Sunday, 12 February 2012

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Sunday, 5 February 2012

Is This The Future of Touchscreen Tech? New Video Will Blow Your Mind By Mashable.com

Gorilla Glass manufacturer Corning has unveiled a follow-up YouTube video to its wildly successful “A Day Made of Glass,” providing another look into what the future could be like with the growth of glass touchscreen interfaces, from innovative chalkboards and activity tables in classrooms to uses for it in hospitals.

Corning released two versions of “A Day Made of Glass 2″ — one with a narrator and another, abbreviated version without commentary — the video follows the life of young Amy and her family as they go through their day using various products made of glass. Amy does classwork on a glass tablet, controls the temperature of the car from the backseat and even attends a field trip at the Redwood Forrest with an interactive signage that brings learning to life. Her teacher also works with students on interactive touchscreen activity tables. Corning expects these activity tables to be rolled out in the near future.

Last year’s video, which followed the same family, brought in over 17 million hits on YouTube and left many in awe of Corning’s interpretation of what’s possible with photovoltaic glass, LCD TV glass, architectural display and surface glass, among others.

However, many left comments on YouTube asking which technology is actually possible with today’s resources and pricing. This time around, though, new technologies and applications are highlighted, such as glass tablets, multitouch-enabled desks, solar panels, augmented reality, electronic medical records and anti-microbial medical equipment.

Corning may be making headlines these days for its Gorilla Glass product — a super-strong, lightweight glass which can withstand drops and mistreatment — but it’s hardly a new company and no stranger to innovation. In fact, the 160-year-old business even worked with Thomas Edison to create inexpensive glass for his lightbulbs.

However, Corning noted at the press screening that there are several challenges the company is facing this year, largely due to lower LCD glass prices, higher corporate tax rates and declining equity earnings, which have combined to lower Corning’s profitability.

Although LCD glass sales are likely to be flat through 2014, the company said it will remain profitable and continue to generate large amounts of cash. Last week, Corning announced that it raked in record 2011 sales of $7.9 billion and plans to grow sales to $10 billion by 2014.

The company also recently announced that it is joining forces with Samsung Mobile to manufacture Lotus Glass for Galaxy-branded smartphones and Super OLED TVs. Corning’s ultra-slim, eco-friendly Lotus Glass is known for strong performance and withstanding higher-processing temperatures.

Although Corning’s first “A Day Made of Glass” video was unveiled a week ago this year, Corning’s vice chairman and CFO James Flaws told Mashable that he couldn’t comment on whether or not the clips will become an annual tradition.

“You can expect more from us though,” Flaws said.

Friday, 20 January 2012

Visualizing Classical Music as a Roller Coaster Ride - the Atlantic

Visualizing Classical Music as a Roller Coaster Ride

JAN 18 2012, 4:55 PM ET 2

This ingenious promotional video for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra transforms the musical notes played by the first violinist in a symphony by Ferdinand Ries into a roller coaster track in real time.
The video was created by the production studio Virtual Republic. On their Vimeo page, they explain, "The notes and bars were exactly synchronised with the progression in the animation so that the typical movements of a rollercoaster ride match the dramatic composition of the music."

Stills from the video above
For more work by Virtual Republic, visit http://www.virtualrepublic.org/.
Via the Vimeo HD channel.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Engage: Apple’s New Tools for Interactive Books on iPad - Wired.com

Image via Apple.com

NEW YORK — Engagement is a big word in education. It combines both objective participation and subjective emotion. It’s one of the few psychological terms in education that links students, teachers andcontent. So it’s not surprising that in promoting the iPad as a tool for education, Apple touted the device’s ability to engage students.

