Here are two ads — called “Alive” and “Together” — that Apple just released to tout its iPad and iPad mini. They’re a clear departure from Apple’s previous TV spots.
With jazzy music and quick word-association, they are much more hyperactively catchy than the usual doink-doink, thinking-nerd style of many others, and they feature a range of very active and visually arresting apps.
Here they are:
Without giving away the tragic end to the third season finale of popular PBS Masterpiece Classics television series “Downton Abbey,” it might be a good idea to take a big dose of Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess to feel better.
Here’s a compilation of some of her most withering asides from the first season — take 10 and see me in the morning — and also an interview of Smith that aired last night on “60 Minutes”:
Angry at what he called the paper's 'fake' review, Tesla founder supplies charts that appear to contradict reviewer's account
The world of electric cars is usually seen as one of mildly eccentric do-gooders striving to solve the world's all-too real addiction to fossil fuels by developing vehicles that can be recharged with a plug.
But a New York Times test drive of a new model of Tesla electric sports car has instead now descended into a bitter war of words, allegations of lying and fraud and a rapidly ballooning media and technology scandal.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla as well as private space firm Space X, has now released detailed computer logs that he says are from the onboard computer of a car that New York Times reporter John Broder took for a disastrous test drive that ended with the vehicle being towed away.
According to Musk, the records reveal that Broder's account of his experience with the brand new Model S car differs in key areas from what the computer logs say happened. On a Tesla blog Musk stated: "Our Model S never had a chance with John Broder ... he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running."
Broder's initial report of his test drive in the newspaper certainly made painful reading. On a trip attempting to travel between Washington and Boston - to explore the creation of new recharging stations on the east coast - Broder detailed a nightmare journey. His Tesla, he said, repeatedly logged miles below what he expected and what the car told him the range was, leaving him limping along at slow speeds to conserve energy.
Eventually the car ran out of juice and had to be towed away. The headline on the piece read: "Stalled Out On Tesla's Electronic Highway".
Not surprisingly Tesla were offended. On Twitter and television, Musk called the story "a fake". Broder then in turn robustly defended his journalism as did the New York Times itself. In a Times motoring blog called Wheels, Broder wrote: "My account was not a fake. It happened just the way I described it." He then went on to tackle various assertions made by Musk and defended his writing.
Tesla's outrage and sensitivity might have been explained by a previous experience with the BBC's motoring show Top Gear. In December 2008, a review of the Tesla Roadster showed the car being pushed by the presenters into a hangar at the test track after apparently running out of charge. Tesla claimed the car had not actually run out of charge and sued for libel. The case was dismissed last year in a British court.
But one result of the spat with Top Gear was that Tesla then made sure that it always logged data from media test drives. Now Musk has published what he says is the data from Broder's trip and detailed how he says it directly contradicts key aspects of the Times' account.
He says the logs show that the car never fully run out of charge, even when a tow truck was called. Musk also says that - contrary to Broder's account - he never set the car in cruise control at 54 mph and never drove at a constant speed of 45 mph in order to conserve the charge.
It also addresses Broder's claims that he had to turn down the car's heating system to save energy on what was a freezing day. "At the point in time that he claims to have turned the temperature down, he in fact turned the temperature up to 74 F," Musk said in a blog post filled with graphs and data.
But, perhaps most damagingly of all, Musk claimed the reporter at one point appeared to have driven in circles around a car park to run down the charge. "After taking an unplanned detour through downtown Manhattan to give his brother a ride, the display said "0 miles remaining". Instead of plugging in the car, he drove in circles for over half a mile in a tiny, 100-space parking lot. When the Model S valiantly refused to die, he eventually plugged it in," Musk said.
Such serious allegations are unlikely to go unanswered by the New York Times and Broder. On his Twitter account, Broder promised a further response and posted a link to his initial defence of the piece. "Stay tuned," Broder said. Meanwhile, the New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan announced that she would be investigating the issue. "On Tesla I'm on it, as they say. May take some time. Meanwhile, look for a point-by-point response on Wheels blog soon," she said.
Sullivan later wrote a note on her blog on the Times' website in which she revealed that Musk had not yet returned a phone call and that she would be interviewing Broder later on Thursday. "I will keep reporting on this, and, for now, am simply telling readers what I know so far," she wrote.
She revealed that she intended to ask Tesla to fully release all its data so that others could examine it and acknowledged that the allegations made by Musk were devastating if shown to be accurate. "Mr Musk's contentions are devastating ones for any journalist," she said.
During a wide-ranging interview at D: Dive Into Media, Rose talked about how Facebook views media, and how media should view Facebook.
“Facebook is primarily two core pillars — identity and sharing,” Rose said, adding that both pillars are part of Facebook’s media pitch.
“From an identity perspective, so much of who we are and how we identify ourselves comes from what we read and what we watch,” Rose continued. “So our identity platform can’t be complete without media being part of it. Similarly, the sharing piece can’t be complete without status updates about news stories, music friends are listening to, updates about movies people are seeing.”
