In the run-up to the Oscars tomorrow, social intelligence startup uberVU conducted a study of how and where people were talking about the Best Picture nominees.
The data was collected during the week between Feb. 19 and today. The company wasn’t just looking at the number of times a movie was mentioned — it also rated the sentiment of each comment, giving the movies an overall rating between 0 (negative) and 100 (positive). So even though The Artist is largely expected to win by movie industry watchers, it’s actually not the winner of what uberVU is calling the “Social Oscar.” Yes, it received the most social media mentions (68,993), but The Help, with 51,968 mentions, seemed to be better-liked, with “a good range of positive adjectives.” → Read More
Coverage of the NBA’s All-Star game in Orlando began tonight at 5pm ET, starting with the Sprite Slam Dunk contest, featuring the Indiana Pacers’ Paul George, Minnesota Timberwolves’ Derrick Williams, the Knicks’ Iman Shumpert, and Rockets’ Chase Budinger. The NBA is stepping up its social media coverage of the All-Star game this year, and is making some crowdsourcing-type changes to the Slam Dunk Contest, which we thought were quickly worth sharing.
This year, the dunk contest will only consist of one round, and each competitor will get three dunks, fan voting will open after all four players have performed their acrobatics. But, more importantly, for the first time ever, fans get to vote directly for the winner of the dunk contest through SMS, NBA.com, or the Twitters. To vote on Twitter, fans simply tweet their favorite player’s last name along with the hashtag “SpriteSlam.” The player with the most votes, via this new “dunksourcing” will take home the victory. → Read More
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Whether you’re a “mobile first” publisher, app developer or carrier, all eyes are set on Barcelona at the end of this month for Mobile World Congress 2012. It’s part conference, part trade show, part excuse to spend a week at extravagant parties with mobile’s biggest influencers – all wrapped up into an unparalleled four-day event. Long the mobile industry’s largest global exhibition, it attracted over 60,000 participants in 2011, including 12,000 developers, 3,000 CEOs, government delegations from 131 countries and over 1,500 media outlets.
Not long after the release of the very first iPhone, each year has been billed as “the year of mobile.” But there are signs this year may actually live up to the already-heightened expectations. → Read More
Tech companies in Silicon Valley and in tech hubs across the United States are at war against each other, to find and hire quality talent that is in short supply. The competition is particularly fierce among startups, which means that it’s ever so important to make the right decisions when hiring your next rock star.
Here are six tips to set you on the right course: → Read More
Pearson, the owners of Penguin, the Financial Times Group and a number of education imprints, has made some significant strides into digital with e-books and apps, but it is always on the hunt for more.
So today the publisher is announcing that it is expanding one of its newer ventures, Plug & Play, which offers its copyrighted material via APIs to third-party developers: it has signed a deal with in-app billing specialists Zuora to monetize that API content; and it is adding another dataset into the mix, Kitchen Manager, containing recipe and other food data. → Read More
A little more than a week ago, the Clik smartphone app launched, resulting plenty of press coverage and more than 100,000 downloads on iOS (at least according to Clik). But there was one area where the launch fizzled — in the Android Market, where the Clik app is apparently invisible to searches.
“Over the weekend, as we get all this hype, nobody could find our app,” says CEO Ted Livingston.
Even today, if you search for “clik” in the Market, the app doesn’t show up in the first five pages of results. (It may be hidden even more deeply than that, but that’s as far as I went.) It’s not clear what’s going wrong, but I’m guessing that the Android Market assumes you made a typo and searches for “click” instead — hence search results that are topped by “1-click cleaner.” → Read More
It’s been said before, but it needs saying again (and again and again): PRINT IS DEAD. Across the publishing industry, year-over-year declines in revenue, subscriptions and circulation, are well documented. Yes, there have been a few quarters of blood stanching flatness (yay!), but – you heard it here first (or few weeks ago from The Annenberg School, or over the summer from Clay Shirky) – print periodicals are going to go away – forced out of this world by the march of technology and changing tastes, and replaced by new powerhouse brands – TMZ, Buzzfeed and HuffPo to name a few — which are poised to own the future, because they know how to adapt to (and even anticipate!) evolving user behavior. As John Paton, CEO of one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., put it recently “‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone’ is not much of a business model.” → Read More
LL Cool J began his 1991 song “Mama Said Knock You Out” with the famous lines “Don’t call it a comeback/I’ve been here for years.” Today in the world of telcos and wireless operators, it’s a similar time — will it be comeback or knock out?
For decades, the big telcos called the shots in their industry, but lately they are having to adjust to a new power dynamic, with the “big four” of the new establishment (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) setting the trends, and coming “over the top” to eat at their margins and consumer mindshare. Can they mount a comeback and regain more control over their destiny? From my perspective, no one should count them out. → Read More
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A vulnerability has been discovered on AT&T’s website which allows anyone to look up the phone numbers of AT&T subscribers, provided they have the subscriber’s email address. The issue involves a form on AT&T’s site where a subscriber can input their email address in order to recover their forgotten AT&T User ID. Except instead of simply emailing the User ID to the email address provided, the following page reveals the wireless phone number associated with that account.
UPDATE: AT&T says the vulnerability has been removed. See below.
→ Read More
Velti plans to announce two new initiatives aimed at helping mobile advertisers get ahead of data collection and privacy concerns, according to a source who has been briefed by the company.
