How kool is an instant Goal replay tweet, of the Brasil World Cup, 2014 ?

Photo credit; Eser Karadağ /Flickr CC

We interrupt our normal programming to inform you of a handy new service for those of usstill watching the World Cup in Brazil. @ReplayLastGoal is a Twitter bot that automatically tweets the video replay and animated GIF of the latest goal in the tournament. Handy right? There are plenty of ways to get the score fast – but this actually SHOWS you the goal. Awesome.

The open source project is by Xavier Damman, the Cofounder of @Storify (acquired by @Livefyre in 2013) and it’s seen its following rise since the the handy service sneaked out a week or so ago.

“I thought of doing this Twitter Bot because given the schedule, all the games happen during working hours so I don’t have the time to follow them,” Damman told me. “The only thing I could find were bots that were tweeting the score. But when there is a goal, I want to see it. So I built this bot during my nights.”

The bot records a live stream continuously with a 20 second buffer. When there is a goal, it records a short video, generates an animated gif and tweets it. With the recent support of animated gif on Twitter, it’s looking pretty good.

The not for profit open source project has also source code available for anyone who wants to create a similar service for anything else – how about baseball? Maybe.

Meanwhile, this is something the likes of FIFA should embrace – TV rights be damned.
ref; http://techcrunch.com by Mike Butcher

Crazy tech additions during Brasil World Cup 2014 !

Courtesy; iRobot, Sony, GoalControl GMBH, Getty images

Half a million soccer fans will visit Brazil to attend this summer’s Fifa World Cup—but they won’t be seeing the same game as in years past. The pitch will feature some impressive new technologies, starting with a ceremonial kickoff by a paralyzed teen outfitted in a mind-controlled exoskeleton. Here’s what’ll come next.

PackBots Instead of clearing bunkers and crossing minefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, 30 iRobot 510 PackBots will check suspicious packages and provide extra surveillance at the dozen World Cup venues.

4K Broadcast Sony and FIFA will broadcast the July 13 final match live in super-high-res 4K. Carriers who devote the bandwidth will get four times the resolution of 1080p— making it nearly impossible to fake being fouled, right?

GoalControl Fourteen video cameras mounted high in the stadium—seven pointed at each goal capture the ball’s exact position and send a vibrating signal to the ref’s wrist watch when it passes the goal line.

Vanishing Spray Argentinian sports journalist Pablo Silva tested hundreds of foaming emulsifiers to come up with this shaving ­cream like product, which evaporates within two minutes.* Refs will use it to mark off free kicks.

Brazuca Ball A record-low six panels makes for less water uptake and fewer seam defects. Plus, the cool panel shape means no large smooth areas— the source of the knuckle-ball effect that plagued the last two FIFA balls.

ref: http://www.wired.com

Batman's Tumbler, racing in the 2014 Gumball 3000.

Batman’s Tumbler will not be racing in the European leg of the 2014 Gumball 3000, the rally in which rich enthusiasts and celebrities pilot expensive cars across multiple continents.

The Tumbler, billed by the rally as “probably the most insane car we’ve ever had on the Gumball,” is a street-legal replica of the vehicle from the Christopher Nolan / Christian Bale Batman trilogy. Under the comic book exterior is a 6.2-liter V8 producing 400 horsepower. Without it, you’ll have to settle for Ferraris, Porsches, and Rolls-Royces.

Saudia Arabia’s Team Galag were set to drive the Tumbler along the 2014 route from Miami, through New York, London, Paris, and to the finish in Ibiza on June 11. The car, with a 6.2-liter V8 producing 400 horsepower, weighs in at 5,000 pounds. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s been beset by mechanical issues, and is dropping out of the rally.

Galag didn’t provide details, but they blame Florida-based Parker Brothers Concepts, which built the car, for this missed opportunity. On their Facebook page, Galag said, “Parker Brothers Concepts have been given a year to fix the issues that were faced last year but chose not to do any work until it was too late to make any difference. We have been misled many times and were told that progress was being made and chose to put our trust in their word…They are also refusing to hand over the license plates in order to be able to drive the Tumbler legally on the road.”

We’ve reached out to Parker Brothers for a comment and will update this post when we hear back. (It’s not the Monopoly-producing Parker Brothers, by the way, which is too bad. We’d love to see a giant thimble or top hat loaded with a V-12 roaring into Ibizia.)

