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On Stage, Startups Have 7 Minutes To Shine

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For Chris Collins, all the hours spent building a website, developing relationships with food vendors and rehearsing his pitch had come down to this: He had seven minutes to persuade a room filled with investors that his company will revolutionize the way people book caterers.

“Catering is broken!” Collins said on stage.

Wearing a black blazer, a white button-down shirt and jeans, Collins said CaterCow.com makes it easier to find caterers, compare prices and pay for their services. What’s more, his company already has a steady source of revenue by taking a cut of every transaction.

“We have a business model that’s working,” he told the audience of 400 investors, many wearing suits. “We have a team in place to execute this. Now all we need is awesome people like you!”

Collins was one of several entrepreneurs on Friday to present their businesses to investors on “demo day” inside an office building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The young companies had just graduated from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a three-month boot camp for startups that gives entrepreneurs $25,000, office space in Times Square, and the chance to pitch their businesses to venture capitalists who could fund their startups and potentially make them wealthy.

The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is one of at least a dozen accelerator programs for tech startups in New York City. There are dozens more across the country.

For young entrepreneurs, such programs are like training wheels. They receive advice from venture capitalists and successful startup founders who help refine their business models, their sales pitches and their plans for growth.

“It’s like a combination of camp and graduate school,” said Jason Shames, co-founder of Jetaport.com, which aims to simplify booking group travel and also presented on Friday. “We didn’t have to make all the mistakes ourselves. They were able to steer us in the right direction through their experience.”

For investors, startups that graduate from accelerator programs are attractive bets because they have developed promising businesses faster than most young companies, said Andrew Parker, principal at NextView Ventures.

“When you think about how old these companies are — some were only founded three months ago — the stage they are at now is a year ahead of where they would be otherwise,” said Parker, who attended demo day.

The 10 startups that presented are hoping to find their niche in a variety of industries. Houdini wants to make it easier to outsource small repetitive tasks. Juniper & Trade wants to market custom-made furniture. HealthyChic wants to become a go-to destination for yoga products.

Still, they face long odds. Many startups fail. About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don’t return the money they’ve borrowed from investors, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

During the presentations, many entrepreneurs wore t-shirts emblazoned with their startups’ logos. They showed videos and PowerPoint presentations, explained untapped opportunities in the market and made bold proclamations about how they were going to disrupt entire industries.

“We are building America’s political genome. This is a big deal. Fundraising will never be the same after us,” Jesse Sandoval, founder of Angel Politics, told the audience. His startup uses data analytics to match political donors and candidates.

“We will be the new de-facto way to exchange documents online,” Jonathon Ende, co-founder of Bizodo, said to investors. His startup wants to eliminate the need for paper within corporate HR departments.

At the end of each presentation, the entrepreneurs asked for money. Some were raising $500,000. Others were raising more than a $1 million.

For Collins, acceptance into the accelerator program represented a second chance. He and his co-founder, Carly Chamberlain, were among the first employees at Airbnb, a startup company that lets people offer short-term home or room rentals. They left the company more than a year ago and started a food company, Gusta.com.

But Gusta.com didn’t work out well, Collins said. So they came up with CaterCow.com and applied for the accelerator program. At the time, CaterCow.com did not have a website and had not completed a single transaction. Now, the company offers more than 100 catering packages.

On Friday, Collins’ presentation was smooth and well-rehearsed. He had practiced it more than 30 times. Still, he acknowledged having butterflies.

“The first time you present in front of 400 people, it’s nerve-wracking,” he said. “But once you get up there, you feed off the energy.”

Afterward, he collected more than a dozen business cards from investors and stuffed them into the pocket of his blazer. Collins said he plans to present CaterCow.com to another large group of investors in San Francisco, another opportunity made possible because of the accelerator program.

“The great thing is we have a lot of options,” he said. “There’s no other way to meet 600 or 700 investors than being in a program like this.”

On Stage, Startups Have 7 Minutes To Shine

Leave a reply

For Chris Collins, all the hours spent building a website, developing relationships with food vendors and rehearsing his pitch had come down to this: He had seven minutes to persuade a room filled with investors that his company will revolutionize the way people book caterers.

“Catering is broken!” Collins said on stage.

Wearing a black blazer, a white button-down shirt and jeans, Collins said CaterCow.com makes it easier to find caterers, compare prices and pay for their services. What’s more, his company already has a steady source of revenue by taking a cut of every transaction.

“We have a business model that’s working,” he told the audience of 400 investors, many wearing suits. “We have a team in place to execute this. Now all we need is awesome people like you!”

Collins was one of several entrepreneurs on Friday to present their businesses to investors on “demo day” inside an office building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The young companies had just graduated from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a three-month boot camp for startups that gives entrepreneurs $25,000, office space in Times Square, and the chance to pitch their businesses to venture capitalists who could fund their startups and potentially make them wealthy.

The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is one of at least a dozen accelerator programs for tech startups in New York City. There are dozens more across the country.

For young entrepreneurs, such programs are like training wheels. They receive advice from venture capitalists and successful startup founders who help refine their business models, their sales pitches and their plans for growth.

“It’s like a combination of camp and graduate school,” said Jason Shames, co-founder of Jetaport.com, which aims to simplify booking group travel and also presented on Friday. “We didn’t have to make all the mistakes ourselves. They were able to steer us in the right direction through their experience.”

For investors, startups that graduate from accelerator programs are attractive bets because they have developed promising businesses faster than most young companies, said Andrew Parker, principal at NextView Ventures.

“When you think about how old these companies are — some were only founded three months ago — the stage they are at now is a year ahead of where they would be otherwise,” said Parker, who attended demo day.

The 10 startups that presented are hoping to find their niche in a variety of industries. Houdini wants to make it easier to outsource small repetitive tasks. Juniper & Trade wants to market custom-made furniture. HealthyChic wants to become a go-to destination for yoga products.

Still, they face long odds. Many startups fail. About three-quarters of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don’t return the money they’ve borrowed from investors, according to recent research by Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

During the presentations, many entrepreneurs wore t-shirts emblazoned with their startups’ logos. They showed videos and PowerPoint presentations, explained untapped opportunities in the market and made bold proclamations about how they were going to disrupt entire industries.

“We are building America’s political genome. This is a big deal. Fundraising will never be the same after us,” Jesse Sandoval, founder of Angel Politics, told the audience. His startup uses data analytics to match political donors and candidates.

“We will be the new de-facto way to exchange documents online,” Jonathon Ende, co-founder of Bizodo, said to investors. His startup wants to eliminate the need for paper within corporate HR departments.

At the end of each presentation, the entrepreneurs asked for money. Some were raising $500,000. Others were raising more than a $1 million.

For Collins, acceptance into the accelerator program represented a second chance. He and his co-founder, Carly Chamberlain, were among the first employees at Airbnb, a startup company that lets people offer short-term home or room rentals. They left the company more than a year ago and started a food company, Gusta.com.

But Gusta.com didn’t work out well, Collins said. So they came up with CaterCow.com and applied for the accelerator program. At the time, CaterCow.com did not have a website and had not completed a single transaction. Now, the company offers more than 100 catering packages.

On Friday, Collins’ presentation was smooth and well-rehearsed. He had practiced it more than 30 times. Still, he acknowledged having butterflies.

