Expert Lancer - Gadgets,Phones,Tech News,Cameras » facebook

Through Buddy Media, HootSuite & More, Google+ Pages Get Third-Party Management Tools

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:36:06 +0000

Last week, Google+ launched “Pages” to enable brands, products, companies, businesses, and everyone else under the sun, to build their very own tailored Google+ presence. Google+ Pages may sound reminiscent of Facebook Pages, and they are, albeit with a few important twists. ( Josh goes into depth about how Google+ could one-up its rival in the battle over Pages here .) As one might guess, Pages offers brands and businesses a similar experience to that of individual Google+, in that brands can place people into Circles to share content with that select group, launch video hangouts to have face-to-face conversations with their customers, and it all works through the site’s mobile app. As G+ Pages roll out to all users, Google wants to give businesses looking to managing their Pages a set of integrations that will enhance their experience on the platform and give them increased flexibility. Today, Google+ announced that it is launching a pilot program that will essentially allow businesses and brands to manage their Google+ Pages using a number of third-party applications, like Hootsuite and Buddy Media, to name a few. In total, six social media companies will get early access to the Google+ API to, in Google’s words, “test Google+ functionality in their management tools”. These six companies, which include Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue, will make a subset of their tools available to Page owners to enable them to manage circles, publish to Google+, access insights, and monitor usage. According to Google+ these six companies were chosen because of “their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and assess their presence on social networks”. Though it’s still early, these social media integrations seem to offer the beginnings of what could be some extensive functionality for Page owners, specifically in terms of targeting, advanced Page management, and analytics. As one can see from Heresay’s announcement , for example, the company’s partnership with Google+ will allow Page owners to schedule posts and campaigns across brand pages, use the company’s CRM tools to manage customer relationships, and take advantage of social analytics to view metrics across every brand and local page. And perhaps more importantly, Heresay will allow its users to target content to specific Google+ Circles, allowing marketers to post (and schedule) campaigns that reach specific demographics within their audience. (Hootsuite, too, offers similar message-tailoring to specific subsets of a business’ audience.) For example, marketers would be able to create a “Loyal Customers” Circle and be able to blast out specific messages, deals, etc. to those power users. Because Google+ doesn’t allow multiple users to access and manage one particular Page, it seems this new integration with these social media companies will be a great substitute. Now, it’s just up to Google to open this kind of functionality up to personal accounts. For more, Hootsuite’s announcement here , and check out Google+’s third-party landing page here .

Here is the original post:
Through Buddy Media, HootSuite & More, Google+ Pages Get Third-Party Management Tools

Half of Water-Damaged UK Cellphones Fall in Toilets [STUDY]

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:26:51 +0000

Have you ever dropped your mobile phone in the toilet, er, loo? A new study reveals almost 15% of Britons have. That might explain how 16% of mobile phones have poop on them . GoodMobilePhones.co.uk surveyed 1,937 mobile users over 18 and found that 31% of respondents have damaged their mobiles with water or another liquid in the past. The number one destination for mobile damage is the toilet, claiming 47% of damage incidents. Spilling drinks on mobiles or dropping mobiles into drinks was the second most popular cause of damage, claiming 21% of cases. Filling spots three through five are dropping phones in a bath or shower (12%), dropping in a kitchen sink (7%) and putting through the washing machine in a pocket (3%). Men are three times more likely to be victims than women, with 73% and 27% respectively reporting to have damaged their devices. The study also revealed 86% of Britons did not insure their phones before their deaths by water. Have you ever damaged your mobile? What was the cause? Image courtesy of Flickr, Plemon Studios [Via Daily Mail ] More About: cellphones , Mobile For more Mobile coverage: Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Mobile channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

Read the original:
Half of Water-Damaged UK Cellphones Fall in Toilets [STUDY]

