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A J.C. Penny billboard appearing in California has been raising some eyebrows for the apparent similarity to one history’s most infamous characters. The news about the billboard, which is located around the 405 freeway near Culver City, in Southern Californiastarted making the rounds after it was popularized on Reddit, which was then referenced by an article in The Telegraph, which, in turn, also gained popularity on the aforementioned Reddit, as the story completed its Inception-like journey. The billboard in question appears in the lead image, and in the original Reddit that started it all, the post’s title says, “This Kettle looks Like Hitler.”

With that in mind, what say you? Can you see the resemblance? When asked about it on Twitter, the J.C. Penny account replied as follows:

@huffingtonpost Totally unintentional. If we’d designed the kettle to look like something, we would’ve gone w/ this: twitter.com/jcpenney/statu…

— jcpenney (@jcpenney) May 28, 2013

While many people see the similarities–especially when the image is blurred–it seems like a bit of stretch. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped the topic from growing legs and jumping into the (fleeting?) world of Internet trends, especially on Twitter. Apparently, it was a slow work day back after all that Memorial Day fun. Whatever the case, if you happen to own one of these kettles–use the following image to correctly identify it:

And it starts annexing other parts of your cabinets for personal use, then perhaps the people who noticed the similarity were on to something.

Would you believe there’s more than 20 minutes worth of video game scenes in the history of cinema? Depending on how deep you want to dig in the annals of cinema history, it actually looks pretty easy. In fact, if you stay until the end of of the credits, you’ll see they actually left off some movies.

I think it’s safe to say that the 80′s ruled in terms of including video games in movies. As proven by the fact that Freddie Krueger killed some teens with the Power Glove. Not to mention that Kurt Russell’s character from The Thing, MacReady, completely ruined what was thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment because of losing a game of chess. They even did video game rage better in the 80′s.

Kasey Kahl, who was a contestant on “The Bachelorette” in 2010, was sentenced to three years of probation and community service for a felony assault charge stemming from a bar fight last January.

The 30-year old reality star pleaded no contest to the charges after he was accused of breaking a man’s nose outside a Fresno, California bar. He was also accused of hitting the man’s girlfriend. His attorney, Gerald Schwab, says Kahl could get the charges expunged from his record if he does his community service and complies with the terms of his sentence.

“He does a lot of charity work,” Schwab said, according to the Fresno Bee. “He is a good kid with a good heart, he just got himself in a bad situation.”

The fight allegedly began when Kahl approached a woman outside the bar and began talking to her, but after she told him to “stop talking to her” because she had a boyfriend, Kahl began hitting the man on the face. The woman said she jumped on Kahl to get him off her boyfriend and was hit in the process.

Sony and Microsoft have left a lot of question marks surrounding the used game policies for their PlayStation 4 and Xbox One video game consoles. Earlier rumors suggested that Microsoft is looking to take control of the used game market and may only allow certain retailers to sell pre-owned products. TV host and industry pundit Geoff Keighley recently said that Sony may also incorporate some form of digital rights management (DRM) for used games, a policy that didn’t sit well with PlayStation enthusiasts. A thread on video game message board NeoGAF suggested that Sony fans reach out to executives through social media and email to try to reverse the company’s still unconfirmed stance on used games. The thread has since garnered nearly 5,000 responses and was successful in getting Sony’s attention.

Continue reading…

New sales figures out from Gartner Tuesday show that server shipments from no-name vendors other than Hewlett-Packard,, IBM, Fujitsu gained marketshare in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the year-ago period. The decrease of server business at big vendors such as IBM is not the takeaway — remember that IBM reportedly considered selling its server division — so much as the rise of little-known vendors such as Quanta and Wistron that customize their gear for big customers. The pattern isn’t new, but it’s becoming more evident.

In the first quarter of 2011, “other” vendors claimed 32.1 percent of marketshare in terms of unit shipments. HP had almost 30 percent, and Dell had 22 percent. Now the “other” guys in aggregate have moved forward and hold 37.5 percent of the market in terms of units shipped; HP has dropped to 24.9 percent, while Dell’s share was roughly flat. IBM in the same period fell from 11.8 percent to 9.9 percent.

