AT&T has experimented with Second Life-like virtual environments to test its response to attacks. Its researchers, who are scattered around the country, create avatars that “visit” labs and run experiments. “We invented it because we were trying to cut down on travel,” he says. “We weren’t doing it to be cute. We were doing it to solve a problem.”
AT&T Talks Cybersecurity With Congress
Showing a new contact-management feature called “Genius” that lets users see similar deals, he said “We stole the idea out of iTunes!” Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce’s vice president of product marketing, clarified: It’s copying Amazon, too, not just Apple.
He admitted that some of his tactics, like encouraging followers to re-broadcast another site’s RSS feed, are ethically murky. “If I do it, it’s clever marketing. If it’s done to me, it’s spam,” he said.
]]>The section, called YouTube Edu, is the result of about a year’s work on the part of Google employees using their 20% time for outside projects, said Obadiah Greenberg, a partner manager at YouTube. Several of the search giant’s products and services, including Google News and its social-networking site Orkut, had a similar start.
Ira Socol noticed election workers at his polling place in Holland, Mich., Tuesday telling voters the address on their ID card had to match the one on their voter registration. Otherwise, they couldn’t use the voting machines.
The 52-year-old doctoral student believed this discouraged some from his low-income district from voting.
In Birmingham, Ala., Joy Heard, a 42-year-old warehouse worker, and her 26 relatives displaced from their New Orleans home by Hurricane Katrina, weren’t able to obtain absentee ballots in time to vote.
Annie Taylor, a new mother who works in landscaping with her husband, noticed people in the parking lot of her polling place in Austin, Texas, giving prospective voters wrong information about how to cast their ballots.
Such Election Day incidents have happened for two centuries of presidential contests, but they typically remain among a few friends, family members and co-workers. In some rare instances a local media outlet might pick up a story.
Not this year: Everyone’s an election observer.
All three of these frustrated voters took their complaints straight to the Internet, recording their experiences, either by email, text or video, and posting them on one of more than a dozen Web sites that have set up pages to funnel stories from voters.
Read it: Voters Post Experiences Online
]]>While the Warren, N.J., company said it limited submissions to strippers 18 and older and was screening the clips to police their content before posting them, the campaign quickly drew criticism from people worried that it would attract teenagers eager to shed their clothes. Further, some nonprofits that work with homeless teens said they weren’t comfortable with the stunt … In response to the outcry, Virgin Mobile is giving the campaign a facelift, renaming it “Blank2Clothe.” Instead of taking their clothes off, viewers will instead be asked to do anything they want — juggling, singing or standing on their heads, for example — to trigger views and therefore, more clothing donations.
Before:
After:
Read more: Virgin Mobile Pulls Back Racy Campaign
]]>“I wanted not a single tooth mark on the dog,” says Ms. Turbeville, 54. Her solution: a paste of cayenne pepper and Cholula Hot Sauce, which she painted on its tail. The cats still sniff the Aibo’s backside. “They just can’t help it. But they never, ever bite him anymore.”
Many owners have found robotic pets attacked by their “bio-pets” when they aren’t home, she says. People on some online forums suggest getting rid of the flesh-and-blood pets with territorial issues. “Obviously, they’re feeling threatened,” Ms. Turbeville says. “They retaliate. They retaliate hard.”
On Page One: When Dogs and Robots Collide, Somebody Needs a Talking To (Thanks, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Jezebel and Wonkette!)
(This story also ran in the Arizona Republic, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Charleston [W.V.] Gazette, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press and the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star.)
]]>Belly Dancing with 8×8’s Tango
It’s late in the day on Day 3, and CES attendees practically need a Tasering to notice an exhibitor at this point. Enter belly dancers.
The Other, Sexier Tech Expo
Attracting plenty of curiosity among CES-goers (and disappointment at the strict admission policies) is AVN’s Adult Entertainment Expo, which started today just down the corridor from one of the main CES exhibit halls.
Feeling the Bullets
You’re playing Call of Duty 2, and because you’re a n00b, you get shot in the back. With a new vest by Redmond, Wash.-based TN Games, you’ll feel more than just humiliation.
Roker, Bartiromo and Access Hollywood’s Nosejob
NBC is also relaunching the Web site for its nonstop coverage of Britney Spears, also known as Access Hollywood.
1.5 is On the Strip
Maybe Hitachi should reconsider one of its ad strategies.
Cute Overload for Geeks
Cute Overload, if you’re reading, you may want to consider an “electronics” category for your blog. Practically every exhibitor in this area sells something with a smiley face on it.
The Tube on Your BlackBerry
As if we all don’t spend enough time staring into them.
More True Black Than Meets the Eye
Example No. 328 of a company overshadowed by its booth gimmick — in this case, literally overshadowed.
Bring in Da Noise
Try getting heard when you’re based near the audio and gaming booths, where volume is one way to get an edge on your fellow exhibitors.
