The growing popularity of text messaging — especially by young adults — has had a really negative impact on vehicular safety, as more and more people text while behind the wheel.
Earlier this year, it became illegal for bus drivers or truck drivers to text while driving, but the problem only continues to grow among drivers in general. AT&T is joining in the fight to educate people about the dangers of texting while operating a vehicle by launching a new texting and driving campaign with the slogan: “Txting & Driving: It Can Wait.”
The U.S.’s second largest wireless carrier has created a website that has resources and safety guides for all drivers, but it’s clear that the focus is on teens.
In addition to offering a pledge and contract for teens and parents, AT&T has a Facebook page dedicated to the cause, and even a widget you can insert into your own website to show your support.
What do you think about the campaign? How do you think wireless companies, parents and the government should attack this problem? Let us know!
Tags: att, safety, texting, texting while driving
Barnes & Noble, Inc. (BKS) is getting into the competitive digital newsstand game. They hired Time Inc. executive Jonathan Shar as general manager of their new "Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content at Barnes & Noble.com."
Shar is leaving Time Warner as general manager of CNNMoney.com and will be in charge of creating a storefront for digital newspapers, magazines blogs and other content publishers for bn.com, Nook users and other platforms.
Shar told us in a phone interview that his main goal will be to "bring that one-of-a-kind experience consumers get with print and create it for the digital world," he said.
Shar will also be busy researching what kind of products and services consumers are looking for at bn.com. He'll have competition with the Apple iPad, Amazon and even Conde Nast, Hearst and other publications working on digital media stores. 
As far as details about what kind of publications he plans to work with or bundled packages of content he might before, Shar said "it's a little too early to say."
Shar said his relationship with publications at Time Inc. won't necessarily be his only advantage. Before joining CNNMoney.com, he was he was vice president of consumer marketing at the Sports Illustrated Group. "I have a track record of building, developing and maintaining relationships across the industry," he said.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:
Though it came out in October that Trader Joe's would be heading to the Market & Noe Center in the Castro, the deal could fall through in two months if a RadioShack at that location doesn't budge from its current spot. The Duboce Triangle Newsletter had reported back then that the RadioShack was readying to move across the street — now, according to the SF Examiner, the batteries-and-speaker-wire purveyor has apparently decided that it's not liking any of this one bit. TJ's dispatched a bunch of architects in Hawaiian shirts to accommodate the grumpy store, allowing them to move into a space above the gro-sto, and even demonstrating how increased foot traffic would increase RadioShack's business — still no go. (Another of Market & Noe's current tenants in the way has agreed to move above the TJ's.) No word in the story from RadioShack, which leaves neighbors hard up for the store at a loss for what's going on: "We can't move forward; we are stuck."
· Castro Trader Joe’s opening hits snag [SF Examiner]
· Trader Joe's Is Jonesing for an Empty Spot On Market & Noe [Curbed SF]
Who Wants an iPad? The Young, the Social & the Pop-Culture Addicts http://bit.ly/buCjjK
Social media data company Rapleaf recently investigated the profiles of users who "fanned" the iPad on Facebook in order to get a better sense of the type of users who are interested in Apple's upcoming slate device. After analyzing the top three Facebook pages and their respective fanbases, Rapleaf discovered that there were some common themes among these users. The prospective iPad buyers on Facebook are young - much younger than the overall Facebook population, in fact. They're also fairly social, with nearly a third of the fans having over 300 friends. And finally, iPad fans are also very interested in other pop culture activities and themes including various celebs, brands and internet memes.
Sponsor
To make these determinations, Rapleaf looked at the top three iPad fan pages on Facebook. At the time of their study, these were: The iPad (#1) (69,293 fans), The iPad (#2) (23,637 fans) and The iPad (#3) (5,009 fans).
There weren't any major variations in gender differences among the iPad fans. Although the second page skewed more female and the third page skewed more male, the overall numbers balanced out to a fairly even split.
However, when Rapleaf delved into the ages of the fans, they discovered that iPad fans were a lot younger than your typical Facebook user. While 61% of the U.S. Facebook market is under 35, nearly 50% of the iPad fans were between 18 and 25. You can see the differences between the pages and Facebook in general (U.S. only) plotted on the chart here.
