Common Paradox Tech Blog

Editor’s note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and universities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees. The U.S. is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, causing concern in many quarters.

While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S. Their exchange is below:

Chris Allison is a social media strategist at NeboWeb, where he helps clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind @Neboweb.

As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.

Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?

Social Media as a Catalyst

With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to understand that social media is neither the end nor the beginning of any marketing effort. Rather, social media is a catalyst that works most effectively when it is finely woven into the fabric of a brand’s other activity.

When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities. Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.

1. Cause Marketing

The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation – pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation process.

However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter account.

One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional benefits to the cause marketing table:

Access to increased publicity

The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining conversations

The ability to bring customers into the support process

Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where Pepsi will donate their funds as well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog.

By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice). Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).

Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.

Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.

2. The Offline World

Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects, locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.

Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.

Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer support representatives that can help customers on location.

On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.

3. Media Coverage

Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful (Iran’s election crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.

When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.

Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited from traditional coverage:

Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among ‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of old media carry

significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of the credibility their names lend.

I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is often read over days, weeks, or even months.

The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.

4. Technology

Lastly, your social media strategy is inherently paired with technology. Without technology, social media cannot exist. However, technology’s role in creating a social media strategy often goes understated.

At SoCon10, a social media conference in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.

But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus, perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the strategy.

Conclusion

Synergy is the name of the social media game. Whether you’re coming from a small company or a well-known brand, starting as far back as possible, zooming out and staring at the big picture, is crucial to creating a strategy that makes sense.

These are four of the most important pieces to the social media puzzle. If you can think of more or have something to add to these listed, please leave a note in the comments.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online

- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence

- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy

- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry

- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

Reviews: Facebook, Iran , Mashable, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: cause marketing, List, Lists, mainstream media, MARKETING, PUBLIC RELATIONS, social media, technology

andylim writes “Separate teams at Oxford university and Zentium, a South Korean company, are working on next-gen augmented reality solutions, which make it possible to fuse real and 3D computer-generated visuals on the fly using mobile phones. The team at Oxford university has named its solution Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) and it has licensed its technology to QderoPateo LLC, which has ambitious plans to grow the mobile augmented reality market and create an augmented reality search and gaming engine running for its ‘Ouidoo’ smart phone. Zentium’s solution is called D-Track and is being used to develop the first markerless mobile augmented reality pet, called iKat. D-Track’s mapping technology is very similar to PTAM and allows your phone to recognise the space in front of the camera and create an appropriate space for an augmented reality object or pet.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes “The Bluetooth 4.0 wireless specification could start to appear in devices such as headsets, smartphones and PCs by the fourth quarter, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The new specification will be able to be used in lower-power devices than previous versions of the technology, including watches, pedometers, smart meters and other gadgets that run on coin-cell batteries.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we’ve been hearing for months, 2010 is going to be a year of belt-tightening for NASA. But it still has some cool technologies on the way: inflatable space stations, research into mid-orbit refueling, and new autonomous space vehicles.

Inflatable space station modules rank high on NASA’s wish list for an important reason: they’re cheap. However, don’t let the price fool you. Despite costing less, the modules can be larger than current models for the same weight, provide just as much protection, and even be tested with the currently deployed ISS. Plus, private sector companies have already started developing the technology.

NASA also wants to automate many of the tasks currently performed by humans, essentially replacing the Space Shuttle with unmanned autonomous spacecraft. This new budget dedicates money for a remote rendezvous and docking system, as well as an autonomous precision landing and hazard avoidance system.

And, like every American who’s getting hit at the gas pump, NASA wants to spend less on fuel. In the new budget, they approach that problem in two ways. The first is by paying for the development of an in-orbit refueling system. This could significantly increase the lifespan of currently existing satellites, and save NASA the time and money required to launch a new mission every time something runs out of gas. Additionally, NASA is allocating more funds to programs that would make fuel out of materials already found on the Moon and Mars. By only having to bring half the fuel for the trip, and gassing up with material found at the destination, NASA hopes to significantly cut the cost of interplanetary exploration.

The new budget contains a number of other interesting programs, some of which seem like reactions to the new age of lower cash flow, and others that appear to signal a true coming of age in automation technology. Either way, it’s as interesting as any 517-page government report can be.

Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what’s new and what’s next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.

An anonymous reader writes “Ex-MySQL’er Brian Aker goes into the history of MySQL and the GPL. His point is that MySQL used the GPL in an over-reaching manner; and now that MySQL is gone as an entity, and the campaigns are over, that the GPL may return to an accurate definition.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We’ve seen some interesting augmented reality experiments emerging, from shoes as game controllers to music videos to recursive iPhones. But how about AR as a form of body art? A company called ThinkAnApp has made that possible with an augmented reality tattoo.

The tattoo’s design is simply a square barcode marker on the skin, but when seen through a webcam an animated flying dragon appears to be hovering over the box. The Buenos Aires-based ThinkAnApp developed software that recognizes a barcode on a curved surface (like your body), making the flying dragon overlay possible.

The below video demonstrates the effect. It’s an initial test for how the augmented reality concept could be used to power even more creative tattoo art.

What do you think: Are AR tattoos too gimmicky? Is it too restrictive to require a webcam in order to get the full tat experience? Or should companies be working on other devices with which to view AR content so that one day we can achieve the futuristic cyberpunk dream of putting on sunglasses to see people’s skin spring to life?

[via BuzzFeed]

Tags: AR, Augmented Reality, tattoo, technology, wearables, webcam

As you may know, each Friday we do an informal poll to find out what Mashable readers think of a particular topic du jour. This week, since we’re at TED with some of the best and brightest minds working hard to change the world, we thought we should take the Friday Poll on location and find out what TED attendees have to say about this week’s topic.