“Chocolate Rain” at Intel
YouTube sensation Tay Zonday is working the Intel booth, but someone might want to let the other staffers know.
How Big TVs Improve Family Life, and Other Sales Pitches
Pushing benefits over features is an age-old marketing tactic, and it gets a serious workout at CES.
Dancing for (and With) the Camera
Its artistic director describes the group’s style as surrealistic visual theater — “it’s not Cirque du Soleil,” he adds — though a Canon spokeswoman who earlier described the act eventually confessed, “I don’t know what they’re doing.
Tailgating at Caesar’s Palace
At the SimulScribe table, to get your attention they’ve even dropped the f- bomb — on their t-shirts. Let’s just say the service is strongly critical of, and aims to replace, voicemail.
Blogger “Lounge.” Press “Room.”
All those of us in the “press” know is that we got a flaming red badge holder (For “Stop and talk to me!” or maybe just “Stop”) and bloggers got, as Gizmodo calls it, the “white badge of shame.”
Ready, Set…
The Consumer Electronics Show officially starts tomorrow, but it’s always fun to get a sneak peek as the 2,700 exhibitors unpack their giant monitors, rehearse their booth banter and swear at the forklifts.
To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.
“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.
“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”
The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.
]]>Scribd, which allows anyone to upload documents much like YouTube lets users post videos online, has grown quickly since its September 2006 debut. Users have added more than 350,000 documents in various languages, ranging from instructions for solving a Rubik’s Cube to the sheet music from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Ave Maria.” Groups dedicated to sharing everything from Federal Communications Commission reports to Japanese comic books have sprung up.
But rivaling Scribd’s growing collection of schoolwork, public documents and other miscellanea is a significant amount of adult content, which the start-up has taken pains to downplay while it decides whether the explicit material will stay or go. As other Internet destinations that rely on user-generated content have learned — from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to video sites like YouTube and Veoh — keeping the site “clean” while not alienating users is a central challenge.
]]>Seconds later, the episode’s title, “Birth Control,” flashes on the screen.
That sort of wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn’t pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators — host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.
The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim — and boring — to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.
In “The Older Boyfriend,” which warns teenage girls against taking up with a guy in his 20s or 30s, Ms. Hasler says, “You may think you’re pretty cool for having an older boyfriend, but what you have to remember is he’s not cool for dating you. He’s a loser. And you can find plenty of losers to date at school.”
More than 50,000 people subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. The “Midwest Teen Sex Show” is listed under iTunes’ “Health” category, where it regularly is in the top 10. Yesterday, it was No. 7, compared with Discovery Health Channel at No. 20.
Along with growth has come controversy, particularly among sex-education teachers and therapists. While some praise it for tapping a hard-to-reach audience, others worry it’s too racy for younger teens, and still others say the podcast focuses too much on humor and not enough on the facts kids need.
]]>In the three-minute film “Cognizance,” a hit man on his way to his next target wordlessly reflects on his life. He walks past shoppers browsing in stores, children on a merry-go-round, a young couple embracing. Finally, he spots his intended victim across a busy street, and, as the soundtrack music by Coldplay swells, he reconsiders and drops his gun in an alley.
As the killer turns and begins to walk home, he finds himself facing the barrel of another man’s gun. A subtle smile crosses his placid, yellow face as the screen fades to black.
One reviewer said he was “overwhelmed with emotion” by the film. Another called it “a gleaming gem,” adding that it was “required viewing for anyone interested in our little plastic world.”
“Cognizance” is one of hundreds of movies known as “brickfilms” that are getting attention on YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Amateur filmmakers use Lego pieces to create characters and scenes, sometimes spending months painstakingly arranging and rearranging the blocks before the camera. Re-creations of famous moments in “Star Wars” and “Titanic,” faithfully rendered in the primary colors of Lego pieces and stitched together from thousands of stop-motion frames, have drawn hundreds of thousands of viewings. Many of the productions are original films with elaborate plotlines, soundtracks and voice-overs.
The growing genre is driven by a lively online community of would-be Spielbergs who swap tips on message boards about tackling the unique challenges of the medium.
Read In This Film Industry It Really Helps To Be a Blockhead
]]>But the 23-year-old, who received his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, instead plans to study the growth of social-networking sites like Facebook and why unpaid volunteers spend time fixing incorrect Wikipedia entries. He enrolls this fall in a new graduate program in social computing at the University of Michigan.
Michigan’s program clinched his decision to attend that school. Social computing “has more of a focus on real-life applications, whereas [computer science] is very broad and more ambiguous,” he said. “I do think there’s a growing interest from students, myself included, and the universities seem to be responding to that.”
After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing. The moves, like other academic expansions into fields like videogame design, are part of an effort to keep technology studies relevant to students’ lives – and to tap subjects with entrepreneurial momentum. Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among the tech companies that have invested in schools’ social computing programs.
The programs tend to draw as much from the sociology, psychology and communications departments as they do from more traditional computer science classes.
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