“The first time you present in front of 400 people, it’s nerve-wracking,” he said. “But once you get up there, you feed off the energy.”

Afterward, he collected more than a dozen business cards from investors and stuffed them into the pocket of his blazer. Collins said he plans to present CaterCow.com to another large group of investors in San Francisco, another opportunity made possible because of the accelerator program.

“The great thing is we have a lot of options,” he said. “There’s no other way to meet 600 or 700 investors than being in a program like this.”

Susannah Meyer: Empowering Women in STEM

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L’Oréal USA celebrated its annual Women in Science awards on Thursday, September 13 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. The whole night was dedicated to the celebration of women in science and geared toward empowering girls and young women to explore their interests and curiosities.

I was invited to the event as a part of Girl Up, and as soon as I walked into the Morgan Library and Museum at 6 p.m., I could tell that the evening was bound to be filled with excitement. The strikingly exquisite glass interior of the museum caught my eye as I walked in, wondering what the night would hold.

Right from the moment I arrived, there was a stir of action amongst the guests and hosts already there. As I was the youngest at the event, people wanted to know more about me and about my experiences and wanted to make sure I was noticed. Photographs of me were taken professionally, with the help of lighting, cameras, and a L’Oréal USA Women in Science backdrop.

The first night of the event involved speeches and an awards ceremony. I walked into a large room with 75 other guests, glass awards shimmering alongside the stage. Rebecca Caruso, the executive vice president of corporate communications at L’Oréal, opened the ceremony. Walking up the steps to the stage, Ms. Caruso’s high heel slipped off her foot. A gentleman, creating a sort of Cinderella story, soon slipped it back on. Though this was unintentional, it sent a message to me. Cinderella stories, with men saving women, are the kinds of things that L’Oréal USA works to reinvent with their Women in Science program.

Throughout the evening, Rebecca Caruso made a point of addressing my generation, the future women in science. In a poll conducted by L’Oréal USA, a majority of girls in middle school who were interested in science chose not to pursue it “because science isn’t cool, or because scientists are nerds.” Ms. Caruso wondered, “What if, instead of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, it was ‘The Real Scientists of New Jersey’? What if we could make science something that’s fun and cool for young girls who have the impression that scientists are simply glued to their microscopes?”

Well, with the recognition of five incredible women in science, and with the launch of their new website, For Girls in Science, L’Oréal hoped to do just that. This program aims to get women more represented in male-dominated fields, like those of STEM, for although women earn over 50 percent of PhDs in the life sciences, for example, they represent less than 25% of the workforce in that area. The Women in Science event empowered women and girls to get involved in science, and the five fellowship awardees being honored that night are living proof that women can and do succeed.

Guest speaker Christine C. Quinn knows a thing or two about taking charge in a usually male-dominated field of work. As the first female speaker of the city council, Christine Quinn has spent her life proving herself as an equal to men. She has worked tirelessly to find innovative and fiscally responsible ways to spark job creation, advocates investment in early childhood education, and works extensively on issues of justice and equality. As she praised the honorees, her words stuck out to me: “I am delighted to honor these women today. Beyond what these women do in their daily work, they are actually achieving something much larger: They are showing the world that women can excel in anything they want to do.”

Following Ms. Quinn, Dr. Shirley Malcom, head of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Program at AAAS, presented the 2012 L’Oréal USA Fellowships for Women in Science and introduced the fellows. The fellows included Dr. Christina Agapakis in synthetic biology, Dr. Lilian Childress in physics who studies optomechanics, Dr. Joanna Kelley in genetics, Dr. Erin Marie Williams who investigates the decision-making processes and abilities of our early human ancestors, finally Dr. Jaclyn Winter, who focuses on exploiting the chemical diversity of biologically active natural products produced by filamentous fungi. All of these women are making “What ifs” realities, showing young girls all over that science is innovative, creative, fun, and yes, cool.

After Rebecca Caruso’s closing remarks, we were all invited upstairs for a mixer. The entire museum and all its exhibits were opened to us for viewing. Additionally, hors d’oeuvres were served and iPads previewing L’Oréal’s new FGIS website were spread throughout. Everything looked beautiful, and a three-piece band composed of a flautist, guitarist, and cellist was playing in the background.

Later in the night, more pictures were taken, and I was given an interview, camera, microphone, and all. I was asked about my school, my interests in STEM, the support of my family, and Girl Up. Going to an all-girls’ school, I have never exactly understood how or why people shy away from opportunities in fields like STEM because they are predominantly male-dominated. For the past 11 years of my life, I have been nothing but encouraged to explore and pursue my interests, no matter what they might be.

The experience of that one night will definitely stay with me. I learned a great deal about science and the issues of women struggling in science. I have built connections and a newfound love for programs like L’Oréal’s program that empower women to do what they want and show them not to be afraid. Women are easily just as capable as men of doing what they love and in succeeding at it. So, in the words of L’Oréal’s executive vice president of corporate communications to my generation, “Go out there, discover what interests you, turn criticisms into motivations, and you will succeed. You will not regret it.”

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At L’Oreal’s event with Girl Up consultant Katherine Arnold (left) and fellow Hewitt student Jamie Russo (right).

Ken Goldberg: Can Social Networks Rapidly Expand Knowledge?

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How many of our friends and neighbors are aware of California’s Proposition 30? Despite the high stakes and its potential impact on everyone from students and parents to business leaders, many Californians are not yet aware of it. Can social networks rapidly expand knowledge about timely issues like this?

In 2009, the DOD launched an experiment to see if social networks could be mobilized to address time-critical tasks. Within three days, a team from MIT recruited thousands of people to help, and they successfully located the DOD’s 10 red weather balloons within nine hours. The key to their success was their offer to share the $40,000 in prize money, not only with the 10 people who first reported the balloons, but also with those that recruited them, and those that recruited those people, and so on up the tree.

Such “recursive incentive mechanisms” are well-known in marketing as pyramid schemes, but they are also useful to extract information from social networks. A Nature article published last week shows that social media, in particular messages from close friends, can have a small but significant influence on voting behavior which can make a difference in tight races. Polls show that voters who are aware of Proposition 30 are split at close to 50/50.

Can an intangible incentive structure be designed to rapidly mobilize citizens to learn about a pressing issue? My colleagues and I at the University of California’s CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative are studying this question with a timely new project to study how knowledge spreads across populations.

The website for the Proposition 30 Awareness Project allows visitors to register their awareness, then receive a custom web link to share with their friends and family using email, Facebook or Twitter. Visitors can return at any time to monitor their growing “influence graph” and track their influence score. After the election, the website will list the 50 Most Influential People.

Influence in the Prop 30 Awareness Project is computed using a variant of the Kleinberg and Raghavan algorithm, where each visitor’s influence increases by one point for each person they recruit, by half a point for every person those people recruit, and so on down the line.

“Clearly, social media can influence people but we’re still learning how to measure social impact,” said social entrepreneur Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org. “It looks like the California Proposition 30 Awareness Project can really help.”

Our project, based at UC Berkeley, is the first step toward a general-purpose tool that will allow citizens to initiate their own awareness campaigns on any issue. The first example emphasizes awareness of Proposition 30 and does not advocate a position. It includes links to the California Voters Guide and to campaigns on both sides of the issue. Visitors may also indicate their position for or against the proposition and join an online discussion afterward.

