Somebody needs to keep track of Santa Claus as he makes his way around the globe Christmas Eve, and, once again, NORAD has stepped up to the plate. This year they’re providing radar coverage and up-to-the-minute info on his every move.

Volunteer military personnel work into the wee hours of the night tracking St. Nick on special equipment that pinpoints his location on Google Maps and Google Earth. “Santa Cams” catch him in action as he criss-crosses the Earth in his sleigh and, if you watch closely, you’ll even get to see Santa do a flyby of the International Space Station.

Santa trackers issue regular reports on the web site as the Big Guy stops at various countries on his way to the United States; the trackers also remind kids about the importance of going to bed so he doesn’t have to skip the homes of boys and girls that are still wide awake. (How convenient!) The trackers also keep busy answering live phone calls and emails from kids around the country who call or write in with questions. You can also track Santa in Google Earth, visit m.noradsanta.org on your mobile device, or just search for “Santa” on Google Maps on your phone.

NORAD’s holiday web site is already up and running with games and activities, but the real fun begins at 12:00 a.m. MST on December 24th. That’s when the Santa Cams flip on and viewers can watch Santa and his elves get the sleigh and reindeer ready to go out for the night.

Be sure to check out the video compilation of scenes from last year’s cams to see some of the places NORAD caught Santa last year. If you’ve never visited the NORAD Santa Tracker on Christmas, you really must do so. It’s so cool that you’ll want to make it a holiday tradition.

Official NORAD Santa Tracker

Send an email to Lisa Hoover, the author of this post, at yvfn@yvsrunpxre.pbz

moc.rekcahefil@asil.

Here comes Santa Claus

Digital Inspiration is an oft-linked blog here at Lifehacker, and its author is a very savvy digital worker. That said, Amit Agarwal learned a lot about safety precautions when both his Gmail and Google Apps accounts were hacked into.

Agarwal’s not entirely sure about how his accounts were broken into, given that he had strong passwords on them. After a few moments’ panic and some back-and-forth with the Google team, he regained control over his accounts. If he had to go through it again, he’d wish he had a whole bunch of backup and verification procedures on hand. Here’s one item that jumped out at us, despite having gone through a similar experience, as something neither we nor most Google/Gmail users probably have ready:

#3. Take a paper and write down the following information about your Google Account. You will need this to verify your identify to Google in case someone else takes over your Google Account and the secondary email address associated with your account.

• The month and year when your created your Gmail / Google Account.
• If you created a Gmail account by invitation, write the email address of the person who first sent you that invite for Gmail.
• The email addresses of your most frequently emailed contacts (the top 5).
• The names of any custom labels that you may have created in your Gmail account.
• The day/month/year when you started using various other Google services (like AdSense, Orkut, Blogger, etc.) that are associated with the Google account that you are trying to recover. If you’re not certain about some of the dates, provide your closest estimate.

Be sure to read the full Digital Inspiration post for more tips and advice on preparing for, and recovering from, hacked Google accounts, and share your own hack/spam recovery experiences in the comments.

Gmail and Google Apps Account Got Hacked [Digital Inspiration]

Send an email to Kevin Purdy, the author of this post, at xriva@yvsrunpxre.pbz

moc.rekcahefil@nivek.

Good summary and links to full posts on preparing/recovering from a gmail hack.

« So you don’t think Twitter is for B2B? | Main | Why Twitter is like a bowl of soup »

December 14, 2009

My answers to 5 Twitter FAQs

Those of us who spend significant percentages of our public time talking about Twitter and social media, often hear the same question voiced over and over again. It my seem redundant to us, but it makes overwhelmingly clear what the barriers are: what reason people have to not use Twitter.

On the short list of these questions is: “How can a message constrained to 140 characters possibly have value?”

It takes more than 140 characters to answer it.

First off, the question often reveals a traditional marketer’s mindset: How do I get a message out? How do I get people to buy my goods and services in a measly 140 characters.

The answer is that you don’t. Twitter does not work well as a one-directional message-sending tool. It is more like a telephone. One person speaks and another listens. The parties go back and forth. The person who started the conversation often finds greater value in what she or he is told, than in the brief words that initiated the conversation.

