Success in this age of technology means networking in person, as well as online. A combination of both will increase your social reach exponentially. Plus, it’s fun to meet people at events and then continue the conversation online; or make connections with people in different parts of the world while aiming to meet them in real life one day.
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Two-thirds of adult Americans online use Facebook, but just 8 percent of non-users are interested in joining the social network, while 61 percent of current users have at some point walked away from the site for a period of several weeks or more, according to a Pew Internet study.
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Bullied Bus Monitor Now $700,000 Richer Thanks To Indiegogo Campaign (SocialTimes)
The life of 68-year-old bus monitor Karen Klein changed forever when a video of her being bullied by schoolchildren went viral on YouTube. Now, she plans to retire, after an Indiegogo campaign has left her with more than $700,000. AP A spokeswoman for the crowdfunding company said more than 30,000 people worldwide contributed, with donations coming in from at least 84 countries and all 50 states. Max Sidorov, the 25-year-old Canadian who came up with the idea for the monthlong campaign, said he was moved by the 10-minute video posted online showing Klein enduring profanity, insults and threats from middle school students. National Post Sidirov initially launched the fundraising drive to pay for a holiday — he had set the initial fundraising target for $5,000. “I still don’t know how that happened,” said Sidirov. The Times and Democrat The school system in the town of Greece, N.Y., has suspended four seventh-grade students for a year. Sidorov said he will soon launch a new drive with a goal of $7 million to combat bullying with counseling, a television series and a nonprofit social media website. The Daily Dot In the past month and four days, Klein has already gone on trips to Boston, New York City, Disneyland, New Orleans and a handful of other less- public locales of her choice thanks to such charitable outlets as the Hilton Sandestin Beach Resort and country music star Tim McGraw. She has appeared on television, showing up on the sets of The Today Show, Fox & Friends, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper 360, and more, and has become an unofficial spokeswoman for the thwarting of bullying. Read more
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Thousands of YouTube Partners Now Make Six Figures a Year (GigaOM)
Thousands of YouTube partners are making over $100,000 a year, according to Google senior vice president and chief business officer Nikesh Arora. YouTube had previously put the number of six-figure earners in the hundreds. SocialTimes If you took a sledgehammer to YouTube or Vimeo, you’d have Ptch. Backed by DreamWorks Investments, the social media iPhone app lets you create short movies from video clips and photographs, add music and filters and share the entire process with friends. ars technica Four YouTube videos that had apparently been taken down earlier this week due to dubious copyright claims by the music publisher BMG Rights Management have once again become available to American audiences. The videos showed President Obama singing the opening line of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” SocialTimes Now, when you upload footage to YouTube that requires anonymity, you can blur out all the faces in the video in one click. When it comes to cats and dogs, it works some of the time anyway. Politico The Romney campaign sent YouTube an appeal letter on Wednesday asserting the footage in the ad, titled “Political Payoffs And Middle Class Layoffs,” was fair use under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and not a copyright violation. YouTube executives agreed with Romney. Read more
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Apple Preps for New Tablet (The Wall Street Journal)
Apple’s component suppliers in Asia are preparing for mass production in September of a tablet computer with a smaller screen than the iPad, people familiar with the situation said, suggesting a launch for the device is near. Two of the people said that the tablet’s screen will likely be smaller than 8 inches. The Next Web According to The Journal, Apple is likely to call upon LG Display and Au Optronics to supply the smaller screens for its new tablet. If, and it’s still a big if at this point, we see an iPad in October, it’s likely that it would enter production as early as August or September. Bloomberg News The product won’t have the high-definition screen featured on the iPad that was released in March, one of the people said. The new device will probably have a price closer to Google’s Nexus 7 tablet and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, both of which have 7-inch screens and cost $199. CNN If the rumors are true, it would be Apple’s biggest departure yet from the vision of co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, who died last year. Jobs was adamant that anything smaller than the iPad wouldn’t deliver the full “tablet experience.” CNET Last week, Google debuted the 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet, which will likely end up serving as the prime competition to Apple’s anticipated 7-inch iPad. Microsoft’s Windows-powered Surface tablet, announced in June, has a larger 10.6-inch display, but pricing has yet to be announced. Read more
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A Cadaver, Facebook, Free Speech (Inside Higher Ed)
The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the right of the University of Minnesota to punish a mortuary science student for posts on Facebook that made fun of a cadaver. The court’s ruling said that because of the nature of the student’s career-related academic program, the university did not violate the student’s rights in failing her in an anatomy laboratory course. AllFacebook Facebook stayed the course on its path to keep optimizing its mobile offerings with Wednesday’s long-awaited introduction of the “like” button for mobile applications. The social network introduced an open graph built-in like action for mobile apps, allowing developers to build like buttons into their apps with the aim of increasing engagement with its rapidly accelerating mobile user base. Bloomberg Businessweek Facebook’s audience in the United States declined in May, while the amount of time users spent on the social-networking website rose, according to comScore. The number of visitors to Facebook.com dropped less than 1 percent to 158 million in May from April, the Reston, Va.-based company said in an emailed statement. Visitors in April also fell less than 1 percent from March. ZDNET Yahoo and Facebook have asked for more time from a U.S. judge as part of efforts to end ongoing litigation, according to a court filing. The two companies, which are locked in a battle over patents, said they wanted court deadlines pushed back to allow breathing space for the talks to continue in the hope the two can avoid the courtroom. The Wall Street Journal A bipartisan group of lawmakers called on regulators to overhaul the way initial public offerings are conducted, concerned that last month’s flubbed stock sale by Facebook shows the current system unfairly punishes small investors. In a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) prodded the agency to revamp rules for pricing and disclosure in IPOs. Read more
