When Ning shuttered its free service for creating social networks back in April, educators and schools who were using the platform expresses their concern at the company’s decision to include educations networks created by schools and colleges in this group. When Ning eventually rolled out its premium pricing structure in May, the company announced that it had partnered with an education company to sponsor networks for primary and secondary educators but didn’t reveal the name of the sponsor. Today, Ning is announcing that Pearson, a education-focused publishing company, is sponsoring network costs for Ning Mini platforms for educators come July. Ning says the partnership will extend for three years. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Ning.com currently hosts 6,500 K-12 and 2,100 Higher Ed social networks, and range from platforms for teachers, individual schools and classes to alumni groups. Pearson will now be assuming the costs for all of these groups to use a Ning Mini model, which have access to Ning’s core features including, blogs, photos, forums and video embeds, and the added ability to run custom advertising. The price for Ning Mini is $2.95 per month or $19.95 per year. → Read More
Adam Penenberg, writer of Viral Loop, interviewed Paul J. Zak aka Dr. Love. Dr. Love studes “neuroeconomics” and has discovered that social media, especially fast-moving streams like Twitter, flood our brains with oxytocin, the “hug hormone” that makes us feel empathy and, more important, makes us feel good.
In a number of test cases, the most important involving Penenberg tweeting about “overweight tourists in Speedos,” the hug hormone spiked and stress went down. Twitter, in a sense, is like taking a fat drag on a good cigarette or a eating a sleeve of Thin Mints. As Penenberg tweeted, they measured his hormonal levels with surprising results:
In those 10 minutes between blood batches one and two, my oxytocin levels spiked 13.2%. That’s equivalent to the hormonal spike experienced by the groom at the wedding Zak attended. Meanwhile, stress hormones cortisol and ACTH went down 10.8% and 14.9%, respectively. Zak explains that the results are linked, that the release of oxytocin I experienced while tweeting reduced my stress hormones.
There’s certainly no shortage of so-called mobility robots, but major Japanese robot maker tmsuk‘s offering seems to be quite cool. In fact, the RODEM (short for “Robot De Enjoy Mobility”) is being pitched as a mix between robot, wheelchair and ultra-small vehicle (or “Universal Vehicle” [JP, PDF], in tmsuk’s marketing language). → Read More
There isn’t a better way to kill a boring Thursday than a Woot-off. Well, maybe a Stevenote liveblog, but those only happen a couple times a year. What we have here is the classic sell-it-until-it’s-gone scheme on both the original Woot and Kids.Woot. Jump on over and prepare to use your F5 key. → Read More
GarageBand.com, the well-known indie music store, discovery & review service and online community, will be discontinued as of July 15th, 2010, more than 10 years after it first saw the light of day.
In an email sent to users this morning, the company that spawned social music discovery service iLike (now part of MySpace), the GarageBand team says users can register for an iLike account to have their music, profile pic and bio automatically linked up and ported over. → Read More
Online ticketing startup Ticketfly has acquired music event listing and promotions site Gigbot. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Ticketfly, which helps concert promoters sell tickets by leveraging social media, plans to integrate Gigbot’s technology into its portal. Gigbot’s flagship product, Gigbot Pro adopts a similar social media model to Ticketfly, allowing musicians to promote shows via the social networks, schedule auto tweets and syndicate content to event listings sites. → Read More
Brookstone, the specialty product retailer in malls across America, recently rolled out an updated mobile website complete with video to augment product descriptions. The site was developed by Usablenet, the same folks that recently worked on the Marks and Spencer mobile site. The site follows the footsteps of the Marks and Spencer site, and offers another good point of reference for successful mobile design, in case you needed “inspiration” for your own mobile design efforts. → Read More
It’s finally here. After months of anticipation, the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4 is upon us, and dozens of people are currently lined up in front of San Francisco’s flagship Apple store to get their hands on one. Of couse, not everyone is fortunate enough to live close to an Apple Store (or has the time to go stand in line at this ridiculous hour). Which is why I’m braving the early morning once again to give you all a vicarious taste of Apple’s devotees at their finest.
I’m equipped with a Nexus One live streaming with Qik. Last time I faced this line during the launch of the iPad, I had an Apple sticker covering the Nexus’s Google logo to throw any particularly rabid Apple fans off the scent. Unfortunately it seems that I’ve exhausted my supply of Apple stickers — this could get nasty. → Read More
Internet panel company uSamp has just announced that it has acquired research and sampling technology DMS Insights (aka Digital Marketing Services) from AOL. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Founded in 1995, DMS Insights, which was acquired by AOL in 1999, created “river sampling” methodology and developed Opinion Place, a portal for random, real-time recruitment of survey respondents via the web. → Read More
VoIP company Rebtel is launching a new version of its Android app that allows users to make free Android-to-Android international calls between more than 50 countries.