Because they’re so engaging: okay, let’s just drop the bull and say it, because they’re cool — Apple sells a lot of iPads for education. At Thursday’s event, Apple’s Phil Schiller said that 1.5 million iPads were in use in education settings, leveraging more than 20,000 education applications. Today, Apple’s giving away brand-new tools that ensure the company will be able to sell many, many more.

iBooks 2: Reinventing the textbook

Apple’s first announcement is an update to its primary reading application for iOS: iBooks 2 is available in the App Store for iPhone or iPad today. (Disappointingly, there’s no move to add a desktop client for Mac or Windows.)

A few of the new textbooks’ features are standard fare when it comes to electronic books. For instance, it’s easy to highlight and annotate text just by swiping, or tap words to define them.

The iPad’s primary differentiator from a dedicated e-reader is going to be its ability to display full-color, interactive, multimedia content. With textbooks, that means not just audio and video, but also three-dimensional diagrams that can be touched, rotated, explored.

iBooks 2 adds familiar iOS gestures to interacting with these textbooks: not just tapping to select or pinch-and-spread to zoom, but also rotation to switch between text and multimedia — exactly the same way you would switch between list view and cover flow browsing music on an iOS device.

It also adds a few new views of its own: for instance, turning notes, highlights and annotations into an interface resembling a series of browsable index cards.

iBooks Author: Keynote’s bookish cousin

Other than these alternate views, the new iBooks are through-designed: authors define and lay out their own text and graphics. iBooks offers more authorial/editorial control than we’ve seen in any competing e-book platform. It’s possible to do this for the iPad in a way that it isn’t for Android or e-readers in part because every screen is exactly the same size.

The books are created in iBooks Author, a free application for Mac. (No app for Windows. Sorry, vast majority of the PC market! Apparently, on top of the iPads, Apple’s still got to sell some desktops, too.)

Even though it was tipped as a “GarageBand for e-books,” a better analogy might be a “KeyNote for e-books,” or “Pages on steroids.” It’s much closer in interface and philosophy to the template-based text-and-information apps of the iWork suite than it is to the media-driven apps of iLife. It’s not a remix machine as much as it is a layout and presentation engine.

iBooks Author even leverages Keynote to effectively drag-and-drop Keynote presentations to become interactive elements in e-books. Designers with a little more in the way of coding chops can build widgets in HTML5 and JavaScript.

From there, there are two important buttons at the top. One lets you preview the book on an iPad; the other publishes it to the iBookstore.

Textbooks in the iBookstore

Once an authored e-textbook is in the iBookstore, it’s got some tough company. Education publishing giants Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are all offering books there too, in a brand-new Textbooks section of the store.

Have you heard of the Big Six trade presses? In education, these are the Big Three.

For high school textbooks, these presses are committing to sell books at a remarkable $14.99 or less, which gets students access to continued updates to each digital edition. (~~It looks like bulk and institutional purchases are off the table, at least for now.~~)

(Update: Keen-eyed reader Daniel Bigler alerted me to this volume purchasing section of Apple’s Education site. A few caveats, though: Not all publishers make their books available for volume purchasing. An institution’s program facilitator buys the books, usually at a discount, and distributes codes to students and teachers. Under the current program, an iTunes account is required to redeem the codes, which limits them to users 13 and over. And the book (or app) is tied to that individual user’s iTunes account — so the school would have to repurchase books for each new cohort of students.)

Most of these presses are also involved in other e-textbook initiatives, including Inkling, in which Pearson and McGraw-Hill are both investors. But there are also a few iBooks exclusives, such as Life on Earthfrom the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, and four new illustrated reference books by DK Publishing, an imprint within Pearson’s Penguin Group. (Bring on the Lego Star Wars books! — sadly not among the new books announced.)

So that’s students, authors and publishers. What about those other people in education? You know, the ones who stand at the front of the room and still smell like chalk?

Reinventing the virtual classroom with iTunes U

Up until now, iTunes U has basically been a special education podcast section in iTunes, mostly geared towards higher ed. It’s a mic feed or camera over the shoulder in a lecture hall — which really only covers the most basic way information is conveyed in a proper classroom.