British driver and designer (and husband of rapper Eve) Maximilian Cooper created the Gumball 3000 in 1999 as a long-distance road race for him and his celebrity friends. Cooper says he got the name from Andy Warhol’s description of the public chewing and spitting out popular culture like gum, although we can’t find evidence of the quote outside of Gumball press releases. Nor do we see what it has to do with awesome cars.

The annual rally, held this year from June 4 to June 11, is the event that sells the Gumball 300 “lifestyle brand” of “entertainment, apparel, music and licensing divisions.” The price tag for participation is £40,000 ($67,194) per vehicle, including two drivers. Each additional person in the car costs another £20,000 ($33,597). That price includes hotel rooms at each of the layover points along the race, plus glamorous post-drive parties stuffed with famous people.

“Racing,” the requirements emphasize, is not permitted, but friendly competition to see who gets to the next hotel first is typical. Participating cars are required to have the Gumball 3000 logo stickered across their paneling, NASCAR style, and drivers “shall endeavour to keep them clean and visible at all times.” For the vehicles, the only requirement is that they be insured and street-legal in the host countries.

We’re always in favor of a ridiculous street-legal one-off automobile, especially when it pulls from comic books. For now, the dark knight will put off rising until next year’s rally.

ref: http://www.wired.com

Your Jewelry, can now call upon your important notifications ?

www.ringly.com

We’ve all done it: You’re at a restaurant, enjoying a nice moment with a friend when all of a sudden you hear your phone buzz. You want to stop the conversation, reach for your phone and check the notification. You really really do. But that would be rude…right?

We’re in a constant battle with our technology; do we control it or does it control us? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Ringly, a new line of technology-enabled rings, wants to make sure we have a say in which notifications are put in front our faces.

The rings, which launch today, are connected to your phone via Bluetooth Low Energy. You can configure the ring and its accompanying app to notify you when certain things are happening on your phone (calls, texts, emails, push notifications from Tinder, etc) by blinking colorful lights and soft vibrations. For those of us bound to our phones, it’s supposed to be a way to free us from our technological shackles. But actually, Ringly was started for the exact opposite reason.

“I’m always missing calls and texts, and it started to get really frustrating to have to keep my phone out on the table at restaurants and in meetings,” says Christina Mercando, Ringly’s co-founder and CEO. “I thought there just has to be a better way.” At that moment, Mercando looked down at her ring-covered hands and had an epiphany: “What if my ring told me what’s going on?”

Though notifications are hardly a uniquely female problem, Ringly has made the choice to position it as one. The rings, made from semi-precious stones set in gold-plated metal, look like something you might find in your great aunt’s box of costume jewelry. They’re clearly feminine, and stylish in a way that says the company is gunning for Barneys, not Best Buy.

                                                                   This is how it works !

Still, the tech is impressive when you consider what’s inside this little piece of jewelry. Bluetooth LE helped the Ringly crew to cram a light, motor, battery and accelerometer underneath the ring’s stone. It’s not a delicate ring by any means, but it’s certainly within the realm of normal. This discreetness was key, says Mercando. “A ring is the smallest form factor, so if you can fit the electronics into that, you can fit them into many different things, like a watch or bracelet,” she says.

The team hints at potential future applications–things like gesture controls, easy mobile payments, unlocking doors–but for the moment, its sole focus is to see how people use the ring in the realm of notifications. “The fashion world is blown away; they can’t believe something like this exists,” says Mercando. “And the technology world is like, is that all it does?”

The value of Ringly is entirely up to the person who wears it. The app allows you to customize which notifications you see, potentially an efficient way to screen calls. “A lot of moms will say, if the babysitter calls, that’s the only person getting through on date night,” says Logan Munro, Ringly’s mechanical engineer and co-founder.

But technology that claims to free us from technology is a complicated proposition. A ring that flashes and buzzes every time something happens in your digital life could be equally, if not more, distracting than just having your phone on the table. “The angle of this is totally something that helps you disconnect is misleading because it does notify you when things are happening and then you want to go and check,” says Mercando. “It’s helping people not worry so much about their technology and not have so much anxiety around it.”

A quick, totally unscientific poll of a few friends found that while all said the ring looked like something they’d wear, they worried it’d only enable their bad phone etiquette. “That thing would make me so edgy,” says one. Replacing one gadget with another might not be a solution for everyone, though who knows how it could change our behavior over time. The key to Ringly’s success will really be in its fashionable style–something that we covet regardless of functionality.

ref: http://www.wired.com

Elevate your Social presence online 'TIPS 2014'; did you make these changes ?

