Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Quits Facebook to Start her own Social Media Venture. Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook.com founder Mark Zuckerberg resigned from the position in Facebook after a long stint as a director of marketing at Facebook. This may be a bad sign for the social media giant after the launch of a rising competitor Google plus. Randi Zuckerberg is two years older than Mark Zuckerberg. Randi is the founder of her new organization RtoZ media which will be working with other media houses to help them build programming helpful for making social media supportive platforms. Randi was a very famous name in Facebook word and has handled some very big projects such as Facebook Presidential Primary Debate, ABC & Facebook Live Election Night Coverage in 2010 and Davos/Facebook partnership.
Randi was on maternity leave before sending her resignation. Intel And Others Invest $2.6 Million In Mobile Entertainment Studio skyrockit. Mobile application developer skyrockit this morning announced that it has raised $2.6 million in new funding from Intel Capital with participation from Asuka DBJ Partners and former Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon. skyrockit plans to use the additional capital to boost its existing entertainment products and services, which includes the virtual Zippo Lighter for the iPhone, and develop new applications. The company works for carriers such as AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, handset manufacturers, media companies and brands. Another one of its services, ROMPLR, is a music remix platform for iOS and Nokia that currently has over 1.1 million users across more than 95 countries. Skyrockit is based in San Francisco and was renamed from Moderati (previously Faith West) back in 2009. The startup claims it has generated more than $300 million in revenue for its partners and more than 100 million pieces of its content have been consumed.
Disrupt, Day 3, Livestreaming For You Right Here, Right Now. Does Social Media Make Us Nicer People? - TNW Social Media. Social media-savvy people are more likely to be helpful to others offline too, new research has found. A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions. The research was compiled by Let’s Heal , an Amsterdam-based independent non-profit organization which aims to help brands become more prosocial – brands that help others by doing good. “It’s no secret that I’m especially interested in ‘Meaningful Prosocial Brands’ in particular, because rather than just helping others, they facilitate their consumers to help others and in doing this, they can mobilize a large force for good,” says Let’s Heal founder Mark Woerde.
“‘Meaningful Prosocial Brands’ go beyond social responsibility. Microsoft Fully Backs H.264 And Has 3,000 Words To Prove It. In case you weren’t aware, Microsoft and Google aren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye right now. In fact, they really seem to hate one another in a public manner not normally exposed. So it should be no surprise that the two are also opposed to one another when it comes to their views of web video. Yes, it’s the H.264 versus WebM debate once again. But while Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and others have had their say, Microsoft has remained largely quiet. Until today. Dean Hachamovitch, the man in charge of Internet Explorer for Microsoft, has taken the time to write a nearly 3,000 word piece about the situation today. I had a chance to speak with Hachamovitch last night about his thoughts on the situation. “We had a somewhat stable state in web video,” Hachamovitch says. Google decided to pull their support for H.264 as the web video standard.
At first, they touted the maneuver as being all about supporting “open” formats. So Microsoft, like Apple, is taking the more sure bet. In Defense of Qwiki - The Machine That Reads to You. Video artist Ze Frank used to say that it would take him all day long to produce each of his five to ten minute long pieces. That's not unusual: creation of multi-media content is incredibly time and resource expensive, especially compared to the creation of text content. That's why I have a lot of interest in today's public launch of Qwiki - a service that combines speech-to-text and assembled multi-media to create little slideshows based on Wikipedia entries. Geeks are engaged in heated debate, some arguing that the technology is lightweight, that the product is limited and that the funding of the company to the tune of $8 million by Facebook's exiled co-founder Eduardo Saverin and others is a sign that Silicon Valley has lost its mind like it did in the original days of the dot com bubble.
You know what, though? Mainstream audiences are really excited about Qwiki. CNN and PC World gave Qwiki rave reviews today. Simplicity can be a virtue, though. Why I Don’t Buy the Quora Hype. Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not writing this in my capacity as a university professor or researcher; I don’t claim to be an expert on social networking; and I will be happy to be proven wrong—I have no vested interest in the success or failure of Quora. And, given the fire I’ve already taken for tweeting an opinion that defies the Valley’s infinite wisdom, I know that this post will offend many in Silicon Valley—as did my piece on why I Craigslisted my iPads. But I just don’t believe that Quora will “rule” or become anything like Facebook or Twitter. It has been a very nice private club; but it’s not for the general public. Quora is a new question-and-answer site on which a few notable members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite have expressed their opinions. Some of the discussions have been very informative; some, completely misinformed.
Some questions are of general interest, such as: Will there be a tech sector crash in the near future? Right now, Quora is tech focused. How I Use Visualization To Drive Creativity. This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC. He sold his second company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster on his blog at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster. Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity.
Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. Almost all business success relies on creativity. What exactly is visualization? Strange, I know. In addition to driving Ms.
Power Play: Kevin Rose, Founder, Digg - The Toppler Project. New Benchmark Ranks Supercomputers More Thoughtfully. There are dozens of ways to usefully measure the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputers – everything from the speed of a system’s internal communications network and its ability to randomly access memory, to the traditional measure of a high performance system’s speed: its ranking on the Linpack benchmark, which is used to “officially” rate systems on the international Top500 list. Now a new ranking, proposed by a steering committee including 30 of the world’s top high performance computing (HPC) experts, has debuted: the Graph500 list, which measures a supercomputer’s ability to chew through “graph” data.
Graph data turns out to be the lingua franca of countless areas, from biomedicine (drug discovery, protein interactions, gene networks, public health) to homeland security, fraud detection, and the social graphs that represent users on networks like Facebook. All these fields, and countless others, could benefit from faster parsing of graphs. - Being more profitable - Etc.