The high-level principle driving this is the idea of finding the perfect balance between great user experience and delivering audience to platform partners.
“At its core, what we’re really striving to do is find the perfect equilibrium from a great user experience and a strong platform that developers and partners will continue to invest in,” Rose said. “… We need to keep the news feed interesting, and one of the ways we do that is through media.”
At the same time, however, Rose said Facebook must “honor” content, and presumably appetite for audience and buzz that’s ever-present behind it.
“We think it’s our job to honor content,” Rose said. “Media content deserves to be honored and respected in the news feed. For example, we recently increased the size of images from media partners. That’s more engaging for users, and for partners it’s great, because click-throughs and engagement increased.”
Media content also deserves to be consumed, says Rose. And here, too, Facebook plays a big role, and hopes to play an even bigger one in the future.
“How did you hear about ‘Downton Abbey’?” Rose asked. “I discovered it on Facebook. I kept seeing it pop up in my news feed. The simple fact is most of us find the TV shows we enjoy by listening to suggestions from our friends. That’s the primary discovery mechanism for content right now. Imagine a future, though, in which you turn on the TV and see a feed of all the shows your friends watch. We think that’s a very compelling idea. Content discovery always has been and always will be social.”
Additional Notes From the Session
[ See post to watch video ]
Reports suggested it was coming, but today Spotify finally brought its popular music streaming service to Italy and Poland, taking its total number of territories up to 23.
The Italian launch is closely linked to the Sanremo music festival, which will act as a marketing push, as artists give the songs exclusively to Spotify. However, it appears the Swedish company has pushed its service live a little earlier than expected, with the event set to commence on February 12.
When Italian and Polish users visit the Spotify website, they are presented with information on the music streaming service, as well as pricing information. Like in all the other countries in which it operates, Spotify offers three account options — Free, Unlimited and Premium.
The free service offers access to millions of tracks, but comes complete with advertising after a specified number of listens. The Unlimited option does away with those restrictions 4.99/PLN9.99 per month, while Premium adds mobile access for 9.99/PLN19.99 a month.
Spotify launches in Italy with the help of former Googler Veronica Diquattro, who joined the company from Google in November 2012.
At Google, Diquattro was tasked planning and implementing the company’s Google Play launch in Italy, as well as managing the “start-up phase of two vendor offices for Google Play in Ireland and UK, supporting the entire EMEA market,” according to her LinkedIn profile.
We first got wind of probable launch last year, when job posting emerged for both countries online. They will be added to its existing launches in Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Man behind fake girlfriend Lenna Kekua says confusion about his sexuality led to two-year 'relationship' with Notre Dame star
A man who pretended to be the online girlfriend of the US college footballer Manti Te'o for more than a year, is said to have fallen "deeply, romantically in love" with the star.
In an interview with the Dr Phil show, hoaxer Ronaiah Tuiasosopo said he was "confused" about his sexuality following the two-year relationship with Te'o. He had convinced the Notre Dame linebacker that he was Lennay Kekua, whom he characterised as a 20-something woman who narrowly survived a car crash only to later die of leukemia.
Te'o has denied knowing about the hoax, telling Katie Couric last week that he believed Kekua was real. Te'o never met his "girlfriend" during the course of their two-year courtship, even though he was told she had been "seriously injured" in the car crash. Neither did he attend her "funeral" after her apparent death, although he talked extensively about both events in media interviews.
The full interview with Tuiasosopo will air Thursday on the Dr Phil show. In released extracts, Tuiasosopo said he had wanted to end the relationship with Te'o earlier than he did. Tuiasosopo ultimately ended the hoax by killing off Kekua in early September.
"I wanted to end it because after everything I had gone through, I finally realized that I just had to move on with my life,'' Tuiasosopo told Dr Phil McGraw during their interview.
"I had to start just living and let this go. There were many times where Manti and Lennay had broken up, but something would bring them back together whether it was something going on in his life or in Lennay's life, or in this case, my life.''
Appearing on the Today show on Wednesday morning, McGraw said Tuiasosopo had fallen for Te'o.
"Here we have a young man that fell deeply, romantically in love,'' McGraw said. "I asked him straight up: 'Was this a romantic relationship with you?' And he says yes. I said: 'Are you then therefore gay?' And he said: 'When you put it that way, yes.' And then he caught himself and said: 'I am confused.'"
McGraw said Tuiasosopo had a "number of life experiences that damaged [him] in some very serious ways". He said he did not believe Te'o was involved in the hoax.
Te'o insists that he always thought Kekua was real, and he genuinely believed she had died in September. He said he received a phone call on 6 December from the voice he had come to know as Kekua, saying she was alive. In interviews after that date Te'o still maintained his story that his girlfriend had died.
A contender for the Heisman trophy in December, Te'o's stock has fallen since Deadspin broke the story of the hoax. NFL team scouts are reportedly preparing to ask hard questions of Te'o at the scouting combine in February, although the player is widely regarded as the best middle linebacker in the draft.
