David Lidsky's Blog, page 3418

This Twitter Account Shames Brands For Lazy, Awkward, And Awful Tweets

Brands can be very bad at social media. A perfect example: trying to capitalize on the marketing opportunity that is the anniversary of 9/11 (Note to marketers: not an opportunity). To call companies out on awful tweets, an anonymous Twitter account has emerged rounding up the worst offenders.

The bio of @urtweetsrbad says it all: "Your tweets. They are bad. @Walmart blocked us." (That last bit hasn't stopped the account for manually retweeting the retail giant.) Doing some digging, Digiday found out the person behind the account worked in marketing and advertising for five years.

"I wish I could say that it started as a one–person crusade to improve brand tweets, but the truth is that I was home sick from work and bored. I mostly started it to amuse myself," @urtweetsrbad told the news site. The ultimate aim of this Twitter account is to inspire social media managers and agency creatives "to be just a little less lazy."

Not just lazy, but hopefully a little less awkward. Some of the gems the account has spotted are cringeworthy to say the least.

Notice the errant comma? If you think the above Pepto–Bismol tweet was uncomfortable, the one following is––if you can believe it––even worse:

Meanwhile, Rite–Aid finds the best way to start the week is with a quote from the polarizing Ayn Rand.

Along the same lines, Dove decided it wanted to inspire something among its fans.

Wendy's makes a reference to Gangnam Style–wannabe What Does the Fox Say, but it receives a hilarious response when a consumer calls out the fast–food chain.

Also, we're pretty sure no one has ever considered a roll of paper towels BFF–worthy.

But maybe that might change if paper towel rolls can buy pizza.

       

BlackBerry Has Been In Talks With Facebook About A Potential Bid

As BlackBerry continues to look for buyers, executives from the Waterloo–based company met with Facebook last week to gauge interest, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Facebook is the latest addition to a growing list of tech companies that have been in talks with BlackBerry, including Google, Cisco Systems, SAP, Lenovo, Intel, and LG. Though it remains unclear if the social network would place a bid, Facebook did enter the mobile phone space earlier this year by partnering with HTC for the HTC First. Dubbed the Facebook phone, it was considered a disaster soon after its launch, with AT&T halting sales of the device a month after its release.

Though BlackBerry accepted a $4.7 billion offer from Canadian insurance company Fairfax Financial, the ailing smartphone maker is reportedly also considering breaking up and selling the company in pieces, a move an analyst said could fetch a higher sum considering BlackBerry's valuable patent portfolio and enterprise business. BlackBerry has until Nov. 4 to seek additional offers, but would have to pay as much as $157 million to Fairfax to renege on the agreement. If it backs out of a done deal after Monday, the penalty could rise to $262 million.

       

An Analog Art Tool For Making 3–D Objects Flat

Art teachers face a major challenge when teaching new students to draw: how do you put techniques into words? Concepts like perspective have a visual language, but don't easily lend themselves to a spoken lesson. Leslie Lienau, an art teacher for 20 years, wished she could teach students how to see before teaching them how to draw. "I wanted to find a way to communicate clearly," she says.

Which is what her new tool, the Miira View Frame, does. The unassuming device is a rectangular frame, which looks like a cousin to the Etch–A–Sketch, only with flexible rods that move on a track, via magnets, over the face. Adjust the rod's position to line up with whatever is in the viewfinder––a person, a still life, a landscape––and the device helps translate the 3–D image into a legible flat drawing.

"Using it creates a cognitive connection about the truths of the 3–dimensional world of space, depth, and form," Lienau says.

The challenge with drawing––or sculpting or painting for that matter––is that our brains get tripped up trying to render 3–D objects onto a 2–D plane. View Frame is like a synapse that helps the mind and hand work in tandem to produce a drawing that doesn't look morphed. The View Frame can also capture things like linear perspective, such as a road trailing off into the distance, and proportion, think of a dancer mid–pose, with limbs angling off in different directions.

"View Frame naturally becomes a learning tool," says Lineau, who points out that even the most expert artists can use it to speed up the sketching process. Not to mention product designers or architects who want to put pencil to paper and take a break from the computer.

