements that it needs to allow its API for Cloud Player to be used by third-party vendors. Amazon is in the process of getting those agreements signed, he says. Presumably, aMusic will return to the App Store as soon as that process is complete.
“Amazon really has been great. I never thought I would be happy and feel good about taking an app down after talking to lawyer,” Clancey says.
We also asked him if Google had contacted him about using the Google APIs in his app. As of now, Google has yet to reach out to Clancey, who classifies Google’s position of “general[ly] seem[ing] to be OK with third-party apps.”
Assuming Google doesn’t have any third-party provisions impacting the use of the Google Music APIs by third parties, the app should remain in the App Store.
Digital Music Licensing in a Cloud Age
The situation with aMusic, an app that uses Amazon APIs but in a way that Amazon hasn’t legally guaranteed, underscores the potential landmines when dealing with cloud-based music services.
Having an API is an essential component for any modern web service — because allowing third parties to extend that API is a great way for the underlying service to grow. Where it becomes more complex is when parts of the data within the API have their own set of licensing or distribution agreements.
Subscription streaming services like MOG, Rdio and Spotify have also dealt with balancing the need for an API with complying with the licensing and distribution agreements signed with the record labels.
With a subscription service, API access is often limited to certain tiers of users — meaning that in-app streaming via a third party is only possible for Spotify Pro members. With storage-based services like the Amazon Cloud Player, the provisions become a bit more tricky.
Apple is still rolling out its iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match services, but it will be interesting to find out what ways developers will be able to use the iCloud API and data (including that stored within iCloud) in their own apps.
The changes, officially announced in a blog post Tuesday, allow Gmail users much more control over the look of the service. You can drag sidebars around to your preferred size and width, choose from a wider selection of high-resolution background pictures, and decide whether you want lots of email on your screen or more white space between mails. (Your choice of email density is between “Comfortable,” “Cozy” and “Compact.”)
Heavy Gmail users will also be pleased to learn that there’s a new search function — that is, you can now access Advanced Search by clicking on the search bar. Conversations have been condensed, and profile pictures added.
These are more features than Google offered in its sneak peek of the new Gmail, which started in July. Here’s the video about the new features Google mistakenly made public last week:
For now, at least, the new features will be opt-in — and not all of us will be able to access them immediately. “If you like what you see, over the next few days you'll be able to switch to the new look by clicking on Switch to the new look in the bottom-right of Gmail,” writes Google user experience designer Jason Cornwell.
So do you like what you see? Will you be switching? Or is Google messing around too much with a good thing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Joshua Baer is the co-founder and CEO of Otherinbox, a prolific angel investor and the director of Capital Factory, Austin's seed-stage incubator. He founded SKYLIST in 1996 from his college dorm room at Carnegie Mellon, and created UnsubCentral in 2004. You can follow Joshua on Twitter @joshuabaer.
AngelList is an online community that matches startups with investors to streamline the fundraising process.
I’ve personally raised $1 million from AngelList for my startup, and have helped dozens of other startups raise $3 million more. I’ve referred more than 20 startups to AngelList, vouched for a dozen other investors and am ranked as one of the top connectors on the site.
Try a similar strategy by adhering to the following steps.
1. Make It Easy for Investors To Write Checks
AngelList is brilliantly designed to make it easy for investors to write checks to entrepreneurs.
Naval and Nivi, the founders of AngelList, took the very best social mechanics from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to create a “social proof” that ultimately makes investors comfortable writing checks.
Every startup, entrepreneur and investor has a profile similar to a Facebook profile.
Your startup has followers like Twitter, and you can make introductions like on LinkedIn.
Others can comment on your profile, similar to writing on a Facebook wall.
You have a status like Twitter, and when you update it, a notification is sent to all of your followers.
Facebook notifies you when a friend is tagged in a photo; AngelList notifies you when a new investor joins a startup that you follow.
2. Start with the Basics
Create a profile and mark it private. Think of this as your executive summary or one-pager. Use the same tone and style as you would with an investor deck or executive summary. Don’t just fill out a few sentences; take a few hours and really polish it up. Don’t leave any section blank. A good AngelList profile doesn’t fit on one page.
Include numbers. Don’t say "100K," say "100,000." If you can name drop big customers, do that too — you want your profile to look impressive.
Focus on traction. How many customers have signed up to your service? How many have been active in the past 30 days? What is your viral coefficient?
