Have you ever seen something legitimately newsworthy and wished there was a reporter around to get the facts correct? Do you wish there was a way you could give feedback to companies easily? Do you love sharing great deals you find with your friends as soon as you encounter them? Now, there is a smartphone app that meets all of those needs! That app is Stringfly.
With the death of Steve Jobs and movies that focus on how Mark Zuckerberg and his friends created Facebook, many in the media are focused on looking out for the next tech sector wunderkind. With so many of the current crop of rising stars in the tech sector focused solely on their Internet startups or technological breakthroughs, it is easy to forget that historically, the real geniuses of the tech sector have been well-rounded individuals with a lot of interests. The fact that these creative geniuses who are interested in many things focus on the technology industry to leave their mark does not negate the fact that the inventors, CEOs and envelope-pushers of the tech sector all had more going for them than simply their career. That is why Martin Kleppmann is the Internet entrepreneur to watch! Read more »
With so many changes coming to the tech sector and the distribution of media, it is understandable that evaluating those changes has often been difficult to assess. While television has mechanisms built in, like the Neilsen Corporation’s statistical analysis, how can industry leaders determine if you are watching their program from your smartphone or tablet computer? When users stream videos from the Cloud is not as easy to chart the impact of your programming. At least, it was not easy to chart before Deb Roy set his mind to the issue!
Deb Roy saw the way social networking was changing the landscape of communication at the same time as technology was advancing to provide users with more instantaneous shared experiences. Deeply interested in the relationship between the distribution of media and news through technology, Deb Roy began an ambitious project to collect the statistics that would inform him – and others – as to the actual effect of the technological changes. That was when he and Michael Fleischman founded Bluefin Labs. Read more »
In the tech sector, there are many important companies whose influence is not felt as widely in the United States as it is in other parts of the world. One company that is still gaining footing in the United States is Archos. Archos has a significant market share in the consumer electronics market in Europe, especially France. Archos produces its own line of portable audio and video players, tablet computers and netbooks. The man who pioneers the various technologies for Archos is Yves Gregoire and he is an impressive engineer! Read more »
Anyone who has visited a historical site or virtually any tourist destination has seen graffiti. At many destinations, unsightly graffiti covers most available surface. Often, graffiti is just names and dates from former visitors, but it can be much more than that. Some people even write or carve poems or song lyrics into whatever space they find available. Usually there are several visible layers of the graffiti and more underneath. It can be very tempting to add your own mark to that wall, bench, or tree, but what if there was a better, legal, way to leave a piece of yourself behind? Read more »
Virtually everyone in business knows that discovery and invention are the keys to future success. Ironically, while most businesspeople know that invention is critical to the future of any company’s long-term health, very few businesses reinvest as radically as they need to in research and development. The profession of “inventor” is all but dead in the United States. Intellectual Ventures is one of the few companies that are investing heavily in revitalizing the American spirit of invention. No one is more committed to the importance of investing in shaping the future than Intellectual Ventures’ President and Chief Operating Officer, Adriane Brown. Read more »
2011 saw some real changes in the world on online video streaming. As the Cloud rose to prominence thanks to Apple and it advertising juggernaut, some of the traditional leaders in home media found themselves in drastically new positions. Netflix, for example, was quick to reinvent itself as a digital streaming company, but in the process of price hikes and trying to distance themselves from their DVD subscribers, the company had a much more erratic year than many in the industry thought they would. With Netflix faltering, Amazon.com was able to make significant strides in the digital video streaming market. Amazon.com now has a service called Amazon Prime that allows members to stream unlimited videos and receive free two-day shipping on all orders, for only $79 for a year. Amazon Prime’s video streaming service is now a very cool way to get your movies and television programs on your computer.
In case you have not yet encountered it, Apple Computers currently has a product available called the Apple TV. Despite what you might think from the product’s name, it is not a physical television. Instead, Apple TV is a media-streaming device that connects to a television. Apple released the first incarnation of Apple TV in 2007. The current iteration of Apple TV was released by Apple Computers in 2010 and is more popular and much smaller. Since then, the design and basic capabilities of the Apple TV device have stayed the same, with only incremental updates over the last two years.
The first big threat to traditional advertising models on television came from the development of cable tv. Advertisers liked it even less when premium cable channels like HBO, Cinemax and Showtime offered viewers both original programing and advertisement-free television viewing at a price customers appeared willing to pay. As advertisers struggle with how to monetize streaming television technology, HBO is working to adapt to the digital transmission framework. For that, they have Alison Moore.
Alison Moore is the Senior Vice President of Digital Platforms for HBO. In that role, Moore is responsible for all aspects of HBOs online and streaming presence. It is her job to oversee the creation of a viable online subscription service for HBO, especially marketing its original content on the Internet. Her responsibilities also include promoting and positioning the HBO digital services to compete with established streaming services like Netflix and Blockbuster Online.
GitHub has become the primary website for democratic open source coding. Open source coding, simply put, is the principle that many programmers work under in which they freely give away their programs and source code (basic programming language) to anyone who wants to use it. Open source software is quite common, though you may not know a program is open source if you are user, as opposed to a programmer. The Android operating system is a well-known open source program. Google allows programmers to access the root code and write new programs for Android, which makes it open source. By contrast, programmers who want to write applications for Windows must to access the source code and sign a contract for the right to use the proprietary code.