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Sunday, 28 April 2013
Switched On: Microsoft's small tablet trap
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Living with Glass, Day Four: Canyon Carving
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Saturno a tiro de piedra
Saturn and some of its moons. From left to right Titan, Rhea, Dione, Enceladus, Saturn and Thetys. twitter.com/lrargerich/sta…
— Luis Argerich (@lrargerich) 28 de abril de 2013 Durante la noche del 28 al 29 de abril de 2013 Saturno se coloca a la distancia mínima de nuestro planeta durante este año, a tan sólo 1.300 millones de kilómetros de nosotros; está en lo que los astrónomos denominan oposición.
Si tienes un telescopio podrás ver una imagen como la de Luis de ahí arriba, pero aún a simple vista Saturno destacará claramente en el cielo nocturno, claro que si tienes dudas siempre tienes la opción de usar SkySafari o una aplicación similar el tu móvil.
Tiene los detalles Ciencia@NASA en No se pierda el esplendor y el brillo de Saturno .
En caso de que esté nublado en la noche del 28 tampoco te preocupes, pues puedes intentarlo otra noche. Total, ¿qué son unos pocos miles de kilómetros frente a 1.300 millones?
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/saturno-a-tiro-de-piedra.html
Microsoft working on brand redesigns for Xbox, Yammer, Skype and Bing
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Hands-On With the Week's Top Apps
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The After Math: Exploring Glass, Apple's cash and Nintendo's no-go keynote
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From The Hackathon, HangoutLater Helps Find A Good Central Location To… Hang Out Later
After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet.
Kolodny and Lin already knew each other before the event. They met Falletti at the Manhattan Center. As they already knew what they wanted to work on, they started developing right away.
Over the past 24 hours, the team has not slept a single minute to deliver this hack built in Python using the Django framework. They certainly needed Red Bull and coffee to keep going during the wee hours of the night. Yet, The team had a great time and will certainly take part in other hackathons.
When asked whether Kolodny will hang out later with fiends that were not at the hackathon, he said that he wouldn’t use the service this afternoon. It’s time for them to celebrate, or more probably to finally rest.
Stage demo coming soon.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/u9FOsEGZx2Q/
Inhabitat's Week in Green: flying electric car, 3D-printed livers and a two-story-tall bike
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Paranoid Android teases in-app pop-up window multitasking (video)
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Beyond The Box Launches A TweetDeck For Sports To Bring Realtime News And Analysis To Your iPad
Like many avid sports fans, Shailo Rao, Sagar Savant and Vam Makam are well-familiar with how frustrating it can be to find quality, relevant sports content — especially on Twitter and other social media. Rao tells me over coffee that, as a PhD student at Stanford, he spent years trying to create and maintain a single realtime feed of content he actually cared about. Because no company or publication was addressing this at the time, he was forced to manually curate a huge roster of RSS feeds from his favorite websites and Twitter accounts.
Not only was that process extremely time-consuming, but with people shifting to native apps, mobile websites, the growth of the unfiltered interest graph on Twitter (sports updates mixed with tech coverage, for example) and the explosion of sports coverage, the RSS feed approach just doesn’t make sense.
Unable to find a better solution, the three amigos decided to build their own at StartX, the startup accelerator program affiliated with Stanford. This week, the team launched their first product, Beyond The Box, an iPad app that allows sports fans to curate realtime coverage, players updates and analysis from their favorite sports teams in one centralized timeline. You can think of it as TweetDeck on steroids — for sports.
Now, I’ve been a little skeptical of the second (and third and fourth and fifth) screen revolution. To be fair, it’s a real phenomenon and will continue to grow — I frequently watch baseball with Twitter open on my iPad — but I’m not sure it’s as big (right now) as the media would have us think. However, a January report from Nielsen on “mobile sports” included an eye-opening and perhaps telling statistic: Today, nearly 60 percent of smartphone and tablet users access sports content on their device — at least once a day.
It’s for that very reason that the founders decided to start with the iPad to offer sports fans curated news, analysis, rumors, video, photos and player commentary in the same timeline-style feed that has become so familiar thanks to social media. The timeline curates content from more than 1,000 media sources and 2,000 players, ranking and analyzing sources based on a number of signals, including popularity, relevancy, and so on. In turn, it allows fans to personalize their feed to focus updates from their favorite teams and players.
This means that fans can get access before these quotes show up on radio, blogs, or on CNN. Furthermore, offering access to updates that come straight from players gives it a big point of differentiation from ESPN and Turner Sports coverage, for example. In this way, Beyond The Box deserves credit for attempting to go beyond the content boxes, walled gardens and content restrictions found on so many sports media properties, like ESPN’s Sports Center Feed or Bleacher Report’s Team Stream.
The app enables users to view coverage of the four major sports from both national and local media analysts and outlets, as well as from over 300 local team blogs, thanks to its pulling in content from SB Nation. As mentioned, the other major point of differentiation is the ability to get updates from players directly, especially those who have strong brands and followings on social media.
These players tend to generate more fan interest than their own team’s feeds, like, say LeBron James, who has 7-times more followers on Twitter than the Miami Heat. And it’s not just the megastars, as Stephen Curry has 3-times as many followers as his team, the Warriors. This can be a double-edged sword, however, as athletes aren’t always known for their incisive tweets and commentary on social media. They do generate interest, but if you’re looking for news straight from the analysts, this could be a point of contention. Of course, it’s left up to you to curate, so it’s fairly easy to avoid.
