Posts tagged Take
How to Take Better Food Porn Photos
Jan 31st
Admit it. You’re an amateur food porn photographer. But don’t worry, you’re certainly not alone.
Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don’t communicate that sentiment.
“You need a light source from the side,” says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photograph. “You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can’t do with a single light source.”
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Amateur food photographs exist in part because of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. People sync up their Facebook and Twitter accounts to their smartphones, shoot a photo and feel compelled to share it with their friends. Crappy lighting usually accounts for the horrible photo.
“You’re in a dark restaurant, you have to use a single frontal flash, it looks like shit,” Hamilton says. “Not even a portrait looks good when you’re taking a photo of friends.”
To prove that it is possible to take better food photos from a smartphone, Hamilton goes out to restaurants every week and shoots food photos with his iPhone. Then goes back to his studio and touches them up. He documents the entire project on his blog, The Restaurant Project. Here’s a short video he produced with tips for taking better food photos. Some of the ideas: Avoid incandescent light. Blow out the background. Use simple light and propping.
“The majority of people who are posting photos to Facebook and Twitter are doing it for the pure pleasure of it. They’re not getting business out of it,” says Hamilton. “Whether it’s going to a restaurant like NEXT or going to McDonald’s, they’re still Facebook-ing about it.”
Instagram Filters Won’t Help You Make The Photo Less Food Porn-y
Jon and Curt decided to take this food porn idea too far, creating a horrible Tumblr blog full of all the bad photo photographs you’ve ever dreamed of. A photo I shot has been added to this Internet hall of shame. Here it is.
It’s gorgeous, right? That’s what I thought. So, I tweeted it to Jon and Curt, looking for some sort of approval. “I would argue that this is not food porn,” I said, proudly. I could single-handedly beat food porn.
Curt replied with a typical, quotable Curt line: “GOOD GOD!” “It is to food porn as amateur porn is to porn – even worse.”
Shocked, I tried a few other similarly desperate tweets. Then at last, I admitted defeat: “@curthopkins @jonmwords Nooooo! I’ve cornered myself into an art food porn-ified corner of hellish green triangles.”
Then Jon added my photo to the Tumblr food porn hall of shame.
Why did this photo become food porn? The rest of this conversation occurred on Facebook with ReadWriteWeb’s Editor-in-Chief, Richard MacManus after I commented on his horrific photo of bean slop.
I think we can all agree that those beans look disgusting. But Richard admitted to purposely making the food look more horrific, for Jon’s benefit.
After I asked him, he honestly explained to me why my green cake looked gross.
“It was very artistic, I’ll give it that 
I think the green is what creates the opposite effect…” he FB commented to me. “Well, artistically the photo definitely works – the triangle shaped table, the brown / green colors, etc. In terms of whether the photo makes the cake look more edible, honestly the Instagram filter makes the green look a little sickly (color wise) and it also somehow heightens the sugariness of the cake (it’s shiny and kind of glistens,” he said.
I appreciated his honesty. Interestingly, in this case, it was my seemingly awesome use of an Instagram filter, which I thought might save this from amateur food pornification. Instead, it was the very thing that actually sent my photo straight to amateur food pornland.
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The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO: 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge – Search Engine Land
Jan 31st
 Search Engine Land |
The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO: 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge
Search Engine Land Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. In fact, it is not even as faceted as many other sectors of SEO in which practitioners have to perform many more nuanced SEO tasks (and often by themselves). So why is Enterprise SEO so … SEO Positive Partners With Bournemouth Nursing & Residential Home Brick Marketing Hosts February Boston SEO Workshop Don't slack off your SEO resolutions |
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The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO: 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge
Jan 31st
Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. In fact, it is not even as faceted as many other sectors of SEO in which practitioners have to perform many more nuanced SEO tasks (and often by themselves). So why is Enterprise SEO so underserved and why do so few large…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
iOS Developers Take Home $700 Million in Q1
Jan 24th
Apple just blew everybody out of the water. It is astonishing, really. Revenue of $46.33 billion? Yeah, Greece called. It is looking for a bailout. Anyway, there is one number that is making mobile developers across the world salivate: $700 million.
That is the amount that Apple paid out to iOS developers in the last quarter. Apple has paid out $4 billion cumulatively to iOS developers through the App Store. If we extrapolate those numbers considering Apple’s 30% take of App Store purchases, the company did $1 billion in gross sales through the App Store in the quarter. Mobile developers: this is the carrot you are chasing.