Get a Miira View Frame for $30, through the company's Kickstarter campaign.

       

Screw Teaching Your Kids––Get This Robot Instead

Less than 3% of graduates in the U.S. graduate with a degree in Computer Science and that figure has been dropping for the past decade, even as the importance of software in our daily lives is so obviously growing. For educators, the problem lies in the dearth of teaching strategies: Existing products meant to "teach kids to code" are usually designed for older children, or they require technical guidance from a parent or teacher.

"The state of Computer Science education in the U.S. has gotten worse over the last 20 years," says Vikas Gupta, who headed up consumer payments at Google until he left to cofound Play–i last year. "Why aren't we doing something for our kids to get them interested in Computer Science?"

But building a teaching tool for all ages––one which doesn't require a guide or tutor––means relying on robots to teach coding. But most robotics kits are still too expensive and complex for the job, which is where Play–i thinks it can make a difference.

"There's a lot of recent research coming from places like MIT which shows that children as young as five years old can grasp programming. What's lacking is the tools which make it accessible to them. Most platforms which exist today, they are focusing on kids to consume content. You can watch videos, you can play games, but how many draw them out to create something? When I give my child an iPad I want them to use their iPad to create amazing things and not just consume technology."

Gupta set out to find a way to teach very young children the basics of coding––sequences of instructions, subroutines, events, conditional statements––in a playful way. Today Play–i launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $250,000 to manufacture two kid–friendly robots called Bo and Yana, which teach high–level programming concepts to children as as young as five.

Gupta wants to build affordable robots which the non–technical parent would enjoy as much as a young child. "Programming tends to be an abstract concept," says Gupta. "The best way to make it concrete for a child is to use tangible products. The very first concept that they learn is that the work they do controls an object in another world in a repeatable and controllable way. Even that is an alien concept for a child. The second one is a sequence of instructions. If I give you an abstract sequence of go straight, go right, go straight, go right, it's not immediately obvious to a child that you will come back to the same point. With a robot, it's obvious what's going on."

Together with a team of advisors from the robotics and computer science education worlds, including Lego Mindstorms creator Mike Dooley, Play–i designed two robots and their associated programming interfaces. Bo is a bug–eyed, blue character with wheels, six connection points for accessories, and 12 different sensors to detect its surrounding and other robots. Yana is a storytelling robot equipped with an accelerometer so it can detect how it is being moved.

The first problem was syntax. How do you teach coding to a child who may not yet be able to read and write? "Any time that I have picked up a new programming language, syntax is the hardest thing to get over," says Gupta. "In many ways syntax is the thing that I'm learning. Programming concepts remain the same. So we wanted to break down that barrier for kids as well. How can we do something that is without syntax?" The solution was a combination of puppeting, animation, and a visual interface. A child can drive Bo along a certain route and that route will be recorded and made available on an iPad as an animation. A child can then edit the animation or schedule it to be performed again. "We can take an animation in an iPad which is basically time frame data and positional data. I can save that and I can call it again and again and again and that's how I can program. This breaks down the barrier of trying to understand what a sequence is, what a subroutine is, what's the syntax for the language, is there an error?"

Another coding concept children learn from puppeting is reusability. "I puppeted the robot to do this and I created this amazing animation. Now I can share it with someone and they can use it. It's not only for my robots but for someone else's robot."

The robots execute instructions in real time and they can be edited while the robot is executing them. "The beauty of that is that it makes programming playful," says Gupta."It's not about 'I do a whole bunch of stuff and I don't know what's going to happen at the end.'"

Play–i did a lot of testing with children and quickly discovered that kids wanted to use them to tell stories. They also wanted Bo, a robot which has wheels, to fly or leap like a kangaroo. So Gupta decided to build a second, smaller robot called Yana which can recognize gestures."Characters, in a way, are what you can call programs or subroutines. I created this character and I can use it in different contexts," says Gupta." If I shake it, I want it to be a lion. If I tap it twice, I want it to be a pig. If I start rotating it, I want it to be a train. What this is, in programming parlance, is a large if–then statement. You can start giving kids the scaffolding of a story. Slowly we take the scaffolding away and let them create their own programs and their own stories."

