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Friday 30 March 2012

Google Partners With Publishers on a New Kind of Paywall

You might not be willing to fork over a monthly subscription fee to read some of your favorite news sites, but would you answer a survey question?

That’s what Google and a handful of well-known online publishers are aiming to find out. On Thursday, the tech giant unveiled “Google Consumer Surveys,” which allows publishers to glean a little more revenue from their content by serving up short surveys to readers. These surveys function like paywalls: When a reader lands on an article page, he or she will have to answer a question or three to view the full text of the article (see it in action here). For every response sent to Google, publishers get $0.05.

The program has launched with around 20 online publishers, including Pandora, AdWeek, the New York Daily News and the Texas Tribune.

And what happens to those survey responses? They’re collected by Google and sold to businesses seeking low-cost market research. Responses targeting the general U.S. population cost businesses $0.10 per response, with a minimum order of $100, according to Google’s pricing page. Questions that are more finely targeted, either by demographic, region or through screening questions, cost $0.50 per response. Lucky Brand Jeans and King Arthur Flour are already clients.


To finish reading an article, you may have to answer survey questions like this one.

The product, it turns out, isn’t that well built. PaidContent‘s Laura Hazard Owen already discovered that the surveys won’t appear for users who have the AdBlock browser extension enabled.

What do you think of Google Consumer Surveys? Do you think it’s a good alternative to paywalls for publishers and readers? Or would you automatically skip any articles that required you to answer questions?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RonBailey

Source: Mashable

3 Reasons Facebook Brand Pages Are Good for Businesses

Christian Taylor is founder and CEO of Payvment and developer of the number one Facebook e-commerce platform for brands, agencies and merchants, and the world’s only Facebook Shopping Mall.

Not everyone is cheering over the recent switch to Facebook Timeline for businesses. But the reality is, the new layout will present many great opportunities, particularly if companies properly use it to merchandise their products. So be afraid, if you must, but then check out the three reasons why Facebook’s new brand pages will benefit sellers and social commerce as a whole.

1. It Encourages Fresh Content and Active Conversation


With the new Timeline, business pages now look and behave like personal profile pages. This means a Facebook storefront can no longer be the landing page for new visitors using the old “default tab” setting. While this was useful to ensure more visibility for the storefront, it was also a crutch for not actively creating fresh content, which is the most effective way to drive new traffic to the store.

With the new Timeline layout, building exposure for the storefront and its products will rely on frequently posting promotions and deals. While a post can be “pinned” at the top of the Timeline for up to seven days, smart sellers will create a daily posting plan to develop continuous awareness with their fans. Better yet, they will look for ways to actively encourage comments on their posts by asking questions, creating polls, or publishing other content designed to provoke responses and make their stream an active discussion forum.

2. It Provides a Richer Canvas for Seller Expression


The new Facebook pages give sellers more real estate to showcase their brand and products, starting with the cover photo. While there are some content limitations for the cover photo, it is a really great way to attract new visitors and engage current fans with a core brand message. The ideal dimension for a cover photo is 850 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall, and it’s a good idea to create several for regular rotation.

Storefront applications will also be a more visible part of the page. The old tabs on the left of the page have been replaced by a large 111 pixel by 74 pixel icon that can be placed just under the cover photo. This icon is automatically filled by the storefront application, but the seller has the option to create a custom icon.

The new application canvas for the storefront will also play a larger part. All of the profile information that used to be on the left of the page will move to the top, allowing sellers to deliver an 810 pixel wide experience for shoppers instead of the previous 520 pixels wide. This means more products above the fold, or larger product photos, or both.