YouTube Upgrades Its Android App

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 01:18:11 +0000

YouTube has just updated its Android app to version 2.3.4, and while the changes aren’t exactly groundbreaking, they do add-in some pretty useful new functionality. Regardless of if you’re a big video watcher, or someone who’s more into uploading your own clips, there should be something in this release to catch your interest. The introduction of a “watch later” queue brings that feature from the web-based YouTube to its mobile app. As you discover videos you’re interested in viewing, you can easily add them to your queue, and then watch them later at your leisure. Uploaders should pay attention to the change in clip info editing features, letting you revise the metadata associated with a video while you’re still in the middle of uploading it. Finally, the app gets a Google +1 button, giving you another tool to show your support for your favorite YouTube vids. The updated YouTube 2.3.4 is available in the Android Market now. Image courtesy of Flickr, Rego – d4u.hu More About: android , YouTube

Read more here:
YouTube Upgrades Its Android App

Links Posted By Big Facebook Pages Have A 0.14% CTR, 1 Click Per 1000 Fans

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:51:45 +0000

The click through rate for links posted to the news feed by Facebook Pages with over 100,000 fans is 0.14%, or 1 click per 715 impressions according to a new study shared with us by analytics provider EdgeRank Checker . Pages receive 0.00093 clicks per fan, or roughly 1 click per 1000 fans. These figures should give marketers an idea of how many Facebook fans they’ll need to accumulate to drive significant traffic to external websites, a core way of deriving return on investment from the social network. Facebook only started providing link click metrics to Page admins at the beginning of October. Until then, marketers had to use links with tracking tags or URL shorteners that can reduce CTR in order to determine the referral traffic their Page posts were driving. For comparison, links posted by Pages have nearly 3x the CTR of Facebook ads which average 0.05% CTR, and they top online display ads which average a 0.1% CTR according to Webtrends. Facebook Pages can be a useful marketing channel for brands, especially those that organically accrue Likes from passionate customers such as entertainment, consumer packaged goods, fashion, and automotive companies. To drive significant referral traffic, though, most brands have to invest in advertising in order to beef up the fan counts of their Pages. Most major brands have at least 100,000 fans, and Posts by Pages with few fans have a much higher CTR as you can see in the graph below. Therefore, I excluded them to avoid skewing the data. For all Pages with over 1,000 fans, including those with few fans, link posts still only have a 0.35% CTR, 1 click per 280 impressions, 0.00236 clicks per per fan, and 1 click per 424 fans. EdgeRank Checker’s data is based on 84,000 link posts by over 5,500 Pages in October. The study also looked at which days of the week were the best for Pages to post on. It found that posts on Wednesday receive the most clicks and shares, while posts on Friday receive the fewest. If they spend the time and money, brands like Porche, Netflix, and Old Navy can drive around 2,000 qualified clicks a day for free. Facebook Pages can’t completely replace the need for paid advertising, but they can become an important component of a savvy online marketing strategy.

View original post here:
Links Posted By Big Facebook Pages Have A 0.14% CTR, 1 Click Per 1000 Fans

What 11/11/11 Looked Like On Twitter [VIDEO]

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:39:53 +0000

Nerd New Year , the alternate name for 11/11/11, has come and gone. And just like the regular New Year, when Twitter records have been broken , it was a popular day to tweet. This video, created by Twitter’s in-house data visualization specialist Miguel Rios , puts a geographic spin on that fact. It shows a wall of tweets moving around the world — first at 11:11am local time, then at 11:11pm. The scale of the “1″ represents the volume of tweets from that location. “Whether you were inclined to crack a joke about this rare binary occurrence, wax poetic about its meaning, or join in a global game to share photos at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m., numerology dominated the conversation,” read a post about the visualization video on the official Twitter blog. As fascinating as it is, the video is incomplete — there’s no clock to tell us exactly what time we’re seeing at any given moment. The two waves of 11:11 local time are easy to pick out, but some parts of the U.S. seem to have jumped the gun, while tweeters in Europe and the Middle East seem to form a second wave of interest in the date. Can Twitter visualizations like this be useful, or are they just interesting novelties? Let us know in the comments. More About: design , Twitter , visualization For more Social Media coverage: Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Social Media channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