Anyone can participate in the study by visiting the Proposition 30 Awareness Project website.

Ken Goldberg: Can Social Networks Rapidly Expand Knowledge?

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How many of our friends and neighbors are aware of California’s Proposition 30? Despite the high stakes and its potential impact on everyone from students and parents to business leaders, many Californians are not yet aware of it. Can social networks rapidly expand knowledge about timely issues like this?

In 2009, the DOD launched an experiment to see if social networks could be mobilized to address time-critical tasks. Within three days, a team from MIT recruited thousands of people to help, and they successfully located the DOD’s 10 red weather balloons within nine hours. The key to their success was their offer to share the $40,000 in prize money, not only with the 10 people who first reported the balloons, but also with those that recruited them, and those that recruited those people, and so on up the tree.

Such “recursive incentive mechanisms” are well-known in marketing as pyramid schemes, but they are also useful to extract information from social networks. A Nature article published last week shows that social media, in particular messages from close friends, can have a small but significant influence on voting behavior which can make a difference in tight races. Polls show that voters who are aware of Proposition 30 are split at close to 50/50.

Can an intangible incentive structure be designed to rapidly mobilize citizens to learn about a pressing issue? My colleagues and I at the University of California’s CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative are studying this question with a timely new project to study how knowledge spreads across populations.

The website for the Proposition 30 Awareness Project allows visitors to register their awareness, then receive a custom web link to share with their friends and family using email, Facebook or Twitter. Visitors can return at any time to monitor their growing “influence graph” and track their influence score. After the election, the website will list the 50 Most Influential People.

Influence in the Prop 30 Awareness Project is computed using a variant of the Kleinberg and Raghavan algorithm, where each visitor’s influence increases by one point for each person they recruit, by half a point for every person those people recruit, and so on down the line.

“Clearly, social media can influence people but we’re still learning how to measure social impact,” said social entrepreneur Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist.org. “It looks like the California Proposition 30 Awareness Project can really help.”

Our project, based at UC Berkeley, is the first step toward a general-purpose tool that will allow citizens to initiate their own awareness campaigns on any issue. The first example emphasizes awareness of Proposition 30 and does not advocate a position. It includes links to the California Voters Guide and to campaigns on both sides of the issue. Visitors may also indicate their position for or against the proposition and join an online discussion afterward.

Anyone can participate in the study by visiting the Proposition 30 Awareness Project website.

Website Problems Reported

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Sept 18 (Reuters) – Some Bank of America Corp customers in the United States said on Tuesday they were having trouble logging into its online banking website, reviving memories of a serious outage last fall.

The scope of the problem could not immediately be learned, and a Bank of America spokesman did not have immediate comment.

Financial advisers reached by Reuters in New York, Georgia and Michigan said they could not access the site. Reuters reporters in several locations had similar results.

Last year, the No. 2 U.S. bank’s web site experienced six days of problems, which it blamed on heavy traffic and an upgrade of its systems. The site allows customers to check balances, transfer money and make payments.

Ariel Not Cute Enough? Font Made Up Of Real Puppies Adds That Something Extra To Any Message

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Ever thought, “This message is so cute I wish I could say it in puppies?”

Well, the creators of PuppyText certainly did, as evidenced by their new font made up entirely of chocolate Labs .

It’s a simple concept, really. The site’s “About” section explains:
There is nothing complex about this site. This site lets you send a message to your friends written in puppies. And everyone loves puppies.

“No puppies were harmed in the making of this site,” the page adds.

So far, PuppyText has its own Facebook page, iPhone app and nifty puppy-writing website where visitors can type in any message and see it magically transformed into lines of cuddling pups. (Giggles and exclamations of “awwwww” so far not included.)

While other sites have attempted to create various puppy fonts, this may well be the first font to use real puppies as part of the lettering.

PuppyText is the canine incarnation of a new theme in font creators, where messages are created from objects. The UK-based site MyGalaxies.com, for example, uses a database of actual letter-shaped galaxies to spell out words and phrases for all the astronomy lovers out there. The “font” can be a little hard to make out, but the concept is still pretty cool.

One thing’s for sure, this is a text that font impersonator Jon Garcia could definitely nail.

Lisa Swan: 3 Simple Ways to Monetize Your Website’s Newsletters

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OK, so your business has a beautiful website that people love and trust. Your SEO team has worked hard and your site finally has the growing traffic you’ve been waiting for. That social media strategy you implemented now has a great following on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, which is further adding to your site’s traffic.

Oh, and your newsletter has people signing up, but it costs money, it’s hard to come up with topics, you’re not sure it’s offering value, blah blah blah. Sound familiar?

Well you’d be surprised to know that your newsletter may be offering/could offer more value than you think. In fact, a survey done by Ecommerce Quarterly in the first quarter of this year found that while newsletters do not create the most traffic (search still generally does), email lists on average produce some of the best conversion rates, and even more so, add to cart rates among traffic sources. Check out these numbers.

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But you’re still skeptical. You’re not gaining the traffic from the newsletter as you are from search. And you’re still saying that the benefits aren’t outweighing the cost.

Well, how about considering monetizing your newsletter?

There are many options to this circulating around the web that are generally easy to do and, depending on the size of your list, could bring in some nice capital.

To make your search a little easier though, we’ve listed three simple ways to make money from your subscriber list. We’ve laid them out here:

1. Monetize the Real Estate within Your Newsletter

One of the easiest and most profitable methods of monetizing your newsletter is to monetize the real estate within your newsletter. This can be achieved in one of two main ways:

• One, you could work in banner ads/text ads to your own products or services that would hot link to your cart page on your site.

• Two, you could sell the space to advertisers to put their own banner ads/text ads within the real estate space you allow — payment to you works a lot like pay per click advertising. You can do this through cost per impression or cost per click depending on the service you use.

We’ve developed an example here of what this form of monetizing your newsletter might look like:

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As you can see, the ads that can be displayed within an email can be as harmless as what it would look like on many websites.

Furthermore, there are even companies providing ways to connect advertisers to publishers to make monetizing your newsletter even easier. In fact, the company LiveIntent (an email advertising solution company for both publishers and advertisers) says that after you set up a campaign with them, you’ll receive a “LiveTag” to add to your newsletter layout (a simple piece of code to load).

After the code is loaded and you are launched, you “can sell ads into your own tags or easily accept demand from LiveIntent or DSPs hooked into the platform,” the company says. Further, they say you can also “create cross-channel campaigns that reach valuable subscribers wherever they are, on any device.”

In other words, after you have campaign set up, all you need to do is add a piece of code and you are in the driver’s seat of monetizing your newsletter! Fairly simple.

2. Work with Affiliates

Working with affiliates can also be a pretty fantastic opportunity to monetize your newsletter. It’s kind of like advertising through your newsletter, but not exactly. In a nutshell, affiliates will pay you on sales/signups/leads, etc. that you direct to their site. The general process for this within your own email would be to talk about a product/service of the affiliate company and add a link to the product/service that the affiliate company will provide you.

There are multiple ways you can do this within your email. You can have full banner ads that you create, you can have subtle ads, or you can dedicate the whole newsletter to the product/service of the affiliate.