3. It Offers Deeper Engagement Insights and Tools


The older version of Facebook Insights did not deliver real-time data, so it could take up to two days to get analytics on a post. With the new Insights, sellers can now track how a post is doing within five to ten minutes after publishing, allowing them to immediately tweak their posts depending on how they are performing. Sellers can then immediately amplify the reach of well-performing posts by turning them into a premium ad or a sponsored story. Some other new or enhanced metrics include:
  • People Talking About Engagement: This is the total number of people that have engaged in any way with your page, including users liking your page, commenting on or sharing a post from your page, or answering a question you’ve asked on your page. Sellers can use this to measure engagement with their brand across all Facebook activities and track the success of their programs beyond “likes” and clicks.
  • Friends of Fans: This is the total number of friends all your fans have. Sellers can use this to track the growing (or declining) influence of their fan base. As the average goes up, so does the potential reach for a seller’s campaign or promotion.
  • Reach: This is the total number of people who have seen content associated with your page. Understanding how far and wide messages are traveling will enable sellers to optimize their content to generate maximum reach.
  • Virality: This is the percentage of people who saw a story from your Page and “talked about it.” Again, knowing what’s being shared can help sellers assess what is actually of interest to their fans and customers.

Source: Mashable

5 Cities Benefiting From Mobile Apps

We live in a mobile world. With new research indicating that smartphone users outnumber basic phone users and 100 million Americans are relying on iPhone, Android or Blackberry to power their day, it’s no surprise that people are yearning to get more done on their phones.

And now, the local government is beginning to heed the call of smarter mobile tools.

City government agencies around the world continue to explore mobile applications to provide services more effectively and to reach citizens in new ways. And it’s not just for civil services — cities are embracing apps to highlight their own civic culture and even promote community action.

Here are 10 cities that offer mobile apps for citizens, tourists or both. Does your city have an app? What do you like about it? Let us know in the comments.

1. Calgary, Canada




The City of Calgary embarked on a 5-app pilot project to improve civic life, and The City of Calgary Pets app was one of the top recommendations. Using the app, citizens can view adoptable dogs and cats, watch videos, and find key information about licensing and responsible pet ownership. For current pet owners, the app can help you find emergency vet clinics throughout the city.

To date, the City of Calgary Pets app has garnered nearly 10,000 downloads. The City of Calgary Animal and Bylaw Services group attributes an increase in people visiting and contacting city shelters to inquire about dogs and cats available for adoption to use of the app.

According to Jacob George, manager of corporate marketing and communications of the City of Calgary, the Pets app and other apps in their program ”provide yet another channel for the city to communicate in a way that is accessible and convenient for citizens.”

The app is available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices and was developed by Purple Forge, a private sector company that has developed apps for municipalities, federal government agencies, politicians and advocacy organizations.

Another application developed by and for Calgary is the Calgary Road Conditions app. Since its launch three months ago, the app has had more than 15,000 downloads. It was the first City of Calgary mobile app to reach the top of its category, making Calgary the first Canadian municipality to have a top-ranking app on iTunes.

2. Jefferson Parish, LA




Jefferson Parish, part of the Greater New Orleans area, is Louisiana’s second-most populous parish. The office is responsible for maintaining records for the district court, parish courts, juvenile court, land records, marriage licenses and elections among the community’s 450,000 residents. 

Clerk of Court Jon Gegenheimer asked his top administrative staff to look at his office from the citizen’s perspective and come up with several apps that would be useful to the office’s patrons. Two immediate needs surfaced: a way for the public to have an additional, convenient and easy way to access election results, and a way for the legal community and other court patrons to easily obtain the requisite materials needed to run the court smoothly. The office worked with software development company Touch Studios to develop the apps — now available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry.

The Attorney’s Toolbox mobile app provides the local legal community with instant access to courts’ docket calendars, fee schedules, forms and office contact phone numbers from their mobile device. Using the Election Results mobile app, citizens no longer need to rely on the media or sit at a computer to access election results — election results are available in real-time, and the data is searchable by election date, candidate, office or proposition. The Jury Management Mobile App — not yet released — will let citizens reschedule their jury service date or apply for exemption from over 70 options.

Gegenheimer believes that as more people use these mobile apps, the number of phone calls to the clerk of court’s office will be reduced. Fewer calls, in turn, lets court personnel be more productive and focus on other important work.

