The Washington Post will launch a new $1.99 iPhone app today providing access to the site’s mobile content online and offline for one year. The app will include articles, columns, blogs and photo galleries which can be saved for offline reading in a “MyPost” folder. The Post does not charge for access to its regular Web site and has indicated there are no plans to do so. The paper reported Tuesday that its mobile site received a record 8 million page views in February. The UK’s Guardian, another newspaper with an advertising-supported Web site has sold 100,000 of its iPhone apps in two months.
(Link: Washington Post to launch paid iPhone app)
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iphone, tweet, wapo
At this time, the greatest single resource available to Moodle users, Moodle.org, and the Moodle partners at Moodle.com, is the content which has been accumulated within each classroom’s walls. These digital blueprints to learning are the key to turning millions more onto the benefits of Moodle. But the number of courses that are available to view, peruse, download and/or reuse is far fewer than the number of courses that have been completed. By my estimate, nearly 100%3 of course materials created in Moodle are still closed to the public.
(Link: Moodle: open source, closed doors. | opensource.com)
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e-learning, moodle, tweet
Kaplan Publishing and ScrollMotion today announced a range of innovative Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) and U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) text book apps will be available from the App Store in February. The apps create an entirely new study experience and allow students to use iPhone or iPod touch to highlight text, take audio and printed notes, search content by topic or type, take quizzes, navigate efficiently and more.
(Link: Kaplan MCAT and USMLE Apps Now Available on App Store)
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appstore, iphone, tweet
These days Chicago’s startup culture is aimed at the steady and sure. As Matt McCall, a partner at New World Ventures and managing director at DFJ Portage, notes, Chicago is home to many of the largest companies in the country, including Accenture, Boeing, Integrys Energy, MillerCoors, McDonald’s, ACNielsen, Trans Union, and Fortune Brands. The list is long and comprehensive. For startups, it means a rich source of customers for products that fill a need or enhance their businesses.
Chicago has a mixture of a lot of very interesting things. I’ll start with the first, which is the customers are here. There are more Fortune 500s in this region than anywhere else in the U.S.
(Link: Why You Should Start a Company in Chicago | Fast Company)
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Chicago, startups, tweet
At LinkedIn we have a unique view into the ebbs and flows of labor markets and one trend we noticed was there were beneficiaries of these large-scale upheavals. In particular, we saw substantial spikes in user activity for the following 5 companies during major financial events:
* Barclays
* Credit Suisse
* Citigroup
* Bank Of America
* JP Morgan Chase
(Link: The LinkedIn Blog » Where did all the people go from the collapsed financial institutions?)
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tweet, visualization
7. Retwee…err…Rebuzz?
While there is no “retweet” function for Buzz, you can simply copy the Public URL which is linked to in the time/date of the post and submit it in a new status update.
It’s worth noting that if the email method (mentioned above) accepted the body of the email as well, you’d be able to simply click the “Email” button at the bottom of the buzz post and email it to buzz@gmail.com. It even includes its Public URL and all the current comments of the post.
(Link: 12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz)
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googlebuzz, tweet
HIPPO #1 – Highest Paid Person in the Organization
* This informal description is basically… the boss. As you might guess, no one actually uses the term “HIPPO” on the job. It represents a concept that is unwritten, though: even if you cannot see the work that the HIPPO does, that’s the person who is ultimately responsible for everything that occurs at the workplace.
(Link: HIPPO Management: Highest Paid Person in the Organization)
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management, tweet
What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.
Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name
(Link: Why You Can’t Work at Work | Jason Fried | Big Think)
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Productivity, tweet
What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else. Those three attributes define the fundamental essence and value of the product — the rest is noise. For example, the original iPod was: 1) small enough to fit in your pocket, 2) had enough storage to hold many hours of music and 3) easy to sync with your Mac (most hardware companies can’t make software, so I bet the others got this wrong). That’s it — no wireless, no ability to edit playlists on the device, no support for Ogg — nothing but the essentials, well executed.
(Link: Gmail creator: If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.)
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design, tweet
So what is so great about process? Well, it gives us:
* Repeatable and predictable results
* Quality Assurances (through the above)
* Cost savings through the ability to optimise work flows
* Defined work flow allows us to use cheaper labour
* The promotion of best practices and conceptual integrity
* The ability to scale to large numbers
* A means to effectively track our progress against the objectives
Process is sometimes inappropriate or unconstructive. Process can:
* Increase cost and reduce performance through bureaucratic overhead and waste
* Hinder our ability to change or adapt to new situations
* Stifle our capacity for innovation and creativity
* Require discipline and training which takes effort
* Only effectively be applied to known quantities
(Link: Software Development in a Post-Agile World)
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agile, methodology, process, tweet
The data suggest they needn’t worry. Opening the courses “provided neither a large positive marketing effect that boosted enrollments nor a large negative free-rider impact decreasing enrollments,” wrote Justin K. Johansen, who conducted the study as a dissertation in instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young, where he also serves as director of independent study.
“Really, the OpenCourseWare ended up serving as an advertising tool,” Mr. Johansen said in an interview. Over all, the six opened courses attracted 13,795 visits and 445 paid enrollments in four months. But Mr. Johansen cautions that the limited length of the pilot study meant that a “statistically significant” measure of the impact of opening the classes on paid enrollment “was not possible.”
(Link: Free Online Courses Don’t Hurt Paid Enrollment – The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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e-learning, freemium, tweet
To assess altruistic behavior on AMT, 194 subjects played an incentivized Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), the canonical game for studying altruistic cooperation. Subjects were informed that they had been randomly assigned to interact with another Turker, and that they would each have a choice between two options, A or B. In addition to a 20 cent “show-up fee”, they were informed of the following payoff structure: if both subjects chose A, they receive each earn a 120 cent bonus; if both chose B, they would each receive an 80 cent bonus; if one chose A while the other chose B, the A player would receive 40 cents while the B player would receive 160 cents. The resulting payoff matrix is as follows (in each cell I first show the row player’s payoff, and then the column player’s payoff):
(Link: Religion and the Prisoner’s Dilemma on Amazon Mechanical Turk)
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aws, mechanicalturk, tweet
The Foursquare staff are very secretive about how to unlock many badges. There are a handful of introductory badges that are earned as milestones in usage. Some badges are tied to venue “tags” and the badge earned depends on the tags applied to the venue. Other badges may be specific to a city, venue, event, or date. Some badges utilize identical icons, but are earned differently. There are a few known badges that are named similarly, but applied differently, specifically Far Far Away, Trifecta and I’m on a Boat.
(Link: List of Foursquare Badges – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
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foursquare, tweet
I don’t think a paper that loses millions of dollars a year and funds itself by taking extortionary loans from plutocratic Mexican billionaires can be said to be competing in anything, Metro or otherwise. My feeling is you only get to congratulate yourself if you produce a great product and make money doing it— you don’t get any points for doing just the first half. And that doesn’t just go for you guys— I don’t think any magazine or newspaper that supports itself by sucking on the teat of some old rich guy (or his heirs!) should be giving anyone else advice.
Specifically in local, I don’t think the Times has had an original idea in years. It’s got a metro staff of what, 60 reporters, and look at all this innovation: Cityroom, which is a fairly lazy and sleep-inducing ripoff of Gothamist, and The Local, a recently closed ripoff of
(Link: How The New York Times Lost An Entire Generation Of Readers)
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newspapers, tweet
