Genachowski: FCC inherited a "real mess" in net neutrality FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Image by jdlasica via Flickr On April 14, 2011 Fortune's Adam Lashinsky interviewed Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in Mountain View, Calif., at an event sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California. The chairman danced around the most prominent item on his agenda, the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. He also discussed spectrum re-allocation, his pragmatic approach, and what it was like being a law school classmate of President Obama. ADAM LASHINSKY: Good evening, and welcome to our Commonwealth Club's Silicon Valley program, brought to you from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'm Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large at Fortune Magazine. Julius Genachowski brings a diverse background to his leadership of the FCC. He served several distinguished clerkships following law school, including for the honorable Abner J. Please join me in welcoming Julius Genachowski. JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Gavels.
Cleaning Up Your Readers’ Lives With Curation | Content Curation Software Image by bunchofpants via Flickr There’s nothing more satisfying in the office than sitting down to clean off your desk. Well, the sitting down to do it part isn’t always fun, but the end result is! Everyone has a different system of organization, but the sort-and-pile method runs through any good system. Picture your desk in disaster mode: bills,statements,magazines,catalogs,newsletters from charities you support,notifications of massive lottery winnings,other junk mail When you get around to organizing this, you prioritize things. The end result is a desk with a lot of surface showing again, with neatly stacked piles of mail and files you have made sense of. Image by Amanda Schutz via Flickr Now imagine sneaking into the homes of each of your readers and doing this for them. Curation accomplishes the same thing for your readers when it comes to information consumption. This is kind of an important function.
5 Myths About the 'Information Age' By Robert Darnton Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. I mention these misconceptions because I think they stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment. Last year the sale of e-books (digitized texts designed for hand-held readers) doubled, accounting for 10 percent of sales in the trade-book market. Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. In studies of culture among the common people, Richard Hoggart and Michel de Certeau have emphasized the positive aspect of reading intermittently and in small doses.
Silicon Valley Cashes Out Selling Private Shares Vince Thompson doesn't appear in any accounts of Facebook's early years. Few of the more than 2,000 employees at the company even know his name. The AOL (AOL) veteran's brief stint as Facebook's first official ad-sales chief lasted less than six months. Even so, when Thompson left the company in early 2006, he exercised his options to buy Facebook stock, as is the custom in Silicon Valley, and took a sizable chunk of shares with him. About 18 months later he moved to Los Angeles and started consulting for media clients such as TVGuide.com on how to tap new sources of revenue, and he began to think about how to create one for himself. The idea seemed highly impractical since Facebook wasn't—and still isn't—a public company. One banker introduced Thompson to a New York firm called Restricted Stock Partners, which in mid-2007 had a small office near Battery Park with two windows that looked onto a brick wall. That tension is on ample display in Silicon Valley these days.
Hand-Picked Content Is Marketing Gold | Content Curation Software Image by Getty Images via @daylife As people get used to the new Facebook “newspaper” angle (“we want to be your personal newspaper”), the masses are going to get a taste of what content marketers have been onto for quite awhile. News aggregators are fine tools for personal curation and research. But no aggregator or algorithm will ever trump hand-picked, people-powered curation. Every serious content site uses curation. When a human does this job instead of a computer program, it is obvious which results are better for the consumer. There is a big need for curation of all types as we all deal with the ever-increasing deluge of data on the web.