3. Philadelphia, PA



During an Open Access Philly meeting last year, open source software developer, “civic hacker” and Code for America fellow John Mertens volunteered to explore the data feeds in the new Open Data Philly data catalog and build an app to encourage participation in a planned hackathon.

Mertens found a feed from Mural Farm, an interactive database of thousands of community murals produced by the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. He joined forces with another Code for America fellow, Aaron Ogle, to build a mobile website that helps citizens locate and learn more about murals around them. Mertens says that after the Philly Art Mapper was launched and supported by the Office of the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia, other CFA fellows walked into other public art departments in Boston, San Francisco, Norfolk, and Seattle and began working with more public art data.

The Art Mapper app allows users to find public art through a mobile, map-based interface. The general public can also tweet out photos with geolocation tags of public and street art to @publicartapp, so that the results will appear on ArtMapper.org.

Mertens feels the biggest accomplishment of Art Mapper the city governments’ understanding that it is okay to open up data to developers. 

“If I show up at city hall and start saying, ‘Hey there, can you give me your data?’ people usually get defensive and assume it is for some sort of ‘gotcha’ project or story,” says Mertens. “But when you show them that local developers can build in a weekend what it would take a city months or years, they start to loosen up. Using public art data is a nice gateway drug — its innocuous, it doesn’t involve crime or children.”

The Art Mapper app API is available on the Civic Commons wiki from Code for America.

4. Elk Grove, CA




Last summer, the City of Elk Grove debuted its first mobile app – Ask Elk Grove“>Ask Elk Grove. The app was the result of Elk Grove City Councilman Gary Davis’s idea to provide a tool to enable residents to more easily interact with the city.

Using the app, residents can submit and track non-emergency service requests, such as graffiti, illegal dumping and nuisances. They can snap photos of the issue and send them directly to the City of Elk Grove staff — and view and track other requests in their neighborhood.

“Our goal is to reach every resident where they are,” says Davis. “These days, just about everyone has a smartphone with app capability. It is more cost effective [for us to provide an app].”

Previously, the dispatch team needed to visit a service location at least twice to assess a situation and then fix it, assuming the resident had taken the time to call, explains Davis. Extra steps can be saved with access to photos and descriptions sent through the app.

Other app features include a listing of public meetings and community events via the Elk Grove online calendar and access to City of Elk Grove news and information.

According to Davis, the app has assisted in faster clean-up of graffiti and, more importantly, in recognizing patterns and identifying perpetrators.

There’s a similar Mobile 311 app developed by the City of Riverside and Xerox, which handles over 400,000 calls per year. Riverside’s CIO Steve Reneker says about 20% of all requests are now submitted using mobile devices, eliminating about 80,000 calls into the city’s call center.

5. Sparks, Nevada




In January, Sparks, Nevada, became the first city in the state to launch an official city mobile app. The app lets users receive visitor event information and to search for restaurants, hotels, shopping, nightlife and parks, among other things. But the app isn’t just for visitors: Residents can use it to access city news, request city services or connect with a city official. There’s also an option to view the latest city softball standings and an “augmented reality” feature that allows users to see detailed information on local businesses and points of attraction using their smartphone camera and GPS.

The app, Sparks, NV, is available for iOS and Android, with an iPad version slated to come out in April. The idea for the app first came from the city’s marketing agency, RKPR Inc., as a direct result of the branding efforts the city had undertaken.

“Fundamentally, the city’s brand is all about economic development, and enticing people to spend dollars in the city, which will contribute to a faster recovery in a state and region that has suffered the most during the current economic recession,” says Adam Mayberry, community relations manager of the City of Sparks.

Tony Lockard, principal of the app’s developer, InfoTechMobile, adds, “A native mobile app was the next logical step for us to ensure we promote the city to visitors and residents alike.”

Takeaways



Mayberry advises government agencies to focus on their audience and the information they expect from mobile technology. Once the app is built, you ought to have “a good team in place that can serve as advocates for the app.” He explains that the agencies that Sparks worked with “really helped to tell the story of why we needed [the app] and the advantages to the city over the long-term.”