HP is trying to shake things up with its new energy-efficient Moonshot servers. The microserver bet looks like a good one, although Moonshot’s adoption is an open question. An HP executive told my colleague Barb Darrow that the data showing the growth of white-box vendors emerged “before the world knew about Project Moonshot.”

Dell, for its part, grew year over year last quarter, but far more modestly than the “other” vendors. It’s unclear what going private will mean for the company in terms of its server sales.

Cisco grew, too, but its chunk of marketshare — 2.3 percent — is small, so growth appears larger than it actually is.

Oracle is absent from the list of vendors measured by server shipment, although its server business doesn’t look promising, either, at least not as much as for the “other” vendors. Oracle server revenue slipped more than 27 percent year on year.

The growth of Facebook, Google and other webscale companies out of colocation facilities and into their own data centers has introduced the opportunity to go with tailor-made gear that make sense at economies of scale. (At GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco in three weeks, this topic might very well come up in conversation with Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon.com, and Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering.)

Some companies running lots of applications have moved in this direction as well — take Amazon and Rackspace, for example. Hence the rise of companies that do this for webscale players.

With more hardware designs becoming available through the Open Compute Project, still more business could flow to no-namers in the years to come. And that’s to say nothing of switches, a piece of hardware certainly ripe for commoditization.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

Verizon’s next network update is expected to more than double internet speeds, upgrading the service to Verizon’s Advance Wireless Service spectrum.

Although the service is not yet active, the Samsung Galaxy S 4 has components that will be in use when using AWS airwaves— the phone will require a software update to activate the connection to the AWS frequency. The service is scheduled to launch in major cities, including New York City, starting in the next few months.

Verizon’s AWS airwaves will increase the capacity of its LTE network— Verizon execs say that the expansion is necessary to keep pace with increased network traffic. LTE traffic volume is expected to be 6 to 7 times greater in three years than it is today.

Source: Bloomberg 

Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy S 4 will be first phone to work on Verizon’s AWS airwaves

The DIY micro-guide platform HowDo, which we last covered back in October last year, has just launched on the web. It was previously only available on iOS.

HowDo is an intriguing little startup. Based in Berlin, the company’s platform offers a very simple way to create instructional storyboards: you just take a series of photos with your phone, make a slideshow out of them with a voiceover, and post the result. It’s very much geared towards the maker movement although, as I noted last year, the same mechanism could also plausibly find an application in citizen journalism.

And now it’s on the web too. You can’t create HowDo guides on the desktop — that’s still an iOS app-only task — but you can now embed them in blogs or websites, or search through profiles from the browser. It was previously possible to view HowDo guides on the web, but only if someone had sent you a link, and even then the guides were in no way interactive.

In keeping with the original app, HowDo’s web player interface is quite simplistic: you can click forwards and backwards through the frames, and that’s it. It’s enough to do the job, though, and I can see it working well in the context of Tumblr or Pinterest embeds.

In terms of users, HowDo won’t say much beyond “tens of thousands”, though that’s fair enough – it’s targeted quite a specific market at launch, and iOS specificity is another limiting factor. An Android version is planned, but development hasn’t started yet. At least making the guides more easily viewable by those outside the HowDo community should help the platform grow.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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As if Adam Levine hadn’t alienated potential male fans enough with his stardom and abs, he’s now moved on to a Sports Illustrated model after a breakup with Victoria’s Secret model Behati Prinsloo.

Nina Agdal, who was recently named Sports Illustrated‘s “Rookie Of The Year”, has been secretly dating Levine since early spring and has been attending tapings of “The Voice” to support her man.

“Behati was in and out, but they finally ended it,” a source close to Levine said. “It wasn’t an abrupt ending.”

Agdal’s own star is rising; not only is she a SI model who’s turning heads, she was recently featured on “Inside Edition” as she went shopping for a prom dress. The 21-year old agreed to step in for SI buddy Kate Upton after a high school senior asked her to the dance and she had to turn him down due to her schedule.