Second, Twitter is a business tool that is best used in conjunction with other social media tools. It’s advantages are that it is very fast for spreading ideas, information or just interesting thoughts. It is broad and shallow, while other tools such as blogs, podcasts or even wikis go much deeper.

Let’s compare Twitter to a hammer.  Both are diverse in the ways you can use them. You can use a hammer to build a house or perhaps bludgeon a spouse. In either case using a saw to help you with the job will usually prove useful and productive.

That gets me to the third frequently asked set of questions: “Exactly what do I use the thing for?”

The answer they hate to hear is precisely the one I have to give: Use it for whatever you want to do with it. Twitter is not an application. It is a communications tool or platform. You can use Twitter in as many ways as a telephone or email.

Then there is the dreaded ROI question, the one that makes Twitter and social media champions roll their eyes toward the sky with Pavlovian consistency. 

There are somethings that have clear value but are difficult to measure. For example, I have elected to wear pants at every face-to-face business meeting I’ve ever attended. I cannot think of any way to measure the value, but I know it’s there. I know in most cases the pants have greater value than say my wearing a skirt or no pants at all.

But I cannot give you the comparative ROI on the investment.

Nor can I quantify the value of a good telephone conversation; a customer whose problem got painlessly fixed by a support technician; a CEO spending five days of company tie and money to speak at an industry gathering; or a holiday donation to a homeless shelter.

Yes, there is a value to each of these things and somehow it translates to the bottom line. Yes, all things in business need to be measured to be understood and to scale. But more and more, measurement has become more complex.

When you understand what it is you want to do with Twitter, then you can find what it is you need to measure. Their are many tools and people who will help you.

And that brings me to the final and most difficult to answer of my frequently asked questions: “Why should I use Twitter.”

My blunt answer is: “Whatever you want.” Just like that hammer and phone.

Posted by shel on December 14, 2009 | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c6ba253ef0120a74f8bfd970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference My answers to 5 Twitter FAQs :

Comments

My answers to 5 Twitter FAQs

Those of us who spend significant percentages of our public time talking about Twitter and social media, often hear the same question voiced over and over again. It my seem redundant to us, but it makes overwhelmingly clear what the barriers are: what reason people have to not use Twitter.

On the short list of these questions is: “How can a message constrained to 140 characters possibly have value?”

It takes more than 140 characters to answer it.

First off, the question often reveals a traditional marketer’s mindset: How do I get a message out? How do I get people to buy my goods and services in a measly 140 characters.

The answer is that you don’t. Twitter does not work well as a one-directional message-sending tool. It is more like a telephone. One person speaks and another listens. The parties go back and forth. The person who started the conversation often finds greater value in what she or he is told, than in the brief words that initiated the conversation.

Second, Twitter is a business tool that is best used in conjunction with other social media tools. It’s advantages are that it is very fast for spreading ideas, information or just interesting thoughts. It is broad and shallow, while other tools such as blogs, podcasts or even wikis go much deeper.

Let’s compare Twitter to a hammer.  Both are diverse in the ways you can use them. You can use a hammer to build a house or perhaps bludgeon a spouse. In either case using a saw to help you with the job will usually prove useful and productive.

That gets me to the third frequently asked set of questions: “Exactly what do I use the thing for?”

The answer they hate to hear is precisely the one I have to give: Use it for whatever you want to do with it. Twitter is not an application. It is a communications tool or platform. You can use Twitter in as many ways as a telephone or email.

Then there is the dreaded ROI question, the one that makes Twitter and social media champions roll their eyes toward the sky with Pavlovian consistency. 

There are somethings that have clear value but are difficult to measure. For example, I have elected to wear pants at every face-to-face business meeting I’ve ever attended. I cannot think of any way to measure the value, but I know it’s there. I know in most cases the pants have greater value than say my wearing a skirt or no pants at all.

But I cannot give you the comparative ROI on the investment.

Nor can I quantify the value of a good telephone conversation; a customer whose problem got painlessly fixed by a support technician; a CEO spending five days of company tie and money to speak at an industry gathering; or a holiday donation to a homeless shelter.

Yes, there is a value to each of these things and somehow it translates to the bottom line. Yes, all things in business need to be measured to be understood and to scale. But more and more, measurement has become more complex.