Include screenshots of your product, a video walk-through and one or two charts that display traction or revenue. If you have a good video pitch, include that too.
Don’t focus on press. Nobody cares that you got covered in TechCrunch, or that The New York Times blog picked up your press release.
3. Find a Good Referrer
Under the “referrer” field on AngelList, you may only list one person. Supposedly, you're meant to include the person who referred you to AngelList, but you have a bit of liberty here. After all, this is the person who is vouching for you – make it count.
4. Shop It Around to People You Already Know
Add any existing investors or advisers. In general, more is better, but it is possible to have too many. Therefore, only add people who are significant. A good target is two or three advisers who are very relevant to your business.
Be careful when listing an investor as an advisor. Most other investors will immediately wonder, “Why didn’t he invest?”
Ask all of the investors you already know to click and request an intro. A good target is to get up to 10 introductions. People are happy to do this — but you have to take the initiative first.
Ask investors and advisers you trust to leave a positive comment. I would focus on comments from investors, not necessarily other entrepreneurs. A good target is three comments.
Do not create fake intros. People will notice, and it will reflect poorly on you.
5. Use Your AngelList Profile as Your Executive Summary
When someone asks to see your executive summary — or even your deck — send them a link to your AngelList profile instead. “See my executive summary online at angel.co/xstartup.”
You want investors to go to the AngelList profile instead of passing around your clunky PDF. The AngelList profile never gets stale because you're able to constantly update the different fields, and your profile will update as new investors come on.
You want investors to go to your AngelList profile because it increases the likelihood that they will interact with it – they can follow you, add an intro or leave a comment. All of these actions increase counters that mark your profile as a hot or trending company. Bottom line, if you're talking to investors, you want to “get credit for it” on your AngelList profile.
When you’re done fundraising, you have the option to “turn off” your profile. Most people won’t have saved their own copy. If you really want to be tight-lipped, lock down most of your profile and choose individuals to share with. Then, even if someone leaks your link, most information won't display to others.
6. Be Responsive
When an investor asks for an intro, try to follow up within hours. Like any “lead,” being fast to respond significantly increases your closing rate.
Ready a form letter to personalize and send. Don’t make it sound like a form letter, however, but have your reply and supporting documents ready to go.
I use a service like Tout to manage my email templates for quickly replies. Here are some valuable templates you can use.
7. Look for Your Lead Investor
Resist the urge to send out a blast. First you'll want to find a lead investor — someone many other investors will recognize and respect. This list of top angel investors is a good start. But look beyond this list as well — search on AngelList for investors who have made more than one investment in your space in the past 12 months, and who bring some of their own relevant experience.
Many angel investors will be significantly more comfortable if they know another respected investor has blessed the deal. Also, most leads will have their own network of co-investors with whom they can share the deal, but make sure to ask that they share on AngelList too.
I’ve seen successful blasting work fine for more than one startup, but the best way to stack all the cards in your favor is to line up the lead first.
8. Fill Out the Round
Once you have your lead, now it's time to open up the floodgates and get your profile in front of more investors.
Start by searching AngelList by market and geography. For example, search for investors who are interested in mobile and also are willing to invest in Austin, Texas. You'll find 590 of them!
Also, request an intro with anyone who follows your investors, advisors or referrer.
If you don't see the "request an intro" button for someone, ask investors you know to “share” the deal with them. It's always best to meet someone through a trusted, third party.
As a last resort, reach out to them elsewhere. Try LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. When you make contact, send them a link to your AngelList profile early on in the conversation.
The hottest and best startups get pushed out to all of the AngelList investors by the team that runs AngelList. The best way to get their attention is to follow the other steps I outline above. They will notice when your startup starts “trending,” gaining introductions and comments.
9. Keep Your Profile Active and Up-to-Date
Consistently use and update your profile. Don't let it die, or rust from inactivity.
Think of this as your investor communication. Update your status with Twitter-like short messages to announce progress. Also, update after raising money (like you would keep LinkedIn current, even when you’re not searching for a job). That way, when you're looking to raise another round, your AngelList profile is ready to go with all of the social proof built in from your previous round.
Special thanks to Matt Mireles, Taylor Brooks, Mike Fisher and Bill Boebel for helping with this post.
