Mac User UK cover: Supercharge your CV

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Stefano

mac user user uk cover supercharge your cvSign of the times?
Mac User UK cover: Supercharge your CV
A cover that’s not (only) about iPad, iPhone & Macs: it’s about people growing their skills using these technologies.

A headline I really love: “Build on your skills to do more in 2012” and “This year, get the skills to ignite your career“.

Covering Graphic Design, Video, Music, 3D CGI and, of course, App development, this cover story is quite unusual for a Mac-oriented magazine.
I guess the economic downturn has something to do with this: no more gadgetry or geekery, but more people- and real-life-oriented topics.
Job seeking, namely.

[Via Mac User UK]

Posted in App world, Apple, Development, Digital life, Digital media, Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Job search, Job seeking, Mac OS X, Magazine, Media, Mobile gaming, Mobile marketing, Social marketing, Social Media, Social network, Software, Tech industry | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hubspot’s Facebook for business guide – for free!

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Stefano

facebook business free guideNever dimiss a free meal!

Hubspot is giving for free this How to Use Facebook for Business 35-pages guide.

Ok… you may know all the tricks of the trade, but this free guide may still be a good starting point for most people willing to move their business on Facebook and leverage the potential social market into something profitable.

Some topics covered:

  • Optimize your Facebook presence for maximum results
  • Promote your business page to attract and grow fans
  • Generate leads with marketing best practices
  • Measure and analyze your Facebook presence

Click here to download the Facebook for Business introductory guide

[Via Hubspot]

Posted in Business, Business Intelligence, Business Model, Business Plan, Case Study, Collaborative Work, Entrepreneurship, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Facebook Pages for Business, Facebook Timeline, Free guide, How-to, Mobile marketing, School, Social initiatives, Social Life, Social marketing, Social Media, Social network, Social news, Startup, Tech industry, User Engagement, User experience, Web 2.0, Web Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Timeline + Moo.com: perfect business cards!

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Stefano

moo business cardsI love my Moo.com Minicards: everytime I give someone my business/personal cards it’s a surprise – for the one receiving it and to me too, it’s so simple to get a smile with a nice picture!

I made my first 100 Minicards back in June 2010, fetching 50 photos from my Flickr albums (several albums, may I add), so I ended with 2x 50 business cards with a twist – my photos on one side, my personal data on the other.

Making the first cards set took me half an hour online (mostly choosing the right photos…) and four days to get them delivered to me (Italy) from UK for the staggering price of 13 euros…
Excellent paper, sharp printing and a customer service that shows a business run by great people.

What else?

What happens when the world’s largest social network hooks up with a beloved social business card maker? The birth of beautiful, Facebook-Timeline-oriented business cards.

Moo.com‘s Facebook Cards are personalized business cards that feature any of your Facebook Timeline Cover Photos on the front and a custom quote on the back.
A set of 50 cards retails for $15 (roughly 13 euros) and includes as many designs as you’d like.
You can also tweak the text and style of each design to your liking.
facebook moo timeline business cardsThe partnership drives home the social scrapbooking side of Facebook Timeline and enables Moo.com users to share a small piece of their profiles with new contacts they encounter in the physical world.

How do you do it?

To make your own Facebook cards just go to your http://www.facebook.com/yourfacebookusername/info and hover over the little Business Card in your Contact Info. Make sure you’ve got a Timeline profile though!

That’s a superb example of a very social use of social networks!

[Via Moo.com]

Posted in Advertising, Art, Business, Business Model, Case Study, Design, Digital life, Digital photography, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Facebook Timeline, Fun, Media, Photo, Photography, Social initiatives, Social marketing, Social Media, Social network, User Engagement | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Flipboard adds Associated Press news & coverage on the 2012 US Presidential Campaign

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Stefano

flipboard appI’ve been in love with Flipboard since its very first appearance on the iPad (namely, my iPad).
It’s one of those apps that really make sense about using an iPad just to browse literally my favorites news sources and has become my best social media hub.
Not only it shows news & posts in a neat – and somehow book-ish – way, but it does so gracefully you’ll soon forget how you’ve been reading stuff through a browser.
Be it a blog, a news site, Twitter or Facebook, you can have it all in a single page (or two) and see headlines at a glance and read them in a way that’s light years forward compared to any browser.

Oh, did I mention you get NO BANNERS whatsoever?

Recently Flipboard has moved to the smaller estate screen on iPhones providing a smaller yet compelling user experience – becoming a huge success among iOS apps.
Not bad considering it’s a completely free app.

flipboard associated press deal presidential 2012Alas, one of the best thing about Flipboard is that it’s been improving its content sources, building up a solid reputation by giving users a reading guide with advices from reknowned media sources.