Originally posted here:
What 11/11/11 Looked Like On Twitter [VIDEO]

iTunes Match Has Us on Cloud Nine [REVIEW]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:30:21 +0000

iTunes Match is now available and ready for sign-ups. Apple introduced the service back at WWDC 2011; it’s a way to access all your iTunes music via the cloud, for a fee. Similar to Amazon’s Cloud Player and Google Music , iTunes Match offers users the ability to access their music libraries — whether tracks were purchased via iTunes or not — from iTunes on a Mac or PC and from iOS 5 devices, including the Apple TV 2. The service is $24.99 a year. For that $25, users can upload up to 25,000 tracks to the iTunes Cloud (past iTunes purchases do not count against that total) and access their tunes on up to 10 devices. We’ve been playing with the service since it first hit beta and have watched it evolve from a promising — if buggy — tool into a well executed consumer-centric music solution. After downloading iTunes 10.5.1, users can opt to enable iTunes Match. After paying the annual fee, iTunes will scan a user’s iTunes library and upload or match the songs that it finds to its servers. Apple has a catalog of more than 20 million songs, which means most users’ existing albums and tracks will already be in Apple’s database, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to upload a library to the cloud. This is a major advantage over both Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music. Another major advantage is that unlike Amazon, which requires pre-Cloud Player purchases to be uploaded to its servers retroactively, all of your iTunes purchases are accessible, thanks to iTunes in the Cloud . iTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud: Perfect Harmony iTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud work hand-in-hand. You can use iTunes in the Cloud without iTunes Match, but when the two are working together, the entire process is utterly seamless. Over the course of nearly eight years, I have downloaded several thousand songs from iTunes. Most of them are downloaded onto my iMac or stored on an aging hard-drive based iPod. With iTunes Match/iTunes in the Cloud, I have access to all of my past purchases in my library. Even if I haven’t downloaded those songs to my MacBook Pro, the songs are still viewable and playable. Playing back these songs can take place in two ways. First, I can just stream the song from the web, a la Spotify , MOG or Rdio . I can also opt to download a track to my hard drive. I can also create playlists or smart playlists using tracks from my existing iTunes purchase library. On secondary machines, local uploads are accessible in the same way that my iTunes purchases are. The experience is similar to what subscribers to services like Spotify have long enjoyed, but the difference is that now the songs I actually own (or have acquired in other ways) are included. Playlist Synchronization The iTunes Match/iTunes in the Cloud harmony really comes together with playlist synchronization. You no longer need to manually sync playlists with your iOS device via iTunes — instead it all takes place over the cloud. That means my iPhone can see playlists I’ve created on my laptop or desktop. The process works in reverse too. I can create playlists on my iPad or iPhone and then access those playlists from within iTunes on the desktop or from another iOS device. Matching Songs with iTunes After signing up for iTunes Match, the service will assess your library and upload tracks from your personal library into the iTunes cloud. If Apple can find a song in its own repository, it just matches the song in place. For songs not available in Apple’s servers, your own files are uploaded directly to the cloud. Click here to view this gallery. High Quality Matched Tracks Although most of my personal compressed musical files are stored in LAME V0 (~225-278 bitrate, depending on the file), I have accumulated some lesser quality tracks over the years. By default, if iTunes Match finds a song in its library, it will replace that track with a 256-kbps AAC version. These files are DRM free when downloaded from the cloud — and appear to be the same files users purchase directly from iTunes. For some users, having improved sound quality will be a big deal, though more discerning fans might not hear much of a difference. Keep in mind Amazon also encodes its MP3s at at least 256kbps, so tracks purchased on Amazon.com, uploaded to iTunes, really just wind up changing from one format for another. That’s an important distinction; although the iTunes Match tracks are stored by iTunes, they are in the AAC or *.m4a format. Most MP3 players will play this format, but be sure to check if you want to sideload those tracks to another device. Listening on the Go If you want to listen to tracks from iTunes or an Apple TV 2 device, you can stream songs without local downloads. Listening to songs on the iPad or iPhone, however, will download a track (though it plays it during the download process). It would be nice if there was a way to indicate if you want to save a track for offline listening or if you just want to stream tunes. The advantage of this download upon play method, however, is that if you are suddenly offline (like on the subway), you can still listen to tracks you’ve recently played on your device. Agains the Competition iTunes Match competes directly with Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player. On the whole, iTunes Match stacks up well against the other services. Although Google Music is free during the beta process, we expect the company will charge $20 to $25 a year, just like Amazon and Apple. Amazon charges $20 a year for a 20GB Cloud Drive, but promises unlimited song storage. Google limits users to 20,000 songs and iTunes Match is limited to 25,000 songs, not counting your existing iTunes purchases. Unlike Amazon and Google, Apple does not have a browser-based music player. For some, this may be a deal breaker. For me, it’s actually an advantage. I find web-based music apps to be clunky in execution. It’s why I prefer the designated desktop apps for subscription streaming services. It’s also why I loathe using Amazon Cloud Player, because the process of getting songs into or out of my account is so tedious. iTunes isn’t perfect, but it handles track playback, upload and download with much less friction than a web interface. Of course, the biggest difference between the services is mobile device support. Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music are both available via unofficial iOS apps , but there are native solutions available for Android. iTunes Match is only accessible from iTunes or iOS devices. That means Android users are out of luck when it comes to cloud-based bliss. You can still offload songs to your phone, using programs like DoubleTwist, but the cloud-based options are iOS only. Still, for a person invested in the iTunes ecosystem, iTunes Match is the mature execution of the music cloud concept. For me, paying $24.99 a year was worth it just to have seamless playlist access as well as the ability to upload parts of my collection from multiple machines. What do you think of iTunes Match? Let us know. More About: apple , Cloud Music , Feature , icloud , itunes-match , redesign