Apple iPad fans are also rather social, with 33% having over 300 friends on Facebook and 8% with more than 500 friends. Additionally, perhaps due to their age, a lot of the iPad fans were fans of other pop culture themes like favorite celebs, brands and memes. By analyzing the top 100 other fan pages of these users, Rapleaf discovered interests like Starbucks, Megan Fox, Coca-Cola, Michael Jackson, YouTube, Will Smith, Twilight, Lady Gaga, pizza, and other various Facebook "memes" like "Pants on the Ground," random laughter, "I need a vacation" and "I really hate slow computers," (the last being a problem the iPad hopes to solve, incidentally).
What does this tell us about the market for Apple's new device? Mainly that it has a lot of youth appeal, apparently. While some have predicted the iPad is the sort of computer that your "mom" will use - implying that the iPad is a sort of computer for non-computer users - it appears that "mom" isn't actually a top demographic among the iPad's Facebook fans. But then again, you can't read too much into that finding - after all, "mom" (the older Facebook user) may not even know how to fan things on Facebook yet or she may simply not be interested in doing so. But the study does at least solidify that there is quite a bit of iPad interest out there among the youngest tech users, something that bodes well for the device's adoption.
DiscussWho Wants an iPad? The Young, the Social & the Pop-Culture Addicts
- (jeff)isageekAnd my mom.
- Amber SpenceSection: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile
Wirefly is currently offering a pretty nice deal on AT&T phones—they are all free. Of course, there does seem to be one exception to that statement, the iPhone. Otherwise, any AT&T phone that Wirefly carries is now free on-contract until midnight tonight (for reference, today is Monday March 8, 2010).
Bottom line, visit Wirefly, find the phone you want to get and sign up for free. Of course, you do have that two-year agreement, but those are pretty standard.
Some phones such as the Samsung Mythic, LG Arena and LG Xenon even give you a $40 bill credit. Plus you also get free shipping via Fed-Ex.
You can even get the recently released Motorola Backflip, which would set you back $99.99 (after mail-in-rebate) with AT&T directly.
But remember this offer ends tonight at midnight.
Read [Wirefly] Via [PhoneNews]
Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
In her ‘Pentax 110′ photograph series, Croatian artist Pekmez Med utilized low-fi film to emphasize the voyeuristic/fetishistic nature of her subject matter, creating a collection of photo’s that maintain a sense of the underground and its happenings. Featuring various action figures and playthings, ranging from the infamous Barbie to Skeletor, the images are stripped down in their simplicity, but ignite and maintain interest in the viewer. Ultimately, her ‘Pentax 110′ series demonstrates a talent for executing a creative notion to a maximum effect.
AP, a view from the hotel
When choosing hotel accommodations a lot of people might not want a floor-to ceiling view of construction, let alone of a site where thousands died in the most-devastating terrorist attack on the United States. Still, the vice president of Club Quarters, the hospitality chain responsible for the recently-opened World Center Hotel, thinks the unusual windowscape works in its favor. "People choose to be here because they want to be close to it. They want to feel it, they want to celebrate. They want to remember," she told the AP, standing by a balcony overlooking the site. "We have a very accessible view on it."
The hotel actually has the best sight lines for seeing the site, complete with cranes, bulldozers and scaffolding. So much so, that the National September 11 Memorial & Museum directs visitors to the building to get a good look. Guests are privy to the view 24-hours a day, though if it gets to them they can easily block it with dark curtains. The noise from the construction of a memorial is controlled by special soundproof panes.
"I thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be neat to be up on the sixth or seventh floor and really see the work in progress?'" said one guest, a salesman from Baltimore. "You could say it's depressing, but you could also say it's been nine years, the Freedom Tower is going up and there's going to be a memorial. We're looking toward the future." But another visitor to Ground Zero had a more somber view: "I wouldn't stay there," said Michael Meindorfer of Frankfurt. "To go everyday and come home and see something like this. ... It's sad."
Apostol Tnokovski’s ‘Orca’ chair maintains the clean lines and substance of industrial design while maintaining an elegance that makes this piece of furniture both inviting and comfortable. The chair, with its highly modern styling and materials, is designed with ergonomics as the focus; creating a piece that is functional, but captures the imagination with its sculptural silhouette. With the ‘Orca’ chair, Tnokovski has created a piece that that straddles the fine lines between art, innovation, and function.
The history of rock music is a tangled web of innovation and influence, and its with this in mind that Milanese artist Alberto Antoniazzi has created the ‘Rock N’ Roll’ map, plotting the lay of the land for histories hit makers. The map, which takes its graphic inspiration from metropolitan transit mapping, presents a wide variety of bands in a clean and visually stimulating manner. Covering a range of groups from Metallica to ABBA, Antoniazza’s ‘Rock N’ Roll’ map uses great design to tackle this diversity of musical history.