We asked a number of TEDsters the following question: “What do you think is the most interesting thing happening in technology right now?” Below is a sample of the answers we got back, featuring a range of responses as diverse as the contributors they came from. What do you think is the most interesting technology trend today? Let us know in the comments.

Di Winkler, CEO of Summer Foundation — Tools and innovations that help people with disabilities do things they otherwise wouldn’t be able to and even in some ways to become superhuman.

Jane Wulf, TED scribe — Open data. As transparency increases in government, the supply chain and elsewhere, we have so much more access to information and are able to use it in so many ways.

Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN — The explosion of smartphones in the developing world, increasing education and community organizing there. Also, the movement to keep the Internet unified, not Balkanized and forked by different countries’ interests.

Andrew Bird, musician — Philosophy is more interesting than technology. Mashable: What do you think about tools that bring music creation to aspiring artists more cheaply? Andrew: I think live performance has become even more valuable because it allows for improvisation and unexpectedness, in contrast to tools that can allow too much perfection in the studio.

Lakshmi Pratury, founder and co-host of TED India — How technology is being used to further the human mind. We’ve finally gone beyond tech for tech’s sake and are using technology to make a difference in the world.

Perry Chen, CEO and co-founder of Kickstarter — Mark Roth’s work on suspended animation. Also Microsoft Pivot, for starting to bring whole new ways of browsing the web.

Juliana Machado Ferreira, biologist at Sao Paulo University and TED senior fellow — Whole genome sequencing.

Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics — Cloud computing and collaborative software that allows distributed teams to work together across place and time.

Julianne Wurm, founder of R-cubed educational consultancy — Microsoft Surface and touchscreens in general; MIT Media Lab’s Siftables; and the iPad. I’m in education, and I think these kinds of tools are going to be incredibly important there.

Ralph Simon, CEO of Mobilium and chairman emeritus of Mobile Entertainment Forum — The emergence of smartphone components in entry-level phones in the developing world, which is accelerating Internet access for so many people who wouldn’t otherwise have it. Also augmented reality, mobile health applications, and mobile money for the unbanked.

Virginia Miracle, SVP of digital strategy at Ogilvy — The collision of our online and offline identities and the concept of an open universal identity.

Farhad Mohit, founder and CEO of Dotspots — Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of an open web of linked data. We’re enabling a kind of “information militia” that can make better, more informed decisions. Information is power and when people have power, everything changes.

Rachel Pike, Ph.D. and atmospheric chemist at the University of Cambridge — Personal and scientific data sharing, and the crowd-sourcing of science making more vital data publicly available.

Kimberly De Los Santos, associate vice president, Arizona State University — Social media. Not any specific platforms per se, but the connections across cultures they enable.

Donald Samuels, managing partner at Pictorial Offset Corporation — QR codes. They’ll become ubiquitous and all our devices will read them and take us directly to information.

Jenny Lam, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market software company — Threadless, Blurb and other tools that let artists create something physical and get it out to the public on-demand and at high quality.

Hillel Cooperman, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market — The falling cost of creating software, and new devices that have commerce built in so that customers can get payments to software developers, are both contributing to a renaissance in software development.

Debra Silver, international board member of Save a Child’s Heart — Touchscreens. I’m a sculptor so I love to see computers getting more tactile!

Peter Knights, executive director of WildAid — Work on cold fusion. Energy solutions are the most important thing right now. And the Nexus One Google just gave me is pretty cool too!

Todd Grant, creative director of Switzerland West — The disappearance of technology as it becomes a natural and intuitive part of our daily lives, so much so that we don’t always notice it.

David Wish, founder of Little Kids Rock — Gift economies and the impact that the web is having on economics overall.

Sunny Bates, partner at Icarus Talks — Microsoft Pivot, Bing Maps and real-life photo integrations, and all the new ways of visualizing information coming online.

Stephen Petranek, editor-in-chief at Weider History Group magazines — Applications made possible by putting genetic code onto discs. Imagine taking your DNA sequence on a chip to the supermarket and having it tell you what foods you should be eating.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ericsphotography

Reviews: Mashable, blurb, iStockphoto

Tags: Augmented Reality, Bing Maps, blurb, cloud computing, crowd sourcing, digital identity, energy, genetics, ipad, microsoft pivot, nexus one, open data, poll, QR Codes, Science, smartphones, social media, technology, TED, ted 2010, threadless

Nathan Myhrvold is an inventor and killer of mosquitos with lasers. The mosquito death ray demoed in the video below was built in-house by Myhrvold’s company Intellectual Ventures Lab from parts purchased on eBay.

Every 43 seconds, a child dies from malaria. Given the constraints of current methods for fighting the disease, Myhrvold put the scientific minds of his company to the problem of eradicating the mosquitoes themselves. The lasers recognize and track the insects, measuring the frequency of the wingbeats to determine their gender. Females are targeted specifically and zapped to prevent them from taking blood meals and breeding more mosquitoes.

Intellectual Ventures’ Eric Johanson explains how the system works in the first video below. Green laser pointers are being used instead of killing lasers for safety reasons, so to witness the satisfying wisp of smoke that accompanies the pew pew-induced mosquito deaths check out the second video embed, also below:

Mosquito Death Ray Demo at TED

Mosquito Shootdown Sequence

[img credit: Intellectual Ventures Lab]

Tags: lasers, malaria, mosquito death ray, Science, technology, TED, ted 2010, video

Could spray-on liquid glass be the future of the iPhone and iPad? It is thin, flexible, transparent and even anti-bacterial. This liquid glass was invented in Turkey and held by the company Nanopool.

For more about this new technology, stay with us after the break.

The liquid glass is incredibly thin, only about [...]

Spray on Glass — Could this be the future of iPhone and iPad Technology? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog