Things worth reading for February 10th through February 15th:
HP’s Open Innovation Strategy: Leveraging Academic Labs – Technology Review – “When Rich Friedrich of HP Labs looks into the future, he sees desks used as 3-D displays, printers that automatically tailor a newspaper to a reader’s tastes, faster and more secure cloud computing servers, and wireless nano-sensor networks that monitor the environment.
But he also sees that achieving these technologies will require tapping into resources beyond HP’s own intellectual property. It will require an embrace of “open innovation,” the idea that companies should make wider use of ideas and technologies that come from other sources—and allow their own technologies and ideas to be adopted by others.
“Toward that end, HP’s Innovation Research Program, now in its fourth year, gives grants of $50,000 to $75,000 to university researchers. Each grant can be renewed for up to three years. The company is reviewing proposals for this year’s round of grants.”
Research Shows News Outlets Key Driver of Twitter Trending Topics | New Comm Biz – “Besides being somewhat validating for PR professionals I find it interesting that news may break on Twitter but that the news outlets themselves are key drivers in awareness on a medium that usually causes them so much pain. (Ironic much?)”
Why Online Retailers Will Squeeze Out Publishers In The Book Business | paidContent – ‘A decade ago, Napster made it clear that the music industry was going digital, forcing record labels to scramble to survive. Today, a similar phenomenon is playing out in the book world – and this time, it’s publishers that are on the defensive. As e-book sales rise, the big question is: do authors really need publishers anymore?
‘The role of publishers: Digital is undermining the role of the publisher because it eliminates the need for certain skills that only publishers have—such as managing a large web of paper and print vendors – and it lessens the value of their deep relationships with brick-and mortar-retail buyers. We are starting to see a few early but real signs of the erosion of the publishers’ position, from Random House’s recent announcement that they will sublet roughly 30 percent of their Manhattan headquarters, to author Seth Godin cutting a direct deal with Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to bring his new works to market.’
Moms Rely on Social Media, Niche Websites — new study from BURST – Relevant for the new iMedia iMoms Summit launching in May: ‘Burst Media… released the results of an online survey of 1,475 moms that found, despite hectic lives, moms carve out time daily to go online. Nearly one-quarter (23.1%) of moms are online for personal use four or more hours daily and another 49.3% spend between one and three hours online per day. The study shines the spotlight on just how important a resource the Internet is for moms, specifically the finding that two-thirds (64.7%) of respondents say their daily family and home routines would be disrupted if web access was taken away for one week.’
MediaPost Publications Most Popular Marketing Tool For Local Biz: Facebook 02/15/2011 – “Engaging local marketers like never before, a striking 70% of small businesses now use Facebook to reach consumers, according to new research from small-business social network MerchantCircle.”
AT&T Makes App Creation Easier for Home Appliances, Other Objects – Fascinating and important: “Connected devices will likely far outnumber human users on the Internet in the very near future. While human Web data is just beginning to be utilized for tracking, recommendations, self-awareness, alerts, pattern detection, monitoring and more – the Internet of Things is being built from the ground up for that kind of systematic analysis of data as a platform.”
Qawker: an open source Gawker theme clone for WordPress – This is so cool! ‘We all know Gawker‘s new redesign either rubs people the right way, or the wrong way. If you’re one of the prior, you might want to try out QAWKER, a new WordPress theme that is a fully-working, open source clone of the Gawker/Gizmodo/Lifehacker/Kotaku redesign.
‘Despite all the criticisms, Sahas Katta, the developer of QAWKER, finds the revamp refreshing and decided to code an equivalent theme for WordPress users. Like the original, his template features a two-pane interface with a full article on the left and a list of scrollable recent posts bar on the right. He used jQuery to get all the instant loading features working without the need to refresh pages. He also threw in support for comments and search. He says that his code is entirely open source, so everyone should feel free to make changes or improvements.”‘
YouTube – LIPDUB – I Gotta Feeling (Comm-UQAM 2009) – Fascinating and wonderful one-take video by nearly 200 French Canadian Communications students. Well worth the time. And note the more than 8 million views!
Kerry Callen’s Blog!: Invulnerability doesn’t solve all problems. – Really cute.
Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – “Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, which such a number might be much more numerous and likely depends on memory size.”
Facebook’s News Feed And “Attention Rationing” | BrandSavant – “Regardless of how many “friends” you have on Facebook, if you confine your interactions to a small, select group, you may never even suspect that the others are posting updates. I’ve certainly seen this in my own feed, which now reliably rotates items from the 15-20 people I interact with the most, and rarely, if ever, shows updates from distant connections. In short, my news feed has become a true meritocracy: it’s hard to get my attention by accident.”
10 Reasons Why the Email You Just Sent Will Never be Read – Adam is my new guru– if you’re overwhelmed by email like me you shouldn’t miss this article.
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