This time it has signed a deal with Associated Press that will enable users to have full coverage on the 2012 US Presidential Campaign.

A strong sign towards a tighter integration between conventional media and new players (and media as well) such as Flipboard on iPad – and still the first one (more to come during this year, I foresee)!

You can learn some lessons from Flipboard’s founder, well-known Mike McCue, on the video below.



[Via Flipboard and theiFile]

Posted in 2012 Campaign, 2012 Presidential Election, App world, Apple, Business, Digital media, iOS, iOS 5, iPad, iPad 2, iPhone, Media, Social Media, Social network, Social news, Software, Tech industry | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Cubelets: the modular robotics you’ve been missing!

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Stefano

cubelets make magazineMake Magazine is always a great source of inspiration for tinkering-oriented people like me.

In this post, Make introduces the Cubelets from ModRobotics: a great educational tool for kids and adults alike! Just like Lego, but with some brain too!

Cubelets are a robotic construction system from Modular Robotics. Using color coded cube modules, a maker can create a robot from snap together pieces that contain sensors, logic circuits, or “actions”. When attached together, the modules communicate via i/o built into the connector. Cubelets seem like they’d be the perfect introduction to robotics because you could easily get started creating robots without having to pick up a soldering iron.

[Via Make Blog and Modrobotics]

Posted in Educational, Electronics, Fun, Gadget, Hacking, Hardware, Home automation, Homebrewing, Magazine, Maker, Tinkering | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Tablet wars: Blackberry PlayBook gets its priced slashed off 50%

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Stefano

blackberry playbookRIM, Blackberry producer, has made the first move in 2012 in tablet wars.
Its Blackberry PlayBook is now available for $299 – that’s 50% off its regular price – but you can find it right now at $249.

The 16GB model originally shipped at $499, while the 32GB and 64GB versions initially listed at $599 and $699, respectively.

What’s in a PlayBook?

Right now, AFAIK, it’s the only tablet that’s running neither iOS or Android – so it’s the fourth tablet OS competitor on the market (so sorry for HP WebOS) considering Amazon’s own Kindle OS.
For $249 (street price) you’ll get a 7 inches colour display tablet @ 1024×600 pixels, 1 GB of RAM and 16- up to 64 GB of flash storage memory, GPS, Wi-Fi (b/g/n) all in a sleek package weighing in at 0.9 pounds.

You’ll get twin cameras, enough to record HD video and an HDMI output for connecting to a compatible HDTV or monitor and playing back Full HD 1080p video. It’s compatible with video encoded in H.264, MPEG4, and WMV formats.

Besides commont tablet browsing, it comes – how could you avoid this? – with a Blackberry-branded app store where you can find… you know the rest.
On the plus side is Adobe Flash 10.1 & Air support (that’s for some gaming).
There’s no 3G support although: RIM wants you to hook the PlayBook with a Blackberry (of course).

The catch: you’ll have to use a Blackberry phone to enable 3G browsing, syncing and app downloading while on the run – and out of any Wi-Fi coverage.

Could the PlayBook (and this RIM price slashing) survive in the tablet war?
Tablet arena isn’t for weak runners, last Xmas sales scored a hefty 13% of online purchases to iPhone & iPad iOS-based devices.

For more info about this market niche, CNet fully reports on production costs, cutting costs and market comparison.

Interested? Hurry up, the PlayBook sale end on February 4th!
Blackberry’s PlayBook is available now and the 16GB versione goes as low as $249.

[Via CNet news]

Posted in Android, App world, Blackberry, Digital life, Hardware, iOS, iOS 5, iPad, iPad 2, iPhone, Mobile gaming, Tablet, Tablet wars, Tech industry | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Photography: according to Trey Ratcliff DSLRs are dead, 3rd gen cameras will survive…

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Stefano

mirrorless dumped dslrTrey Ratcliff is best known for his site StuckInCustoms.com, which has become the #1 Travel Photography Blog on the internet.

In his latest post, DSLRS ARE A DYING BREED – 3RD GEN CAMERAS ARE THE FUTURE, he’s predicting the end of DSLR photography as we know it.

3rd gen cameras, namely mirrorless, Evil ILC, micro four thirds, etc… will rule in the near future, according to Trey’s vision.

In a nutshell, there’s nothing that can’t be done on a Sony NEX5 that you’ve been used to shoot with a Nikon D3…
You may or you may not agree with him…
He even disputes about the incorrect naming mirrorless and 3rd generation digital cameras.

