The separate YouTube and MySpace competitions to send one very lucky videoblogger to the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland are over.
Rebecca McQuigg from Los Angeles was chosen to represent the MySpace community. 24 year old Pablo Camacho from Bogotá, Colombia chosen to represent the YouTube community. Their video submissions are embedded above.
Rebecca and Pablo receive an all expense paid trip to the conference, where they will video blog their experience. → Read More
This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com.
Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:
1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you. → Read More
Really? This is getting out of hand, no? The onslaught of Obama clad doodads has begun. This stuff is going to sell like hotcakes! → Read More
I’m not a Canon man, but this appears to be working from the videos that are available on Youtube. Anyone in the audience care to test it out and send us their videos? Instructions on how to hack your Canon after the jump. → Read More
This is only one data point. But at least the Wikipedia entry on TechCrunch doesn’t state that we sell corn and oat cereal, and it wasn’t written by someone whose bio simply reads “Troll“. Other than that, it’s pretty accurate..
So much for units of knowledge.
Update: Googler Matt Cutts weighs in on the discussion of Knol’s quality, saying that the service is doing fine and that it’s still aspiring to “contain high-quality, authoritative, very informative articles”. Ok then. → Read More
We’ve already seen that Twitter is turning into a source of breaking news. But it’s also clearly turning into a way of organising social movements extremely quickly. “Tweetup” (as in a meetup facilitated by Twitter) has passed into common parlance amongst regular users but now the concept has spawned a global event for charity which will involve nearly 50 U.S. cities among over 100 worldwide, including Beijing, Tel Aviv and Beirut. Twestival, on Thursday 12 February, will happen over a 24 hour period in a kind of tweetathon – except it is Twitter-organised meetups that people will be hitting, not phone lines. And the whole thing came together over Twitter inside 24 hours. Lead organiser Amanda Rose told me that because of Twitter’s viral nature it took only 24 hrs to get the the main 40 cities organised, and the rest followed shortly after. There are now over 100 Twestival cities, including London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Sydney, Melbourne, and Lima. The London event sold out tickets in 24 hours. The events will be raising money to support Charity:Water, a not-for-profit organisation bringing safe drinking water to people in developing countries. Twestival started out as a one-off event in London last September. It’s come a long way. It may not be Live Eight but Twestival is just the latest “tweetup with a cause”. One December has already lead to an initiative to clothe homeless people through Winter in Vancouver, and there are certain to be many more, less publicised, events in the future. → Read More
Wow, here’s a new one. Apparently Nate Robinson of the New York Knicks plays quite a bit on Xbox Live and constantly has trouble trying to prove to fellow gamers that he’s really Nate Robinson.
So in last night’s game against the Philadelphia 76ers, Robinson apparently made a special salute before shooting free throws in order to prove to someone on Xbox Live that it was really him playing Call of Duty: World at War. → Read More
This April will bring the 500th issue of Mad Magazine and, starting with that issue, the publication will be moving from monthly to quarterly circulation. → Read More
It’s not quite a price cut, but it’s the next best thing. Walk into your local Best Buy and you should be able to pick up a 32-inch 1080o Sony Bravia and an 80GB PS3 for $1,100. That’s about $300 less than you’d pay for the two items separately. → Read More
Any Papists in the house? Hooray for everything, then, as the Vatican has just launched its own dedicated YouTube channel. Now you can watch Pope Benedict XVI, in all his heavenly splendor, demand that y’all leave Steve Jobs alone. Something like that. → Read More
An article by Mike Ferro over at Blorge cites Microsoft’s recent quarterly FCC filing of a 54 percent revenue drop in Zune sales and the Redmond giant’s planned layoffs to propose that “It is more than likely that the Zune business will receive a good helping of the layoffs and possibly the end of the Zune as well.” → Read More
You’ll need a jailbroken iPhone for this but it appears that a developer called MeDevil is hot on the trail of facilitating Bluetooth file transfers between the iPhone and other compatible devices. → Read More
Yes, Microsoft will release Halo Wars here in North America on March 3. Great, right? Sure. But that demo that will be released on Xbox Live on February 5, well, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to play it a few days early. You can thank the good folks at Major League Gaming. → Read More
It’s not the first social network that caters to wealthy people only, and it won’t be the last: Affluence is the latest company to take a crack at building a community site exclusively for the rich and famous among us instead of the petty riff-raff that make up the bulk of internet users.