As a caveat to this process though, just as in selling your advertising space expressed above, it is generally very important to make sure that the affiliates you are working with can complement your brand. What we mean by this is, if the brand you are promoting is not relevant, has some troubles in the press, etc., that can translate back to your brand through your promotion. And frankly, your subscribers are generally savvy enough to connect the dots.

With all that said though, monetizing your newsletter through affiliate channels can be pretty fruitful and there are some companies out there making it very easy for you to do. For instance, Commission Junction works with many different companies across a variety of industries who are already interested in working with companies in the affiliate marketing space. They work with companies like Visa, Roku, Canon, Groupon, Etnies, etc. etc. etc. Thus, they’re serving as a way to make it easier to connect with a company that you trust, you feel your subscribers will respond to, and that may be relevant to your audience. Furthermore, they even offer the ability to manage the relationship for you.

3. Charge for Subscription

While this option may not work for all companies, it can be a viable option to monetize your newsletters. The basic concept is this: If you are able to offer your subscribers value that would entice them to pay for a subscription while doing so at a positive ROI, it might be worth it to offer a paid subscription.

The key to this whole structure is how much value you are adding to get people to pay. Thus, strategies like baiting through your newsletter (offering a taste of the premium content) might be a good method to gain paid subscribers.

As an example of this, let’s say you have a fantasy sports site and are sending out a bi-monthly newsletter to your subscribers. Within this newsletter, you talk about the top 5 players for these two weeks and give a nice full outline of why you should start them, pick them up off of waivers, or trade for them. You could then offer access to see the top 100 players via a paid newsletter subscription that offers exclusive access to some of the best tips, advice, etc.

We know that this list is by far not all inclusive, but thought to open the doors to further discussion. If you have any other thoughts/methods or success/failure stories, please feel free to comment below. Cheers.

Lisa Swan writes for marketing sites including LiveIntent.com.

Veterans Go Online In Lieu Of Brick-And-Mortar VFWs

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DENVER (AP) — Busy, tech-savvy and often miles from their peers, thousands of new veterans are going online to find camaraderie or get their questions answered — forcing big changes in long-established veterans groups and inspiring entrepreneurs to launch new ones.

“We’re going back to school, we have full-time jobs, we have families and kids,” said Marco Bongioanni, 33, of New York, who deployed to Iraq twice while on active duty in the Army.

That leaves little time for what he calls “brick-and-mortar” groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion.

Bongioanni and many other men and women who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are gravitating to websites open only to them, where they can talk about GI Bill education benefits, job hunting, the personal toll of war and other concerns they share, any time, day or night.

“The fact that it’s a virtual world, 24/7, allows us to manage it better,” said Bongioanni, now a major in the Army Reserve and attending Army Command and General Staff College in Georgia.

They can also track their health benefits on a Department of Veterans Affairs website and read the VFW magazine on their smartphones, upgrades prompted at least in part by the needs and habits of the 1.4 million veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“You need to go where they are, and that’s online,” said Jerry Newberry, director of communications for the VFW.

Not all the changes are happening online. The VFW’s oldest chapter, Post 1 in Denver, was created in 1899 by First Colorado Volunteers returning from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. Today, it’s reorganizing around the needs of the new veterans.

Its new building, currently being remodeled, won’t have a full-time bar. The space will be devoted instead to offices for veterans service groups, said Izzy Abbass, the post commander and a 44-year-old Army veteran of the first Gulf War.

“We’re not the traditional VFW post,” he said. “Typically the image is of a smoky, dark bar, (a) bunch of guys wearing funny hats sitting around bitching, and they look a lot older than I do.”

Abbass said he has deep respect for the previous generation of veterans and is grateful for what they accomplished, on the battlefield and at home. He said older veterans in Post 1 are among the strongest advocates for making changes to engage the new generation.

The VFW traces its origins to local associations of war veterans who lobbied for health care and pensions, and their meeting halls often became neighborhood gathering places.

The VFW is no longer the center of its members’ social lives, Abbas acknowledged.

“There’s, what, 2,500 bars across Denver? We could hit a different one every night and be fine,” he joked.

Post 1 emphasizes activism, working with veterans groups on college campuses, sponsoring outings for families of deployed servicemen and women and coordinating with a group that helps families reconnect after a deployment.

“What we’re saying is, look, we love you as a member, but we don’t want you to sit on the sidelines, because if we as vets don’t step up to help our fellow vets, no one else will,” Abbass said.

It was the activism that persuaded Dana Niemela to join Post 1.

“To be quite honest, I thought it was for a different generation of veteran,” said Niemela, 36, who served in the Navy from 1997 to 2005, including two years in the Mediterranean. “When I thought of VFW, I thought of World War II, I thought of Vietnam. I frankly didn’t think of women, and I think that’s a common stereotype,” she said.

“When I started meeting the other members and this post in particular, I was really inspired by how actively engaged they were in the veteran community,” she said.

For Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who don’t have much contact with their peers, a website can be a lifeline, said Jason Hansman, manager of the Community of Veterans website at the not-for-profit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

“We’re talking about less than 1 percent of the population that served in Iraq or Afghanistan. The social isolation can be great,” said Hansman, 29, who served in Iraq with an Army civil affairs unit.

In November, one veteran’s messages on the site grew darker and darker as he struggled with job and relationship problems, and he eventually made a suicide threat in a chat room. Following its policy, Community of Veterans gave the veteran’s contact information to the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line, and the suicide was averted, Hansman said.

Community of Veterans started in 2008 and has swelled to more than 23,000 members.

TakingPoint.com, a for-profit veterans website, had nearly 16,000 members weeks after going live this year, said David Johnson, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of the website.

“It’s kind of like LinkedIn meets Facebook meets Angie’s List,” Johnson said with a laugh. Its name invokes the vanguard role of the point soldier or pilot at the head of a patrol.

TakingPoint will soon offer software that can analyze individual veterans’ service records and tell them what benefits they may qualify for, said Johnson, who served three tours in Iraq with the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group.

“The VA in some places has nine-month backlogs,” Johnson said. “Calling up the VA (for that information) … in my opinion is not what a lot of people are doing.”

The VA has long been saddled with a reputation for bureaucratic torpor, but its hospitals and benefits offices have leaped online with 150 Facebook pages, 75 Twitter feeds and a combined total of nearly 640,000 friends and followers, said Brandon Friedman, director online communications for the VA.

“In terms of reach, we’re doing very well,” Friedman said, acknowledging that some of the 640,000 online contacts are duplicates. “In terms of impact, we’re not sure yet, and we’re still struggling with how you measure that.”

The American Legion and VFW have launched Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, but the transition to the web isn’t always easy.

When the Legion wanted to start taking membership applications and renewals online, it “literally took an act of Congress,” national communications director John Raughter said.

Congress chartered the Legion in 1919 — its purposes include “to cement the ties and comradeship born of service” — and any change in the Legion’s constitution, such as new membership procedures, requires congressional action.

The Legion and VFW say their membership numbers show they’re connecting with new veterans. The Legion, with 2.4 million members, has grown by 50,000 since 2009, Raughter said.

“We don’t want to be so aggressive that we become pests,” Raughter said. “Some of the troops, their big message is, ‘Leave us alone. We’re coming home. We’re settling in.’ That’s why we’re more interested in advocacy.”