Bill of Rights in Cyberspace, amended « BuzzMachine. I’m still refining my thoughts on a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace — the latest version in preparation for tomorrow’s PDF symposium on WIkileaks and transparency. The idea is to have principles we can point to when dealing with such events as Wikileaks, Google/Verizon, Google/China, and so on. Try this on for size: I. We have the right to connect. II. We have the right to speak freely. III. Earlier versions are here and here. At the PDF event, I want to talk about the need to discuss principles we can point to when we see violations of these rights. I will also talk about the idea that we are passing from a world organized around power-to-power transactions to one based on peer-to-peer engagement. Thoughts? : LATER: Some have pointed out that I don’t have a privacy clause. BitTorrent Close To Launching Live Streaming Technology. Posted by Tom Foremski - September 29, 2010 Tuesday evening I attended a media roundtable at Boulevard in San Francisco with top executives from BitTorrent, which invented the popular file sharing technology that has about 80 million monthly users.
Here are some notes from my evening: - BitTorrent has been working on a live streaming technology for two years and now it is almost ready to be rolled out. The company expects to launch it by the end of this year. It is described as very robust. . - The company is trying to distance itself from the use of BitTorrent by those sharing files of illegally copied music and movies and show the commercial sector that it can be used to solve significant issues around distribution of large files across the entire Internet. . - BitTorrent doesn't know very much about how people use its technology. . - It is looking into launching a service that helps connect like minded BitTorrent users.
BitTorrent Debuts 'Apps' Sneak Peek Company Overview Management Team. Web Developers Get Real (Time) Many websites offer application programming interfaces (APIs) that let programmers tap directly into their data and capabilities. This makes it possible to add the latest Twitter headlines to a desktop application, or combine content from several sites in a so-called “mash up.” Wikipedia Vision, for example, uses the Wikipedia API and the Google Maps API to show new entries to the online encyclopedia by the geographical location from which the entry was posted. But many websites now offer a stream of data in near real time. Such streams offers new possibilities to developers.
Phil Windley, Kynetx’s founder and chief technology officer, says KRL can help developers make more of a Web stream. Windley was inspired to develop KRL by database software that can handle floods of real-time information, such the software that responds rapidly to data from financial markets. KRL allows a programmer to write rules that react when data is spotted in a feed of data. 5 Innovative Uses of an API [Mashable Awards] As part of the upcoming Mashable Awards, we're taking a closer look at each of the nomination categories. This is "Best Use of an API. " Be sure to nominate your favorites and join us for the Gala in Las Vegas! Sponsorships are available.
Please contact sponsorships@mashable.com for more information. Application programming interfaces, better known as APIs, let third-party developers utilize the power of web platforms like Facebook and Twitter to create amazing applications and features on top of them. By tapping into the Twitter streams, Facebook Likes, or YouTube playlists of millions of people, startups and independent developers are creating some incredibly innovative apps. We wanted to take a little time to highlight some interesting apps that really demonstrate what you can do with a great API and some elbow grease. Here are five of the most innovative uses of a social API. 1.
Foursquare has some incredible location data and launched an API last year. 2. 3. 4. 5. Dead Codebreaker Was Linked to NSA Intercept Case | Threat Level. A top British codebreaker found mysteriously dead last week in his flat had worked with the NSA and British intelligence to intercept e-mail messages that helped convict would-be bombers in the U.K., according to a news report. Gareth Williams, 31, made repeated visits to the U.S. to meet with the National Security Agency and worked closely with British and U.S. spy agencies to intercept and examine communications that passed between an al Qaeda official in Pakistan and three men who were convicted last year of plotting to bomb transcontinental flights, according to the British paper the Mirror.
Williams, described by those who knew him as a “math genius,” worked for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) helping to break coded Taliban communications, among other things. He was just completing a year-long stint with MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, when his body was found stuffed into a duffel bag in his bathtub. He’d been dead for at least a week. See Also: Adopt a Hacker wants to find couches for coders. The startup scene in NYC is blossoming. While the city has always had a tech culture — “Silicon Alley,” etc. — increasingly, in addition to fashion and finance and media, technology is becoming one of its big industries. The challenge now, say Jonathan Wegener and Ben Fisher, is to attract new tech talent to the city — coders and other hackers who will help to build New York’s startups into even more of a force than they already are. Enter Adopt a Hacker, a new project that wants to connect coders to the NYC tech scene — with the hope of making them part of it.
Though the name is cheeky, the purpose is not. “It’s tough to get a job in New York City if you’re not physically here,” notes Fisher. “A program like this offers the opportunity to make the leap a little less scary. It’s also a recommendation engine for NYC itself. Already, the effort has received over 100 responses from New Yorkers offering their couches, with several dozen people requesting visits.
12 tech predictions for 2011 | Adventures in IT. Tech predictions for 2011: The winners and losers. Predicting 2011 is tough, Mashable's Pete Cashmore says, but if 2010 is a guide, here are some winners and losers. Tech in 2011, if this year was a guide, will be full of surprises Apple, Tumblr could be among the big winners in the coming months Facebook rival Diaspora and Google's Chrome operating system might struggle Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media.
He writes a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com. (CNN) -- This year in technology has been packed with surprises: From the rise of the iPad to Facebook's global domination. If this past year is anything to go by, 2011 will be anything but predictable. And yet we can at least hazard a guess -- based on early signs -- as to which technology companies will flop and which will fly in 2011. The winners The popularity of the tablet form factor, meanwhile, has brought new possibilities -- in particular, new ways to consume content. The losers Mixed results. Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Twitter Takes Best Startup Of 2010.