THE Tech Scoop » James Hicks

The Facebook IPO

James Hicks — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:59:48 +0000

It’s about to happen. Zuckerberg, and a large number of Facebook employees are going to become extremely paper rich !!

Are you planning to pick up a few hundred or so shares? My pockets aren’t that deep just yet, but if you’re in – good luck !

I’ll let this infographic do all the talking about what’s about to go down.

Created By: MBA Online

James Hicks

James is the Founder and Chief Technologist of HicksNewMedia, a technology consulting and digital publishing firm providing effective and relevant solutions to individuals and businesses looking to utilize all things on the interweb. Follow him on Twitter | about.me | Facebook | Google+

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Apple Scotland, Having a Weee Bit o’ Trouble

James Hicks — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:04:22 +0000

Ah Siri. We love you and we hate you.

You help us find the closest Starbucks and see what our daily schedule is like, but if you don’t have that perfect Cupertino, California pitch to your voice, there could be problems with Ms. Siri understanding exactly what it is you’re asking.

Let’s take our Scottish-based Apple enthusiasts for example, here is a great post on latimes.com that points out some of the frustration that is occurring getting Siri to decipher the Scottish accent.

Below, a NSFW, but hilarious video that sums up the Scottish-Siri dilemma perfectly.

James Hicks

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My Love/Hate Relationship With HootSuite

James Hicks — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 05:47:10 +0000

Social media manager, new media specialist, or maybe social strategist – whatever the perceived title may be, that’s one of the roles I put on my business card. Essentially the goal I have is to assist businesses and individuals to more effectively utilize the Social InterWeb.

In this role I’ve been approached by tons of startups and organizations looking to make managing social/new media profiles easier and more thorough (with analytics and true understanding of KPIs – key performance indicators).

As far as social media dashboards go I tend to bounce back and forth between the default Twitter app, which is now actually TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite. Yes I know there are other tools but the Radian 6, CoTweet and other big money platforms are outside of the scope of my stealth startup’s budget!!

Ever since TweetDeck got fully taken over by Twitter that dashboard has gone downhill in terms of usability and is more frustrating than anything at this point. I’ll expand on that in a future post.

As far as Seesmic goes; I love everything the company is doing; the LeWeb Conference and all the other aspects that Loic Le Meur is pursuing for his company. The challenge with Seesmic, for me, and a lot of other users is that Seesmic Desktop doesn’t work with OSX Lion due to a crazy Microsoft Silverlight compatibility issue. Man I hope they get that all sorted out sooner than later.

That leads me to HootSuite. Great tool. Great management team. Great energy. I tend to bounce back and forth between having a paid subscription to HootSuite and just using the free version. I’m always looking for and seeing other 3rd party tools that’ll pull in the various analytics and Facebook Insights that HootSuite offers with their Pro membership.

But, at the end of the day, it just makes sound business sense to spend the $6 per month and have all of that analytical aggregation integrated within one tool.

Not too long ago HootSuite announced their App Directory, which I truly believe is in direct response to the great app marketplace that has been part of Seesmic Desktop since day 1.

HootSuite’s App Directory makes the $6 worth the expense. Flickr, Tumblr, and Summify were the first apps that I installed when they rolled out, but now I see that the offering has been extended to include some absolute musts for those utilizing social media, especially Twitter, to make a living.

Constant Contact, Digg, Get Satisfaction, and one of my absolute favorite tools online InboxQ have now been added to HootSuite.

InboxQ is the Quora of Twitter. InboxQ allows you to search and filter through tweets from everyone, based on whatever category or topic you choose. Then you can utilize those filters to respond and answer questions that are asked. Helps you gain followers, credibility and a broader reach since you are seen as a subject matter expert to people you probably wouldn’t have had any previous interaction with.

So I’m back on HootSuite. Still spending my $6 per month. I’m loving the App Directory. Now, my only gripe – I really don’t like how HootSuite goes to sleep after some thirty minutes or so of “inactivity”. I’d be willing to pay $10 per month to kill that feature.

What are your thoughts? Do you use any of these tools? Do you have any other recommendations? One other dashboard that I am evaluating and am participating in a beta for is MarketMeSuite which is a UK-based company getting positioned to take over the social media dashboard world!! I HIGHLY suggest you check their product out as well before finalizing on a tool of choice.

James Hicks

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How Long Can Your Business Be Without Critical Systems? [infographic]

James Hicks — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 04:52:02 +0000

When’s the last time you, personally or at your business backed up your critical data?

We always talk about it; the fact that disaster recovery mechanisms are a must-have, however we tend to always procrastinate or just hope that inevitable day when a hard drive fails never happens. Well – it’s gonna happen!!!

Check this great infographic by Doyenz that points out just how long a business can probably survive should critical business applications go down.

Not to be a complete downer, and to leave some ray of hope, Doyenz also includes five tips for small businesses to consider when planning for a disaster such as redundancy with geographical distribution of data and actively poking holes and testing your DR plan.

Take heed people. Take heed.

CrunchBase Information

Doyenz

Information provided by CrunchBase

James Hicks

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Facebook Timeline Movie Maker

James Hicks — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:33:10 +0000

As you all may know, Facebook has released the Timeline and making it part of everyone’s view.

I’ve been running the Timeline, like a number of other early adopters, for a few months now and really think that it is a great culmination and view of what your shared, digital life looks like. We can talk privacy and opt-in and opt-out concerns later – for now lets just talk about the cool photos and videos we’re all sharing on Facebook.

Well, to make those photos and videos standout even more, and connect with your viewers Facebook has worked collaboratively with Definition 6 to create the Timeline Movie Maker.

After opting in (see told you the privacy conversation would come up…), the app generates a movie based on your greatest hits, attempting to capture the highlights of your Facebook experience through the years by surfacing pieces of content with high levels of engagement.

