Digital media. Making the most of your Facebook page profile picture | ClearRiver Advertising and Marketing. Color.hailpixel.com · Swatch you doing? Reddit Rapists Come Clean On Controversial New Thread, But Should We Listen? "I am a post-colleged age male who raped several girls through use of coercion, alcohol, and other tactics over a course of 3 years. " Thus begins the comment of an anonymous Reddit user submitted three days ago as part of a massive Reddit thread dealing with sexual assault, born out of one Redditor's question: "Reddit's had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any redditors from the other side of the story?
What were your motivations? " the user asked, "Do you regret it? " The response was instant, and instantly controversial. While the subject matter of the posts may be problematic for some readers, the question of whether or not such "dialogue" can actually contribute to the discourse of how to deal with and prevent rape in America is just as debated by experts and advocates. It's a fact to which the Reddit thread attests again and again, as both victims and victimizers recount their stories. For "the post-college male," it was all about the chase.
Study: Hispanic Smartphone Owners Want Mobile Shopping Apps To Be Social. Using a smartphone while shopping to find better deals or to look up product reviews is now pretty mainstream. There are some interesting differences between how Hispanics use their phones while shopping compared to the average U.S. consumer, though. While observing 15 Hispanic smartphone owners in Los Angeles and conducting a nationwide survey of 500 Hispanic smartphone users in late 2011, White Horse and digital advertising agency Sensis noticed that Hispanic users often prefer to shop with friends and family members – a use case that most mobile shopping apps currently ignore.
The study found that Hispanic users generally care less about reading product reviews while they are shopping and are more interested in the social experience of shopping with others. Indeed, 68% of Hispanic smartphone users in this survey said that they prefer to shop with at least one more person when buying expensive products. Startup Lets You Buy and Sell Stuff on Twitter. A startup called Chirpify introduced a platform on Wednesday that lets you buy and sell things as well as donate money on Twitter.
The Portland, Ore., company has linked up with PayPal to make Twitter-based transactions, a.k.a. "T-commerce" sort of like writing a check. For instance, you can buy stuff from your favorite brand just by tweeting "@favoritebrand Buy" (assuming they use Chirpify, of course.) You can also donate by typing "@politician Donate. " The platform also enables peer-to-peer transactions. If you owed your friend $20, for instance, you could "donate" the money back to him via a Twitter-enabled smartphone, making the check analogy all the more apt.
So far, PowerBar is the only brand using Chirpify. PowerBar fans, for instance, will see on the company's Twitter feed this week that such transactions are possible, but if they want to buy something, they will have to register with Chirpify. 'This Message Will Self-Destruct': One Shar.es Erases Data After Transmission. 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.
Name: OneShar.es Quick Pitch: OneShar.es lets you send confidential data that automatically deletes after the recipient views it once. Genius Idea: Allows your sensitive data from becoming one of the many "read" emails in a recipient's inbox, which could potentially be accessed if his or her smartphone is lost or stolen. Ever wonder if the private emails you send to trusted friends and acquaintances are deleted or if that information lingers in their inboxes? OneShar.es has a smart solution to safeguard sensitive information that's very Mission Impossible. The web tool allows people to easily share private information, whether its via your mobile device (apps for iOS and Android) or your browser window. The lesson here: No one deletes email, so protect your information.
Who needs a nanny? Parents turn to tablets to rear children. No nanny? No problem! Modern-day parents are increasingly employing tablets to entertain, teach, and occupy their children, according to survey data gathered by analytics firm Nielsen. Seven out of 10 children under 12 (70 percent), in tablet-owning households used a tablet during the fourth quarter of 2011. The figure represents a nine percent increase from the third quarter, Nielsen found. The most popular activity among young children is far and away playing games. Here’s something fun: The tablet also seems to help parents with the often headache-inducing task of keeping kids quiet and occupied while traveling or dining out. Of course, there’s bound to be a subset of the parental community that frowns upon on the tablet’s growing role in (and out of) the household.
For now, the convenience of placing a tablet in front of a child is one too tempting for a growing percentage of parents to pass up. Photo credit: Wayan Vota/Flickr. Is your company prepared for the next digital evolution? There’s a gap growing between an increasingly digital society and the organizations that serves it, B. Bonin Bough, senior global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, said during the second annual What’s Next D.C. event. As consumer consumption of technological advances increases at a breakneck pace, brands are fighting to keep up with a society that thinks in 140-character status updates.