Now, iTunes U — still free — has become something much closer to a full-fledged learning management app for iOS. Teachers can post materials from syllabi to assignments, blog entries and updates, and everything else they need in order to communicate with students — on top of incorporating iBooks 2 and iTunes U audio/video content.

It’s not entirely clear to me that the new and improved iTunes U can become a wholesale replacement to current widely-used learning management systems like the much-reviled Blackboard. I don’t know whether it meets some of the specialized security requirements for handling assignment submissions, grading, and so forth. And again, deploying it as an iOS app rather than a web-based service limits its use to Apple’s proprietary platform. But it is potentially a powerful new tool to add to existing “open education” iTunes U-related initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare. And it’s exciting to see a company that actually knows how to build software a person would want to use venture into the bone-ugly world of education management systems. Finally, Apple’s lined up a slew of university partners who seem willing to give it a shot. So who knows?

Also, in line with the K-12 focus of today’s announcement, “iTunes U” is now also open to K-12 teachers and their students. The old joke about getting your kids ready to go to university when they start preschool has new meaning.

Summary: Apple’s publishing crabwalk

If you’re disappointed that Apple didn’t take something closer to a direct shot at either Amazon or the education industry establishment, don’t be. This has the potential to disrupt both — just elliptically.

Pardon the pun, but it’s a textbook Apple move. It leverages the company’s ability to create excellent desktop software (making the continued absence of an iBooks app for Mac or Windows now utterly perplexing, if not near-criminal) and team up with media partners.

It’s also a textbook Apple game-changer — in an almost literal sense of shifting the field of play. Amazon has far too much of a lead on Apple in distributing electronic versions of trade press and self-published books for iBooks to tackle them directly. Make that the metric and Apple can only lose.

Shift the focus to the education market — which by revenue actually far outstrips trade books — and Apple now can compete with startups like Inkling, Kno and Chegg on much more favorable terms.

Meanwhile, iBooks Author is the trojan horse. There really aren’t many easy-to-use e-book authoring apps, even for plain-text books for Kindle or Nook. And none of the easy-to-use applications have beenfree.

Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a development and publishing ecosystem that begins and ends with Apple. Amazon may offer more eyeballs, but Apple offers an easier workflow. And the multimedia enhancements baked into the new iBooks will tempt everyone creating an e-book to add bits that will be specific to Apple’s platform — creating accidental exclusives.

It’s not just about engaging students. It’s about engaging everyone in the education and publishing industries. If Apple can win their hearts and minds, it will win their business, too: Macs, iPads and iBooks.

Why Education Publishing Is Big Business

Tim is a technology and media writer for Wired. He loves e-readers, Westerns, media theory, modernist poetry, sports and technology journalism, print culture, higher education, cartoons, European philosophy, pop music and TV remotes.
Check out Tim's Google+ profile.
Follow @tcarmody on Twitter.

Tags: Amazon, Apple, education, iBooks, iPad, iTunes U, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Publishing

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Friday, 23 December 2011

How to Master YouTube Promoted Videos By Mashable.com

How to Master YouTube Promoted Videos

14 hours ago by Matt Lawson5

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Matt Lawson is the vice president of marketing at Marin Software, the largest paid search management provider.

Many people think of YouTube as a place to watch cat videos and post clips of their kids singing silly songs. However, marketers should take YouTube as seriously as they do Google.

By many counts, YouTube is the second-largest search engine(behind Google and ahead of Yahoo). In June 2011, ComScore reported that Americans had more than 5.6 billion YouTube viewing sessions per month, with the average visitor frequenting the site 23 times a month at an average of 26 minutes per visit. Reports show that YouTube passed 20 billion video views during October 2011 alone.

YouTube’s millions of visitors do a lot of searches, either by way of Google or the YouTube site itself. Predictably, sophisticated video search is the cornerstone of YouTube’s success.