Twitter unveiled a collection of Twitter Stories Monday designed to remind users “of the humanity behind Tweets that make the world smaller.”
There are currently just under 20 short vignettes gathered at stories.twitter.com. And these vignettes are indeed short: between 100 and 150 words in most cases, fitting for a service known for imposing a 140-character limit on all posts.
There’s a heartwarming story about a man who saved his mother’s bookstore and another about movie critic Roger Ebert’s use of the service after he lost his voice. One user got a much-needed organ donation after sending this tweet: “sh*t, I need a kidney.” Brands such as Burberry are represented as well.
Twitter Stories appears to be a shorter, more beautifully produced version of Twitter Tales, a project Twitter rolled out in August 2010. Why the company felt compelled to launch a separate product under a similar name rather than revise the first isn’t immediately clear. We’ve reached out to Twitter and will update this post with further information.
Twitter unveiled a collection of Twitter Stories Monday designed to remind users “of the humanity behind Tweets that make the world smaller.”
There are currently just under 20 short vignettes gathered at stories.twitter.com. And these vignettes are indeed short: between 100 and 150 words in most cases, fitting for a service known for imposing a 140-character limit on all posts.
There’s a heartwarming story about a man who saved his mother’s bookstore and another about movie critic Roger Ebert’s use of the service after he lost his voice. One user got a much-needed organ donation after sending this tweet: “sh*t, I need a kidney.” Brands such as Burberry are represented as well.
Twitter Stories appears to be a shorter, more beautifully produced version of Twitter Tales, a project Twitter rolled out in August 2010. Why the company felt compelled to launch a separate product under a similar name rather than revise the first isn’t immediately clear. We’ve reached out to Twitter and will update this post with further information.
Acknowledging that having a mobile presence is trickier than it appears, Google launched an initiative called “GoMo” Tuesday that aims to help businesses work out the kinks involved in going mobile.
As Jesse Haines, head of marketing for Google’s mobile ads explains in the Google Mobile Ads Blog, GoMo (short for “go mobile”) is designed to help businesses that have set up a mobile presence but find it’s not working as well as it should. In Haines’ example, a company that sells scarves attracts a prospective customer, but that customer is repelled by a site that doesn’t work properly.
“This happens hundreds, even thousands of times every day because most businesses' websites don't work well on smartphones,” she says. The post directs readers to HowToGoMo, which includes a view of how your site looks “in mobile” as well as resources to help build your site. The latter includes links to select vendors and lets the visitor qualify themselves as DIYers by the amount they plan to spend and the time frame in which they intend to build their mobile site.
For Google, the goal is to further grow its mobile ad business, which is on a $2.5 billion run rate this year vs. $1 billion last year. Google also expanded its mobile ad formats last month. As usual, Google has included a cute video in its blog post to explain what it’s up to:
Nellie Akalp is CEO of CorpNet.com. Since forming more than 100,000 corporations and LLCs across the U.S., she has built a strong passion to assist small business owners and entrepreneurs in starting and protecting their business the right way. To learn more about Nellie and see how she can help your business get off the ground quickly, visit here or “Like” CorpNet.com on Facebook.
Red flag and IRS — two things you never want to see in the same sentence. If you're self-employed or have a small business, chances are somewhere along the way, you've been told that deducting a portion of your housing costs will be a red flag for an audit.
However, this isn't necessarily the case. And if you legitimately qualify for the home office deduction, there's no reason to avoid it. After all, the typical home office deduction will run into the thousands of dollars. It's substantial and well worth the effort (far more so than scouring your car for a missing receipt for printer ink).
So, how can you make sure you can take as much of a deduction that's allowed to you, while minimizing your chance of an audit? The key is knowing (and following) the rules. According to the IRS (Publication 587), "To qualify to deduct expenses for business use of your home, you must use part of your home:
Exclusively and regularly as your principal place of business
Exclusively and regularly as a place where you meet or deal with patients, clients, or customers in the normal course of your trade or business"
Decoding the Elusive “Exclusive Use”
The word “exclusive” shows up frequently in the IRS definition of a deductible home office. If you use any portion of your home exclusively for business purposes, you're entitled to claim a home office deduction for that space. But just what does "exclusive" mean? In short, it's a space that you use solely for your business, and nothing else. For example…
If you have a blogging business and do the bulk of your writing at the dining room table, you can't take any deduction for the dining room if you ever eat there, host dinner parties, or use the dining room for anything else other than your blog.