View original post here:
iTunes Match Has Us on Cloud Nine [REVIEW]

Penguin Becomes Latest Publisher to Sell Digital Shorts

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Penguin is the latest publisher to test out e-singles with the launch of Penguin Shorts, an ongoing digital series of original fiction and nonfiction titles from authors like Colm Toibin and Anita Brookner. The program is launching in the UK first, with nine titles being released on December 1. All are priced at £0.99 ($1.58) or £1.99. ($3.17) In the U.S., Penguin has been publishing short-form “ Penguin eSpecials ” since 2008, and those will be rebranded as Penguin Shorts next year. A glance at the two countries’ lists suggests that Penguin has a little work to do in terms of branding and merging the titles under one banner. Most of the U.S. “eSpecials” are fantasy, romance and mystery titles (“Romancing Lady Cecily,” “Kris Longknife: Training Daze”), while the UK’s Shorts tend toward more serious topics like immigration and history’s great battles. Penguin aims to publish new e-singles each month and sell them across e-bookstores. In the U.S., Open Road and Rodale both recently announced e-singles publishing programs, and the “big six” publishers are experimenting with individual e-singles across platforms. I expect the next step for these publishers is more branded programs like Penguin Shorts. More About: books , ebooks , penguin For more Business coverage: Follow Mashable Business on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Business channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad

Read the rest here:
Penguin Becomes Latest Publisher to Sell Digital Shorts

Robotic Bear Paws You When You Snore [VIDEO]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:15:30 +0000