My source says Velti, a publicly traded mobile ad company, is working on the first “Do Not Track” list built for mobile. Consumers should be able to direct their smartphone browsers at a specific Do Not Track website, which will build a “fingerprint” for that phone adding it to a list of devices that will be blocked from ad targeting. Velti is working with partners to finalize these plans, but it might announce the Do Not Track feature this week, at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. → Read More
We’re on the ground here in Barcelona for the 2012 GSMA Mobile World Congress and are happy to report that, according to the GSMA press release, the planned strike by Metro subway workers has been staved off. An agreement has been reached.
The Bus workers, however, are apparently still negotiating. → Read More
Almost none of the stuff on the radar of the silicon valley echo-chamber is innovative or solves any real human needs. They won’t cure anyone of disease, feed a child, improve the environment, or radically improve manufacturing…
Pinterest? Quora? Other social apps. It’s all a big distraction, it’s entertainment…
It’s all well and fine to pursue these avenues for making money. But don’t pretend there’s anything really innovative going on, that 50 years from now someone’s going to look back like we look back at Einstein, Darwin, or Newton and say ‘thanks’.
That’s from a comment written by one Ray Cromwell, regarding a week-old TechCrunch post about Pinterest — and I have to admit, it struck a chord. And I’m clearly not alone: lamentations re the paucity of meaningful innovation in today’s Valley are growing increasingly common. PayPal founder Peter Thiel, in a recent interesting conversation with Francis Fukuyama, actually questions “whether we’re still living in a technologically advancing society at all.” → Read More
I just gave up all parenting responsibilities this weekend to Mark Cuban. Meaning, my kids and I watched eight straight episodes of “Shark Tank”.
For the past two years, people have been begging me to watch “Shark Tank”. One friend of mine, who has co-invested with me on two deals, has given me two pieces of advice in life. One is: “you never know what someone is worth until they declare bankruptcy”. The point is, we all speculate that someone is worth $100 million or a billion or whatever, and the next day you read in the newspaper that they declare bankruptcy. Now you know.
The second thing my friend and co-investor was always telling me was that “James, you need to watch Shark Tank”. Now, after watching every episode, I can say I agree with him. → Read More
Leadership in management is the art and science of getting others to do what they don’t necessarily want – or don’t understand why they’re being asked – to do. Doing it at a startup is accomplishing all of that in the face of uncertainty and with little resources. Now imagine doing that without the war chest supplied to you by VCs as you bootstrap. Good times, but also a pain in the ass. → Read More
ChinaBang conference, an annual two-day event with a focus on local startups, innovation and entrepreneurship, was held last weekend in Beijing. With a mixture of keynote and panel discussions from local startup founders and entrepreneurs, the awards ceremony recognized the best Chinese startups and founders in 2011 and featured a startup launchpad contest. Organized by TechNode, ChinaBang’s Launchpad competition had 16 teams pitch to 14 judges (from GSR Ventures, IDG, Qiming, Matrix Ventures, Atomico, Singtel, Paypal, Innovation Works, CyberAgent, Rovio, Infinity Ventures, Taishan, CSDN) and a live audience. → Read More
The long-running “Live” name Microsoft has placed on its many connected services (Mail, messenger, photos, etc) is coming to an end in Windows 8, as part of their ongoing, major brand rehaul. Zune, of course, has been on its way out for some time, but will receive the coup de grace in Windows 8.
Their main services are being rolled into bundled applications with a native Metro look and simpler names — Mail instead of Windows Live Mail, Photos instead of Windows Live Photo Gallery, and so on. The new apps will be tightly integrated, as we’ve seen in demos, and will retain much of the Live cross-service functionality. They’ll be unified by a single “Microsoft Account.” → Read More
Digg’s January saw an increase in page views by 35% and was its highest traffic month since October 2010. When it dug into why, it found we’re proud to look smart, hip, or funny by sharing tech news and offbeat content, but we keep our guilty pleasure entertainment and divisive political reading to ourselves.
Specifically, Digg analyzed what people read vs what they shared to their Facebook Timeline in part through the new Digg Social Reader Open Graph which has helped boost Facebook referral traffic by 67%. It discovered telling psychological trends in how people want to portray idealized versions of themselves. → Read More
Look, sometimes you just have to take a break and skim Etsy for cool iPad stuff. Are you thinking of picking up a new iPad 3 when they come out, or maybe just celebrating the release with a cool new case for your existing tablet? Check out this little round-up of cases collected by a felt-loving blogger on a Friday afternoon.
Do you like felt, and leather, and buckles, and supporting the artisan iPad accessory community? Enter. → Read More
The Los Angeles Times reports that The Los Angeles Times will be adopting a paywall (they prefer the term “membership program”) starting March 5th, joining the ranks of other large newspapers hoping to replace plummeting subscription revenues. Readers, naturally, are incensed, though the change was inevitable for such a large newspaper.
Although the move to a paid or at least somehow powerfully monetized online model is going to be critical for the LA Times and other major print establishments, it appears that everyone in the industry is still in the “flailing” stage, and hoping that a model rejected and circumvented by readers will somehow work for them as it has (in a way) worked for others. → Read More
A single blogger recently relayed comments made by a single Tesla service tech who reportedly knew of five Teslas that were “bricked” by owners who left them off the charger too long. This single unverified report spread like a sensational wildfire across the blogosphere. Tesla came out and acknowledged that it was possible to destroy the Roadster’s battery pack by keeping it unplugged but Tesla has employed numerous counter-measures to prevent that from happening. The company responded further today in a lengthy blog post titled “Plug It In. → Read More
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