Cool Website Design

As a business major, I pay close attention to various companies’ websites. Below is a link to a website that I think is cool, fun, and interactive. The company is Red Frog Events and they host various events throughout the country. These events include the Warrior Dash, Beach Dash, and the Great Urban Dash. They target young people to attend their events as well as young college students to work with them. The website works well with their target market and demographic and is fun to search around on. Check it out!

 

http://www.redfrogevents.com/

 

Facebook Launches Groups for Schools

Facebook has launched groups for college universities, giving users a reason to use the site for academics for the first time. The groups allow faculty and students to file-share un-copyrighted material over the website. These groups can be created for clubs, organizations, and even individual classes. There is a file sharing limit of 25MB and users must have a .edu email address to join the groups. For now, the groups are limited to US colleges but it is expected that they will be open to other countries soon.

Google+

When Google+ was introduced as a social networking site to compete will Facebook, many people wrote the site off as a failure when it did not slow Facebook’s growth and membership. However, Google+ may in fact see a huge increase in popularity over the next few years a a social networking site for businesses. ” In fact, a Forrester study found that the market for enterprise social collaboration is projected to increase tenfold in the next four years as more traditional services like video conferencing decline.” Below are a few tools that Google+ contains that will help with its growth:

- Circles

- Google Docs

- Hangouts

- Search functions

 

read the full article here.

Rumor Alert: Youtube Rentals Coming to Google TV

There are now rumors that GoogleTV will support Youtube video rentals.. No official announcements have been made by Google, Youtube’s parent company, however. How the rental process would be streamlined in unknown, as Youtube has always been a free service up until this point. Another problem that will need to be addressed is that GoogleTV will need more subscribers. Only time iwll tell if these rumors are true, but personally, I think that this is a great idea!

 

 

Be Careful What You Tweet!

I just read this article, about a British student who was sentenced to 56 days in jail after posting Racist Tweets after a televised soccer match on Saint Patrick’s Day. The student was arrested the day after the tweets were posted and at first, tried to claim that his twitter had been hacked. He was recently sentenced to 56 days in jail and is also suspended from his university until further notice.

This has raised a lot of controversy in the U.K. because the Internet now is considered part of the public domain, and therefore, comments made when expressing emotions can be used to arrest individuals in the U.K.  What do you think?

Turn Your Tweets into Toilet Paper!

I just read this ridiculous article online about a company called “Shitter”, which will take any of your tweets or the people you follow’s tweets and turn them into toilet paper. You can create a list of favorites or get a whole feed printed out on a role. The toilet paper costs $35 for a pack of four, so its relatively pricey, costing over 8 cents per sheet. While I see the comedy in this idea I wonder if anyone would actually buy it? Thoughts?

Application Teaches Grammar

I just read a very interesting article about an English teacher who developed an application to teach students basic grammar lessons. The application, NoRedInk, teaches basic grammatical lessons through quizes in which students must type in answers, as opposed to multiple choice questions. The application makes it easier for teachers to monitor students’ progress and monitor their success. It also allows students to personalize their questions to an extent by allowing them to select some interests which are then incorporated into the questions. While the application is basic, there is hope that it will continue to be developed to teach more complex lessons in the future. This is just another interesting example of how technology is effecting education and making it more successful.

Editing Youtube Videos Just Got Easier!

I just read this article about how Youtube.com has updated their video editing software to allow users to edit their youtube videos in just one click. This enables users to edit the brightness of a video, fix shakiness, rotate the picture, and many other things with just the click of a button. Youtube places your original video and the edited video side-by-side to allow users to compare before deciding if they wish to edit it or not. Youtube also recommends editing when it detects that a video could benefit editing. Should a user decide later that they no longer wish to have the editing, they can easily revert the video to its original version. I think this new feature is great considering how expensive video editing software can be, not to mention, how time consuming it can be as well. It would have been great to have had this available to us when we uploaded our viral videos earlier this semester!

Should You Upgrade to the New iPad?

Should you upgrade to the new iPad? With Apple’s release of the latest iPad, many consumers are wondering if it is worth it to buy the new model. Below are lists of what features the new iPad does and does not have.

Some of the features that people speculated new new iPad contained but it in fact does NOT have are:

• extra storage
• smaller screen model
• Adobe Flash
• camera flash
• Siri

Some features it DOES contain, however, are:

• faster wireless
• high quality screen display
• a better camera
• a dictation feature
• better battery life

Facebook Privacy Policy

1) What information do they collect?

After reading Facebook’s privacy policy, I was surprised to discover exactly how much information they collect about you. Not only do they have your name, email, IP address, my location, the type of browser I use, or the pages I visit. Having been a member of facebook since 2005, facebook must have a huge amount of data collected solely about me, which is unnerving.

2) How may they use this information?

They may use that information to tailor certain things to you, such as suggestions based on our location or recommending friends for you.

3) What role does advertising play in these policies?

Facebook uses the information that they have to collected about us to select advertisements that we are more likely to respond to. While I don’t like online ads (who does?..), as  a marketing major, I can’t deny that this is a higly effective way of reaching your target market.

4) How do you feel about this?

Reading the privacy policy really shed light onto how much information Facebook collects about you. I think I will be extremely careful in the future and think twice about what I post. I will also now be logging in and out of facebook before and after each use.