Treemapping Treemap of soft drink preference in a small group of people. Color and gradients are used to group items, while still identifying individual items. Treemap showing changes in waiting times for patients of English PCTs. TreeSize Treemap visualizing hard disk space usage. Main idea[edit] When the color and size dimensions are correlated in some way with the tree structure, one can often easily see patterns that would be difficult to spot in other ways, such as if a certain color is particularly relevant. The tiling algorithm[edit] To date, six primary rectangular treemap algorithms have been developed: In addition, several algorithms have been proposed that use non-rectangular regions: History[edit] Area-based visualizations have existed for decades. These early treemaps all used the simple "slice-and-dice" tiling algorithm. A third wave of treemap innovation came around 2004, after Marcos Weskamp created the Newsmap, a treemap that displayed news headlines. See also[edit] References[edit]
New Internet bubble gathering steam Therese Poletti's Tech Tales By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — If there was any doubt that another Internet bubble is forming, the first-quarter venture capital data released earlier this month should have dispelled it. Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association earlier this month showed that the number of deals funded in the quarter dropped. Venture capitalists funded 736 deals, down from 787 deals in the first quarter of 2010. But VCs have not exactly been restraining themselves as the valuations of the still private companies like Facebook and Groupon have soared in the secondary markets. While the number of deals may be down, the average deal size is up, showing that many young companies are getting more dollars per venture round. The NVCA said that the first quarter data showed the lowest number of deals since the third quarter of 2009. PWC also has another category called Internet-specific companies. US : U.S.: Nasdaq
Why Content Marketing Is King | Blog | Daily Dose When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today's business-to-business entrepreneur. Late this summer, HiveFire, a Cambridge, Mass.-based internet marketing software solutions company, surveyed nearly 400 marketing professionals about the state of the business-to-business, or B2B, market, and discovered that marketers are retreating from traditional marketing tactics such as search marketing and have made content marketing the most-used tactic in their brand-enhancing tool box. Fact is, according to HiveFire's B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report, twice as many B2B marketers now employ content marketing as they do print, TV and radio advertising, according to the survey. So what exactly is content marketing? How have you used content marketing to enhance your brand? Photo: Thomas Pajot/Shutterstock
Llegamos a la infoesfera... y ahora, ¿qué hacemos? - BBC Mundo Storify Collects Strands of News on the Social Web Jim Wilson/The New York Times Burt Herman, left, and Xavier Damman, the founders of Storify, which opens Monday. A Web start-up named Storify, which opens to the public Monday, aims to help journalists and others collect and filter all this information. Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, , and other sites. Storify, based in San Francisco, is one of several Web start-ups — including Storyful, Tumblr and Color — that are developing ways to help journalists and others sift through the explosion of online content and publish the most relevant information. Even though journalists may not be the first on the scene, they select the most reliable sources, digest loads of information and provide context for events, said Burt Herman, a founder of Storify and a longtime Associated Press reporter. “We have so many real-time streams now, we’re all drowning,” Mr. Mr.
What Makes A Great Curator Great? How To Distinguish High-Value Curation From Generic Republishing Today content curation is "sold", promoted and marketed as the latest and trendiest approach to content production, SEO visibility, reputation and traffic building. But is it really so? Is it really true that by aggregating many content sources and picking and republishing those news and stories that you deem great is really going to benefit you and your readers in the long run? Is the road to easy and effortless publishing via curation tools a true value creation business strategy, or just a risky fad? How can one tell? Photo credit: theprint Let me clarify a few key points: 1. 2. 3. 4. For these reasons, I think that much of the apparent new curation work being done is bound to be soon disappointed by the results it will gain. Highly specific news and content channels, curated by passionate and competent editors will gradually become the new reference and models for curation work. Here's is my official checklist, to identify value-creation curation, from everything else. Why Curation?
Have trade magazines got a shelf life? | Media It helps to have a sense of perspective if you are a senior trade magazine publishing executive, on the front line of the media industry's struggle to fashion viable new business models as traditional print circulations and advertising revenue drain away. David Levin, United Business Media chief executive, draws a comparison between the situation the trade press finds itself in today and 1912, "when there were a lot of blacksmiths about and we were about to get the motor car". There have been two more high profile casualties in the past month as the sector navigates the tricky transition from print to digital, with controlled circulation titles Accountancy Age and Computer Weekly both abandoning the weekly news magazine format after more than 40 years and going online only. The UK business-to-business sector took a battering in the 2009 recession, like other advertiser-funded media, and is now in recovery mode. Building gateways Sign of defeat Consumer co-operation
Scott McNealy re-emerges in tech circles | Deep Tech Scott McNealy, who co-founded and led Sun Microsystems for many years before its sale to Oracle last year, is once again engaging in the technology world. Fittingly for the one-man sound bite factory, McNealy has taken to Twitter, dishing up snarky remarks and relishing the fact that not being CEO of a company means he doesn't have to be politically correct. And he's involved in business again, too, as chairman of stealth start-up WayIn. McNealy isn't dishing on WayIn, but some details are bubbling up. WayIn start-upMike Schmitz, who says he's senior director of consumer products and marketing at WayIn on his LinkedIn profile, has the most detailed description. "WayIn is a platform where consumers can play user-created games while watching television or live events," he said. Schmitz also ran a contest for a WayIn.com logo at 99designs.com. WayIn's director of software development is Liqun "Lea" Wang, according to her LinkedIn profile. He also brings up technology matters.