The Innovation Whiteboard – get your idea published in the New York Times

What innovations have you made in your daily life? Whether it’s a gadget you’ve fashioned, or something less tangible, we want to hear about it. Your submissions will be published on nytimes.com and may be featured in the New York Times Magazine if our judges — Martha Stewart, James Dyson, Paola Antonelli and Ben Kaufman — select your idea. Submit now:

Innovation Whiteboard

For a special issue on June 3, we invite you to share an innovation that you have made in your daily life. Maybe you’ve figured out a way to make waking up more pleasant by jury-rigging your alarm clock. Or maybe you’ve invented a foolproof method for shining your shoes, or for finding time to exercise. It could be a gadget you’ve fashioned, or something less tangible. We want to hear what you’ve come up with.

To be published in the June 3 issue.

Submissions will be accepted until May 7 at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

 

// Thx to Neville Hobson, Photo – Seth1492

Thousands of never-before-seen-photos from New York City – 100 years ago

New Yorkers cool off in the Astoria public pool with the Hell Gate railroad bridge looming in the background in the summer of 1940.
Murder most foul: A detective took this crime scene photo in 1918 after children found the body of Gaspare Candella stuffed in a drum and dumped in a field in Brooklyn, New York.

Continue reading “Thousands of never-before-seen-photos from New York City – 100 years ago”

Every major federal agency is now using Social Media – 125 in total

Every major federal agency is now using Twitter and YouTube and 23 of the 24 major agencies are on Facebook.

The Nuclear Regulatory Agency — the only major agency reported as not using any of the three major social networking sites in a June 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office — joined Twitter in August 2011 and launched a YouTube page a month later.

via NextGov

“The NRC has no plans to get on Facebook in the immediate future…”

Now, don’t judge, the world isn’t coming to an end. This is citizenship 2.0 and these are public agencies. Meaning that they are here to help us. What better way than to share information on the internet?

If you add in the minor agencies the federal government is pretty busy:

A total of 125 on Twitter, 114 on Facebook, 85 on YouTube, 44 on Flickr, 4 on FourSquare, 4 on Google+, and 2 on Pinterest.

And, in case you were wondering, the most popular agencies on Twitter:

  1. NASA – 2.16 million followers
  2. Smithsonian – 651,000
  3. FCC – 480,000
  4. Justice Dept – 465,000
  5. Peace Corps – 451,000

 

Data pulled from: Government Social Media Wiki & Federal Social Media Index

 

YouTube Movies – 300+ free movies

A friend on Google+ shared that YouTube has a few free movies to watch like Real Genius and Life in a Day. I clicked over to YouTube Movies and found hundreds and hundreds of free ones. Tons of classics and B-movies, but many that I would definitely watch:

All of these are highly rated on Rotten Tomatoes (some even 90%+).

Free Movies on YouTube – definitely worth adding to your channel surfing.

President, Congress pass bill to allow venture capital funding via crowd sourcing

Earlier this month, President Obama sign the JOBS bill into law with strong bipartisan support, and no this isn’t the one you’re thinking of. This one is designed specifically for funding start-ups with a particular focus on crowd funding (i.e. Kickstarter).

Explained by author and professor, Jeff Jarvis:

The JOBS bill being signed by President Obama today is critical to the emergence and growth of the next generation of industries as ecosystems.

Those ecosystems are made up of three layers: platforms, entrepreneurial ventures, and networks.

Platforms (Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Facebook, Kickstarter, Federal Express, Foxconn), which make it possible for entrepreneurial ventures to be built at lower cost with less capital and reduced risk at greater speed. To provide the critical mass that large corporations used to provide — to, for example, sell advertising at scale or acquire distribution or acquire goods or services at volume — sometimes these ventures need to band together in networks (Glam, YouTube, Etsy, eBay).

The bill supports this flourishing start-up trend by updating some outdated laws, from the 1930s, and correcting some from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Of interest to us, the regular people:

  • Entrepreneurs can raise up to $1 million per year through those approved crowd funding channels.
  • Investors with incomes of less than $100K will be limited to 5 percent, or $2K, investments.
  • Those who make over $100K/year will be limited at 10 percent, or $10K.

Previously, one could not sell equity through crowd funding and only registered investors with $100,000 could fund a company. Now, with the crowd sourcing provision anyone can get in on the action.

This is great for the industry and those with a nose for investing, but do be wary. Internet scammers and unskilled entrepreneurs will soon be asking for your money to fund the next Google.

 

Learn more about the bill – Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups (JOBS) Act

 

// Photo – Guano

LA Light – the electric radiance of Los Angeles at night

I sought out to capture the electric radiance of Los Angeles at night and paint a portrait of my city. It took me 6 months of on and off shooting to finish this project.

Shooting time lapses is a labor of love and a study in patience.

This video is dedicated to the memory of my Grandmother. She spent most of her life bettering the lives of others and was exemplary of what humanity can be in its purest form.

 

Nominated for the 2012 Vimeo Festival Awards. Open to public voting – vote here.

Klout – using data to determine your influence and then give you free stuff

I love this story of Klout founder Joe Fernandez:

With his jaw still clamped shut, recovering in his Lower East Side apartment, Fernandez opened an Excel file and began to enter data on everyone he was connected to on Facebook and Twitter: how many followers they had, how often they posted, how often others responded to or retweeted those posts. Some contacts (for instance, his young cousins) had hordes of Facebook friends but seemed to wield little overall influence. Others posted rarely, but their missives were consistently rebroadcast far and wide. He was building an algorithm that measured who sparked the most subsequent online actions. He sorted and re-sorted, weighing various metrics, looking at how they might shape results. Once he’d figured out a few basic principles, Fernandez hired a team of Singaporean coders to flesh out his ideas. Then, realizing the 13-hour time difference would impede their progress, he offshored himself. For four months, he lived in Singapore, sleeping on couches or in his programmers’ offices. On Christmas Eve of 2008, back in New York a year after his surgery, Fernandez launched Klout with a single tweet. By September 2009, he’d relocated to San Francisco to be closer to the social networking companies whose data Klout’s livelihood depends on. (His first offices were in the same building as Twitter headquarters.)

via Wired

 

Fast forward a few years and Klout has become a big deal (in social media).

One more interesting element of the story:

As the child of a casino executive who specialized in herding rich South American gamblers into comped Caesars Palace suites, Fernandez saw up close and from a young age the power of free perks as a marketing tool.

Which provides the final piece to the puzzle. The perks that Klout gives out allow the company to connect users with brands, and monetize their business.

It’s brilliant because it gives everybody something they want, whether it be free stuff or engaged customers.