As always, I’m going to be completely honest: all the information on sizes and dimensions of cover photos for social networks, including backgrounds, profile pictures, etc. have changed several times. So, the infographics prepared for 2014 were basically rendered obsolete overnight.

In November 2013, Google Plus launched its latest change and just recently, in January 2014, Twitter changed the design of the users’ homepage. Even, at this exact moment, they’re preparing a new surprise for us all. So, this infographicthat’s been so helpful for all of us, isn’t really going to be that useful anymore.

The goal of this article isn’t only to present you with cold hard data about social media image dimensions, but to also give you practical advice to optimize your brand strategy, and improve its image throughout different social networks.Competition on social networks is fierce, so you can’t afford to waste opportunities to attract new audiences. Users are constantly exposed to tons of information, which is why the first impression of a brand must be powerful and convincing in a matter of seconds. If you want to avoid the mistakes all companies talk about on social networks don’t miss this article.

Now, I’m gonna share some information with you that I’ve been gathering on the sizes and dimensions of pictures for different social networks as of April 2014.That way we can complement the information on the infographics that are still valid.

1- Twitter’s cover dimensions – Updated April 2014 – (+tips!)
The new Twitter has arrived!!

On April 22, 2014 this popular social network rolled out its new web profile experience to users all around the world. It’s appearance has radically changed: we’re talking about real changes that are far from the original structure. Twitter has swapped the aspects that made it so unique for some that make it actually very (VERY) similar to Facebook.

So, what do you guys think?

The reason for these changes, and other changes that they made in 2013, is to give much more importance to pictures and buttons. Why? In order to give users a similar experience to the one they have on their mobile devices. Precisely, in May 2013, Twitter also optimized the navigation for Android and iOS devices which resulted in it being simpler to see, share, and tweet.

Here we go, the dimensions of Twitter’s cover: (Updated April 2014!)
The new Twitter is now available for all users. If you haven’t gotten it yet, you can find it here.

Now if you are particular about how you present yourself online, then please discover the major channels     ( Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Vimeo, Youtube, etc) the latest changes like dimension and others; please visit postcron.com.blog for all the major social media platforms information with short and sweet details. It is by far one of the best put well together by Josefina Casas.

Pele, Zidane and Maradona - luxury brands creation of lifestyle !

LV Campaign

Real luxury lifestyle must be rooted in authenticity. If luxury brands stray too far from their roots, they will be reduced to little more than faded labels. Here is how companies can infuse their luxury brands with a sense of lifestyle—and substance, too.

Keith Richards lounging in his hotel room with a branded custom guitar by his side.
Zinedine Zidane playing a game of table soccer, with his Louis Vuitton trolley barely visible in the distance.

These images successfully create a sense of lifestyle, helping to articulate Louis Vuitton’s rich and authentic luxury brand identity. Everyone has a sense of what constitutes luxury; defining lifestyle is more difficult, and even trickier for brands to create. Yet there are enormous rewards for doing so. The conjunction of luxury and lifestyle is more popular than ever, and consumers and the press increasingly perceive lifestyle as an element in luxury.

Keith Richards

This comprehensive McKinsey report, “Luxury lifestyle: Business beyond buzzwords” details the steps and core principles businesses need to follow when trying to infuse their luxury brand with a sense of lifestyle. First, it’s important to understand that building a sense of lifestyle is a slow, evolutionary process that requires patience and care. Too many brands have rushed into expanding both categories and message touchpoints without first defining their core values.

Authenticity is the most important consideration when communicating luxury lifestyle. A senior executive at one of the world’s most renowned fashion houses put it this way: “Lifestyle is the result of what we do, not the purpose.”

Brands that effectively communicate lifestyle messages use images that tell stories beyond just their product. These can include visuals of cityscapes, leisure activities or other slices of the luxurious life. The brand’s products may be visible, but they are not necessarily the center of attention. These lifestyle messages and images are broadcast not just through magazines and TV ads, but across multiple channels, including blogs, social media profiles, and interactive mobile apps.

Connecting with the idea of lifestyle is promising territory for luxury brands. Consumers are eager for products that communicate a sense of uniqueness and distinctiveness, for something special and authentic that will enrich their lives. Brands that create these stories can enhance their value many times over.

ref: mckinseyonmarketingandsales.com