The 1.6 million-member VFW said Iraq and Afghanistan veterans make up 15 to 16 percent of its total, the largest single group.

Cameron Cook, a 37-year-old Iraq veteran who is director of veteran student services at the University of Colorado’s Denver campus, tells other veterans it’s important to get involved.

“I try to tell them, ‘You know that GI Bill you’re on, that Post-9/11 GI Bill you’re on? There would be no such thing if it wasn’t for these organizations really pushing for us,’” said Cook, a former Marine and a member of VFW Post 1.

While Cook keeps in touch with his military buddies on Facebook, he said email and online networking have limits. He insists on meeting face-to-face with student veterans in his program.

“I think it makes you feel like you’re part of something instead of just having a name on a website,” he said. “I think face-to-face interaction makes you really feel like you belong a lot more.”

___

Online:

Community of Veterans: http://iava.communityofveterans.org

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America: http://iava.org

TakingPoint: http://www.takingpoint.com

Veterans of Foreign Wars: http://www.vfw.org

VFW Post 1: http://www.vfwpost1.org

American Legion: http://www.legion.org

Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov

VA MyHealtheVet: http://www.myhealth.va.gov

___

Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP

This story is the latest installment in a joint initiative by The Associated Press and Associated Press Media Editors taking a closer look at this latest generation of war veterans as they return to civilian life, and the effect this is having on them, their families and American society.

Adam Levin: The Great iPhone ID Caper: What Really Happened?

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If you’re someone who cares about your privacy, these are indeed strange times. When everything from your iPhone to your iPad (and every derivation in between) is secretly tracking your every move from behind its colorful screen, when advertisers gather enough information about you to know you’re pregnant even before your parents do, it’s clear that we are living in a twilight zone. What we think we know about staying safe, and what we actually know, may be two entirely different things.

The recent kerfuffle over Apple device identification numbers is the perfect case in point. Last week the hacking group AntiSec announced that it had succeeded in stealing 12 million Apple device IDs from a laptop belonging to an FBI agent. To prove it, AntiSec released a million of the IDs (which they encrypted) on a publicly available website. The group even posted a tweet taunting Christopher Stangl, the FBI agent alleged to be the victim of the hack, thanking him for the vast cache of data.

Then things got really weird.

First, the FBI posted a press release on its website that denied even possessing Apple device IDs in the first place. The Bureau was even more adamant in its Twitter feed, saying, “We never had info in question. Bottom Line: TOTALLY FALSE.”

Next, Apple released a statement denying any involvement. “The FBI has not requested this information from Apple, nor have we provided it to the FBI or any organization,” Apple told CNN.

Not to be outdone, on Monday, a Florida firm, Blue Toad announced that the purloined database had actually been lifted from its files. Blue Toad is a digital publishing company that converts files to enable easier reading online and by mobile devices.

Regardless of the official denials, the device IDs certainly appear to be authentic, says Eduard Goodman, chief privacy officer at Identity Theft 911. So one thing is clear, somehow someone got their hands on a whole lot of information.

But AntiSec was adamant: The data came from the FBI. And unlike the vague denials from the government and Apple, AntiSec is very specific about how they pulled it off.

“During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java,” according to AntiSec’s online post, which goes on to post the exact file name from Stangl’s computer and the exact number of records stolen: 12,367,232. (If you’re wondering how to keep your iPhone secure, you’ll want to read this.)

I don’t know about you, but all of this sure feels pretty creepy to me.

So as you put your head on your pillow tonight, riddle me this:
Who should we believe?
Is Blue Toad taking the proverbial bullet for someone else?
If AntiSec is on the level, why is the FBI gathering this data anyway?
How big a risk does this present to our privacy and identities, really?

Answering the first question lands us in a thorny nettle. We know the FBI has had issues in the recent past regarding the collection of way too much information about private individuals, sometimes illegally, and then being, shall we say, less-than-forthcoming with the truth about that surveillance. In 2007, 2008 and again in 2010, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued reports finding that the FBI illegally spied on American citizens by using false statements in National Security Letters to obtain consumers’ telephone records, in violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Once it had illegally obtained rafts of data about private citizens, who themselves were not suspects in any criminal investigation, the FBI tried to “cover” itself using “after-the-fact” security letters that “were legally flawed,” the inspector general found.

I’m not saying that the FBI is not being straight when it says it never obtained Apple device IDs, since no evidence exists to support that claim. But if on some future day the Justice Department’s Inspector General discovers that Hoover’s boys actually were collecting such data, I will be the one playing the role of Captain Renault from Casablanca, protesting a little too loudly that I am “Shocked! Shocked!” by this wholly unexpected revelation of wrongdoing.

Next there’s Apple. We know even less about the Cupertino, Calif.-based company than we do about the FBI, and that is at least partially by design, since Apple is famous as much for its zealously guarded secrecy as it is for its beautifully-designed devices. Stories abound of Steve Jobs firing employees for leaking details about upcoming products, and the company is famous for the Heisman-like stiff arm it throws at reporters. Jobs once went so far as to tell a journalism student to bugger off, stating in an email, “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade,” and “Please leave us alone.”

If Apple actually did hand over 12 million device IDs to the FBI, it doesn’t enhance their public image to admit it.

There is AntiSec. The data they’ve unearthed certainly looks authentic. But when it came time to describe how they pulled off their caper, the members of AntiSec included a bizarre request: They said they would talk to journalists, but only after Adrian Chen, a tech writer for Gawker.com, posted a picture of himself wearing a tutu with a shoe on his head. So, “No tutu, no sources.”

I kid you not. Here’s the photo, though it now appears that Gawker does not believe that an FBI laptop was hacked. I can understand their skepticism given the whole tutu affair, but the truth is that we really can’t be sure who did this.

Here’s what we do know: A large breach just happened that might (I stress the word might) endanger the privacy and identity of millions of people. And someone — the FBI, Apple, Blue Toad or AntiSec — is not on the level here.

From this flows the second bizarre thing about this whole fiasco. The stolen file also contained users’ names, addresses and cell phone numbers, according to AntiSec. If the FBI is being less than truthful about its role in this breach, what was it doing with all that data the first place? Were these 12.3 million people under active investigation for terrorism or other crimes? Or was their data obtained as part of the mother of all fishing expeditions, without any grounds for suspicion whatsoever, as happened in the FBI’s previous phone surveillance program, according to the Inspector General’s investigation. At this moment, your guess is as good as mine.

Finally, there’s the mystery of whether or not this breach is actually a big deal. My gut tells me it is. If we accept AntiSec’s account, all this personally identifiable information was sitting unencrypted on a government laptop. That’s a huge potential danger, since seemingly every week we witness another major security breach, like this one and that one, caused by some negligent employee leaving a laptop computer in his (often unlocked) car. I don’t know about you, but the fact that all this sensitive data may have been walking around on a laptop, without any encryption whatsoever, scares the hell out of me.

What’s more, despite AntiSec taking the thoughtful extra step and encrypting the million records it placed online, within a day of the breach’s announcement there was at least one website offering Apple customers (and whomever else) to test the stolen file and see whether their device ID is among those released. There is simply no way to know whether such services are legitimate, or just another layer of an identity-stealing scam. Bottom line: Any time any personally identifiable information on 12.3 million devices goes walk-about, I think it’s a big deal.