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We have written several times that it is unlikely that developers will ditch iOS in favor of writing for other platforms, such as Android or Windows Phone. There is too much money to be made in iOS for developers to choose and Android-first strategy, unless they are looking at some market inefficiencies that could be better served by developing for something other than iOS. We have seen some developers focus on RIM for that specific reason.
There are 550,000 apps in the App Store according to Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer and that includes 170,000 for the iPad (a number that could be misleading as many iPad apps are made with the “+” designation that means they function on both the iPad and iPhone). If we figure that the Android Market is generating even 50% of what the App Store does, that makes mobile applications about a $1.5 billion quarterly market or $6 billion a year. That is probably a high estimate considering that Apple’s last quarter happened to coincide with the holiday shopping season (Oppenheimer did note a lot of activity on iTunes and the App Store on Dec. 25).
Note, we are talking gross revenue here, not just application sales. That would include in-app purchases as well. What this does not include is money made through advertising within mobile apps, which makes the number quite a bit higher. Google does not take a cut for itself with 70% going to developers and 30% split among various parties like payment processors.
For 2012, perhaps $6 billion is not low at all between Andriod and iOS app revenue. Smartphones such as the iPhone 4S and new Android devices continue to make their way into more and more hands. Apple has sold 315 million iOS devices in its history and Android still technically outsells Apple devices. There were 37 million iOS devices sold in the last quarter and about 15 million iPads. Estimates place Android sales for the quarter within the 60-65 million range.
The fact of the matter is that there will be money to be made by some smart entrepreneurs looking to make some great apps in the near future. Developers, it is time to cast your net. Working across both iOS and Android, there is a decent living to be made writing mobile applications.
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The Google-Approved Way To Take Down Your Website In Protest
Jan 16th
There’s been a flurry of good news in the last few days for opponents of the SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy legislation worming its way through the U.S. Congress. The White House has come out opposing key flaws in the legislation, so both versions are effectively stuck for now. Not taking any chances, some of the world’s biggest websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, are going dark on Wednesday, January 18 to protest the ill-conceived anti-piracy legislation.
On American Censorship Day in November, Tumblr censored its users’ dashboards. Now other Web behemoths will follow suit, taking their sites offline entirely. For other sites interested in joining the protest, there are technical considerations affecting search engine placement that webmasters should consider. Google’s Pierre Far has shared some important tips.
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Far’s recommendations apply for any intentional, temporary downtime, whether for protest or maintenance. The essential step is to use a 503 HTTP status code, which indicates “service unavailable,” for all participating URLs.
That tells Google that the temporary conditions of the pages are not their “real” content, so the search engine won’t index them. That will also prevent duplicate content issues, even if the same message – whether it’s a word of protest or a message about maintenance – is displayed on all pages.
“Googlebot’s crawling rate will drop when it sees a spike in 503 headers,” Far says. This is normal, but he says the rate will recover soon for a temporary blackout. For webmasters only blacking out a portion of their sites, Far says they should not change the status code or explicitly disallow crawling in the robots.txt file, which gives Googlebot site-specific instructions. Webmaster Tools will report errors, but this is normal.
Far’s bottom-line advice is, “Keep it simple and don’t change too many things.” You can read his full instructions over on Google+.
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Dating a Geek? Take This Compatibility Quiz
Jan 13th
Dating a geek can be a lot of fun: we all want our live-in tech support. Let’s face it, geeks can be sexy too. But how do you know when you have a ringer or the real deal? And what if one of you is a PC and the other is a Mac? Time to take our quiz. Ask your geek these questions and add up the score to see whether you are truly compatible in tech.
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- What kind of home Internet connection are we talking about?
- S/he is still is on dial-up. WTF?
- Your connection is way faster than your companion’s.
- Your companion has got the fiber thing going on and you can’t wait to stream the latest episode of DWTS.
- When s/he says he is going to make you a mix tape, you actually get:
- A real cassette with music on it that has been personally selected from a collection of vintage vinyl.
- A CD that s/he has burned from iTunes.
- A dedicated playlist on Spotify or Rdio or personal Pandora station.
- Who has more apps on their cell?
- Your companion doesn’t have a smartphone, still using a Razr from 2005.