Gupta has a two–year–old daughter so he put a lot of effort into designing a robot which would be as appealing to girls as to boys. This required some surprising changes to the designs. "The moment you have wheels which are visible on a product, immediately for many girls we found that becomes a boy's toy. They don't want to play with it. So when you see this robot (Bo), you actually don't see the wheels at all. A simple thing like that has broken down the barrier and suddenly girls love it." Girl's also wanted to customize the robots. "There are six attachment points which let you customize it physically and then we also have this idea of personalities in a digital form––a set of sounds, a set of subroutines, and so on. Let's say that you have a dog. You can go around recording the sound of the dog. Then you can save it and say when you run into a wall, bark. Suddenly your robot starts to take on the personality of your dog. Those little personalisations draw girls out quite a bit."

Play–i robots will be available in the summer of 2014. Bo will cost $149 as part of the crowdfunding campaign while Jana will be available for $49. While the initial visual interface is aimed at children from five up, Play–i will also provide a path of progression to more sophisticated development by providing libraries for environments like Scratch, Blockly, Android, and iOS.

The robots were recently demoed to 20 kids in Seattle. "Eventually after a few hours the robot's battery died––it's a prototype––and two children started crying. They wanted more of the robot!" says Gupta.

       

Aereo's Newest Hurdle: Paying Its Electricity Bills

Disruptive TV streaming service Aereo, which has been the subject of heavy legal drama basically since its inception, is now facing another obstacle: How does it pay for the massive electricity bill it's racking up?

Aereo operates through tiny antennas that are assigned to each individual user. Each antenna uses roughly 5 to 6 watts of power. The Wall Street Journal recently visited Aereo's Brooklyn facility and, by "counting lit–up boxes," estimated the service has between 90,000 to 135,000 New York subscribers. Chief Executive Chet Kanojia said the company could support up to 350,000 New York subscribers. Powering that many antennas would require "nearly as much power as it would take to light up two NFL football stadiums," which could cost the company roughly $2 million in the Empire State.

Kanojia admitted that power is "one of the biggest challenges" Aereo is confronting, and says he plans to look into alternative power sources.

       

Disney's New TV Show Will Debut On Tablets, Because Toddlers Love Them

Three–quarters of children are spending an increasing amount of time on smartphones and tablets, including nearly 40% of babies under two years old. So, although it's a first, it's not entirely surprising Disney is bringing "Sheriff Callie's Wild West," a television show debuting November 24th, to tablets before it makes a more traditional cable debut on the Disney Channel and Disney Junior.

The decision to embrace a tablet–first debut is part of a strategy to capture what Disney Junior Worldwide general manager Nancy Kanter tells the New York Times amounts to "billions of minutes spent watching" by members of its core demographic of two– to seven–year–olds. And in case Kanter's claim to "billions of minutes" sounds lofty, consider this: The Watch Disney Junior app has been downloaded an estimated 5 million times since last June, generating 650 million video views in the process.

But the real winners in Disney's play for the second screen may be the parents who no longer have to compete with their children for control over the first screen: Their home televisions. Disney–ABC Television Group's digital media chief Albert Cheng tells the Times: "We get a lot of e–mails from dads saying, 'Thanks for giving me back my TV.'"

       

Today's Google Doodle Pays Homage to Edith Head

The current Google Doodle is decked out in ball gowns, sharp dress suits, and fur–trimmed ruffles in honor of legendary costume designer Edith Head, who would have been 116 today. Over the course of her career, Head racked up 438 film credits and won eight Oscars for her work on The Heiress, Samson and Delilah, All About Eve, A Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, The Facts of Life, and The Sting. She died in 1981 at the age of 83 and still holds the record for most Oscars won by a woman.

To be a good designer in Hollywood, one has to be a combination of psychiatrist, artist, fashion designer, dress–maker, pin cushion, historian, nurse maid, and purchasing agent.

