Posts tagged Than
[STUDY] Jonesing For A Retweet: Twitter Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes And Booze
Feb 4th
Sleep, sex and…Twitter?
A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.
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“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann told the Guardian.
The study was primarily focused on willpower as opposed to addiction, and the moments when people were forced to resist urges to partake in an activity or deal with conflicting urges, such as the urge to sleep and the urge to stay out socializing. Sleep and sex generally trumped other urges, but checking media and work were generally put ahead of socializing and shopping urges.
“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” Hofmann said.
The study found that resistance to all urges declined as the day wore on, and that people seem to do a better job of resisting the urge to smoke or drink than many may have thought, given the addictive nature of both.
“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one,” Hofmann said. “So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”
Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.
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Pinterest the Referral Giant: New Site Driving More Traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn Combined [INFOGRAPHIC]
Feb 2nd
In addition to recently winning the Crunchie for Best New Startup of 2011, a new study by shareaholic is now indicating that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined. The study, which examined aggregated data for over 200,000 web publishers with a reach of over 260 million unique monthly [...]
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Pinterest Driving More Referral Traffic Than Google+ [Infographic]
Feb 1st
Forget Google+. Pinterest is the hot new social network right now. Numerous reports agree that unique visitors to Pinterest are skyrocketing, and that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
How to Start A New Business in Less Than 50 Hours
Jan 29th
Just about every weekend someplace on the planet a peculiar series of meetups is happening called Startup Weekend. The idea is to bring together a group of people, many of whom have never set eyes on each other before, to form new ventures, many of which are tech-related. So far the model seems to be working: each weekend on average has produced two or three companies. According to the master website, more than 5,000 startups have been created since the process began, and some 2,000 just in the last year alone. We last wrote about the process last April and here is more information about the process and the role that the Kauffman Foundation has played.
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The schedule is uniformly consistent from city to city. They start with open mic pitches on Friday evening where attendees bring their best ideas and try to inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts. Over the course of both Saturday and Sunday, volunteer mentors roam the halls and meet with the teams that want their advice. That is where I come in.
I signed up for this past weekend in St. Louis. I could have gone to Nice (France) or Minsk or Bergen (Norway), but the event in my hometown was a lot easier to get to. I met with several different teams who were struggling with their direction and implementations, and helped to refine their focus and mission, and suggest some ways that they could incorporate existing technologies into their process. By the time Sunday rolled around twelve teams were left to present what they had accomplished.
The weekends aren’t free: the cost is less than $100 but that covers all your meals and a chance to rub keyboards with other smart folks in your city who are interested in building something new and exciting. You also get a $50 credit for hosting and cloud computing services per each team, something that came in handy for those teams doing some Big Data implementations.
The groups met in the Railway Exchange building in downtown St. Louis, down the hall from the tech accelerator that Capital Innovators is running and which we wrote about here. It was a good choice, because you could see the fortunate companies that have been part of that process: several of their founders were working over the weekend, no surprise given the scrappy nature of these entrepreneurs.
Startup Weekend – Full from Eighteen Eighty on Vimeo.
What I found interesting was the mix of skills and people that came together for the weekend. I was expected a lot of multiple-pierced 20-somethings that were all sizzle and no steak; instead there were lots of minorities and women and people nearing my advanced age sitting around with the Gen Y’ers. That was amazing: everyone had something to contribute. It was a nice mix. Several of them came from other cities that don’t have their own weekend code-a-thons.
As the weekend progressed, I was drawn into other teams by just ambling around the building and stopping in to visit and watch them collaborate. Computers were everywhere, and several folks brought their own monitors to connect to their laptops. Several teams also sent around surveys to the group email list to start doing some basic market research.
The master of ceremonies for the weekend was Steve Chau, who hails from Kansas City (about four hours away by car) and who has run several weekends in other places for the past four years. He knew what he was doing, and clearly was having a lot of fun. “I am getting emails from the participants who have had ideas and gotten ignited,” he says. “Spending 54 hours with a complete stranger doesn’t happen anymore, and it is pretty cool.” Now is a full-time employee that works for the operation, but that was a relatively recent circumstance: before he was hired, he volunteered his time. There are more than 80 similar facilitators around the world. “I can’t think of any other event that has the diversity of the participants.” While there are numerous hackathons held by private software companies, the Startup Weekenders are trying to build new things that could become big successes. Zaarly.com is one of the success stories that started about a year ago, Foodspotting.com is another company that had its origins with one of the Startup Weekend.
I would tell you more specifics about the services and products of the teams that I mentored, but I can’t: not just because it wouldn’t be fair to them, but also because things are in a state of flux. Several teams even changed the name of their ventures before the weekend was over, and mission statements were flying fast and furious.
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Thursday’s Top Tech Video: How to Translate Your Voice to More Than 30 Languages Using Siri
Jan 26th
Just to be clear, Lingual is an extension for phones and iPads that are jailbroken (big surprise), but as you can see from Jeff Benjamin‘s preview, it’s pretty remarkable. Not only will it translate individual words (it supports more than 30 languages), it can do phrases, too: “What’s ‘I need an iPhone 4s, please.’ in simplified Chinese?”