Let's say you're a freelance application developer and have set aside a desk for your workstation and server in the bedroom. You can deduct the area around your desk as your exclusive work space (assuming this space is used only for your business).
Of course, the above examples are rather straightforward and we all know that tax matters are rarely cut and dry when it comes to your business.
For example, let's say you're a self-employed designer and rent a studio outside your home. But occasionally, you invite potential clients to your home to review your portfolio in your living room. Since your living room isn't an exclusive place of business, you can't deduct this. But, if you designate a spare room in your house as a client meeting area, then you can deduct this area.
Let's say you're a plumber who makes house calls. Your primary place of work is in clients' bathrooms or kitchens. However, you can claim a home office deduction if you use part of your home to handle the bookkeeping, administrative, and other management activities for your business. Again, this space qualifies only if it's used exclusively for your plumbing business.
If you're a telecommuting employee (and not an independent contractor), home office deductions get even trickier. In this case, you must be working from home for your employer's convenience. Let's say you're a virtual call center agent or data entry specialist and your company saves money on office space by hiring agents to work from home. In this case, you can deduct your home office space using Form 2016. However, if your employer lets you work from home because your commute is long (and the employer does have office space available for you), then you don't qualify for the deduction.
Taking Your Deduction
Home office deductions are based on the percentage of your home that is used for business purposes. The first thing you need to do is figure out the total square footage of your home, and then the square footage of the space that's designated as an exclusive office or working area.
If you use a spare room (180 sq ft.) as an office and your home is 1,900 sq. ft., then you can write off 9.5% of certain home expenses, including: rent or mortgage payments, insurance (homeowners or renters), and utilities. Direct costs relating to the space, such as repairs or paint, can also be deducted.
The rules around other expenses can be a little fuzzy. Can you deduct a stereo as a business expense? What about an expensive painting or a designer rug for your workspace? Tax experts tend to give a few general guidelines for these questions.
Will the expense bring your business more profit (i.e. increase your productivity or sales)? Expensing a desk lamp that helps you see can certainly be defended. If you meet with clients in your home office, then aesthetic elements (like a painting) may be eligible for deduction. However, these expenses should be ordinary and standard, meaning that other business owners would have the same expense at a similar price point.
It's also important to note that the rules have loosened with regard to how profits are taxed when you sell your home. In the past, if you used 9% of your home as an office (and had been taking the home office deduction), when you sold your house, 9% would not qualify as tax-free under the rules that allow up to $250K tax-free profits for individuals, $500K for joint returns. This no longer applies. However, you do have to pay tax on any profit resulting from depreciation claimed for the office.
What About an S-Corp, C-Corp, or LLC?
The above scenarios apply to self-employed sole proprietors. But let's say you decided to form an LLC or Corporation in order to separate your personal and business expenses, minimize your personal liability, and perhaps lower your overall taxes. Deducting the use of a home office is handled differently here, but it is still possible. Talking to your accountant will be the easiest way to figure out the most favorable solution for both the corporation and shareholder.
For example, in an S-Corp situation where one of the shareholders uses a home office as his principal office, the corporation can reimburse the shareholder for the home office costs on a monthly basis under an accountable expense reimbursement plan. This becomes a deductible business expense for the corporation.
IRS Publication 551 if you claim the business use portion of depreciation on your primary residence
IRS Publication 523 if you plan to sell the home that was the principal location of your business and you've claimed depreciation deductions on the home
IRS Publication 2106 if you are a telecommuting employee and want to deduct your home office
As with any tax strategy, the best way to avoid trouble is to claim the home office deduction only if you qualify, to deduct only the expenses you're entitled to, and then thoroughly document all expenses in case the IRS has any questions. And of course, consulting with a qualified tax professional is always a wise move, so make sure you're following the rules and enjoying all the deductions available to you.
The world is now inhabited by 
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Toyota also released the Independent Walk Assist, pictured at left, designed for walking training. In addition to guiding the leg to bend and move forward, the robot can support a patient’s weight. As the patient improves, it can be adjusted to progressively support less weight. The machine also monitors metrics such as joint angels so physicians can more easily track a patient’s progress.
All four machines were developed in collaboration with Fujita Health University Hospital in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, which provided feedback on the needs of specialized medical facilities to incorporate in the robots’ designs.
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