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Thursday, 7 March 2013
Incredimail launches for iPad with a photo inbox and built-in browser
Un elegante truco para rellenar de datos «inventados» las hojas de cálculo de Google Drive
¡Gran truco! Escribes un par de valores sobre el mismo tema. Seleccionas la segunda celda. Arrastras desde la esquina inferior derecha manteniendo pulsado la tecla Control (Opción en Mac OS X) y el resto de datos los rellena Google «inteligentemente» con datos inventados similares.
Es una idea estupenda para hacer pruebas y prototipos rápidos. Lo más divertido es que funciona con todo tipo de términos: Burns y Flanders; cocaina y heroína; Europa y África… Los datos provienen de Google Sets, al parecer un proyecto abandonado de los laboratorios Google.
(Vía Buzzfeed.)
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/truco-hojas-calculo-google.html
Skype scores an iOS update with improved calling UI and some bug fixes
'Iron Man 3' Inventor Fair Looks for a Real-Life Tony Stark
Pandora’s Long-Time CEO Joe Kennedy Abruptly Steps Down, Just As It Starts Making Money Mobile
Hot on the heels of a relatively strong quarter for the streaming music service, Pandora has announced that its long-time CEO and President, Joe Kennedy, will be stepping down. In a statement this afternoon, Pandora said that he will “continue in his current role until his successor is named.”
Kennedy, who has been at the helm of the streaming music service since July 2004 and helped take the company public, helped Pandora build a platform that now has over 67 million monthly active listeners. In its earnings report today, the company also said that it now stakes a claim to 8 percent of total U.S. radio listening market share.
“As I near the start of my tenth year at the helm of Pandora, I am incredibly proud of the team and what we have accomplished in redefining radio,” Kennedy said in a statement today. “As part of our Board discussions of the road that lies ahead, I reached the conclusion and advised the Board that the time is right to begin a process to identify my successor.”
Kennedy’s exit will come as a surprise to many, and may put a damper on the 19 percent jump the company’s shares took in after-hours trading today.
Updating
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/VgOKpnWYEXU/
Dita von Tesse y su impresionante nuevo vestido impreso en 3-D
La diva del burlesque Dita von Tesse ha lucido estos días un vestido creado con una impresora 3-D , obra de Francis Bitonti y Michael Schmidt.
Tal y como explican en Wired . El material es un plástico especial tallado cuidadosamente con un láser en una impresora EOS P350. El resultado son 2.633 anillos entrelazados en 17 piezas que luego se unen cuidadosamente:
Y tal y como puede apreciarse en la segunda foto, si uno se fija mucho, mucho, mucho, mirando muy de cerca, los equipos de sonido utilizados durante la presentación eran de la marca JVC.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/mundoreal/dita-von-tesse-vestido-3d.html
Educar en una sociedad digital no significa introducir un iPad en el aula
Si hay dos temas de los que escribo de forma recurrente son el del verdadero origen de Internet, que no fue concebida como una red de ordenadores capaz de sobrevivir a un ataque nuclear, y de los famosos nativos digitales, que no existen.
Al menos no en la forma en la que se habla de ellos, la de aquellos chavales nacidos a partir de los 90 que se supone que porque siempre han tenido acceso a ordenadores y similares ya saben usarlos casi de forma innata.
Es cierto que no tienen ningún miedo a ponerse a usarlos, pero no lo es menos que los sacas de Messenger (antes), de Tuenti y de las descargas, y aún en eso tienen graves carencias, se pierden.
Por eso me ha gustado mucho esta entrevista con Anna Blázquez Abella, la responsable del departamento de Acción Digital de la Fundación Pere Tarrés, de la que me quedo en especial con estos dos párrafos (las negritas son mías):
Todavía queda mucho para que el modelo educativo esté al servicio de las necesidades de los ciudadanos del siglo XXI. Educar en una sociedad digital, no significa introducir un iPad, una pizarra digital o un portátil en el aula y quedarnos con el modelo antiguo de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Todo ello comporta un cambio conceptual y metodológico que replantee la manera de enseñar y de aprender, los roles del docente y del alumnado…, en definitiva, un nuevo modelo que eduque en las competencias básicas digitales requeridas para ser un buen ciudadano.
Te sorprendería saber que existen jóvenes universitarios que no saben dar formato a un texto ni crear una tabla de contenidos. Están conectados todo el día al Whatsapp, al Facebook… O tienen el último modelo de iPad, pero todavía no han aprendido a hacer una búsqueda eficaz en Internet o no protegen sus datos personales. Entonces, podemos volvernos a preguntar, ¿el sistema educativo actual capacita a los y las estudiantes para llegar a ser autónomos y tener capacidad crítica para utilizar de manera responsable las TIC? Personalmente creo que no.
En efecto, hay muchas cosas que replantearse, so pena de ir a terminar con un montón de patosos digitales.
- Educación y nuevas tecnologías y esos «nativos digitales» que no existen, una más que recomendable charla de Juan «Blogoff» sobre este tema.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/opinion/educar-en-una-sociedad-digital-no-significa-introducir-un-ipad-en-el-aula.html
Back to BlackBerry: closing time
Boy Scouts of America go thoroughly modern, make designing videogames a badge-worthy affair
Google and MPEG LA settle up, free VP8 video codec for the world wide web
Bipartisan bill to re-legalize cellphone unlocking introduced in Senate
Motorola Droid RAZR and RAZR Maxx get updated to Android 4.1
The Engadget Podcast is live at 4:00PM!
BlackBerry patent application shows the dual-screen phone that thankfully never was
Will Anyone Create a Killer App for Google Glass?
Reports: Apple's internet radio service delayed by slow-going music licensing negotiations
Google's Field Trip location-discovery app comes to iOS
PopTip Brings Its Instant Twitter Polling And Revamped Dashboard To Brands On Facebook
After launching out of TechStars NY back in June, PopTip has been building out a Facebook version of its instant polling product.
PopTip originally launched for Twitter, letting brands ask questions in natural language and then tracking all the responses (misspellings and all) to give back to the brand.
PopTip promised a Facebook counterpart to the product down the line, and has today delivered upon that promise.
PopTip has its own Dashboard that lets brands ask questions that are posted directly to Twitter, and now Facebook. For example, Nike would tweet (or post) a picture of a new pair of shoes, asking their followers which color would be best, blue, green, black, or red? PopTip would then track every answer to that question, even if the user misspells blue or doesn’t use the proper hashtag.
That product is now extending into the world of Facebook, which already has it’s own Polls product. However, founder Kelsey Falter tells TechCrunch that PopTip is much better for brands, in that they can post media along with their question. On Facebook, PopTip tracks and indexes every comment made on a brand’s Facebook post.
In fact, once a brand signs on to PopTip’s platform, the service indexes every word that crosses their social channels. PopTip will only deliver results on the questions brand’s specify as PopTippable, so as to not congest their dashboards, but brands can always request to see information on other posts even if they didn’t go through the PopTip dashboard originally.
The PopTip dashboard has been entirely revamped, yet maintains its two-facedness. There is a front-end dashboard that can be seen by all followers to track the results of a poll they’ve participated in, while there’s a back-end dashboard catered to the brands, who can watch the answers come in in real time.
PopTip charges $1,000/per month per handle, and that includes a Facebook connection through a Twitter handle. In other words, PopTip will hook brands up with Twitter and Facebook tracking (not exclusively Facebook tracking) for $1000/per month.
However, brands seem to be down with the price tag, considering the 15 brands already signed on to the platform are seeing a 10 percent response rate to PopTip questions, as opposed to the usual 1 percent of followers who respond to brand social media.
PopTip is excited to tackle the big wide world of Facebook, and even more excited to see the way brands integrate PopTip into their social media workflow.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/TvVI7KAJuW0/
Marvel Unlimited for iOS appears, brings comics subscriptions to iPhones and iPads for $60 a year
3D-Printed Skull Implant Ready for Operation
Locu Partners With Automattic To Bring Its Menus To WordPress.com’s Restaurant Sites
Automattic’s WordPress.com recently added a restaurant vertical to make it easier for restaurant owners to manage their sites and avoid the pitfalls of Flash-based homepages that auto-play annoying music and don’t work on mobile. Today, those sites get even better, thanks to a new integration between Locu and Automattic that makes it easy for restaurateurs to bring their Locu menus to their WordPress.com sites. WordPress.com users can simply embed a Locu shortcode on WordPress.com and every edit they make on Locu will immediately appear on their sites.
Locu, which raised a $4 million Series A round last year and recently branched out a bit beyond restaurants with the launch of its merchant dashboard, allows restaurant owners to manage their menus in one place. Once the menu is finished, users can print them (Locu offers a number of templates and design tools), share them on social networks and push them out to Locu’s partner sites like CitySearch and OpenTable.
The new WordPress embeds also come with a number of menu templates and, Locu stresses, should also provide some SEO enhancements on the site because it automatically embeds the “menu and price list metadata into the body of the website, increasing the likelihood of items being found online by potential customers.”
“We are very excited about the integration with Locu,” Raanan Bar-Cohen Automattic’s SVP of commercial services said in a statement today. “With Locu’s easy-to-use WordPress.com shortcode, restaurants can more easily deliver an engaging menu experience directly on their WordPress.com sites to further connect with their consumers.”
Locu offers a free tier for restaurants that also includes this new WordPress.com integration and paid accounts that offer more advanced features and premium templates cost $25/month. The service currently has about 15,000 users.
For WordPress.com, this integration is yet another step toward positioning itself as more than just a site for hosting blogs. Besides restaurants sites, WordPress.com also launched verticals for schools and portfolios. As Automattic’s CEO told our own Colleen Taylor last year, WordPress may have started out as a service for blogging, but “then it became just a content management system so people started building all kinds of websites. And now, those websites get more personalized into small business areas like restaurants.”