According to Jacob George of the City of Calgary, “Governments need to understand that the mobile environment is constantly changing, and that there is still no clear platform ‘winner.’ Developing apps that run solely on one particular platform can end up alienating large segments of the population and can result in heavy criticism.” He also encourages updating mobile apps following their release because “citizens will notice.”

Christine Brainerd, public information officer for the City of Elk Grove, emphasizes keeping the apps simple and be realistic. “Think about how much information a person is really going to want to enter from their mobile device. Anything that can use a drop down, or pre-filled category will make routing it to the appropriate person much simpler and will have a better result from the person trying to enter the information.”

Louisiana Parish Clerk of Court Jon Gegenheimer sums up developing a mobile app in this way: “Think like a citizen. Get citizen input. Listen to the citizens.”

Series supported by HubSpot

The Digital Marketing Series is supported by HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA, that makes a full platform of marketing software, including marketing automation tools.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mbortolino

Source: Mashable

This Website Is Made of Real Bacon [VIDEO]

Ruby on Rails. PHP. HTML. Bacon? Yup, pork belly just became an honorary member of the list of things you can use to make a website.

Bleacher Report — among the web’s most popular sports sites with more than 25 million monthly unique visitors — went all-bacon beginning Friday morning. After navigating to BleacherReport.com, users can click a yellow button on the homepage to switch to a bacon-draped version of the site, in which its links and images remain but the rest of the layout is made of the greasy fried meat.

The funniest part? It’s not just some digital wizardry, but actually a photograph of a physical replica of the site made with real bacon. The stunt is a promotion for Kraft Homestyle’s latest flavor, sharp cheddar and bacon. The premise is that everything, in fact, goes better with bacon. Even websites.

SEE ALSO: Clorox Smells a Winner with Bacon-Scented Cat Litter [VIDEOS]

The bacon model and parallel Bleacher Report site were built by a team at the digital ad agency CP+B.
“We know people hate banners about as much as they love bacon, so it made sense to use one to offset the other,” CP+B creative director Tom Markham says. “And we’re lucky enough to work with a client who knows that sometimes you’ve got to do unexpected things — like build a website entirely out of meat.”

Bacon-loving web surfers will be able to “baconize” Bleacher Report all day Friday and Saturday, and again on April 7. Check out the video below for a behind-the-scenes look at how the bacon-based site was created.

Is this advertising idea funny? Creative? Tacky? Gross? Stupid? Let us know in the comments.



Source: Mashable

Today’s Top Stories: Google Tablet Store Rumors, Changes at RIM

Social Media NewsWelcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.

RIM Refocuses on Enterprise, Changes Leadership
After RIM’s less-than-stellar results in the last quarter, co-CEO Jim Balsille, COO of Global Operations Jim Rowan and CTO David Yach have all been replaced. New CEO Thorsten Heins promises to turn the company around by focusing on enterprise customers. RIM “cannot succeed by trying to be everybody’s darling,” said Heins.

Google Might Sell Android Tablets Through Its Own Online Store
Google will start selling co-branded Android tablets directly to consumers through its own online store according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Pricing and other details aren’t clear yet, but sources say the store will likely be launched sometime in 2012.

Chrome 18 Brings Hardware Accelerated Canvas Rendering
Google has released a new stable version of its web browser, Chrome 18. This version enables hardware-accelerated rendering for the HTML5 Canvas element by default — a change which should improve gaming performance in the browser. The new version also brings various performance improvements and security fixes.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

Source: Mashable

Google to Sell Tablets Through Online Store [REPORT]

Google plans to sell co-branded Android tablets directly to consumers through its own online store, the Wall Street Journal reports.

This move comes in an effort to kickstart Android tablet sales, which are still nowhere near the iPad sales levels.

The tablets will be manufactured by Asus and Samsung, WSJ claims, but a Google branded tablet is a possibility, too.