Gearheads talk too much about the tech, and it simply confuses the common man. The “3rd” bit pays homage to the first generation – those innovative but weak first forays into digital. It also puts all the current DSLRs into the “2nd Generation Cameras,” since that’s when digital photography really got its legs under it. Heck, even most of the old-school film curmudgeons have crossed the Rubicon. To think that DSLRs with gesticulating mirrors and spinning gears are the future is to have one’s head in the sand.

Video: Watch this video below by Scoble, and jump ahead to 35:25 to see Trey Ratcliff talk about this new generation of cameras.

I guess that mirrorless cameras and electronic viewfinders digital cameras are somehow the future, just like my 2006 Fuji Finepix S9600 bridge camera.

A DSLR, though, retains a different shooting ability – an unbiased optical viewfinder that will never fake reality…

[Via Stuck in Customs]

Posted in Digital photography, Photo, Photography, Tech industry | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Browser war: IE7 will not show Facebook Timeline

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Stefano

Another episode in the Browsers war saga.

ZDNet reports that Facebook may be phasing out support to Internet Explorer 7 for its latest Timeline.

It’s not just that IE7 is aging, 5 years at least, it’s that the Timeline requires the very latest browsers, standards adherence, complex HTML rendering engines and then some.

So long IE6 on August 2010 (the chat feature was the latest bullet shot on it), so long IE7 in 2012 since the Timeline is truly technically challenging (if you still have IE7 somewhere on legacy PCs take a look at the buggy output when browsing a Facebook profile).

Moreover IE7 currently has a market share of about 4% according to StatCounter; combine this data with the fact the some 30% social networking activity comes from mobile devices, it’s easy to argue that a very little Facebook user-base will be affected by this decision.

To those IE7 users: go try Firefox o Chrome or Safari and get a better browsing experience – as well a horde of plug-ins, extensions and gadgets.
(oh, yes: there’s Internet Explorer 9 too…)

If the move is intentional, it’s hardly a surprising one. Once, support for older versions of browsers was an important feat for web services, especially popular ones. Nowadays – with many browsers, including IE, being automatically updated for users – there’s little reason to keep using a browser that’s more than five years old.

Public statement: I’ve never been a great IE fan, I’ve been using Netscape, Opera, Firefox, Chrome and almost any other browser.
IE served me just as a reference when building web sites to see things like most people see them.

[Via ZDNet]

Posted in Browser, Business, Chrome, Facebook, Facebook Timeline, Firefox, Google Chrome, Mozilla, Social network | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

2011: a video summary of the whole year as seen through Twitter – and the growth of Twitter itself too!

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Stefano

twitter 2011Jeremiah Warren. has come up with a brilliant round up of the biggest stories in 2011 via Twitter.

If 2011 is to be considered the year of Social Media, Twitter is, for sure, the star of all Social Networks.

Most conventional media, TV and newspapers, relied on Twitter to tell most of the events that occurred in 2011 – often gasping while late, compared to the blazing speed of Tweets.

My personal picks:

  • Arab spring has shown the true power of user-generated media – and then some lessons about authority unable to control it
  • Japan’s earthquake and subsequent nuclear crisis has shown how deep environmental concern can get help from social media to engage people
  • History’s irony: Gheddafi end was Tweeted using .LY url shortening services – that’s the Lybian country domains or TLDs
Posted in Brand, Case Study, Digital life, Digital media, Digital video, History, Media, News, Social initiatives, Social Life, Social marketing, Social Media, Social network, Social news, Social survey, Tech industry, User Engagement, Video, Youtube | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How much is worth Mozilla browsers loyalty to Google? $300 million per year!

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Stefano

browser warsYes, the browser war is still on – more than ever.

Google’s the default search engine for most of us, and it is for most Firefox users.
Anyway, there’s no free meal in this world so, if you ever asked yourself how it comes that a search engine is the weapon of choice of a certain browser well… here’s a good answer.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher reports

Earlier this week, Google and Mozilla said they had struck a deal to renew their search royalty agreement for another three years.

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sources said this total amount — just under $1 billion — was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.

Google’s main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft’s Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.

Firefox share on the market has been recently slightly surpassed by Google’s own Chrome but still remains one the most used (power users too!) browsers ever.
Should you want to check the very latest data about browser market share, just take a look at W3Schools Browser Statistics.

In a nutshell, considering the period from January to Novembre 2011 (December data still not available at the time of writing), Internet Explorer fell from 26.6% to 21.2%, Firefox from 42.8% to 38.1% (November data).
Chrome, in the same timeframe, rose up from 23.8% to an amazing 33.4%.

[Via AllThingsD]

Posted in Browser, Business, Chrome, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Marketing, Search engine, SEO | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment