Let's Talk Tech
I hate being “that guy”, but social media is in a pretty dark place. I don’t want to be negative. I don’t want to “hate” on something just because it’s trendy. I genuinely want good ideas to thrive and find success.
There’s success, and then there’s “SUCCESS ®™ ©”.
As we approach a long-delayed IPO, if investors reward Reddit with a healthy stock price, I can’t see any positive outcome for the communities that rely on Reddit. Continue reading “Reddit’s IPO: I Hope It Fails…”
Can smaller services compete against juggernauts like Facebook? Snap’s stock took a tumble. Built on “cool”, how can this service transition to monetizing without alienating users?
Continue reading “Snapchat stock tanks – Can smaller services compete?”
Oof. Even if you’re right, calling out someone publicly might not be the best way to win hearts and minds.
We’ve covered the war of words often fought between fourth place carrier Sprint and third place carrier T-Mobile. Usually reserved for press releases, those digs can be a fun way to shake up otherwise dry industry news. It’s rare though that the public face of a company takes the gloves off on a platform like Twitter.
Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, after responding to a somewhat snotty question about T-Mobile’s yearly phone upgrades, decided he needed to call out Lil Magenta’s CEO directly over what he considers to be a deceptive pricing scheme.
It is super frustrating when there’s a market perception of a product or service which isn’t quite, though we don’t often see figures like these lose their cool. T-Mobile set the standard for making headlines by calling out Verizon and AT&T. Could this be a new era of tough talk for Sprint?
A whole suite of new features for the folks using Google Plus!
In the Hangouts app, users will now be able to share location with a simple button press. I’ve been in situations where people have asked “where are you” and now a simple tap can share a Google Map location with them.
What most people have been itching for though is SMS integration, and now the Hangouts app is including the ability to add text messaging to chat.
For people broadcasting with Hangouts on Air, you’ll now have the ability to plan a Hangout ahead of time, and this will create an event page you can use to promote the Hangout. It’s a nice one-piece solution as we’ve been doing this manually to share our Hangouts with people online.
New broadcast tools allow hosts to control the microphone volume of HOA participants. Increase or decrease their chat volume, and now we can finally remove someone from a Hangout. This is welcome control for those of us trying to create professional videos during live broadcasts.
For standard Hangouts video calls, users now have more creative tools to play with, like blurring the background behind themselves. Also we’ll be able to see animated gifs, for all our stop motion photo animation needs.
Moving to Google Plus, over 1.5 BILLION photos are uploaded every week. Google will be unleashing new organization and editing tools to help back up and share your experiences.
Photo scanning will allow for searching the content of a picture without tags. If there are pics of your dog un-tagged, searching for “dog” on G+ will bring up your pet pics. New photo editing tools can help improve the look of your pics. Either via “Auto-Awesome” or Snapseed integration, you’ll be able to touch up your pics before sending them out. Snapseed is introducing a new HDR filter to help improve pics which might be a bit under or over exposed.
Auto-Awesome will now track through multiple exposures to create animated gifs, composite images, or use the new Eraser tool to eliminate moving objects from your photos. Say you have a series of shots from a vacation, and someone walks in front of your frame, Eraser can scrub that distraction out of your shot. This’ll pretty much encourage people to take series of photos for every set up instead of just one pic and done.
Lastly a new auto movie feature is being added. Collecting all of your pics and vids from a time or place, Google will auto-magically combine them all and add background music to present you a share-able highlights reel of your latest adventure. Users can manually edit elements, or select themes which will change up the music, editing, and effects.
If you’ve been jamming on G+, there are going to be a bunch of new features to play with. You can catch the whole announcement video below!
It’s a good thing I don’t ramble or anything…
I was invited to teach a master class on media production for Social Media Week in Los Angeles. I was honored to be asked, and thankfully they had me tackling a subject I could jump into, producing higher quality materials using the tools which come standard on just about all of our various gadgets and phones and tablets.
It was a great environment, being able to let my geek flag fly, and share my experiences ABOUT sharing my experiences while discussing how to create a work flow, tackle pre-production, and take some of the stress out of the post process for photos, audio, and video.
We’re wrapping up SMW-LA tomorrow, but I’ve gotten to meet some really cool folks and sit in on some fantastic workshops. For more info on Social Media Week events around the world, check out: http://socialmediaweek.org/
***UPDATE***
My somewhat rambling master class is now on LiveStream for you all to marvel at my presenting skills!
What else would you have expected?
The long rumored Twitter IPO looks like it might be happening. Now the dance of managing expectations begins. They need to drum up excitement about their public offerings, but they can’t go overboard like Facebook. It’s an extremely delicate balance. How do you get investors to open their wallets without getting them overly hyped up. We’ll see if Twitter can figure out the formula where other services have faltered.
Fittingly, they announced this long anticipated industry news with a tweet:
We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.
— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013