When you understand what it is you want to do with Twitter, then you can find what it is you need to measure. Their are many tools and people who will help you.

And that brings me to the final and most difficult to answer of my frequently asked questions: “Why should I use Twitter.”

My blunt answer is: “Whatever you want.” Just like that hammer and phone.

View the entire comment thread.

Quick read for most asked questions on Twitter – the truth is there is no wrong way to use twitter just be yourself and help others.

Five video game buying tips for parents

Just as there are movies, TV shows and books that are inappropriate for young eyes, not all video games are ideal for players of all ages.

Granted, you already know this, thanks to widespread media coverage of many “Mature”-rated video games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series. I don’t think many parents want their 7 year-olds playing games where you can shoot police officers or pick up prostitutes — even if it is “just a game.” And imagine if you accidentally gave this kind of game as a gift to a child?

Considering the holiday season is upon us, the following are some helpful tips for parents (and/or gift-givers) buying video games, courtesy of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (www.theesa.ca).

1. Check the recommended age ratings. An age rating is featured on the lower left of every game package, and it gives information as to age appropriateness. For example, “E” is for “Everyone,” “T” is for “Teen” and “M” is for “Mature.”

2. Read the back of the package. Called “content descriptors,” the back of the game box will tell parents why games are classified for certain ages. It might say something like “strong language,” “violence,” “blood” or “sexual references.”

3. Monitor your child’s game play. Sit down with your kids when they play these games so you can see what they do in them. Create a dialogue with your child about their game playing — their habits, feelings and with whom they play online.

4. Use the parental controls. All three video game consoles — Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii — all have built-in controls that allow parents to restrict content based on the age of the user. In most cases you can also set time limits for play.

5. Go beyond the box. There are many other resources for information about video games, including game reviews, trailers and demos, both online and in store. The Entertainment Software Rating Board website (www.esrb.com), for instance, will give you specific examples of what can be found in each new game.

By Marc Saltzman, MSN Tech & Gadgets

Posted at 11:55 AM in Games, Holiday Guide | Permalink

summary of the basics for parents as we near the last few days of christmas shopping.

Paris-based entrepreneur Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is covering the Le Web conference for us this year. Follow him on Twitter for more updates.

More cool startups from Le Web:

Stribe was the winner of the startup competition at Le Web. You may already know them from TechCrunch50, where they presented.

Stribe is a social network for your Web site. Instead of setting up a separate social network for your site or brand on a network like Ning, you can add a line of code to your site and it becomes full-fledged with social functions. People can log in through Facebook Connect (Twitter OAuth soon) and chat, share items, etc. The site is in private beta and will go public soon.

Their charismatic CEO Kamel Zeroual explained that the most popular feature is chat — if you’re logged in Stribe on one site you can chat with someone you know who’s on a different site that also has Stribe. They will operate under a freemium model; with premium accounts users can have deeper analytics about social usage and can push content, which would be very interesting to corporations that want to add social features to their sites.  

Hypios calls itself the first social marketplace for solutions.

Companies can post R&D problems that they have to the site, associated with a big cash reward (of which Hypios takes a cut), and get responses from tens of thousand of users, plenty of them graduate students in the hard sciences.

The company got its early users by building an academics-focused social network. Interestingly, they also got users by having their first challenge be a feature of their site that they were having a hard time solving and that was solved by their community in an unexpected way.

This, their CEO told me, is the main advantage of Hypios: companies get their problems solved in unexpected way; for instance, the solution to a bioengineering problem might be found by a computer engineer, or the solution to a computer problem by an economist. Hypios is young and has 8 projects online now.

Perhaps my favorite company of the whole conference is a startup called Yatedo, and I met them on the subway leaving the conference.

There were these two French geeky guys, carrying around huge signs and stuff from their booth in heavy luggage. When I asked them to give me a pitch, they leaped into it enthusiastically, stumbling through English for the benefit of the girl I was riding with, demoing the service on their unfinished iPhone app. Man, these guys were hustling.

Yatedo is a search engine for people, and I was impressed as much by the product as by the founders. It’s really well done, you get full profiles, and without the bunch of garbage and false positives that you find on other people search engines. It looked like a Mahalo or Wikipedia entry, but with more depth — and unlike those, it’s all done through an algorithm instead of human editors (unfortunately the product is in closed beta right now).