The internet of things is gaining attention for its role cobbling together our home security systems, letting us play with our lightbulbs and even for helping track our personal fitness goals, but it’s also a fun toy for parents to engage with their kids. Unfortunately, since most connected devices are gaining ground because they borrow the brains and screens of a smartphone for their interface, most children, especially younger ones aren’t really playing with the internet of things widely.

But that could soon change. Tuesday a <a href=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/messagepetz/make-your-text-messages-huggable?ref=live”>Wi-Fi </aequipped teddy bear launched on Kickstarter. It will let parents who are away from their child text a message to the bear. The child (or a person at home who can read) will read the parent’s message as it scrolls across a little LED screen in the bear’s chest. From the MessagePetz press release:

Glenn Jones, Co-Founder and CEO, explains: “Being away from your kids can be one of the most difficult things a parent can go though. It gives me peace of mind to know that even when I’m far away, my son can snuggle up to one of the MessagePetz Bears and know I’m thinking of him. MessagePetz is like a Teddy Ruxpin for the smartphone generation”.

For those who like the idea and want to spend $89 to get the bear in March 2014  or $139 to get it in times for the 2013 holidays, here’s the project. But, with a little creativity and other connected devices you could do something similar. For example, the other day I was playing with my Belkin WeMo and realized I could send a text to IFTTT that would trigger whatever is plugged into the WeMo to turn on. So I told my daughter that when I was out of town I could plug in her disco light and whenever I thought of her, I would turn the light on.

She was unimpressed, telling me that then the light would be on all the time. So I scrapped that plan. But it started me thinking about how to use the array of connected devices in our home to send messages to her, even though she has no smartphone. You could use IFTTT to flash your child’s favorite color using Hue lights at a certain time every day, or with a bit more engineering have them trigger a a remote camera such as People Power and get a message or a short video from them as they enter the house. My daughter would love offering me a mug shot. When the MobiPlug boxes come out I could set my daughter’s favorite song to play on the Sonos given certain triggers.

The bottom line, is that a Wi-Fi enabled teddy bear that can read texts and tell you when your child hugs the bear is fun, and might indeed be worth the $89, but the internet of things can offer a lot more if you’re willing to get creative and have a few connected devices lying around. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the monitoring aspect of parenting.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
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We all know that the internet is home to illegal software, music, movies and much more. It may seem like an impossible task to put figures to piracy levels, but a report by Ofcom, the independent regulator for the communications industries in the UK, has done just that. The Online Copyright Infringement Tracker report found that a staggering 30 percent of regular downloaders of media did so illegally.

The report looked at the period November 2012 to January 2013 and analyzed UK consumption of online music, film, TV programmes, books, games and software. Compared to the previous three months, the percentage of web users accessing any of this type of content increased from 57 percent to 60 percent.

But the really interesting figures are concerned with piracy. The results are based on anonymous questionnaires in which 18 percent of participants admitted to indulging in some form of online copyright infringement.

Narrowing down the numbers to include only those who streamed or downloaded media, makes the findings particularly intriguing. 33 percent of movie watchers enjoyed films illegally, while 26 percent of music lovers got their singles and albums from illegal sources. Authors and publishers fared slightly better, with a mere 8 percent of digital book downloads taking place illegally.

Those indulging in online theft of this nature were more likely to be male and aged under 34, and the reasons for illegally downloading or streaming media was that such content was free, convenient and quick.

By far the most popular means of obtaining illegal content was through the use of P2P service, and uTorrent had the largest following, accounting for 20 percent of illegal downloads.

Despite the apparent increase in piracy, there was also an increase in the number of people who claim to pay for all of their online TV watching, as well as those watching a mixture of free and paid-for content.

As the study only looked at internet users aged 12 and over, it’s entirely possible that the real figures are even higher.  While some of those questioned said they would be discouraged from illegally downloading files if their ISPs wrote to them, 16 percent said nothing would stop them.

If you fancy crunching the numbers yourself, the full report is available for download from the Ofcom website.