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Facebook Swapping Out Credits, Adding Subscription Billing (AllFacebook)
Facebook announced Tuesday that the company is doing away with Facebook Credits and transitioning to local currency. The social network also announced that it is accepting subscription billing for apps. Simply put, these moves make it easier for Facebook gamers to spend more by cutting out the Facebook Credits middleman. The New York Times The changes are designed to encourage companies well beyond game developers to sell their wares on the Facebook platform itself. It carries the additional benefit of potentially keeping Facebook users on the site longer and harnessing more data about what they buy. San Francisco Chronicle App developers will soon be able to charge subscription fees, Prashant Fuloria, Facebook product management director, announced in a company blog for developers. Subscriptions could become an easy, ongoing source of revenue. The Wall Street Journal Facebook is getting support from two big-name advertisers after tough questions over the effectiveness of its ads. On Tuesday, Ford and Coca-Cola separately said they found value in Facebook advertising, and Ford plans to expand its use of the social network in advertising. Reuters Facebook offered a rare peek on Tuesday at one facet of the elaborate system it uses to police its 900 million-user social network, as it attempts to keep it free of content it deems offensive, illegal or just plain inappropriate. A detailed, and somewhat confusing, chart published by Facebook on its website depicts how reports of various infractions are routed through the company and lays out all the potential outcomes, which can range from an account being disabled to Facebook alerting law enforcement. Read more
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Microsoft Breaks Tradition With Surface Tablets (CNET)
Microsoft — a company that traditionally has relied exclusively on its PC partners to provide hardware powered by its Windows operating system — is trying out a new business model with its Windows 8 release. The company is going to offer two Microsoft-branded tablets of its own, both of which are branded as Microsoft Surface. Mashable Super-thin, the tablet is just 9.3mm thin for the Windows RT version and 13.5mm for the Pro version. Both have two full-size USB ports — something you won’t find on the vast majority of the tablet competition. You’ll also find a micro SD port on the side of the RT version and a microSDXC port on the Pro version for adding data to the device or reading files (like pictures from your digital camera) on the fly. Bloomberg News The tablet has a 10.6-inch display, said CEO Steve Ballmer during Monday’s announcement, and the device’s cover serves as a track pad and a full keyboard. Business Insider Surface for Windows RT will be available to the public when Windows 8 is officially released. Microsoft still hasn’t given an exact date for that, but we do know it will be in the fall, in plenty of time for holiday shopping. The Windows 8 Pro model will be available about 90 days later, Microsoft said. The Guardian Analysts gave the as-yet unpriced devices a cautious welcome. “From a design perspective, it looks great,” said Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president for the consumer devices team at Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company based in Stamford, Conn. She said the device looked like a serious competitor to Apple’s iPad, but success would depend on price and the apps available for the devices. Read more
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Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor Leaving Facebook (AllFacebook)
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor announced that he will leave the social network later this summer to start a company with Kevin Gibbs, founder and tech lead of the Google App Engine and creator of Google Suggest. Taylor joined Facebook in 2009 as director of platform products, and he was promoted to CTO in June 2010. PC Magazine The Stanford-educated Taylor previously worked as CEO of FriendFeed. He also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, and as a group product manager with Google, according to his LinkedIn profile. AllThingsD The move is likely to be of concern to some over the newly public company’s ability to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, especially in the wake of continued intense media and investor scrutiny over its rocky IPO last month. That’s especially true since Taylor has been in charge of both platform and mobile efforts at Facebook, a critical arena for it. The Wall Street Journal “I’ve really enjoyed working with Bret and getting to know him as a friend and teammate. I’m grateful for all he has done for Facebook and I’m proud of what he and his teams have built. I’m also proud that we have a culture where great entrepreneurs like Bret join us and have such a big impact,” Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. A pair of Facebook executives under Taylor — Mike Vernal and Cory Ondrejka — will be taking over platform and mobile duties, respectively. TechCrunch Taylor’s is one of the first in a wave of Facebook departures TechCrunch is hearing, as a slew of older employees have hit their four-year stock cliffs, and the 90-day IPO lockout fast approaches. According to a source, many Facebook employees including one other executive are already planning what to do next. Read more
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Twitter’s Expanded Tweets Now Show More Interactive Content (Mashable)
Twitter updated its “expanded tweets” feature on Wednesday, according to a post on the social networking company’s blog, allowing users to see more interactive content — such as news stories, video galleries and audio clips — inside tweets via a desktop or mobile browser. For example, when users expand a tweet containing a news article from a “growing group” of Twitter partner sites such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, users will see a headline, introduction and sometimes the Twitter accounts of the publisher and writer. CNET In addition, Twitter promises the feature will present images from TMZ and BuzzFeed, as well as video from BET, Lifetime and Dailymotion. TechCrunch In the audio realm, SoundCloud’s HTML5 widget will show up in tweets that contain a SoundCloud URL. This means that Twitter cards will display a summary of SoundCloud sounds right inside a tweet allowing anyone to follow both the SoundCloud platform and any SoundCloud content creator directly within the expanded tweet. Bloomberg Businessweek The service began rolling out to website and mobile users on Wednesday. It will be available on Twitter’s iPhone and Android apps soon. PC Magazine Twitter used an image of controversial singer and convicted felon Chris Brown to advertise the new video-viewing feature. Brown, who in 2009 was sentenced to five years probation for felony assault of his then-girlfriend and fellow pop star Rihanna, features prominently on the Twitter blog post, appearing in a screenshot of an expanded tweet that’s showing video from BET’s 106 & Park. Read more