All the founders are computer science engineers (normal in Silicon Valley but unusual in Paris, where you almost always have a too-slick business person to give you the pitch), they’ve been doing this as a research project for several years but the startup itself is really young, they’re bootstrapping and they’re looking for funding. A great product with technical depth plus founders who are, as Y Combinator founder Paul Graham put it, “relentlessly resourceful” is a sure winner — or at least a startup after my own heart.

All these companies (except Yatedo) have something in common: they’ve raised angel money, often multimillion amounts. The main thing that was interesting that I got through my conversations with French entrepreneurs and investors was paradoxical: entrepreneurs can relatively easily raise money from angels, but find it really hard to get VC funding.

A few years ago, the complaint was the opposite: too few angels were willing to put money at risk, and there was a funding gap between seed/”friends, family and fools” funding and big, multimillion dollar VC rounds. Now, angels will put money to work, and plenty of startups raised the kind of money that would be a Series A VC round through only angels. But the VCs are fearful.

You would’ve thought that, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it would be the other way around: angels damaged by the meltdown trying to conserve cash and VCs, with institutional money, filling the gap. This is what is happening in the US, with VCs taking part in smaller and earlier rounds. I don’t know why this phenomenon is, but I think it’s good for the long term because angels are the ferment that gets an entrepreneurial company going.

All in all, I have to say Le Web was a really great experience. As I said before, the conference was really well put together, the venue beautiful. As in all such conferences, the panels tend to be boring and rehash known themes and memes, but the attendees were a wonderful mix of American, European and French entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the tech scene, and that’s the reason why people attend these things — the people you meet.

More Le Web coverage here.

Photo: Robert Scoble

Good view of some of the top startups at Le Web this past week — including some mentions of bootstrapping through the start up phase.

Christine Mason McCaull is one of several entrepreneurs Portfolio.com is following as part of the series The Great Global Adventure. All of the entrepreneurs will be blogging about their experiences. This is the third in the series of blogs from entrepreneurs.

When we started our most recent business, ClickMarkets (in shared office space with a decent broadband connection and high-powered laptops), we did all the same things we did at our last big endeavor.

It was the usual drill: Develop a value proposition, craft a brand and market-entry strategy, put together a financial model, pull together a team, set up an infrastructure, and, eventually, actually sell services to our first customers.

But this time there was a big difference: It took a lot less of money and time to get to that first dollar in sales revenue, thanks to technologies that have vastly reduced selling, marketing, and administrative costs in setting up a new venture. This has freed us up to invest our money and time in the development of what is core to our business, run very lean, and bootstrap our company through sales revenue, not Other People’s Money.

I’ll even put numbers on it: What cost a minimum of $500,000 and took nine months and lots of engineering talent in 2004 can be done today, thanks to technology changes, by smart people with some Web awareness or the willingness to learn, for less than $20,000 in three months. It’s not that we’re doing this business on duct tape and baling wire, either. We’re working with very clean, professional services that can scale and which just a few years ago cost a hundred times as much to put in place.

As a former venture-backed CEO and 18-year industry vet, I’ve been an insider creating some of these technology shifts—but it’s only now, as we’re applying them in our own new startup, that we really understand their real impact from an operating perspective.

The following five major tech-enabled trends have saved us money and improved our business in the process.

• Trend 1: The Open-Source Movement
• Trend 2: Technology-Enabled Distributed Workforce
• Trend 3: Social Media
• Trend 4: Software as a Service
• Trend 5: Online Productivity and Communications Tools

We see that these trends don’t just impact new businesses, but are also applicable to established businesses of all sizes.

Trend 1: Open Source Everything

The open-source movement makes it easy to launch a functional, commercial, and robust Web presence at a fraction of the cost.

Usable open-source software and business applications cut down the cost of building really robust, functional websites.

Example: We used the free open-source Joomla (www.joomla.org) content management system to build our Web presence, including user registration, email, and social-media management and e-commerce—and to avoid using developers to interpret our content and place it on the Web.

• Cost savings: $25,000.
• Extra benefit: Day-to-day control of our own site content without developer intervention.