Unlike its most famous competitor aSmallWorld (there’s also Diamond Lounge and Qube), Affluence doesn’t require you to be invited in order to be eligible to become a member. No, you can simply register, free of charge. That is, if you can demonstrate you have a minimum household net worth of $3 million or a minimum annual household income of $300,000. Or if you have 5 other people who qualify tell Affluence that you are upper class enough to become a member of the virtual country club; that should do the trick as well. → Read More
We’ve already seen that Twitter is turning into a source of breaking news. But it’s also clearly turning into a way of organizing social movements extremely quickly. “Tweetup” (as in a meetup facilitated by Twitter) has passed into common parlance amongst regular users but now the concept has spawned a global event for charity which will involve nearly 50 U.S. cities among over 100 worldwide, including Beijing, Tel Aviv and Beirut. Twestival, on Thursday 12 February, will happen over a 24 hour period in a kind of tweetathon – except it is Twitter-organised meetups that people will be hitting, not phone lines. And the whole thing came together over Twitter inside 24 hours. → Read More
While 2008 was Twitter’s hockey-stick year, Twitter’s little brother FriendFeed is also beginning to show hockey-stick tendencies in its growth. According to comScore, FriendFeed attracted 950,000 unique visitors worldwide in December. That’s a tenfold increase since June, when comScore counted only 93,000 unique visitors worldwide (and nearly double since September, when it was 550,000).
Twitter.com, by comparison, which is raising money at a $250 million valuation, has four times as many visitors (4.35 million worldwide in December). While recently there was some debate about whether Twitter has passed Digg, the real question might be whether FriendFeed can ever catch up to Twitter. → Read More
Napera, a recent Seattle-based startup, is looking for 100 IT and Network Managers for a closed beta test of their new 24-port gigabit network switch. Details below. Napera is testing a relatively new concept–targeted security software subscriptions installed onto the network hardware. These security subscriptions recognize that different industries face different threat profiles–for example, the health industry versus the financial services industry. Each industry is also willing to pay for different levels of security. CEO Todd Hooper explained it to me: A good analogy is the trial antivirus software that is bundled with computer. Imagine if networking hardware came with bundled security features you could activate for a trial and subscribe to remotely, rather than being a new single function box you had to buy just for this purpose. The recent mini-epidemic of the Conficker worm shows that breached network security remains a very real threat for the enterprise. Networking hardware is now sophisticated enough that installing applications on the switches themselves results in extremely fast and cost-effective deployment–particularly for businesses too small to hire a full-time security guru. On the flip side, subscriptions to security in the cloud means your usage statistics can also be collected for continuous improvement. I don’t know if Napera intends to do this, but it certainly seems the logical next step. Beta details: Napera is looking for 100 IT and Network Managers to join a closed beta test of our most innovative product features. We will ship you a fully functional, business class, 24-port gigabit network switch. Install it on your network, use it, and keep it, with our thanks for participation in our beta program. We will ask you to turn on and use advanced features, never before seen in network switching equipment. Give us your feedback, ideas, and comments. The beta test is open to US residents only and will take 90 days. Participants responsible for hardware shipping and handling. Apply to participate in the Napera Project Indigo Beta Test at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=3_2bo0W86aSCZR65aT2zIU5g_3d_3d CrunchBase Information Napera Networks Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Twitter, which just recently turned down a half billion dollar acquisition offer from Facebook (albeit to be paid mostly with Facebook stock), is dipping back into the venture capital market, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. They’ve signed a term sheet with at least one venture fund to raise a new round at a $250 million valuation. We are still gathering information on how much they’re raising and from whom.
It’s likely they’ll raise more than the $20 million in capital they’ve taken in over two previous rounds. Their last round, raised in June 2008, was a $15 million raise from new investors Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage increased their previous investment.
Rumor is Twitter hit up more than a few venture firms to pitch the $250 million valuation, and got more than one “no.” But someone’s bit, perhaps encouraged by Twitter’s breakneck growth and the interest from Facebook. That means Twitter gets a new cash injection and time to figure out its business model at an even more leisurely pace. → Read More
According to Ars Technica’s MS mole, there is going to be a special Xbox 360 bundle coming: a Resident Evil Bundle with exclusive content. Click on to find out what might be included. → Read More
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