- You are totally hip-deep in apps and can show your companion some funny Siri moments on YouTube.
- S/he has written at least one app and is selling it on iTunes.
- When you spend the night at his/her place and bring your laptop, does s/he give you access to the home Wifi network?
- No, because s/he doesn’t have Wifi, what where you thinking?
- Yes, no problemo, you are sitting side-by-side typing away and sharing your online moments right now.
- Yes, but s/he will also show you how to hack into several of the neighbors’ networks too just for fun.
- How long have you been together before you get your own ringtone on your companion’s mobile?
- Forget it: s/he has no clue that you can program your own custom ringtones.
- By the third date, s/he has this covered.
- S/he downloaded your favorite songs to his or her phone and gives you several choices.
- You want to go out for a movie. What’s playing?
- S/he reaches for the newspaper to look up the movie times.
- S/he brings up Yahoo Movies website on the phone while you are discussing the issue.
- S/he has Flixster or equivalent app on his or her phone.
- You want to stay in and watch a movie. What happens next?
- S/he asks you if you want to pick something out of his or her personal collection or go to the nearest Blockbuster to pick up a DVD.
- You bring up your companion’s Netflix account and stream something to the laptop while you cuddle on the couch.
- S/he has a choice of online video services, knows the way around Hulu and Justin.tv and you pick out something that you watch directly on the big screen TV.
- What operating system is s/he running?
- Still using Windows XP or Mac OS pre-Tiger.
- Is current with Windows 7 or Mac OS Lion.
- S/he runs several inside virtual sessions, take your pick.
- Compare computers.
- Your companion’s is way older than yours, and a desktop too.
- You both have about the same vintage.
- Your companion just got a new one for Christmas and it is smoking fast.
- You need to get in touch quickly about something that is upsetting you. Which will get you the fastest response?
- Call your companion on his or her cell.
- Text a question.
- You text a question and get an answer from your companion’s work PC with Skype because s/he would rather talk to you.
- What is your companion’s preferred personal email address?
- cuteguy@hotmail.com or cutegirl@AOL.com : in other words, clueless.
- Not to worry, s/he is on Gmail.
- Your companion has owned his or her own dot com since like whenever.
- Your relationship is getting “serious”. What happens next online?
- Nothing. S/he doesn’t even have Facebook.
- S/he updates his Facebook status to “its complicated” or “in a relationship with.”
- Your companion has already started a blog of your relationship and posted pix of the two of you after your third date. And checks in on Foursquare and made a list of the places you’ve already been together.
- You get in your companion’s car and they get a phone call. What happens?
- S/he picks up the phone and answers it while driving.
- S/he’s got a Bluetooth headset and answers it.
- The phone is paired to the car electronics and s/he puts it on speaker
- You want to listen to some music at your companion’s place. What next?
- Everything is analog, how retro.
- S/he brings up iTunes and away you go, but you have many more tracks on your laptop.
- S/he has an extensive collection of digital music even has romantic playlists with hours of tunes to choose from.
- You think you just got infected with some kind of computer virus and ask your companion for help. They respond:
- “I guess we better go to Best Buy and see what they can do.”
- “I don’t know much about this but let’s try scanning your laptop.”
- S/he is online checking out the latest security sites to see what has been posted even before you have finished asking the question.
- You are over at your place and your printer isn’t working. What does your companion do?
- Turns the printer off and on several times, but without really a clue why.
- Asks you for the manual to try to troubleshoot the problem.
- They have the innards exposed and seems to know what s/he is doing and gets it fixed in a few minutes.
For each “a” answer, award 0 points
For each “b” answer, award 1 point
For each “c” answer, award 2 points
Bonus round: Add half a point for every service that your companion uses that you don’t.
- Klout
- Github
Now add up your points.
If you got less than 10, your guy or gal doesn’t have any geek cred. Accept your fate or move on.
Between 11 – 20, you still rule in the tech department. If your companion is male, be careful about that fragile male ego, and try to be gentle when explaining tech topics. If your companion is female, try not to overdo the tech lingo when answering questions.
Over 25, you got a real gem here and try to overlook the personal grooming deficiencies. Your companion could be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
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How to Take Control Over Your Social Media Proliferation
Jan 10th
A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn’t counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.
