Group items tagged

Lately, an unofficial Google News Regional app popped up in the Android Market. Now, Google has introduced a location-based content filter for Google News on mobile devices, called “News near you”. Google News for mobile will enable you to keep up with the latest local news, wherever you are.  The new feature in the U.S. English edition will be called “News near you” and seeks to provide you with news relevant to the city you are in and the nearby areas. Back in 2008, Google made the location-based news first available in Google News, and today there is already a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from many sources. Google News does their local news a bit differently from others. They employ machine learning to analyse each word in an individual story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is situated. Thanks to Google News’ new feature, you can now find local news on your smartphone.

"Thousands of Turkish demonstrators poured into central Istanbul yesterday to protest against the government's Internet censorship. New regulations from Turkey's Internet Technologies and Communications Authority set to come into effect on Aug. 22 will require Internet service providers to offer a choice of four filtering options: family, child, domestic or standard. Many websites are expected to be blocked as a result of the filtering measures."

GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

The trick is in the filtering, to be sure: you don't want to plow through irrelevant searches or receive too few alerts about the things that you want to track. "The quality of content I receive is unbeatable. I now spend less time searching for stories about prospects, competitors and my industry and more time engaging my audience," says Kelly Morgan, director of marketing at HealthRx and an early user of the GageIn service.

It tries to pull information about companies, people and actionable events such as personnel changes to a single place and doing so in real-time, too.

Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.

the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.

Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.

It looks like Facebook has just acquired mobile video and image app developer Digital Staircase, according to a blog post on the startup’s site. We’ve embedded the blog post below and emailed Facebook for confirmation.

Digital Staircase has developed a number of apps for video recording, image editing and more. MovieCam, which is available as an iPad and iOS app, is a camcorder app that provides recording features like 8x digital zoom, pause-and-resume recording functionality, and contrast enhancement. The app also allows you to add 18 movie effects and filters while shooting video.

From the post, it appears that the development team may be adding some of these functionalities to Facebook itself. Unfortunately, Digital Staircase will be removing its apps from the Apple App Store.

In the past 20 years, a lot of research has been done towards visual information retrieval on pictures and video files. Not all of it has been successful. But on the last years, the quality of these visual search engines has reached levels that are beginning to be acceptable for eDiscovery, compliance, law enforcement and intelligence applications.

More and more electronically stored information (ESI) is non-text based or does not contain any searchable text components: sound recordings, video and pictures are growing exponentially in size and more and more collaborative and social network applications support (only) these information formats.

In addition, a whole generation is growing up that no longer uses written communication forms such as letters or emails: they only use social networks and other new media forms for communication and collaboration.

In September, Wikets, Inc., announced it had raised $1.5 million from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Battery Ventures, as well as from six angel investors, to build a new iPhone application that allows users to rate products and share those recommendations with friends. Today, the app has gone live in iTunes.

At launch, Wikets lets you recommend products from its featured partners and from 60 major retailers, including iTunes (music and apps), Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Best Buy, The Home Depot, Wine.com, and others, as well as any place you can pull up on Yelp or Foursquare. You can also scan a product’s barcode, if you choose.

The resulting product is deceptively simple. You make a recommendation, optionally share it with friends via Facebook or Twitter, and then get rewarded in the form of points that can be later turned in for gift cards at online merchants.

A common mistake for those seeking to cope with this profound disruption is to confuse technology with innovation. Algorithms, apps and search tools help make data useful but they can’t replace the value judgements at the core of journalism.

Genuine innovation requires a fundamental shift in how journalists think about their role in a changed world. To begin with, they need to get used to being ‘curators’; sorting news from the noise on the social web using smart new tools and good old fashioned reporting skills.

I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we can trust it? * Delivery: How do we turn that content into stories for a changed audience?

#1: Assign campaign codes & track offsite converting goals (micro-conversions).

#2: Uniquely track online micro-conversions in offline systems.

#3: Get the current "faith based" number from Finance.