But most companies are failing to evolve, Bough said, and instead are staying stagnant, unable to keep up with the technology that has captivated their customers. Society thinks digitally now, and mobile has taken the world by storm. In fact, Bough added, there are some countries where more people have access to mobile phones than running water. Bough challenged attendees to perform digital fitness tests on their own companies in order to evaluate the readiness of their organizations to evolve and adapt with their consumers. Invite innovation. 7 Ways That Retailers Can Combat 'Scan and Scram' InShare36 Brick-and-mortar retailers feel under siege by mobile price-checking tools. They shouldn't panic. For retailers, especially those who just can't compete with big discounters on price, the concern is growing about new mobile shopping behaviors.
The core phenomenon, often called pejoratively "scan and scram" or "showrooming" is now widespread: customers shopping at brick-and-mortar retailers examine physical merchandise at the shelf but use smartphone price-checking tools such as barcode scanners to buy the product at a better price online or at another store. The implicit accusation of these new catchphrases is that shoppers are doing their research furtively, and that they are violating a quid pro quo with retailers by reducing venues to "showrooms" for business they intend to transact elsewhere. That's hard for local or regional store owners to remember sometimes, especially amid the flames that online competitors are stoking.
Businesses need a plan. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Why SOPA and PIPA Won't Stop Real Piracy. Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (and its Senate-sister the Protect Intellectual Property Act, PIPA) legislation — like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — argue that legislation is needed because online piracy puts jobs and industries at risk. While I agree that content piracy is a real problem, the language and implications of SOPA has the potential to hurt the very industries and content creators the bills purport to protect. Artists and content creators are understandably bothered by how easy it is to obtain content without payment. My musician friends cringe when their albums are available for download even before the CD is pressed. My filmmaker friends distress over seeing the blood, sweat and tears put into a project more easily accessible from MegaVideo or other filesharing sites than from Amazon or Netflix.
SEE ALSO: Artists: SOPA Would Hurt More Than Help First-run movies hit the streets in China before the films play at the Cineplex. Why SOPA Is Dangerous. I'm sure you've heard by now that SOPA is bad and would ruin the Internet, but have you actually read the bill? If not, it's worth reading, for two reasons. First, if you are going to oppose a bill, you should know exactly what you're opposing, not just the vague principle behind it. Second, it'll provide you with a valuable insight: that these bills are written in an attempt to obscure the truth. First off, I'm going to qualify that I'm not a lawyer. However, I am a programmer, and that's made me pretty good at unraveling spaghetti code.
Here is the full text of the bill, as of Jan. 15, 2012. The Scalpel Section 102(a)(2) permits the attorney general to take action against foreign sites (i.e., sites that do not fall under U.S. jurisdiction) if "the owner or operator of such Internet site is facilitating the commission of [copyright infringement]. " This isn't quite as bad as the rest of the bill because the power lies with the attorney general, rather than the copyright holder. To Sum Up. Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for.
In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Start With The User When starting a new Web design project, we’re often handed a design brief, branding standards, high-level project goals, as well as feature and functionality requirements. Two examples of popular user flows for e-commerce and subscription websites. Map User Flows Into Conversion Funnels Display Media. CES 2012: Understanding what you hear on the show floor. It is CES week in Las Vegas and thousands of attendees are jostling for position in the crowded show booths to get a glimpse of the latest and greatest gadgets. The representatives working in the booths are trained how to best show the toys, and answer all questions about them appropriately. After attending shows like CES for years, you hear a lot of the same buzz words and phrases. Here are the most commonly heard booth snippets, and what the representatives really mean by them.
Even if you're not attending the CES, chances are you'll see these phrases quoted in the coverage. See also: CES 2012: ZDNet’s news and product coverage We don't have a ship date or pricing for that yet. That's just a prototype. This fantastic gadget is our reference design. This is the thinnest/lightest/fastest/cheapest [device type] ever made.
Up to 8 hours battery life. Sorry, the [gadget name] can't be used while held like that. It's better than the iPad/iPhone/MacBook Air. Image credit: Flickr user khelvan. Paint-On Solar Cells Developed by Notre Dame Researchers. Government agencies using solar power may soon be ditching their panels in favor of paint brushes. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Nano Science and Technology (NDnano) have developed a “solar paint” that can be applied on to a conductive surface, such as transparent conducting glass or plastic, that turns the energy of the sun into electricity. The project consisted of taking nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide, coating them with either cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide and suspending them in a water-alcohol mixture to create the paint. The semiconducting nanoparticles — called quantum dots — were mixed into a one-coat spreadable paste that can generate power, without using any special equipment.
The team that worked on the solar paint was a small one, consisting of Lightcap, Prashant Kamat, professor of science in chemistry and biochemistry and an investigator at NDnano who led the research, and Matthew Genovese, an undergraduate student. Challenges Remain. Model S Options and Specs.