NoSQL Live, which will will focus on NoSQL databases in production environments and be sponsored by MongoDB backer 10gen, will take place March 11th in Boston. Session topics will include scaling with NoSQL, NoSQL in the cloud, schema design with document-oriented databases, the evolution of graph data structure from research to production, enterprise adoption of NoSQL and web standards for NoSQL. Panelists from Twitter, AT&T, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others and will cover a wide array of NoSQL technologies including MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, HBase, and more. Although NoSQL Live is sold out, a live webcast will be provided.
Check out this cool t-shirt by a graphic designer that goes by “ramyb.” He won 1st place in Derby #130: Nightmares at shirt.woot.com, with 942 votes
Well, except for that money thing. They want the pretty much want what we all want from social networks: to connect with people they know and trust, spend some time unwinding, and share content.
The key difference is this: affluents don't want to friend a brand on Facebook - they prefer to check out fan pages. [Then again, I feel the same way. Hmm. Maybe I qualify to be rich? I can haz affluence, plze?]
What they do prefer is a user experience on the company's website that addresses their needs. Easy navigation, helpful information, perhaps even the availability of a live chat to answer any questions that might not be apparent solely through the navigation. Ultimately, I think they value their time and don't want to waste it with updates that aren't central to what they need. They want content that is relevant to them at the right point in time.
For marketers, this means a solid user experience coupled with a true customer relationship management tool. We should be at the point where we can customize content based on the visitor. Or is that a little too invasive? What do you think?
From Unity Marketing's "How Affluent Luxury Consumers Use the Internet and Social Media"
Image courtesy of eMarketer.
Today we have the honor to offer our readers a free chapter from a stunning new book – 10 Steps to Powerful Online Self Promotion for Creatives – by Alex Mathers of Red Lemon Club. Hands down the most complete and entertaining e-book about online promotion & social marketing for designers & bloggers. A must read for every creative!
Photos Manipulations by Waldo Lee on TutorArt
I thought I'd never forgive Time Warner for their abominable service before I switched to FiOS—but I just might, if their plan to lease their pipes to AT&T and Verizon makes using an iPhone in NY actually tolerable.
AT&T's iPhone problems are two-fold. There's the wireless aspect, which is having enough towers with enough spectrum for everybody—that's probably what you're familiar with. (The problem in really crowded areas is that there's only so much wireless coverage you can provide before you run into issues like cross talk. We'll see how it goes down at SXSW this year, since AT&T's almost certainly loaded Austin after last year's implosion. In the meantime, the FCC is pushing to get more spectrum into carriers' hands to ease congestion.)
The other side is backhaul—the actual pipes carrying data. I've never been able to get AT&T to tell me how much of their backhaul is copper vs. fiber, which would tell us a lot about their backhaul capacity. (Fiber can carry a lot more data to and from towers than copper, obvs.) Supposedly, they're increasing fiber deployments alongside with their U-Verse rollouts, but I'm not sure how (or if) that's been affected by the slowdowns in U-Verse deployment. (Presumably not much, if at all.) Either way, their needs for backhaul have been exploding.
What Time Warner Cable's offering is more backhaul. That is, according to BusinessWeek, they're pitching Verizon and AT&T on leasing their pipes in New York City, which is one of AT&T's two admitted problem areas, besides SF. A short-term solution, it's cheaper for carriers than installing more backhaul themselves, but would give them additional bandwidth for data-hungry iPhones.
Which, incidentally, makes me real curious about Time Warner's broadband cap trials (which haven't hit NYC, yet, because of how competitive the market is, thanks to FiOS) and how they sell capacity to customers. They'd be selling unused capacity to the carriers, so their incentive would be to sell you as much bandwidth as possible for the highest price, while getting you to use as little of it as possible. Unlike Comcast, Time Warner hasn't publicly announced they'll throttle your whole connection during periods of congestion (a net neutral way to manage traffic), but if they're making a side business out of selling whatever's not eaten by assholes like you watching tons of internet video, it's easy to see where the squeeze could come.
You will pay for your data. That's the future. But hey, at least your iPhone might work now! [BusinessWeek]
Click here to view the embedded video.
This video, Beta Killer, captures a microtonal synth jam on a Synthesizers.com modular synthesizer.
Patch details below.
via davidryle:
Jammin in 63.833cET.
Using a synthesizers.com Q960 and Q962 module for sequencing into the Q172 quantizer aid. Using Li’l Miss Scale Oven (LMSO) to load in the notes into the programmable quantizer and sending note to the Virus TI while playing the Novation ReMOTE 37SL.