It’s similar in format to the video Facebook made to introduce Timeline at the F8 conference in September featuring Andy Sparks.

It’s also reminds me alot of the Intel Museum of Me app that was introduced about a year ago.

Timeline Movie Maker will initially be available in English, French, Spanish and German, and will have five music soundtracks from which people can choose to create their minimovie. People can also customize their music selection, images, videos or check-ins at the end of the first automated video view.

“Timeline is about sharing the key moments of your life with your friends and family,” said Paul Hernacki, chief technology officer at Definition 6. “Timeline Movie Maker is evaluating highly engaged content in a chronological fashion, choreographing a user’s personal journey on Facebook, with content that has the most engagement and uses comment analysis to identify key life moments and where the user is tagged.”

Go here to create your own Timeline Movie. Click here to go check out mine.

[source AdAge]

James Hicks

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RIM Wants To #BeBold in 2012

James Hicks — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:16:22 +0000

I can honestly say I feel a bit sorry for RIM users and employees (not for their “leadership” team). It’s the users who love their BlackBerry devices and who sincerely want a quality product.

But when you have an executive team that has been caught up in all the nonsense they have as of late, and a new executive team running marketing campaigns such as this #BeBold one – man it hurts.

I do like the pretty colors in the infographic though.

Your thoughts?

James Hicks

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MacBook Air Docking Station

James Hicks — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:38:50 +0000

Since Apple won’t build it, we have to look to 3rd-party innovation to build us MacBook users that much need docking station.

Now that I have moved over to a MacBook Air I’m especially intrigued by this latest Kickstarter project, that was at MacWorld|iWorld last week. It’s from an organization called LandingZone and after only a few weeks listed on Kickstarter, they’ve reached their target numbers and are going forward with production.

Here are the specs

Total of 4 USB 2.0 ports; no need to attach a separate USB hub
Built in 10/100T Ethernet port; no more dongles for the Ethernet or fumbling with the cable
Built in Mini DisplayPort capable of driving resolution up to 2560×1440
Built in locking port compatible with all the Kensington Locks; now you can secure your MacBook Air
Two models to support either the 11″ or 13″ version of the MacBook Air (2010 or later)
Beautifully designed and engineered for simplicity, elegance, reliability and functionality (patent pending)
Comes with US power adapter which accepts wide range of input voltage (100~240 Vac)

Since they’ve already reached funding goals, the early adopters have gotten the sweet pricing deal. So for the rest of us, it looks like LandingZone is going to charge $200 for both the 13 and the 11-inch models of the dock. Shipping is expected to as early as February for the 11-inch and March for the 13-inch model.

Yeah – I’m getting one of these.

James Hicks

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Vidify – The Instant Video Maker iApp

James Hicks — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:51:15 +0000

Sharing our photos and videos, that’s what we want to do with these fancy smart, mobile devices (every once in a while maybe make a phone call, but that’s definitely becoming the secondary function).

Vidify is a neat, fully featured app that one of our writers found out about recently at the LA AppShow.

What Vidify does is simply the task of creating high quality video from your iDevice.

Vidify automatically edits music videos and montage videos on the fly using the footage from your camera roll and a soundtrack from your iPod/iPhone library.

“When we share personal videos, we’re sharing a story, and music can play a big role in communicating that narrative. When we developed Vidify, it was important that people had the option to tell their story to their favorite music, or to music that was deeply imbedded in the app,” states Ian Noe, co-founder of Nice Labs. “Users will be blown away with how a touch of a button results in creating a story that seamlessly blends from moment to moment as the music plays. It literally looks just like you spent hours editing it.”

What’s awesome – there’s NO editing required. Simply select your videos and your song and Vidify does the rest.

Specifics:

Use any video on your camera roll from any source
Use any track from your iPod library as a soundtrack
Fully licensed Featured Music Library with music by independent artists
Instantly share videos with your friends using Facebook, Youtube and email
Play wirelessly on your Apple TV
Fast processing times using the iPhone’s built in hardware
Create sharp hi-res videos (HD 720p)

Note: You’ll obviously want to be aware that using commercial music in your video will get rejected by YouTube. I hear that Facebook is also sending notices to people for using copyrighted, commercial audio in video montages – just be aware !!

Here’s video showing exactly how easy Vidify is to use.

Now the fun – we at THE Tech Scoop are running a little giveaway for your very own copy of Vidify. Enter the contest by following the instructions below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good Luck !

James Hicks

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Nintendo Wii U – Coming This Holiday Season

James Hicks — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:36:53 +0000

In a report published by NetworkWorld and based on news straight from Japan - Nintendo has announced that its next-generation Wii U game console will launch in time for the holiday season in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

The successor to the popular Wii console will integrate a popular touch-card technology into its controllers. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said the device will use NFC, or near field communication, standards that are widely employed in tap-and-go train passes and other payment systems worldwide.

“It will become possible to create cards and figurines that can electronically read and write data via noncontact NFC,” Iwata said in a speech, a copy of which was posted on Nintendo’s web site.

“Adoption of this functionality will enable various other possibilities such as using it as a means of making micropayments,” he added.

The Nintendo chief said final details about the Wii U will be announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a major annual game exhibition to be held this year in June in Los Angeles.

The Wii U has a large controller that is similar to a dedicated handheld console, with a touchscreen, motion detection and camera. Its small screen can be used to supplement games played on TVs or replace the larger display entirely.

Speaking about related Nintendo technologies, Iwata added that Nintendo is working to expand StreetPass and SpotPass, the peer-to-peer platforms of the device, which let users communicate and compete via their 3DS consoles. The company is also working to expand its fledgling online shop for the device.

Looks like I may have an original Wii up for sale soon.