Of course, plenty of well-informed people disagree with me. An identification number won’t help anyone hack into a device unless the thief also has the device’s password, Bob Bigman, the CIA’s former chief information security officer, said in a recent interview. I hope he’s right. Further, Apple has announced its intention to phase out use of such device IDs in future products; however, that’s little comfort for millions of people walking around today with iPhones, iPads and iPods.

In the end, nobody outside the FBI, Apple, Blue Toad and AntiSec knows exactly what happened here. For all we know, it might even be a type of threat that privacy experts haven’t even thought of yet, as in the land of cybersecurity every day is a new adventure.

“The more I think about this, it could be part of a larger phishing or other type of event we haven’t yet seen,” Bigman told Bankinfosecurity.com.

So how does this movie end? Will AntiSec make good on its promise to give more details about this hack? Is the FBI an innocent bystander here? Is Blue Toad going to hang out alone on the lily pad? All we can do is wait and see.

The Internet has added a completely new dimension to our lives. On the one hand it has so connected the world that we are learning way too much about each other, but on the other it has fostered a major disconnect in that big and dangerous things are happening every day with many fathers but few fingerprints. Therefore, anyone can claim responsibility for anything and there is less evidence of who did what to whom other than the fact of the hack or the disruption. Go ask the folks at Go Daddy.

The most powerful fear is that of the unknown and the one thing we do know about the cyber world is that there is so much we will never know.

Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.

This article originally appeared on Credit.com.

John Haydon: Six Powerful Ways to Make Your Website More Social

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The purpose of your website is to encourage people to take action. Period.

Now the actions might vary — like joining e-mail lists or donating money — but regardless what the specifics are, your website’s value is the net of action it encourages.

Two critical areas of action on your website are:
Sharing content from your website via social media.
Liking and following your organization’s outposts.

The reason why these two areas of action are critical, is that they help build your fan base, amplify word-of-mouth, and increase traffic to your website.

Let’s take an example:

Someone finds your website in a Google search and decides to share a very useful article from your blog.

If they share it on Facebook, the resulting visits are essentially by word-of-mouth. If they shared on Twitter the resulting visits are people interested in the topic of the article. In either case, social sharing will eventually result in new email supporters, donors, etc.

Six Ways How To Make Your Website More Social

Below are six ways you can make your website more social. Keep in mind that the ease or difficulty of making these changes is related to your technical abilities and resources, and your website’s software.

1. Create Awesome Content

There’s a reason why you’ve heard this a million times. People don’t share boring content. And even on the rare instance that someone does share a boring video or a blog post, it won’t get that far anyhow.

You owe it to your people and the cause to become the best creator/curator of content you can be.

2. Add Sharing Plugins

If someone has to copy the URL from your website and paste it into Twitter in order to share it, you’re uninviting people to your party.

The Digg Digg plugin (the one you see to the left of this blog post) includes all the major social media sites and then some. The folks over at Buffer own this plugin, so you can bet that it’s very reliable. And if you don’t use WordPress for your website, check out their Buffer Button.

3. Add Facebook’s Social Plugins

Websites that integrate Facebook’s social graph tend to have much more traffic and loyalty.

Facebook plugins allow you to easily add a variety of different Facebook features to your website, like social comments, a recommendations bar and even Facebook login. A WordPress plugin is also available.

4. Use Huge Images

Lately it seems like people are sharing pictures more than ever before. Pictures of cats (of course), politicians, and even sharing pictures with just words!

Why? Well, for two reasons:
A picture takes up more visual “real estate” in the Newsfeeds.
A picture says 1000 words (except for pictures that have only words)

People are more likely to scan, read and share an article on your website if it’s got an attractive image that goes along with it. They’ll take that image and pin it on Pinterest or post it to Facebook. Read this post for optimizing your website for Pinterest and this one for Facebook.

5. Invite People to Connect

Instead of sticking social media outposts in a sidebar or below the fold, dedicate a single page on your website site for social connecting.

A great example of this is a recent project by Goodwill in San Francisco that has a space for people to connect with each other on Facebook, Twitter, and even submit photos to be shared on Pinterest.

Something you can do right now is add a Facebook like box to your website, which allows you the ability to display the faces of people who’ve liked your Facebook Page.

6. Acquire Emails with Facebook Login

Many email marketing services, like Aweber, offer a Facebook connect option for their web forms. This feature makes it easy for people to join your e-mail list simply by authorizing an With Facebook. In most cases, the opt in form is pre-populated with their name and e-mail. Check out the example on this page.

Putting It All In Context

The most important aspect of making these types of changes to your website is understanding your community. Go back to the personas you (hopefully) developed and ask yourself they’d share your content and connect with you on your outposts.

How have you made your site more social?

Andrew Lloyd Webber Is Heading To Your Wii

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Fans of musicals everywhere can finally rejoice, because Andrew Lloyd Webber is heading to a gaming system nearest you.

According to gaming website MCV, the famous musical director is the star of a new video game titled “Andrew Lloyd Webber Musicals: Sing and Dance,” which was released exclusively for Wii today. The game features 32 hits from Webber’s popular musicals, including popular ballads like “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” and “All I Ask Of You.”

A description of the video game posted on Broadway World states: “Fans of hit musicals such as ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, ‘Sunset Boulevard’, ‘Evita’, ‘Cats’, ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ will now be able to put themselves center stage with this new game.”

Players can pick between “Dance,” “Sing, or “Career” modes (we have no idea what that last one means), incorporating jazz hands and high-pitched solos. Plus, they can choose to belt out their songs next to Mii versions of ALW greats like Elaine Paige, Michael Crawford, and Donny Osmond.

Think Rock Band for the gentler music lovers out there. That’s right, no more lonely shower singing, now you can bring your best impression of Munkustrap to, erm, your living room. That’s a step up right?

“This is a fabulous signing for us,” said Paul Nicholls, sales and marketing director at Koch, in a statement to MCV. “Andrew Lloyd Webber and his creations are a British institution that have been enjoyed by generations across the world. The chance to bring this product to market for the Nintendo Wii is both an honor and hugely exciting.”

“Andrew Lloyd Webber Musicals: Sing and Dance” was published by Tubby Games and is available for Wii starting September 14th through Koch Media.

Check out the slideshow of images from the best of Andrew Lloyd Webber below.

Sold Out In 1 Hour

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If you want that shiny new iPhone 5 as soon as possible, then grab your folding chair and an umbrella, because you may have to wait in a long line outside the Apple Store.

According to Business Insider, about one hour after the iPhone 5 pre-orders were made available to the public (at 12:01 a.m. PT on September 14), the entire stock was sold out. Shipping estimates on the company’s site now currently say it will take at least two weeks to deliver phones in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and Germany.

While some lucky Apple enthusiasts quickly ordered their devices, this morning’s purchasing process had a few glitches. CNN reports that heavy traffic on Apple’s website led to the damning “We’ll be back” sign, which inevitably frustrated the sleepy internet and Twittersphere.

Some smartphone users found a loophole and were able to bypass Apple’s overwhelmed website and place orders via the Apple Store’s iOS app. According to CNET, “buying options went live immediately after midnight” via the app.