There’s no word on the price, but Google might subsidize the price of the tablet(s), making them more attractive to consumers and closer to the $199 price of Android-based Amazon Kindle Fire and B&N’s Nook Tablet.
Google already tried this approach with smartphones, having sold its Google Nexus phone through its own online store, but it gave up on it after disappointing sales.

This fact alone makes it unlikely that Google would try the same approach again, but recent rumors that Google is working on a cheap tablet of its own give some credibility to the story.

If WSJ’s sources are correct, Google will launch the store sometime this year.

[via WSJ]

Source: Mashable

Creepy iPhone Case Forces You to Interact with Siri

Your iPhone 4S has a beautiful touchscreen retina display. But who cares about that when Siri can do everything for you by voice command?

This reverse iPhone case covers the smartphone’s screen, revealing only the home button. That way, Siri leaves you no choice but to interact with her. Muahahahahaha!

Designed and sold by 3D printing company Shapeways, the Siri case retails for $90.


Source: Mashable

Online Tool Reveals How Politicians Will Affect Your Wallet


Five different candidates for president means five very different economic plans. But whose would really benefit you?

You can find out with Politify, a new online tool that encourages users to “rethink democracy.”

Politify is simple: Enter your income, martial status, age, ZIP code, number of children and students in your household (“don’t worry, we won’t share this” says the site). Politify crunches the numbers and shows you the exact effect each presidential candidate’s economic blueprint would have on your personal finances.


No more guessing about esoteric tax codes or economic plans; Politify’s goal is to give every citizen the chance to make an informed decision come Election Day. The site also allows people to register their support or disapproval of a candidate, or donate to a campaign directly on-site.

The site was designed by Nikita Bier, a student at the University of California, Berkeley. So far, he’s been funding the platform mostly through grants.

Bier, who studies Political Economy, says his frustration with the American political system drove him to design the site.

“The political parties in the rest of the Western world are really connected to the economic impact of what they’re trying to do,” says Bier. “In the U.S., they’re a lot more ideological. They view things the way they should be as opposed to what the practical impacts of their policies will be.

“This bothered me, and I thought I could disrupt it in an entrepreneurial way.”

It took Bier about a month to write the algorithms that power the site. He says the most difficult part of designing Politify was finding a way to display the information in an “intuitive and accessible way.”

Bier’s data sets have come from the U.S. government and economics professors. He has brought on “as many smart people” as he could, including Pandora founder Will Glaser, who serves as an advisor, and Emanuel Saez, an economics professor at Berkeley.

Bier won several contests with Politify, and the platform is getting noticed. He’s gotten nods over Twitter from the chief technical officer of Obama for America, and Politify has been visited by the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the State Department and several congresspeople.

Politify has the potential to become a powerful platform — Bier himself says that it’s a goal of his to change the way politics are done in the U.S.

“I realized we had stumbled on something powerful because we were forecasting policy outcomes and we had the power to change the outcome of elections,” says Bier. “Right now, the goal is to make these numbers as exposed as possible — provide deeper analysis and go into other areas of public policy.”

Everything could go wrong for Politify if its algorithms were found to be flawed. But Bier is conscious of transparency, which right now he admits “leaves something to be desired.”

He’s planning to open a Wiki for other academics to try to pick apart and improve his system for the benefit of the site, in true open-source style.

Eventually, Bier wants to turn Politify into a “full economic simulator,” which would allow any interest group, politician or other individual to submit specific parameters for a policy and see the exact results of what they want to do. Bier and his team will work on the site full-time beginning this summer.

Have you used Politify to check out the effect of each candidate’s plans on your own bank account? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, pagadesign

Source: Mashable

‘Wonders of the Universe’ Lets You Explore Space On Your iPad

HarperCollins released a new iPad app Thursday that will set you off on a 3D exploration through space using high-resolution visuals specifically optimized for the new iPad’s Retina display.