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SEO NEWS: When 2 Isn’t Better Than 1 – SubmitEdge SEO News
Jan 24th
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SEO NEWS: When 2 Isn't Better Than 1
SubmitEdge SEO News A debate has been raging on between SEOs, SMMs and almost everyone else in the online world as to whether or not two SMM teams are better than one, returning actual benefits to clients. Since it works in some areas, why not this one? |
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Streaming Super Bowl Ad CPM Higher Than TV Ads – ReelSEO Online Video News
Jan 24th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Streaming Super Bowl Ad CPM Higher Than TV Ads
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" … Digital Marketing Agency ymarketing to Predict Top 2012 Super Bowl XLVI Commercial |
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More Than 50% of Devices at CES Were Internet Connected
Jan 23rd
More than half of the devices launched at CES earlier this month were connected. That’s according to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies. GSMA calculated that more than 90 percent of TVs at CES, 70 percent of automotive devices, 44 percent of healthcare devices and 30 percent of cameras were connected.
CES is a pointer to the future, so the GSMA predicts that there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world by 2020. That’s up from 9 billion today. It identified car connectivity as an especially important product category to watch.
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At this year’s CES, more than 40 percent of the connected devices announced were gadgets such as laptops and smartphones. The rest were non-gadgets, such as those in the “home lifestyle” category – which according to the GSMA made up 30 percent of the connected devices at CES. The products in the home lifestyle category included connected TVs, smart refrigerators and Internet-connected washers and dryers.
The trend towards increasing connectivity in devices will accelerate in upcoming years. As one example, GSMA predicts that more than 40 percent of vending machines will be connected by 2020. The GSMA estimates that connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020.
GSMA also listed some less traditional connected products seen at CES:
- A smart window pane with built-in apps, including computerized “blinds”.
- Connected, roaming vacuum cleaners.
- Tablets built for underwater computing or designed for home and office video surveillance.
- A space-age personal work environment complete with a reclining chair, multiple computer monitors and a connected air filter.
The GSMA has come up with a catch-phrase for this trend: “The Connected Life.” It defines this as “a world where all technology devices intelligently connect.” A more common term is Internet of Things. Either way, everyday products and devices are increasingly getting connected to the Internet.
There are approximately 9 billion connected devices today, according to the GSMA. About 72 percent of those are mobile devices. That figure will drop to 48 percent by 2020.
Put another way, by 2020 the GSMA predicts there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world and over half will be non-mobile devices. These will include connected home devices, healthcare devices and automotive technology.
GSMA is particularly bullish on the automotive sector, which it predicts will account for 1.4 billion connections by 2020. To put that into perspective, in 2011 just 1 percent of the world’s 1.8 billion road vehicles were connected. However, by 2020 GSMA expects that figure to reach 14 percent. Car connectivity features will include new in-vehicle applications, phone features and navigation.
We knew the Internet of Things was slowly becoming a reality, but these new statistics and predictions by the GSMA show that the commercialization of this trend will be driven by cars, home appliances and healthcare devices.
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Tablet Visitors Spent 54% More Than Smartphone Visitors in 2011
Jan 22nd
The study pointed to two reasons why tablet visitors may be more valuable than those using smartphones, laptops, desktops: tablet users are more affluent than those using other devices, plus the devices may be more conducive to shopping.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Pinterest Works Better Than Google+
Jan 20th
Let’s be grown up about this. Pinterest is an app for sharing lists of scrumptious-looking stuff. It’s not for girls or guys, it’s for people who like looking at things. The story I’ve heard is that it was designed for architects and designers and “then brides found it.” This is why, my sources explain, it tends toward the jewelry-and-table-settings end of the spectrum.
But like on any social network, it just depends on whom you’re following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google’s efforts to figure out how to control unwanted social stuff with Circles, I daresay they got it backwards. Pinterest is the reverse of Google+ circles, and it’s better for users.
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Pinterest has been around for a while, but lately it has caught on intensely. The statistics suggest that lots of women use it, but lots of non-women and businesses also use it. It’s inspiring blatant imitators, and Alexia Tsotsis even thinks that Google wants to buy it. Why all this interest all of a sudden? Pinterest is visually driven, which makes it easy and pleasurable to use, but I think its mechanics as a social network are more interesting than that.
Facebook’s Smart Lists and Google+ Circles have popularized the idea that we need the ability to share different things with different audiences. That lets us have fun with some people and be boring with others without having to maintain two profiles. But neither of those networks offer much control for the person on the receiving end.
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is a bit of a magic soup. You can tell it you want more or fewer updates from certain things in certain situations, but for the most part, if they’re sharing it with you, you’re going to get it. Google+ lets you turn down the volume on your circles, so you can adjust the noisiness of groups you’re following, but the people in those circles are just sharing wherever they share. The recipient has to do her or his best to keep all the senders organized.
Pinterest Is the Reverse of Circles
But Pinterest nails the mechanics of this. On Pinterest, users create “boards” for different things they want to share. When you follow a person on Pinterest, you follow all their boards. You can also follow individual boards. If someone you like has a board for “desserts,” which you like, and a board for “spaceships,” which you love, but they also post to their “cute puppies” board all day long (and you hate puppies), the solution is simple: You unfollow “cute puppies,” and everything else remains.
Both the pinner and the follower only have to think about their own tastes. They don’t have to guess what other people are like. People are more likely to enjoy themselves that way. Because hey, if Pinterest teaches us anything, it’s that we have impeccable taste.
Do you use Pinterest? Do you need an invite? Let’s get some invite gifting going in the comments.
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