RebelMouse, a content aggregation and curation site that lets users set up a profile and pull in content from their social networking accounts, as well as other sources, has hired some key former employees from CNNMoney and VaynerMedia.
Since launching to the public last June, RebelMouse has had 240K sites created and is hitting 1.5 million unique monthly visitors to its landing pages. The company tells us that it has seen a big demand from publishers, and has partnered with TIME magazine for its person-of-the year campaign. Additionally, it worked with C-Span for the presidential inauguration, will power an ESPN Magazine online experience for the Super Bowl and continues to bring in movie and television properties to create their own “portals.”
To help RebelMouse build out these partnerships and plans for the future, it has hired former CNNMoney social product lead Niketa Patel as Director of Content and Stephanie Bagley from VaynerMedia as Director of Partnerships. This is an interesting hire since Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of VaynerMedia, is an investor and advisor in RebelMouse. Both will report to Sam Epstein, RebelMouse’s VIP of Platform, who previously worked at Google and HuffingtonPost. Yes, this is the beginning of a power team in content curation and distribution.
In addition to these roles, the RebelMouse development team is now at 24, and has added both iOS and Android specialists to build out its mobile offerings. I spoke with RebelMouse CEO, Paul Berry, about where the company is now and what we can expect from it in the future.
TC: What direction do you see RebelMouse heading?
Berry: RebelMouse is solving a core problem with publishing on the realtime and social web. Everyone’s efforts are fragmented working on each network, and everyone needs to bring it all together to show who they are and highlight their efforts and the best of their community. We believe enterprise and individuals are increasingly using the same tools and this is a perfect example for that. Big publishers and brands will use RebelMouse to power more and more sections of their websites. RebelMouse will stick with a freemium model where rebelmouse.com/You is always going to be free, but you can pay as you use RebelMouse to power your domain and engage with more sophisticated features. RebelMouse should be the solution everyone uses, from companies with massive revenue or traffic to small companies. We believe we can apply a network effect to the open web. This year we are focusing deeply on building more and more network dynamics and engagement into the product while helping gain significant scale with partners and directly with consumers.
TC: What is it about content aggregation that makes the space so interesting to you?
Berry: I don’t see RebelMouse as a simple aggregator. Its the combination of curation plus content creation that is so interesting. Everyone’s struggling with their blogs because of what realtime and social have done to us. Five years ago if your last blog post was three weeks ago you were totally fine with that. Today it starts to get embarrassing. So when you can have your site constantly fresh with the work you’re doing on these vital social networks then you begin to also publish more original content.
TC: How do companies like Twitter and Facebook react to what you’re doing? Basically you’re stealing some eyeballs from their destination sites.
Berry: Our mission is to prove that a Twitter user who joins RebelMouse finds Twitter more vital and essential to them than ever before. Now instead of just reaching the people who are following them at the time they tweet, they know that these interactions are populating their website, not as a widget but as a core part of the content that shows who they are and who loves them and what articles support their thesis of the world. We work very very hard to make sure we are adding value to these networks. We push follows back to the networks they came from instead of asking them to follow only on RebelMouse. We believe that as astounding as the scale and growth of these networks has been, they are still nascent and we can be a strong partner to them, helping give more ROI on efforts to engage. We were one of the first companies to move onto the new Twitter API and to officially match new display requirements. We’ll always iterate and work quickly with them as they grow.
TC: How are you working with social networks right now and how will you work with them in the future to display things in a beautiful way for your users?
Berry: We are working with each to help users get into latest best practices on engagement and display. For example because Facebook is a mix of private and public, we look carefully at the permissions of each post and only publish what is marked clearly as public and send stuff that is just for your friends to draft so you can decide to make that public or not. One of the fundamental features of RebelMouse is the ability to freeze stories into a spot, so something that is particularly meaningful to you as an individual or as a company isn’t just lost in the stream.
TC: What’s next for the product?
Berry: We’re tremendously excited about the updates we have coming. We’ve reached a critical point where instead of having aspirational hopes about how what we were building could be used, it’s being used by some of the smartest people in the world and in high-traffic, high-impact situations. So we’re iterating with them, taking their feedback and looping it back to make RebelMouse sophisticated but simple.
In particular we’re really excited about adding contributions to Rebel Nav because essentially people are able to create topic-based front pages on the fly and invite guest editors and meet new people as they organize and create content. We’re working on sponsored content solutions, turning on revenue where it makes the product durable and focusing on creating network dynamics at every level of the software.
———
We all share a lot of things, and it’s hard to put all of our favorite content into one place, displayed in a way that’s consumable by anyone who isn’t completely obsessed with the inner-workings of the Internet. At its very core, RebelMouse lets you curate your own magazine, full of photos, stories and videos that you choose to share, in the order that you’d like them shared. It’s a nice breakaway from the current model of reading a constant stream of information on Twitter or Facebook.
Think of RebelMouse as your Internet mixtape. While it’s not a completely new concept, it is very relevant in the age of people collecting items on Pinterest so it’s the right time for this product. Plus, it’s kind of fun to play with.