MacRumors suggests that customers “may still be able to receive launch-day delivery” (September 21) by ordering though AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint. But the Apple-obsessed site also gives one final caveat to expecting iPhone 5 owners: the 9/21 delivery date from listed on the carriers’ sites may not “immediately reflect available stock.”

Yikes.

So back to square one: If you weren’t one of the lucky few who could access the Apple Store last night, and you’re concerned cellphone carriers won’t make good on the promised release date, then prepare to wait a few weeks or camp in front of an Apple Store.

Never have pre-orders for a new iPhone sold out within one hour. TechCruch notes that the iPhone 4 pre-orders sold out in 20 hours, while the iPhone 4S pre-orders sold out in 22 hours, meaning the iPhone 5 sold out a whopping 20x faster than its predecessors.

Were you successfully able to pre-order the iPhone 5 last night? Let us know how it went for you in the comments section, or tweet us at [@HuffPostTech]. If you’re still on the fence about the new iPhone, take a look at our chart to see how it compares to top competitors like the Galaxy S3 and the Lumia 920; and view our gallery of the 7 things the iPhone 5 has that the iPhone 4S doesn’t.

Opponents Steal Puerto Rican Governor’s Website

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Politicians be forewarned! Remember to renew your website’s domain name on time, otherwise you may fall victim to URL thieves.

Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuño is learning that lesson this week after his website, LuisFortuno.com, expired and his opponents, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), swooped in and snatched up the name.

As Latino Rebels reports, the Republican incumbent used LuisFortuno.com for his 2008 gubernatorial campaign, however the website appears to have changed hands this week and is now sponsored by the PPD (as seen at the bottom of the site). The home page, which features a photo of Fortuno with arms crossed above the message “Hazme Tus Preguntas” or “Ask Me Your Questions,” opens with an incendiary video that slams Fortuno.

luis fortuno website

PPD, also known as the Populares, added insult to Fortuno’s injury, posting a photo of the receipt for the purchased domain name on the party’s official Twitter account. The cost? $12.17 for the domain name and $6.99 for private registration services — even though the PPD is certainly not holding anything back in its claims of ownership.

Former Puerto Rican governor Anibal Acevedo Vila, a member of PPD, responded to the party’s takeover of LuisFortuno.com in a tweet, writing: “Not renewing luisfortuno.com, when LF used it in his campaigns in 04-08 is the best example of incompetence. Failed campaign and government!”

No re-comprar luisfortuno.com, cuando LF lo uso en sus campañas 04-08 es mayor muestra de incompetencia. Campaña y gobierno colapsados!

— anibalacevedo (@anibalacevedo) September 11, 2012

While it appears Fortuño allowed the domain name to expire, trading in LuisFortuno.com for PorPuertoRico2012.com, the domain name may have changed hands as early as October 2011, according to data from GoDaddy.com.

Why Fortuno’s opponents chose to wait until this time to announce their take over is anyone’s guess, but the Sept. 10 launch — on the eve of Fortuno’s first debate — was likely a strategic move.

Watch the main video below and click over to the website to see the other videos the PPD posted.

(h/t Latino Rebels)

WATCH: What’s That On Paul Ryan’s Hip?

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Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has one eye-catching iPhone.

While speaking at a town hall meeting in Wisconsin this past Wednesday, a photo was snapped of the VP hopeful with a camouflage phone clipped to his hip.

Turns out, Ryan is rocking a Defender Series OutterBox case, priced at $59.99 on the company’s website. This accessory is meant to provide “unrivaled protection from rough treatment in the worst environments,” making this iPhone case perfect for election season.

“We’ve got protection for the punishment you endure,” says a man with a slow, southern drawl in the hunting-themed promotional OutterBox video. Check out the full clip below:

This video has us thinking Ryan’s phone case is a strategic appeal to a certain collective of voters. Or perhaps he just needs his waist to blend perfectly in with tall grasses?

Either way, Ryan’s probably got more skill with an iPhone than Barack Obama, who had a momentary iPhone “oops” while campaigning in Florida last week. The president couldn’t get a handle on dialing a number from the smartphone and chalked it up to being an iNoob. “See, I still have a BlackBerry,” the president admitted after fumbling briefly with the iPhone. (Maybe he’ll switch over to the Apple side now that the iPhone 5 is out.)

For more information and a brief review of the OtterBox Defender Series, check out the video below.

Do you have an iPhone case you absolutely couldn’t live without? Let us know your favorite (and least favorite) brands in the comments section below, or tweet your thoughts to @HuffPostTech. Then read up on some weird accessories you can buy for your phone, or check out this nifty iPhone case that comes with a physical keyboard.

Fugitive Sex Offender Arrested After Girlfriend ‘Likes’ Sheriffs’ Dept. On Facebook

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Facebook’s stock has risen pretty high, at least in the eyes of sheriffs in Tazewell County, Va., who were able to use the social media website to land a fugitive sex offender.

Authorities arrested Dyllan Otto Naecher, a 29 year old white male from Maryland, for failing to register as a sex offender while in Virginia. He may also face federal charges for crossing state lines under the Adam Walsh Act. with possible ties to gang activity, according to WJHL-TV.

Naecher had been in hiding but police were able to find him after determining the identity of his girlfriend when she “liked” the sheriff’s office’s Facebook page, the Associated Press reported.

The girlfriend, Samantha Dillow, has been charged with obstruction of justice and is expected to be arrested today.

Members of the U.S. Marshalls office are interviewing Haecker with detectives from the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office, according to WVVA-TV.

(h/t: Fark.com)

The Ping Is Dead

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All good Pings must come to an end, and for Apple’s social network Ping, that end date is coming soon.

Apple has officially announced that Ping, its music-based social network baked into the iTunes desktop player, will shut down on September 30. Clicking on the Ping tab (try it, just once, while you can) brings up a message that says just that; 9to5Mac has a larger screenshot:

ping bye bye

AllThingsD also points out that Apple’s old website for Ping has vanished from the face of the Internet.

Introduced at a September 2010 Apple event as “a social network for music,” Ping never really caught on with music-listeners. A kerfuffle with Facebook over sharing activity may have doomed Ping from the start: Facebook blocked access to Ping, which made it impossible to find Facebook friends who were also using Ping.

Ironically, Ping will be replaced with deep Facebook integration in iTunes 11. When that version of iTunes becomes available in October, you’ll be able to see whenever your Facebook friends “Like” an artist, song or album on iTunes.

You can read more about the new iTunes — which will be, for the first time in two years, Ping-less — here.

How To Follow Apple’s Big iPhone Event LIVE

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During Apple’s big event in San Francisco, which kicks off September 12 at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT), we’re expecting to see a new iPhone unveiled, as well as a bevy of other products (iPods? iPads?? iCars???).

So how can the overly enthusiastic fanboy following the up-to-the-millisecond coverage of the big presentation? Beside constantly refreshing this website of course, here are the best ways to follow the coverage online.

For The Best Video…

These will be hard to come by, since Apple won’t be posting a livestream of the event and is vigilant about taking down illegal USTREAM feeds from inside the event, though sneaky attendees have been known to get away with posting a secret live stream or two. (Check back for updates on that front.)

For the more patient, Apple will post the keynote on its website for your viewing pleasure after the event is over.