This bear may be soft and pillow-shaped, but you might want to think twice before curling up for a nap on Jukusui-kun. If you snore, it will stroke your face with its furry paw. It’s not hitting on you. Rather, it is helping your partner or roommate sleep by urging you to move on to your side, a position in which you are less likely to snore . Japan Trends discovered the robot, created by Wasaeda Univeristy , at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo last week. Jukusui-kun, which does not yet appear to be on the market, monitors snoring through a microphone and a matching fuzzy bear oxygen meter that the sleeper attaches to his or her hand. To avoid using cords that could interfere with sleep, Japan Trends says the creators developed a mat of sensors to be placed under the sheets instead of using cords. When oxygen and decibel levels signal loud snoring, the pillow takes action. It’s an interesting set up, but will getting pawed by a bear actually inspire snorers to shift to a quieter sleeping position? Or will Jukusui-kun be little more than an annoying stuffed animal that swats at their ears? Let us know in the comments if this would help the snorer in your life. More About: Jukusui-kun , robots , trending

Go here to read the rest:
Robotic Bear Paws You When You Snore [VIDEO]

Is Lenovo About to Release a Quad-Core Android Tablet? [PICS]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:57:18 +0000

Tablet backside Click here to view this gallery. Asus isn’t the only tablet maker working on a quad-core Android tablet — Lenovo appears to have one in the works as well. Engadget has gotten its hands on what appear to be “leaked” photographs of a 10.1-inch tablet Lenovo is allegedly planning to release by the end of the year. Like Asus’s next-generation Transformer Prime device, the tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 T33 processor and Android 4.0 ( Ice Cream Sandwich ). It also sports a back-facing camera, 2GB of 1.6GHz of RAM and a “fingerprint scanner” that also functions as an optical joystick on the backside. (If you’re wondering what an optical joystick is, read this .) Lenovo declined to comment on the veracity of the report. But if it’s true, is this something you would like to get your hands on? Let us know in the comments. More About: android tablet , lenovo

See the original post here:
Is Lenovo About to Release a Quad-Core Android Tablet? [PICS]

Music Lovers’ Social Network Flowd Gets All New Mobile Apps

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:53:58 +0000

The music lover’s social network Flowd , which recently arrived stateside after its European debut, just updated its mobile applications with a boatload of new features that make them worth a look. Up until now, Flowd was only mildly interesting, as it was primarily touting its 600 or so artists and DJs who had signed up for the network – a number which, in the grand scheme things, is merely a drop in the bucket of all things music. But with the new mobile apps, Flowd is now aggregating artists’ activity from other social networks, including Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud and Last.fm, allowing users to access artist updates, bios and gig calendars, even if the artist is not on Flowd. Although in testing, this added import/aggregation functionality didn’t mean that every artist profile page was now filled with data (it was still sort of hit-or-miss), there’s certainly more information than before. Plus, it should be noted that the problem with filing out profiles through automated means could be affected by the simple fact that some artists don’t have gig info online right now. In other words, nothing to pull in. In the updated Flowd mobile apps, there are nifty Twitter-esque “follow” buttons which let you quickly build a stream of updates from your favorite bands in order to get details on new concerts and other news. In a way, the Flowd apps can serve as a Twitter client for those interested in music, without you having to…you know…actually use Twitter. Also new in today’s app updates (iOS and Android) is a feature that lets Flowd scan your device to see what music is currently being played or the last track played. It can then post that info back to Flowd and optionally cross-post it to Facebook or Twitter. It’s not as elegant as the Spotify + Facebook integration (or MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, etc. + Facebook), but it can serve as a path for social music sharing for those old-school people who still like to purchase MP3′s from services like Amazon or iTunes instead of paying for a music subscription. (And yes, there’s a lot of those people left yet). The Flowd mobile apps are available for free on iTunes , Android and Ovi (Nokia), but the app updates are on iOS and Android only. Flowd is a portfolio company of Digia Ventures, the venture division of leading Finnish technology services firm Digia, Plc with offices in Helsinki, Finland and Santa Clara, CA.