July 2008 For over 27 years President Mubarak has ruled with an iron fist. With protests and strikes forbidden, activists are finding new ways to fight for democracy. Through Facebook, protestors can now find a voice.
Scottish photojournalist Harry Benson, who’s captured some amazing frames of The Beatles, world leaders, and historic events, gives the New York Times his best tip for shooting at night or in low natural light.
He doesn’t lighten or otherwise touch his photos with image editors, and his secret to shooting in low light is simple:
Don’t be afraid. You’ll be surprised just how good your photos will be. Make sure there is some light on your subject’s face. But be brave about it. The thing about is that I’ve been awakened to see just what digital cameras can do in low-light situations. It digs right into spaces that I never thought a camera could penetrate.
The post offers a few nitty-gritty details for manual-settings types, but he’s right—the best photographs I’ve seen from parties, weddings, and news events come from shooters who simply stand steady, shoot what they can frame, and shoot a lot.
Face it, kids — it’s tough to make a landline telephone hip in the age of cellular telephony, but somehow or another Sharp has managed to do just that. For the second time in a year, no less. The new JD-4C1CL/CW is a rather typical cordless phone, but the super-dee-duper docking station has a 4.3-inch digital photo frame and 64MB of internal storage space. Beyond that, most everything else is under wraps, but we’re told that it’ll ship in brown, red and white this April for an undisclosed amount.
Continue reading Sharp crams digiframe into JD-4C1CL/CW telephone
Sharp crams digiframe into JD-4C1CL/CW telephone originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Ever wish you could acheive a documentary-style face blur in your video projects? DIY video blogger extraordinaire Tinkernut details how to do exactly that with a handful of free software.
The star applicaiton in this process is a free app called Wax, which handles video compositing and some special effects. Tinkernut excellent walkthrough coveres every step in the process.
Apart from blurring the face, the video also covers how to change the voice to give it a little extra anonymity, but be aware: At the very least the voice adjustment is just a pitch change, so it could be reverse engineered easily enough by someone determined to hear the voice. The same may be true for the blur, but we’re not exactly video modulation experts over here. Either way, this isn’t a “hide from the KGB” guide—it’s just a simple and effective method for blurring out faces or other sections of your video.
Heavy Rain relies on its characters to deliver much of the gravity and story of the game, but what you might not know is that the actors often provided both the sound and the face of their characters. How close are the two?
Jem Alexander, of the European Playstation Blog, recently posted some photos of the actors who play the game’s protagonists to his twitter account. The images below show just how much the character models look like the actors. The resemblance is frightening, particularly how much of a mirror image Sam Douglas is for Scott Shelby.
There is a video on the Blu-ray that shows Langdale delivering some of Mars’ lines, and it’s just uncanny. Look for Heavy Rain to be released on the PlayStation 3 on February 23. You can read our full review of the game to see what we thought.
That’s right, we just arrived in Barcelona fattened up on airline food and as rested as 8 hours of recirculated oxygen consumed at a 30-degree incline can provide. Weary? No way, we’re staring Mobile World Congress 2010 in the face, and if you’re a smartphone nerd (and really, what modern gadget fan isn’t?) then this is the event that will reveal our future handheld device purchases. So what’s going to happen? Windows Mobile 7 seems like a lock as is a Samsung Bada debut with the Wave handset. But what are HTC, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and the rest of the industry up? We’ll find out soon enough — press events begin tomorrow.
Engadget is live from MWC 2010! originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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While we patiently wait for the X10 to make its way into retail channels (or, you know, give up and buy something else instead), mobile-review’s Eldar Murtazin has come through once again with one of his world-famous eleventy billion page previews rife with thousands of screenshots, which should take you long enough to skim through so that the phone’s available by the time you’re done. Thing is, you may not want it anymore: Eldar’s concerned by the phone’s cheap plastic shell, which is particularly alarming in light of the direction competitors are going, and the screen could apparently be better. Add in the fact that it’ll be launching with Android 1.6 and there’s no question Sony Ericsson’s first Android effort is going to face an uphill battle — let’s just hope they learn from the complaints and get an updated Android build rolled out on the double.
[Thanks, Alex]
Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10 exhaustively previewed, screenshotted to death originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
On this morning’s earnings call for Warner Music, CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr said that the company’s $1.29 tracks — a 30 percent price boost over Apple’s standard 99 cents — have been a “net positive” for the company. Yet as media pundit Peter Kafka observed, the entire music industry’s iTunes sales growth is slower than a year ago, when consumer confidence and willingness to spend were much lower:
Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit growth” was at five percent in the December quarter, down sequentially from 10 percent in the September quarter and 11 percent in the June quarter. And since iTunes sales make up the majority of Warner’s digital revenue, growth is contracting there, too. In the last quarter, digital revenue at the label was up eight percent compared with a year earlier, when that number was 20 percent.
