Tag: Social

Peel Recommends TV Shows For You

Posted by Andrew at 12:24 AM on February 9, 2012

In the “old days” finding enjoyable TV programmes relied on three sources – in programme advertising for another show, flicking through the channels or your friends saying, “Did you watch xxxx last night? It’s brilliant!” At CES, Andy and Courtney discover Peel, a fourth way of discovering great new TV shows.

Peel is an iPhone and Android app which offers show recommendations based on your viewing habits and the shows that your friends and family are watching.

The app offers “Top picks” based on what you watch and you can rate shows as favourites or as “guilty pleasures” – I think we all know what that means! The app also gives “Friends’ favourites”, the shows that everyone else is watching, so you can catchup with what’s hot.

It’s not clear whether Peel is US-centric or not, but it’s a free app, so there’s nothing to lose.

Interview by Andy McCaskey and Courtney Wallin of SDR News and RV News Net.

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Tags: Android, Apple, ces, google, IOS, iPhone, Peel, Social, TV

Posted in Android, Apple, ces, Film, google, Interview, iOS, iPhone, smartphone, Social Media, Special Media, TV

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Quirky – Social Product Development

Posted by Andrew at 3:42 PM on May 23, 2011

I love these entrepreneurial websites such as Kickstarter. It’s a vicarious pleasure in seeing other people’s ideas and helping these people succeed by investing in their products. I found a new one today – Quirky – which I think takes the idea development to the next level. Quirky refer to it as a “A Socially Developed Product (TM)” and they help you take a product from the idea through product development to production and sales.

Here’s Quirky’s product development process.

The Quirky Process (courtesy of Quirky)

What seems to be unique about Quirky (and to be fair, I haven’t exhaustively researched the topic) is that part of the process is to encourage feedback from Quirky members to improve the product. They call it “community curation”. It’s a great idea especially if it leads to better products.

Taking it further, Quirky has this notion of influence. You earn influence by submitting ideas or commenting on products, and influence converts into a proportion of the profit from those objects that you worked on. The explanation is a bit opaque in places and I’d be interested to see what sort of money people make but it seems to be way to reward everyone who helped make the product a success.

There are some really interesting products on the site and the one that currently has my eye is the Converge docking station. It’s probably less docking station and more charging station but it looks great and solves a problem that many of us have.

The Converge is in pre-sale and so far it looks like it has garnered only 69 orders out of the 1300 needed to put it into production, so I don’t know how many products actually make it from pre-sale to production.

Overall, I like the idea and I’ll be following along but with all of these things, exercise caution. If you’ve got a great idea, it might be an excellent place to get a product into the market. But you need to read the small print and understand ownership of the intellectual property and design, your portion of the profit and so on – I haven’t delved into any of these things yet. If you aren’t happy, walk away.

Tags: gadgets, product development, quirky, Social, toys

Posted in Gadgets, Information, Toys

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Smyle Social Collaboration App

Posted by tomwiles at 9:34 AM on February 8, 2011

James Sim and Ilya Braude discuss the debut of a new social collaboration app for Android and the web called Smyle, enabling users to form collaborative groups. Features include chat, location sharing, white boarding and image exchange.

Interview by Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central and Tom Newman of The Fogview Podcast.

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Tags: Android, app, ces, collaboration, Drakontas, google, Ilya Braude, James Sim, Smyle, Social

Posted in Android, application, ces, google, Info, Information, Interview, smartphone, Special Media

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Flixwagon Mobile Video Broadcast and Social Networking Platform

Posted by tomwiles at 5:11 PM on February 2, 2011

Arie Offner and Roy Ginat present Flixwagon (http://www.flixwagon.com/), a mobile video broadcast and social networking platform. The product is aimed at business and corporate users. Verizon will be soon launching the Flixwagon Android application for selected Verizon Android phones.

Interview by Esbjorn Larsen of MrNetCast.com and Jeffrey Powers of Geekazine.Com.

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Tags: Android, broadcast, ces, Flixwagon, google, Mobile, networking, platform, Social, verizon, video

Posted in Android, ces, google, Info, Information, Interview, mobile, Special Media, verizon, video, videocast

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A Review of GetGlue

Posted by KL Tech Muse at 9:35 PM on November 30, 2010

GetGlue is a social sharing service that is available through the web, Iphone, Ipad and Android. It allows you to share not only what your watching or listening too, but also what your reading, thinking about, eating. The first thing you do when you join GetGlue is you have the opportunity to rate various categories including movies, music, actor, artist, books. Based on how you rate things Glue offers you suggestions of things that you might like. Getting suggestion from Getglue is especially useful when you first join and you don’t have many followers. As you get more followers the suggestions get better and more accurate. Also when you rate and review things you can win actual physical badges.

It is fun to see what other people think of the things that you like and also what you didn’t like. Sometimes when you watch or read something and your view of it is different then what the majority of the web seems to think, it makes you feel bad as of you are missing something. With Getglue you find people who think like you and see things the same way you do. I like reading those reviews and seeing what other people think. There are other programs like GetGlue one that I also use is Miso. However with Miso you can only review videos, and there are no way to rate them. Also with Miso you don’t get suggestions based on what you have rated. I will admit I don’t use Miso that much, unlike Getglue I am not really getting anything out of it.