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/XJa01inKXns/
Facebook freshens up News Feed, brings bigger images, feed filtering and a uniform cross-platform UX
Ouya store ready for launch, will highlight devs with short documentaries
Twitter, LinkedIn apps updated for BlackBerry 10, now function like the real deal
The Boundless Open Textbook Initiative Has Evolved But Its Future Is Marred By Lawsuits
Our education system is broken, from lower-level public schools all the way up to higher learning. EdTech startups are coming at the numerous problems from every angle. Boundless, a startup out of Boston, is aiming to offer an open alternative to the college textbook.
But major publishers like Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, and Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group aren’t so thrilled with the thousands of beta testers across 2,000 universities in the U.S. enjoying Boundless’ free and open alternatives. Students using the beta product rated the Boundless’ platform 50 percent higher than physical textbooks, and the average grade for users was a B+, with 80 percent saying they received grades they wanted or higher.
The top three publishers sued Boundless in March of 2012, but just as the company said it would, Boundless has evolved and moved out of beta with various new publicly live products. The company raised an $8 million Series A round, led by Venrock in April 2012.
Boundless has now filed an Amended Answer and Counterclaims with the court, asserting that Boundless no longer offers the products being charged with three counts of copyright infringement, one for unfair competition, and one for false advertising.
Boundless is now asking that the plaintiffs take a look at the new products and determine whether or not they also allegedly infringe. It’s unclear if this can or will affect the current court case, which is against the now-extinct beta product. In either case, the publishers seem adamant to ignore the evolution of Boundless’ products and let the ruling for the beta product determine the future of the startup.
Boundless founder and CEO Ariel Diaz tells TechCrunch that neither the beta nor the current products are infringing any copyright, since the content is sourced from publicly available information, or Open Educational Resources (OER).
In an email to the plaintiffs, Boundless’ counsel asks for more clarity about the plaintiffs’ intentions for Boundless’ current live products.
Given that there is some overlap in the content of [the beta product] and [the current products], our client is concerned that Plaintiffs will claim that Boundless’ aforementioned works infringe Plaintiffs’ textbooks only after this case ends. Our client would prefer not to conduct its business under such a cloud of uncertainty.
In other words, Boundless simply wants to know if it will be slapped with yet another lawsuit for its current products after the lawsuit on its currently unavailable beta product ends.
Here’s how the publishers’ counsel responded:
With all due respect, Plaintiffs are under no obligation to monitor and analyze those changes, factually and legally, on an ongoing basis. Plaintiffs are also not under any obligation to respond to your client’s request that they research and evaluate whether they have new claims that could potentially be added to their case at this time. It is not realistic to litigate against a moving object even if we wanted to, which we do not.
He goes on to say…
We have little doubt that the Court’s resolution of Plaintiffs’ claims will inform your client’s current and future business practices.
As it stands, 80 percent of the market is controlled by four top publishers, who all generally provide the same content in the same order. Much of that content is also readily available as OER, which Boundless takes advantage of to offer accessible course materials to students. Prices have been jacked up three times that of inflation, according to Boundless.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/rSKMJbr2chQ/
Sony Xperia Tablet Z with LTE to hit NTT DoCoMo on March 22nd
Free App Magically Turns Your iPhone Pics Into Videos
BeauCoo, The Social Style And Shopping Network For Women, Comes To Android
BeauCoo, the Calgary, Canada-based startup that wants to make it easier for women to discover new styles, brands and stores and shop for clothes online by matching them with other women who have a similar body type, just launched its Android app. The service started out as an iPhone app and recently expanded to the web.
The basic idea behind BeauCoo is that “women are naturally drawn to one another in their search for fashion advice and styles, despite the fact that very few women are truly alike in shape or size.” If finding the right fit is hard in a regular store, it’s obviously even harder online, so if BeauCoo can help shoppers connect with others who share their body type, brands could potentially tap into this and use it to drive sales and reduce returns.
The service uses Facebook logins to ensure that only women can sign up in order to ensure that they can feel comfortable about sharing photos of the clothes they try on and talking about their body types.
As BeauCoo co-founders Christian and Victoria MacLean told me earlier this week, the site is currently growing at an average of about 200% a month since launch. though they weren’t quite ready to announce any concrete user numbers yet. On the web, the average user now spends about five minutes per session on the site (mobile sessions tend to be shorter).
The team of co-founders, which also includes Rick Cotter and Cory Smith, puts a strong emphasis on what they call ‘body positivity.’ “
“Women need to actively see other women their size looking beautiful,” explains Victoria MacLean. “BeauCoo is all about women inspiring other women. To be [body positive] is to believe in yourself and love your body – no matter the size.”
For the Android launch, the MacLeans told me, the team decided to leave out a few underused features. BeauCoo’s users, for example, didn’t really want to share their photos outside of the app on Facebook and other social networks, so the Android app doesn’t have this functionality anymore.
The Android app is now available in the Google Play store.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/mDkW7wB7KKQ/