Called Wonders of the Universe, the iPad application incorporates 210 full-color articles, hundreds of photos and two and a half hours of video from Brian Cox’s award-winning series of the same name into a single space discovery app.

Matt Walton, Digital Product Consultant for Harper Collins told Mashable, “Wonders is the first iPad application to make use of two innovative technologies developed by the OTHER media: a 3D rendering engine used to create a truly amazing interface and a revolutionary publishing platform that provides a new reading experience for tablet and mobile: Glide Publisher.” Walton added, “The 3D engine is capable of handling high-resolution textures and complex animations. Created exclusively for iOS5, it takes full advantage of iPad’s graphic engine and the superior display and processing power of the new iPad.”
With Glide, navigating through the app and reading the articles is different from what you might be accustomed to –- in a good way.

You scroll through each article by sliding your finger from the bottom on the screen to the top. Images and video are embedded within the text, and when you get to one or the other in your reading, the app automatically makes them full screen. Photos are occasionally slideshows that can be swiped through, and when you reach a video it immediately starts to play. Swiping up or down on the screen will then close the photo or video and allow you to continue reading.

“Instead of following the page metaphor, Glide creates a simple, scrollable column of text that introduces rich media elements — video, image galleries and interactive infographics — at appropriate moments in the narrative,” says Walton. “Whereas many applications entice you away from the story causing distraction, Glide weaves multimedia into the narrative leading to a deeper engagement.”


The app is divided up into sections that offer content in seven different realms: Subatomic, Atomic, Solar System, Stars, Milky Way, Galaxies, and Universe. Each section contains its own unique visuals in the form of 3D graphics on the screen, as well as individual chapters on different topics pertaining to the realm. The goal behind the app is one of discovery.

“We wanted the user experience to be one of unconstrained discovery, so we gave them the option of jetting off on their own through the 3D Universe, to a Black Hole for example, where they could call up related content on arrival. But, if they preferred, they could [take] Brian Cox’s guided tours of the Solar System and the Universe for a more curated experience,” says Alex Gatrell, Digital Publisher for Collins.

The $6.99 app is available now from the App Store. While definitely on the pricey side for an app, the graphics and content make the experience well worth it for any space enthusiast.

Have you checked out Wonders of the Universe? Let us know what you think of the app in the comments.

Source: Mashable

Apple Employees Like Tim Cook a Little Better than Steve Jobs

The late Steve Jobs may be as venerated within the company he founded as he is outside it. But that doesn’t mean his successor is suffering by comparison.

In fact, according to anonymous employee posts on the employer reviews website Glassdoor, Cook has the highest approval rating of any CEO in tech — indeed, any CEO in the U.S. — a whopping 97%.

That’s a small but significant step above Jobs, who garnered 95% approval during his final year in the CEO role. (Cook’s year includes the months he was officially filling in for Jobs while the founder was on medical leave.)

But for that extra 2%, Cook would not be the sole winner of Glassdoor’s list of tech CEOs. He’d be level-pegging with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, who has had a stunning year as far as his employees are concerned, rising from 87% approval to 95%.

SEE ALSO: Top Tech Companies to Work for in 2012: Facebook Beats Google, Apple


Meanwhile, Google CEO Larry Page isn’t faring so well — he’s seen a 2% decline in employee satisfaction compared to his predecessor, Eric Schmidt. Given that Page has been on a tear killing projects in order to focus on a few core products, it’s perhaps surprising that his number is still as high as 94%.

As for Cook, there are any number of reasons why his popularity is so high. Apple shares are soaring past $600, a 50% premium since Jobs’ departure. He’s set up a matching program for charitable donations, something Jobs famously refused to do. And he’s dealt expertly with threats to the Apple image — most recently making an impromptu visit to the Foxconn factories in China.

“The products speak for themselves and the company,” writes one anonymous Apple engineer on Glassdoor. “We have the best management team anywhere,” says another Cupertino reviewer.

Perhaps the real question should be: What’s the deal with the 3% of Apple employees who don’t like Tim Cook?




Source: Mashable