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“This lack of coordination is a recipe for disaster,” posts Shel Holtz on his blog last week. “The inability to coordinate effort, maintain a consistent customer experience, monitor accounts, ensure legal and regulatory compliance and act quickly when an issue arises are all consequences of a fragmented approach to managing social media.”
Less than half of those surveyed by Owyang coordinate their social media approaches, and those that did spent on average $272,000 trying to do so. That is probably undercounting a lot of time that people contribute too.
The other part of the report is evaluating the various management solutions to audit and track an enterprise social media deployment. Here the news is equally depressing, with a lot of immature offerings, incomplete products, and halfway analytic tools. The APIs from the major social media networks are also in a state of flux, so relying on them can be troublesome. He has 27 different vendors arranged in a chart, based on their appropriateness with five different use cases for managing social networks.
Many of these are vendors that aren’t well known, or the province of ad agencies that are looking to branch out into social media. The five use cases are: an intense engagement to handle a high customer volume of tweets, posts and comments; social broadcasting that is more of a one-way communication; platform marketing on Facebook and Twitter; a distributed brand presence where a hotel or restaurant chain tries to coordinate actions across their many properties; and highly tailored or custom solutions. For each one he highlights a couple of the management vendors that excel in that particular area.
If you are looking to get back some control over your social media mess, it is worth your time to
view Owyang’s report here on Slideshare.
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What Will It Take For Mobile Payments to Be Embraced By Consumers?
Jan 3rd
We may still be a few years away from the mainstream adoption of mobile payments, but that hasn’t stopped a whirlwind of buzz and product development from going on in the space. Some of the biggest players in tech, telecommunications and finance are all working on solutions that will enable people to pay for everyday items using only their phones.
So what’s the hold up? For one, there are technical challenges. Technologies like NFC are not yet ubiquitous in handsets, and smartphone adoption itself is still growing. Few and far between are the retailers who have the infrastructure in place to support accepting payments this way. Another issue is consumer demand and trust. Only 23% would be willing to us their mobile device to pay for things, according to a recent report from KPMG.
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Branding, Privacy and Security are Key
One reason for the lack of public support for mobile payments could be that most consumers outside the tech space are simply not aware of the technology and its capabilities. Another issue, as the KPMG survey outlined, is consumer trust. Many people just aren’t comfortable with the security and privacy implications of using their phone to pay for things. Is the data secure? What if one’s phone is lost or stolen? If you thought losing your phone is a nightmare now, just wait until it’s also your wallet.
The institutions most trusted by consumers to administer mobile payments are, not surprisingly, banks. These are the organizations through which they’ve always managed their money, including via branded smartphone apps. The brand and reputation of any mobile payments service provider is paramount to gaining the trust of consumers, according to 73% of those surveyed. A majority also think disclosure of privacy and security practices is a must.
For as bad of a PR black eye as many banks have received since the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, banks are stuff trusted by consumers to manage their money. Companies like Google are entrusted with a trove of data about our lives, but never before has their brand been so close to the activities contents of our bank accounts. This isn’t to say that the necessary trust can’t be gained, but it’s not a slam dunk.
Driving Public Awareness of Mobile Payments
If marketed and operated properly, programs like Google Wallet can help build consumer confidence in mobile payments. If Apple does in fact include NFC in the iPhone 5 this year, that will help propel the technology toward mainstream consciousness, just as Siri introduced everyday consumers to voice-controlled artificial intelligence (even if Apple’s implementation was not the first of its kind).
These early efforts of Apple, Google, PayPal and financial firms can also fill in another blank: awareness. As people see television commercials espousing mobile payment technology and see it being used more in the wild, there’s no doubt they’ll grow more comfortable with the idea.
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What Would It Take to Turn Apple Into Research In Motion?
Dec 16th
On the heights, all the paths are paved with daggers – Robert Jordan
The Apple rumor cycle is gearing back up. It is always exciting when the mass of Web pundits get on their high horses and start making prognostications about who, when, what, how the new iDevice will be. With all the attention that new versions of the iPad and iPhone receive, it begs a question: what happens when/if Apple releases a complete flop? You know, something along the lines of a BlackBerry Storm-like disaster. The driving force of Steve Jobs is gone and, one way or another, that is going to affect Apple’s products. What happens to the Cult of Apple and its iDevice line if the next iteration is widely disgusted?