"To be a good designer in Hollywood, one has to be a combination of psychiatrist, artist, fashion designer, dress–maker, pin cushion, historian, nurse maid, and purchasing agent, too," Head once said. Despite having no formal fashion training, Head was hired as a costume sketch artist by Paramount Pictures in 1924. She went on to create iconic costumes like the strapless evening gown Elizabeth Taylor wore in A Place in the Sun; the toreador pants Audrey Hepburn wore in Sabrina and Funny Face; and Dorothy Lamour's floral sarong in Jungle Princess. Between 1949 and 1978, Head was nominated for 35 Oscars for costume design.

As Alfred Hitchcock's favorite designer, she created the mint–green dress suit Tippi Hedren wore in The Birds, inspiring many a crow–pecked Halloween costume. And even after actress Kim Novak declared, "I don't wear suits, and I don't wear gray. Another thing, I don't wear black pumps," Head managed to dress her in a gray suit and black pumps for her starring role in Vertigo. Also on her list of red–carpet devotees were Marlene Dietrich, Shirley MacLaine, Sophia Loren, Bette Davis, Natalie Wood, and Ginger Rogers.

Head's close–cropped black hair, trademark round spectacles, and straight–shooting personality are said to have been the inspiration for the superhero costume designer Edna Mode in Pixar's The Incredibles.

       

#Thinspiration And #Underboob Are Now Approved Instagram Hashtags

Rejoice, soft porn– and profanity–loving Instagram users: You now have more hashtags to use to find and label content, thanks to the powers that be at Instagram, who have unbanned several previously banned hashtags.

Some quick background: Since Instagram's list of banned hashtags was originally published in August, Instagram has unbanned a large number of them, including #bitchesofig, #fuckfuelprices, #getnakedpls, and #underboob. A larger list still remains banned, mostly related to hardcore sex, racism, and explicit mentions of eating disorders.

Instagram also appears to be easing its policy on hashtags related to self–harm and eating disorders. Drewes writes "while hashtags like #thinspo and #thinspiration were previously unsearchable, Instagram now returns a full set of search results, along with a content advisory warning and a link to the National Eating Disorders Association."

       

Study: 75% Of Kids Under Age 8 Use Mobile Devices

There's been an explosion of mobile technology use among young children in the past two years, even as overall media exposure is declining. According to a report out today from Common Sense Media, which studies the safe use of media for kids, the percentage of children under eight with access to a smartphone or tablet has jumped from half (52%) to three–quarters (75%), while the average daily time on the device has tripled from five to 15 minutes (for parents, that's measured as the length of time it takes to wolf down your meal in a restaurant, or conduct a conversation in peace). Perhaps most startling is that 38% of babies under two years old have used a mobile device, up from one in 10 just two years ago.

The most interesting finding in this report is the 21–minute decline in average reported screen media use, from two hours and 16 minutes to one hour and 55 minutes. Although plain old television still accounts for half––about an hour––of daily screen time for kiddies, usage is down for DVDs, video games, TV, and computers, and the rise in mobile usage hasn't been enough to counteract it. Ironically, even as parents are perhaps clamping down on screentime at home (or at least the amount they admit to), there has been a countervailing rise in the use of digital devices in public schools across the country. Technology: panacea or poison?

       

Louis CK Is Better At Self–Promotion Than You

It is in keeping with Louis CK's no–frills persona that he can't seem to be bothered with traditional advertising. When he released his new HBO special last spring, that tendency manifested itself in a promo that mocked similar promos. Now that this special is available to stream on the comedian's website, he is at it again––with banner ads that deconstruct banner ads.

Looking aggrieved that he has to do even this bit of self–promotion, Louis CK appears in the ad on sites like Vulture, holding up a rudimentary sign that simply says "Buy my jokes $5." Even though he pioneered the distribution strategy which established that people are actually willing to pay for specials if they're inexpensive enough, the current reigning champion of comedy is savvy enough to present himself as an underdog with a devalued product.

Perhaps his next ad will just be an apology tacked onto a bulletin board.

H/t to Slate