Geek News Central Research Analyst Carissa Caramanis O’Brien looked into how Getglue is doing and found an article from Crunchbase that said that in October Getglue reached the milestone of 10 million checkins in October. It is also starting to offer not only badges but also discounts through its partnership with HBO. If you subscribe to HBO this great, however for those of us who are not HBO subscribers it’s interesting but not useful. Hopefully GetGlue can make more arrangements with other providers such as Itunes or Amazon. I would especially love to see it make an arrangement with Amazon, which would allow everyone to use it no matter how they view or get their media. Do you use Getglue, if you do you can follow me I am listed as klandwehr. If you don’t, I would recommend that you try it. It is free and it is great way to find new things.

Tags: sharing, Social, suggestions

Posted in Information

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My First Look at RockMelt

Posted by KL Tech Muse at 6:34 PM on November 9, 2010

RockMelt a new browser came out this week to a lot of fan fare from the main stream tech media.Robert Scoble did a good interviews with the creators of the browser which can be found on YouTube. The newest Net@Nite which should be available for download tomorrow (Nov 10, 2010) interviewed the cofounder and they asked some questions about how much personal information the company was caching and their security. Their basic answer was we’re not interested in personal information and they take security serious. Once the episode is available I would recommend watching it. I was lucky to receive a beta-invite yesterday afternoon and have been trying it out since then. There are a couple of things that I really like about Rockmelt, On the right hand side of the browser there is a side bar where you can put your favorite sites and as they update a ticker number goes up. If you click on the icon. A stream comes up showing the latest updates and you can key down through the updates. If you find something you like you simple click on it and the page pops up. If you want to share a site there is an icon at the top to share it on Twitter or Facebook . You can add sites manually or Rockmelt will nudge you if you visit a site a lot to add it. If you search for something and you use the RockMelt search pane a preview of the searches will come up and as you arrow down through them the pages on your browser windows change to the corresponding page. On the left hand side you see your Facebook connections, which you can arrange either by who is online or by your favorite contacts. If the person is online the dot next to their avatar will turn green. If you want to chat with the person you simply click on their avatar and a chat window comes up. If you want to share a link with someone, you can simply drag the link to their avatar and drop it.

There are a couple of negatives about RockMelt, the first is when you open up the browser you have to sign into Facebook. So if you are not into Facebook or Twitter this is definitely not the browser for you. Most extensions available in Chrome will work, however they are still having problems with some extensions like Lastpass and 1password. They are working to fix those problems as they are being reported. The one thing that is a little annoying is when you share something thru the RockMelt sharing app the number indicator on the icon goes up. I don’t really need to know that I just posted something. The browser did crash once today, but came back up right away other then that I haven’t had any technical problem that I am aware of.

So far I do like the browser, the connection to your social site is great and easy to use. I am not sure though how successful this will be in the long run, after all a social browser has been tried before, think Flock. If you already using a browser that you are happy with, is the integrated social media enough to change, I am not sure it is. However if you are into Facebook or Twitter I would recommend trying it. If you are interested in trying RockMelt I do have two invites available.

Tags: browser, RockMelt, Social, startup

Posted in Information

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The Long Tail

Posted by tomwiles at 8:06 PM on August 13, 2010

In the world of blogging, podcasting and social networking, much has been said about the so-called “long tail.” The concept of the “long tail” revolves around the idea that available content living on the Internet gets a lot of extra audience over a long period of time, as opposed to traditional print and broadcast content which has a much more limited lifespan.

As services such as Netflix gain popularity, yet another form of content is experiencing the benefits of the long tail – movies and TV shows that are available for long-term streaming. An excellent example of how the “long tail” benefits movies in particular are obscure documentaries that in the old pre-streaming days would have a limited initial audience and then end up on a shelf somewhere or be sold in consumer video release one at a time.

Now more obscure movies and TV shows that had a limited lifespan and limited impact are able to take a new lease-on life that used to simply not exist.

I am particularly enjoying streaming documentaries on Netflix. There are some real gems out there. One documentary I really enjoyed in particular that I’d never heard of before I found it on Netflix is called “Cowboy Del Amor.” It’s about a Texas matchmaker who specializes in matching up American men with Mexican women. If you haven’t seen this gem, I highly recommend it. “Cowboy Del Amor” is but one example of movies that have a very limited promotion budgets and therefore are unable to make much of a publicity splash when they are released, yet they can be absolutely fantastic movies to not only watch yourself but to share later with friends and family.

I dropped my Dish Network account in July 2010 and have not looked back. Streaming videos via services such as Netflix forces me to take a much more active role in selecting something good to watch. Having literally tens of thousands of movies and videos available for instant streaming on demand is a far superior way to find and consume commercial content.

Tags: audience, blogging, content, Cowboy Del Amor, long tail, matchmaker, Media, Mexico, movies, netflix, Social, streaming, Texas, TV

Posted in blogging, internet, Netflix, Social Media, Streaming

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GNC-2008-01-25 #342

Posted by geeknews at 2:57 AM on January 25, 2008

Great commentary from all of you and we cover a huge amount of tech news today. Some voicemail taking me to task at the end of the show over the financial issues of dreamhost.

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