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Apple gets its fair share of criticism. The iPhone 4S was not the iPhone 5. It did not have NFC, LTE or a variety of other things that people expected the company to include in the new phone. Those improvements will make their way into the next iteration. That is how Apple does things. It holds back on certain innovations until they are more commonly available and stable and will not ruin the user experience. Apple also will have some new marketing tools for the next in the series – “iPhone 5S, now with NFC!”
This iterative product release strategy makes it all but certain that Apple will not come out with a dud in the next couple of years. The roadmap is pretty clear. The iPhone 4S may not have been what a lot of consumers or pundits thought they wanted, but it is still a good device with a little talking search engine baked inside. The user interface for iOS 5 is polished and leaves little wanting.
Now come the rumors for the iPad 3. What is it going to be? Is it going to be smaller? Will there be two new iPads next year, a big one and a small one? Will it have retina display and an A6 processor (it is probably pretty safe to say “yes” for these)? Apple has two things going for it with the release of the next iPad: money and time. Apple’s cash reserves could literally bail out the banks of a couple small-to-medium sized countries. Research and development will get all the money it needs to figure out what consumers want, run through a couple of prototypes and carpet bomb the market next year. Apple does not need to rush the next iPad. The iPhone 4S did not come out until near 15 months after the iPhone 4. The iPad 2 is still a great device that many have a hard time envisioning any better. Outside for some spec bumps, what could and iPad 3 really show us?
Yet, there is a well-known slope in the tech industry for device makers with poor product releases. Look at Nokia, Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion. All three of those companies dug themselves holes that will take years to climb out of, if ever. RIM has had the biggest drop of all of these companies. Revenue is dropping (even though smartphone sales are technically increasing) and market share has been depleted as Android and iOS gobble up would-be BlackBerry users. The company released its quarterly earnings statement this week and things are looking bleak in Waterloo. RIM has been savaged by mismanagement, poor product decisions, failure to innovate quickly, delayed product releases and infamous service outages. It is a company in disarray.
BlackBerry is an interesting corollary for Apple. It is a product that once engendered cult-like feelings, just like Apple does now. For years though it has been releasing products that are “good enough.” BlackBerry OS 7 does not really look all that different from BlackBerry OS 5 or 6. We are in wait-and-see mode for BlackBerry 10 (the formerly named BBX, RIM cannot even get names right these days) but even the QNX-based operating system is being pushed back to the end of 2012 as opposed to Q1 2012, as previously thought. Pushing back product releases is almost as bad as releasing poor products in the eyes of the consumer. Unless you are Apple or an Android Nexus device, more time does not mean more anticipation. It means your company is going to be forgotten when the newest shiny toy that came out (on time) arrives.
Apple is never “late” on its product announcements. That is because Apple does not issue estimates of when a new device is coming. They let the tech press do that for them. Apple’s recent strategy has been to announce a product and then release it about a week later. Instant gratification, a brilliant strategy. In contrast, RIM announced the BlackBerry PlayBook in September 2010 and said “eventually.” It was put off several times before finally coming in April 2011, still a half-baked shell of what consumers were expecting.
Could Apple ever be in danger of turning into RIM? The fact that the company only releases two mobile products a year gives Apple little room for error. A couple of mediocre releases in a row that do not excite the public could whittle away at the Occult and Apple loses its luster. As we have seen, iOS users will not be swayed to a different product because it is different or shiny. The only way they are going to leave is if Apple shoots itself in the foot, multiple times in a row. That is what RIM did and not only did the product lose mindshare but the corporate infrastructure (which was never great in the first place) crumbled around it.
What it comes down to is the ability of Apple CEO Tim Cook to steer the company and its product releases in the next several years. Cook will need to oversee a significant innovative jump in the iDevice line eventually. Consumers are smart, they know when a company is milking their pockets. The iterative approach to iOS updates is only going to work for so long before Apple needs to make a major upgrade to the platform. When that time comes, Apple will need to make sure that its new products are the type that consumers have come to expect from the behemoth. Because, as we have seen so many times, the slope to decline is cobbled with good intentions gone bad, products that fail to live up to up to expectations and companies taking their cult status for granted.
Apple has enough money and brilliant engineers to avoid any type of decline for years. But, if Cupertino is not careful, the downward spiral is clear. Ask RIM if it ever thought it would be in the situation it is in now. Or Nokia. Success is not guaranteed, no matter how much people like you today.
Top image: Samsung Galaxy S II commercial
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