Going forward, the founders hope to monetize Beyond The Box by leveraging what they see as increasing interest from advertisers in the second-screen viewing experience. Rao says that consumers are increasingly using mobile devices while watching sports — each time there’s a time out, commercial break or fans are looking for more insight, for example — which could provide plenty of opportunities to integrate sponsored content or in-stream ads.
While monetization is still a work in progress, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see Beyond The Box add in-app purchases for advanced insights for those looking for a leg up in their fantasy leagues.
Next up on the roadmap, the founders say that they want to continue refining the way they curate and process content, as well as adding more breadth. Integrating more multimedia content, like photos and videos, into its timeline could be an easy way to improve the user experience. On the back end, the more big data analysis the app provides, the better it will be able to stand out. And the same can be said for information visualization, like expanding the “box score,” which really hasn’t changed in 100-plus years, for example.
These are just a few of the things that Rao says the team is considering as it moves forward. If it can follow through, Beyond The Box could be a winner. As of now, it’s off to a great start, but there are plenty of players in this space, from enormous, billion-dollar media brands to startups like SportStream and Chadwick. But, either way, it’s a good time to be a sports fan, as these startups are demonstrating that an evolution is underway.
Find Beyond The Box on the App Store here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/g52_tmII1EM/
Vermount Telephone Company's gigabit internet service is live, half the price of Google Fiber
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LG Optimus F5 mid-range LTE smartphone hits France April 29, global dispersion to follow
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Wonderville Launches An Interactive Content Library And Virtual Classroom Network For Kids
Last July, a group of veteran executives from eToys, eBay, Sesame Street, Discovery and Disney unveiled their ambitious plan to create a souped-up Khan Academy for kids. But rather than a straightforward port, the learning platform, called Wonderville, aimed to expand on Khan’s approach to the “flipped classroom” by aggregating educational content from a variety of third-party sources.
Using eBooks, TV shows, videos and mobile apps from iTunes, Amazon, YouTube and beyond, Wonderville creates what it calls “Smart Galleries,” which consist of digital content like quizzes, apps, fact sets and so on designed to reflect what kids are studying in class. The content, which includes some fun topics as well (like Bigfoot) to keep kids interested, is vetted by Wonderville’s team of teachers to ensure quality and age-appropriateness.
After nine months of development, Wonderville is officially launching its new-and-improved pilot program. The new Wonderville focuses on Kindergarten through fifth grade (as opposed to its previous focus on a wider range), allowing parents and teachers to improve their lessons through the inclusion of Common Core-aligned content. Wonderville has also expanded its scope in the hopes of becoming a platform that enables teachers and classrooms to connect, collaborate and share media — along with providing access to smart galleries of learning content.
The startup has leveraged input from over 1,000 teachers to create hundreds of smart galleries, which now include more than 10,000 videos, images, quizzes and rewards — and support Common Core State Standards for K-5. Teachers can build from 2,700 lesson plans contributed by their peers, much like fellow EdTech startups, BetterLesson, LearnZillion and TeachersPayTeachers, each of which aims to find better ways for educators to discover, share and customize Common Core-aligned lesson plans.
Each of these startups is scrambling to beef up its library of lesson plans and sharing tools. LearnZillion, for example, has 120K teachers registered and reaches over 1.5 million students, while TeachersPayTeachers doled out over $20 million to more than 5,000 teachers for sharing their lesson plans for cheap.
However, in comparison to its competitors, which focus more generally on K-12 teachers and content, Wonderville has narrowed its focus to the younger crowd and may benefit from “specializing” in this way. Wonderville founder Mark Eastwood tells us that teachers in more than 50 schools across the country are participating in its pilot program, and 25 companies and institutions are contributing to its crowdsourced content model.
The startup is also eager to extend its value proposition beyond its interactive library of educational content, though, by allowing teachers to create virtual classrooms on top of its content, which work in concert with whiteboards, mobile devices and PCs. Today, 30 percent of U.S. classrooms use interactive whiteboards, a number that is expected to grow to 65 percent over the next few years, Eastwood says.
Thanks to its recently being accepted into the Smart Ecosystem Network for content developers, the startup is now able to reach more than one million teachers per month by populating their interactive whiteboards with Wonderville content.
The other draw for teachers is that they can use these virtual classrooms to create personalized learning “rooms” for each student, or use them to upload class pictures, video and messages. In turn, teachers could, say, choose one of Wonderville’s interactive quizzes or games, assign it to students to take home or put them up on their whiteboard during class to test students’ mastery of a specific subject. Parents and teachers can then track student development through the platform, while engaging them in ongoing discussions about everything from Bigfoot and space exploration to popular culture and Abraham Lincoln.
The founder also tells us that Wonderville is standing firm in the decision to offer its learning platform (and future products as well) to teachers for free. The base product, he says, is also free for families, while parents can participate in Wonderville’s subscription plan to tap into additional features and help guide their kids along their learning path. And that’s where Wonderville will begin to monetize — if parents want to get help their kids get ahead, they’ll have to pay.
Today, Wonderville has 10 employees and has been privately financed, but, as it looks to beef up its distribution partnerships (particularly by focusing on the iTunes), the startup will be looking to raise its Series A this summer.
For more, find Wonderville at home here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/Cjm765GXrDY/
Samsung Galaxy Mega hits FCC (again), this time with LTE
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I/O Denim Jeans Are Designed for Your Smartphone
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Ask Engadget: best WiFi router for super-fast Fiber?
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Mobile Miscellany: week of April 22nd, 2013
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Samsung Galaxy S 4 drops original TecTile support, requires new TecTile 2
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