For marketers, this means you need to think about your video strategy as carefully as you do your paid search strategy. Creating compelling videos and posting them on YouTube is a given — but you also have to get people to watch them. Make sure your videos turn up in search by using YouTube Promoted Video Ads to ensure your videos get found. The ads operate much like Google paid search ads, enabling advertisers to draw attention to videos, gain viewers and channel subscribers, and eventually influence downstream conversions. According to visitors’ search results, Promoted Videos appear either at the top or at the right of the page.

Additionally, with a Promoted Videos account, marketers can add overlays to their videos that link directly to their site, offer a promotion, etc., which will drive traffic to their sites and directly boost sales. Given the prominence of YouTube today, every marketer should consider a Promoted Videos program. Here are a few practical steps to get you started.

1. Create a Channel

Before you even think about buying Promoted Video ads, make sure you have a complete presence on YouTube. Start by creating engaging videos (not just one, but several) that promote your products and services in a fun, dynamic way. Don’t make these videos “salesy,” but instead focus on entertaining people. Experiment with different kinds of video, including how-tos, product reviews, customer testimonials and professionally-produced marketing videos. To create these videos, you can work with an agency, hire a video production company or shoot some yourself.

Once you’ve generated a menu of videos, create a YouTube channel to showcase them. Just as important, add accurate titles, descriptions and tags to every video; YouTube will use these keywords to match your video with visitors’ search queries. Over time, make sure to monitor video feedback. If a video achieves a positive response, it’s time to invest in promoting it.

2. Keywords are Key

Like other Google ads, Promoted Videos are managed through AdWords and follow a similar format to paid search, so search marketers may find the process of creating Promoted Video ads quite simple. When creating an ad, make sure the thumbnail description and ad copy reflect the nature of your video. Like paid search, you can select between broad, phrase, exact or negative match types for your Promoted Video keywords.

One thing to remember: YouTube visitors are looking just for video content, so their search habits differ from traditional search. That means porting over keywords from search or display campaigns won’t work. Instead, choose keywords that relate to the video you’re promoting. YouTube offers advertisers a keyword suggestion tool that provides recommendations based on your video description, video id/URL or target demographic. The tool, currently in beta, also provides monthly search volume statistics for each keyword, so you can see which keywords visitors tend to use more often.

3. Make Every Bid Count

When it comes to bidding for Promoted Video keywords on YouTube, approach the task as you would a paid search or display campaign. That means setting a conversion goal and determining an expected volume and budget for each month. Naturally, you’ll want to determine the value of each click before making bids. A third-party bidding tool, particularly one integrated with your SEM campaigns, proves useful in managing your YouTube bidding decisions and assessing the results of your Promoted Video campaigns.

4. Don’t Forget the Overlay

One of the primary perks of running Promoted Videos is the ability to include an overlay ad, clickable text that appears at the bottom of your video while it plays. The overlay allows you to add a link from your YouTube video to an external site, and is thus an invaluable technique to drive viewers to your site.

You can also use this space to offer a promotion, such as 20% off a customer’s first purchase, which directly impacts conversion. Video is often more of a branding tool, but with the overlay, you can turn your videos into actionable, direct response campaigns.

5. Don’t be Boring

First and foremost, YouTube is a massive content destination and social network. Consumers go to YouTube to be entertained, get information, find specific video clips and then share. Therefore, create videos that engage your target audience, then embed links in the overlay or at the end of your video that encourage people to pass along. A successful video doesn’t just get views, but also elicits a response and encourages sharing.

Track the social sharing path of your videos and respond to viewer comments. If viewers ask for a follow-up video, be sure to provide one. And if your video is shared onto other social networks, be sure to respond on those channels. Participating in the conversation with viewers allows you to strengthen your brand and provides insights on how to create better videos.

Online video is no longer just “nice to have.” Every marketer should have a video strategy — and YouTube is the place to start.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, ozgurdonmaz, Flickr, jonsson

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