While the international part of the call is free, the caller and recipient still may have to pay for local calling minutes determined by their mobile phone plans. The app runs in the background and will intercept users making a more expensive long distance calls by automatically converting the number to a cheap local number. So when the user dials an international number from the native Android dial pad, or selects a contact with an international number from the address book, the call is automatically intercepted and routed via Rebtel instead of their carrier. Also since Rebtel works on the standard cellular network using local phone numbers, no WiFi is needed to make calls. → Read More
White label social networking startup KickApps has launched a new development suite that aims to simplify the Facebook app development for marketers, brand managers and developers. The KickApps App Studio now allows anyone, including non-programmers, to create rich media Facebook applications.
The suite’s ease of use is obtained through drag and drop functionality, allowing users to create and deploy custom video players, social widgets and rich media ad units. Applications can serve as a Facebook fan page or as a tab on a Facebook page. → Read More
If you like detail as much as you like Nokias, then this news is going to make your day: Mobile Review have posted one of the most thorough overviews of an OS that I’ve ever seen.
The OS in question is Symbian^3, Nokia’s latest build of their tried-and-true OS, and the final Symbian OS to grace an N-series device. → Read More
More good news from the French open source scene: Paris-based open source enterprise content management (ECM) platform, Nuxeo, has just announced another €2.7 million in funding from OTC Asset Management – one of its principal investors.
After the €2 million raised in December 2008, this additional funding will put the company’s series A round at €4.7 million. → Read More
You crazy kids and your Nexus Ones. It looks like the final Froyo build (FRF83) is now being rolled out as an over-the-air update.
This update supersedes the previous Froyo build (FRF50) that was rolled out to a limited number of Nexus One handsets for testing. → Read More
It’s a pretty old video, and it has garnered some 230,000 views since its publication in November 2009, but we hadn’t seen it yet and perhaps neither have you.
Try not to grin while watching this demo video on the Office Live Workspace website.
Looks like the person demoing how to add multiple documents to your workspace is keen on using Mozilla Firefox (around the 0:25 mark) to showcase how to download Silverlight, Microsoft also competing in the browser space be damned. → Read More
Application store company GetJar this morning announced it has secured $11 million in a Series B funding round led by previous backer Accel Partners, report PaidContent and others.
The company says it plans to use the funding to bolster its consumer-facing sites as well as its professional solutions geared towards app developers and publishers. → Read More
Mmm, sexy designer LED desk lamps iPhone cassette tape case is retro-practical So it begins: The iPhone 4 shatters like a mofo Your disposable wine glass, monsieur CrunchGear contest: keep that old iPhone 3GS alive and useful → Read More
It’s all the rage these days. You fire off an email to Apple‘s Steve Jobs, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest and most secretive technology companies, and to your astonishment, the great man himself replies.
You then publish said email, sit back and watch as the tech press dissect each and every word.
It’s quite the media spectacle, especially when you factor in that Steve can’t (and doesn’t) reply to every email he receives. But when he does, the replies are usually sparse and occasionally cryptic.
Steve’s reply to my lengthy email was no different.
We will keep making the best computers on the planet. We love it.
Sent from my iPhone
So what did I ask him? → Read More
Travel website operator TripAdvisor, an Expedia company, this morning announced it has acquired Holiday Lettings, credited as being the UK’s largest independent vacation rental website.
The seller is Rightmove, a UK-based property website operator, having sold its majority interest in the holding company of Holiday Lettings to TripAdvisor for an undisclosed sum. Rightmove acquired a 66.67% stake in Holiday Lettings in March 2007, and recently said it intended to report Holiday Lettings as a discontinued operation in its half yearly report, with the gross assets disposed of totalling £1 million.
The acquisition follows the launch of vacation rentals on TripAdvisor in 2009, and the purchase of a majority stake in United States-based FlipKey.com in 2008. → Read More
I’ve read David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect twice now. I’ve also interviewed him about the book twice on stage – once at TechCrunch Disrupt and a second time this evening at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
On a side note, as far as I know Kirkpatrick’s publisher Simon & Schuster is still planning on suing us for copyright infringement. I never heard back from them after their initial legal volley. I’m not holding that against Kirkpatrick, though – he’s a long time friend.
So I’ve spent a lot of time with this book. And I’ve spent a lot of time covering Facebook over the last five years, since my first post in 2005 when the company told us that 85% of college students at covered schools were logging into the site at least once a week. → Read More
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