Recorded in Cubase 4.
Three programmable scales which were portions of the carlos beta 63.833cET tuning set are sending control voltages to the oscillators for pitch data and the selection of voltage is made from the Q960 sequential controller. This is run at a high rate with three echo devices to merge the sequences into a background river of arpeggiated chords. Three rows of sequences (8 steps) each are tapped into with the Q962 sequential switch. The switch is controlled by a pulse out from step 1 of the sequencer into a sample & hold/noise source which delivers a random voltage out to an instrument interface. This interface threshold is set high to only shift the sequential switch every so often randomly. It even caused the sequential switch to step backwards from time to time. First time I’ve ever seen that.
Li’l Miss Scale Oven can be purchased from X.J.Scott’s website at http://www.nonoctave.com
Two important brands, the Oscar Academy Awards and Steve Jobs company - Apple. This year the link between these two names is defined by the Final Cut-created documentaries. Nine of ten documentaries nominated for this year’s Oscars, in both selected categories, respectively “Documentary Feature” and “Documentary Short&rdquo... (read more)
Over the weekend, yet another BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) OS dropped… courtesy of the CB Forums. If you’re packing a Bold 9700, this may (or may not) perk your ears… if it does, listen up.
This is NOT an official update, so be sure to backup your device and take all necessary precautions before you proceed. Chances are if you’re geared up for an update, you already know what you’re doing and take proper steps when updating… But I’m just sayin’… Be careful! The update will bring your Bold 9700’s OS up to 5.0.0.536. You can nab it right here.
As always, be sure to let us know of any marked improvements, fixes or feature enhancements that you notice. Happy Monday to all, and happy OS updating to Bold 9700 users!
Related News from IntoMobile:
This is my weekly project update, where I tell you what I’ve been up to this week in my business and share what’s on my mind.
I’m fresh back from Continuity Summit, an event hosted by Ryan Lee up in Stamford, CT.
All in all, great event. Ryan did a great job in delivering a lot of content. In many conferences, I’ll be in and out of the room. A lot of networking happens out in the hallways, after all. However, I attended almost every speaker this time because they were all good. I have a lot of notes sitting in Evernote to go over and process.
Continuity Summit is an internet marketing event. I’ve been to several of them and they are always different than a blogging event. The crowds are very different. The people in attendance are generally running internet businesses – real businesses like the kind I talk about on this blog. They weren’t so much interested in blogging. They weren’t that active on Twitter. They were just making money.
At blogging events, the level of Twitter activity is usually quite high. Everybody is blogging (obviously). But, most of them are trying to figure out even the most basic business strategies, and often don’t think much beyond banner ads.
It is interesting being in the middle, with one foot in each world. The power really is in the middle ground. In fact, this is pretty much the very definition of the Third Tribe, as those guys have defined it.
The power of this business lies in creating a relationship with your crowd and providing tons of value – and charging money for some of it. But, the relationship is key. Proof of that is the fact that Ryan Lee himself filled this event with over 1,000 attendees and did it using only his own blog and his email list. No JVs. He got 1,000 people to hop on planes and fly to Stamford. That’s the power of a relationship. It’ll KILL PPC advertising anytime, as far as I’m concerned.
I would love to see more bloggers showing up at events like this. I met a few. In fact, I met up with several readers of this blog there in Stamford (nice meeting you guys!). But, bloggers who are interested in monetizing need to get out of the blogger bubble.
What do I mean by the blogger bubble?
The word “blogger” usually denotes a person who writes a lot, shares their thoughts. When it comes to making money, most bloggers never leave the paradigm of “writing a lot”. They look for indirect ways of making money from their work – banner ads. It leads to this self-contained little bubble of limited thinking. Because they think their product is blog posts.
This bubble even extends outward. In this crowd of internet marketers, when I told them what I did, many of them asked me how I make money and automatically assumed I did it by way of banner advertising. So, even THESE guys think banner ads are the only way to go.
What a bubble!
We have to burst that bubble, guys. Blogging is just a medium. It isn’t a business.
When it comes to monetizing a blog, blogging is not a unique business model. Instead, it is just another promotional medium where all the same stuff internet marketers talk about apply. In other words, there shouldn’t be two different camps here. There’s only one, really.
I’ll be flying to Washington DC on Thursday to attend Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar. This is another internet marketing event. As usual, I expect I’ll find very few bloggers there. But, you know what? I probably will find several marketers with blogs – they just don’t define themselves by the medium.
And they’re banking.
Think about it.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...