For The Best Pics…

Engadget, sister blog of the Huffington Post (both owned by Aol), has historically been quick to post high-res photos from inside Apple press events. Keep tabs on it to get a first look at the new gadgetry.

For The Best Liveblogging…

In addition to Engadget’s live blog, you have the following:

The Verge
GigaOm
Wired
CNET
TechnoBuffalo
Ars Technica
MacWorld

Of course, you can also follow HuffPost Tech’s coverage of the event right here or on Twitter (@HuffPost Tech). Before Apple CEO Tim Cook takes the stage, take a look at our roundup of everything we expect to see announced, as well as a few things we wish Apple would announce (but are pretty sure it won’t).

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz: Chasing the Social Media Data Trail

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Every website visit and click on the internet leaves a trail, and that makes social media quite different from the mass media world defined by newspaper subscribers and readers, radio listeners counted by quarter-hour ratings, television households and cable viewers.

In my last column, we established that a lot of folks in the technology sector have concluded that privacy is dead, but online legal issues remain unresolved. From the perspective of journalists, public relations professionals and digital strategists, your social media data trail has value.

Early attempts to list useful social media metrics quit counting somewhere beyond 100 different measures, yet the quality of these online analytics has been questioned from the start. More often the concern has been about return on investment (ROI) and marketing potential. Last month in Chicago, I assembled a panel of experts to sort out what journalism and mass communication professors should be teaching their students about measurement.

2012-09-10-AEJMCPanelAudience.jpg

Carol Fowler, a former television news director, told the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) that journalism is in “a time of tremendous turmoil, angst, anxiety.” She now manages content at Viewpoints, a national consumer product reviews website that measures online traffic flow to it. Fowler said 58% of site traffic comes from Amazon Askville -more than Facebook and other popular social sites.

The digital trail makes it fairly easy to see where an online user comes from and where they go after leaving your site. Still, we should be skeptics about the quality of online data.

“It all comes back to basic measurement and research principles,” Rebecca Denison of Digitas said. Traditional social research concerns of reliability and measurement still matter. The panel agreed that while social media measurement can be challenging, we can learn to ask better questions about the data.

In a crisis situation, for example, Edelman Digital Senior Vice President Phil Gomes said measurement determines whether or not a client should respond to online comments. “Is this somebody that we’ve previously identified we have or want a relationship with?” Gomes asks. “If it fails that test, then I ask ‘Is the person otherwise influential?’” The “velocity of chatter” also is important, he said.

The measurement of social media has created “an acute desire and need for people who can adopt… an analytic mindset to the kind of problems we solve in journalism, advertising or public relations,” Loyola University Chicago School of Communication Assistant Professor David Kamerer said.

Everyone wants to make decisions based upon data, it would seem, but how do we know when the data can be trusted?

“Most social media metrics are crap,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Assistant Professor Stu Shulman claimed. “They’re built for speed, not for reliability. Not for accuracy. Not for validity. They’re built for consumption.” He developed a competing product that attempts to use rigorous social research methods, he said.

“All the free tools are mostly crap,” Gomes responded. “The paid for tools are actually getting a little bit better.”

The quest for good data continues because social measurement has moved from fun online toys and slick charts.

“There’s some serious value in this data,” Gomes added. “I think people would be surprised the degree to which they are observed online and the degree to which their activities are public.”

“These are powerful tools that have never been available before,” Kamerer said, “so I think we’re all a little intoxicated by it.”

The danger is that technological intoxication might lead professionals to violate ethical principles to gain a competitive advantage. I’m not sure we have even established what constitutes ethical use of online data in the mass media context. Unlike other contexts — schools, hospitals and federally-funded research — media research is unbridled.

In that environment, it remains difficult for users of social media measures — including business website operators — to sort out junk data from valuable findings. Every time consumers go online we are, in effect, research subjects only giving our informed consent via a click on opaque Terms of Service (TOS) agreements.

We are several years into the use of social media metrics and analytics, and I see no quick fix to the problems associated with the social media data trail.

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz: Chasing the Social Media Data Trail

Leave a reply

Every website visit and click on the internet leaves a trail, and that makes social media quite different from the mass media world defined by newspaper subscribers and readers, radio listeners counted by quarter-hour ratings, television households and cable viewers.

In my last column, we established that a lot of folks in the technology sector have concluded that privacy is dead, but online legal issues remain unresolved. From the perspective of journalists, public relations professionals and digital strategists, your social media data trail has value.

Early attempts to list useful social media metrics quit counting somewhere beyond 100 different measures, yet the quality of these online analytics has been questioned from the start. More often the concern has been about return on investment (ROI) and marketing potential. Last month in Chicago, I assembled a panel of experts to sort out what journalism and mass communication professors should be teaching their students about measurement.

2012-09-10-AEJMCPanelAudience.jpg

Carol Fowler, a former television news director, told the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) that journalism is in “a time of tremendous turmoil, angst, anxiety.” She now manages content at Viewpoints, a national consumer product reviews website that measures online traffic flow to it. Fowler said 58% of site traffic comes from Amazon Askville -more than Facebook and other popular social sites.

The digital trail makes it fairly easy to see where an online user comes from and where they go after leaving your site. Still, we should be skeptics about the quality of online data.

“It all comes back to basic measurement and research principles,” Rebecca Denison of Digitas said. Traditional social research concerns of reliability and measurement still matter. The panel agreed that while social media measurement can be challenging, we can learn to ask better questions about the data.

In a crisis situation, for example, Edelman Digital Senior Vice President Phil Gomes said measurement determines whether or not a client should respond to online comments. “Is this somebody that we’ve previously identified we have or want a relationship with?” Gomes asks. “If it fails that test, then I ask ‘Is the person otherwise influential?’” The “velocity of chatter” also is important, he said.

The measurement of social media has created “an acute desire and need for people who can adopt… an analytic mindset to the kind of problems we solve in journalism, advertising or public relations,” Loyola University Chicago School of Communication Assistant Professor David Kamerer said.

Everyone wants to make decisions based upon data, it would seem, but how do we know when the data can be trusted?

“Most social media metrics are crap,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Assistant Professor Stu Shulman claimed. “They’re built for speed, not for reliability. Not for accuracy. Not for validity. They’re built for consumption.” He developed a competing product that attempts to use rigorous social research methods, he said.

“All the free tools are mostly crap,” Gomes responded. “The paid for tools are actually getting a little bit better.”

The quest for good data continues because social measurement has moved from fun online toys and slick charts.

“There’s some serious value in this data,” Gomes added. “I think people would be surprised the degree to which they are observed online and the degree to which their activities are public.”

“These are powerful tools that have never been available before,” Kamerer said, “so I think we’re all a little intoxicated by it.”

The danger is that technological intoxication might lead professionals to violate ethical principles to gain a competitive advantage. I’m not sure we have even established what constitutes ethical use of online data in the mass media context. Unlike other contexts — schools, hospitals and federally-funded research — media research is unbridled.

In that environment, it remains difficult for users of social media measures — including business website operators — to sort out junk data from valuable findings. Every time consumers go online we are, in effect, research subjects only giving our informed consent via a click on opaque Terms of Service (TOS) agreements.

We are several years into the use of social media metrics and analytics, and I see no quick fix to the problems associated with the social media data trail.