On the call, Bronfman said:
“Digital growth has slowed following iTunes’ introduction of a variable pricing model in April 2009 … It couldn’t have come at a worse time. [Variable pricing was] agreed in summer of 2008 before the financial crisis even hit — Apple went through that price increase in April, but in the face of the worse recession since the Depression … It’s difficult to know, even today, if it is just consumer resistance to a higher price points or if [the cause was] taking a pricepoint of 30 percent more at such a fragile time.”
Don’t overreact to the news. iTunes sales are still creeping upward. And Michael Bublé’s “Crazy Love” album with its hit single “Haven’t Met You Yet” has helped Warner’s revenue stay pretty much flat. But it’s odd that while most spending has begun to recover from the panic of 2008-2009, music sales growth is slowing. Kafka thinks the prices are putting off would-be new buyers. I think it’s possible that the target market for iTunes music is spending its money on iPhone apps instead.
Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of “Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG.
Social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.
Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”
Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.
In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook and Twitter, to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.
Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.
Lesson: Release fewer “official statements” and more personal ones that help you make a connection to your customers and audience.
With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.
In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become super important.
Loic Le Meur, CEO of startup software company Seesmic, once told me that one of the most important jobs of a CEO today is to hear what people are saying about the company’s product across social media channels, and to respond to them directly. In fact, much of his Twitter stream is @replies to people commenting on his company’s product.
Bigger companies, such as Southwest Airlines and Comcast are using Twitter in the same way, making sure customers’ concerns are addressed. Because bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.
Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.
Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.
I am not sure how NBC directs the social media efforts of their employees, but in watching NBC newscaster Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) on Twitter it is clear that she is not simply trying to get people to watch her shows. Curry is someone who speaks out about women’s rights, deeply cares about justice, and likes to quote the Persian poet, Rumi — there is a person there, not a company representative, and as such, I am much more likely to pay attention when and if she does talk about any of her television shows.
John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe, offers another great example. Adobe is a company that smartly encourages and provides the means for their employees to blog, and anyone who reads Nack’s blog will notice that Adobe doesn’t put many restrictions on what people write about. Nack’s blog is focused almost exclusively on his area of interest — graphic design and photo manipulation — but he doesn’t post solely about Adobe products. Many of the interesting art projects and articles he links to have nothing to do with Adobe and some may even have been created using software from competing companies.
Lesson: Forget the unified company image, give staff the freedom to be themselves, and trust that the relationships that they build will help the company in the long run.
To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction.
If I want to communicate with a company, I tend to look them up on Twitter first. Knowing that I can communicate with a company on the networks upon which I am already most active makes me feel more comfortable doing business with them, because I know that if I have an issue, there is someone at the company I can communicate with through those means.
Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.
Lesson: Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.
In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.
Businesses who choose not to adapt to the new culture will be at an increasing disadvantage, as their customers slowly build personal relationships with their competitors. We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.
- Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- 5 Social Media Lessons Learned From Whole Foods
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business
- HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, studiovision
Tags: business, facebook, List, Lists, social media, tips, twitter
Originally posted 2009-09-22 18:27:35. Republished by Old Post Promoter
Oh, man, we haven’t seen a video of a poorly thought-out tattoo since this guy was shilling for Ray-Ban (although there’s talk that the ink was fake). Thank heavens for this lady, who got a tat of a DJ’s face on her lower back so that her daughter could meet Justin Bieber, who is apparently very popular with the kids.
This video has been out for a few days now, but it’s been racking up the views — mostly for the sheer “Why, God, why?” factor of it all. We all know that YouTube sensation turned super popular pop star Justin Bieber makes people do crazy things (and sometimes gets folks fired for not being scarily attentive enough), but this little stunt takes the cake.
Apparently the host of FM radio show Mack at Night has a little project called “Tats for Tickets,” which promises just that. In this case, a mother got what is commonly known as a tramp stamp of the DJ’s face (a rather flattering representation, I might add) in exchange for a meeting between her daughter and the singer. Check it out below and be happy that this girl is not your daughter. (Bonus awfulness points for the “Pants on the Ground” reference.)
[via Buzzfeed]
Tags: justin bieber, music, pants on the ground, viral video
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