Would you be honest about your online activities if questioned? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo Credit: Didecs/Shutterstock

Apache Corp is exploring a sale of a stake in its shallow water Gulf of Mexico assets, attracting private equity interest as it looks to reach a $4 billion asset sale target, Reuters is reporting.

(Reuters) – Apache Corp is exploring a sale of a stake in its shallow water Gulf of Mexico assets, attracting private equity interest as it looks to reach a $4 billion asset sale target, several people familiar with the matter said.

Apache has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc to sell a minority stake in its oil and gas assets located on the shallower continental shelf region of the Gulf, the people said. These assets currently produce more oil and gas and are easier and less risky to exploit than their deepwater counterparts.
Apache would retain control and continue to develop and operate the shelf assets, they added, underscoring its reluctance to give up its status as the largest oil and gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico shelf.

Apache shares ended up 0.9 percent at $82.39 on Tuesday.

The Houston-based company has also hired Jefferies Group Inc to sell all of its deepwater assets in the Gulf of Mexico, which could potentially be more lucrative, but are also more costly and risky to develop, the people added.

The shelf assets appeal primarily to financial investors, the people said. TPG Capital LP, Apollo Global Management LLC and KKR & Co LP are among the private equity firms mulling offers for them, they added.

The deepwater assets appeal to other oil companies as well as private equity, the people said.

TPG is working with the former Mariner Energy team, led by Scott Josey, that sold the deepwater assets to Apache in 2010 in a $3.9 billion deal, one of the people said.
TPG is interested in acquiring both the deepwater and shelf assets provided Apache gives up control of the latter, the person added.

Some of the people spoke on Tuesday and others spoke last week. They asked not to be identified because details of the processes are confidential.
An Apache spokesman declined to comment on the sales processes, but noted the company has announced an asset sale program. Goldman Sachs also declined to comment. Jefferies, Apollo, TPG and KKR did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Apache has developed a robust list of potential assets sales and believes it can generate about $4 billion of proceeds in 2013 from the initial phase of its divestiture program, Chief Executive Steve Farris told analysts on May 9, without referring specifically to the Gulf of Mexico assets or their value.
The company would use the money first to pay down $2 billion of debt and then buy back shares, he added.

According to the company’s website, Apache has been the largest owner of acreage held by production on the Gulf of Mexico’s continental shelf since 2004, with about three million gross acres.

Apache spent more than $16 billion acquiring oil and gas properties over the last three years. But the company now is selling assets off, including some that acquired over that period, as it has struggled to grow its production, causing its shares to fall.

The company agreed to buy its deepwater position from Mariner just three years ago, five days before BP Plc’s (BP.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Because of the increasing regulation since the spill, drilling in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico has become a costlier and lengthier process for oil and gas companies – a daunting prospect for a company such as Apache that is looking to shore up its balance sheet.

Investors showed their displeasure with Apache’s recent strategy and performance at the company’s annual meeting where, in a non-binding vote, they rejected a pay raise for Farris.

Apache’s deepwater production in the Gulf of Mexico in the first-quarter of 2013 was 13,311 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe), a 26 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2012, Apache said earlier this month. Its production from the shelf was 92,024 boe per day, a 4 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2012.

The post Exclusive: Apache Explores Gulf of Mexico Shelf Stake Sale – Sources appeared first on peHUB.

EaseUS Software has released EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Free and EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Workstation, major new versions of its image- and file-based backup tool. Version 6.0 adds support for recovering individual files from partitions, while WorkStation users also gain tools for simplifying migration between physical and virtual machines.

The major new feature affecting all users is support for recovering selected files from image-based backups. Previously users could only recover entire partitions or disks, but now users can either recover individual files using the Recovery wizard, or mount the image as a virtual drive for browsing and extracting files.

To recover selected files from a drive image, users should select Recovery and choose File recovery. A list of all backups should be shown — select the appropriate disk and partition backup from the list and click Next. From here, users can opt to recover specific files or folders, search for files to recover or recover files by type using the categories and file types specified.

Then it’s a choice of either recovering files to their original location – copies will be created where necessary unless “Replace existing files” is ticked — or by choosing a specific folder or drive to recover data to. Users can also mount images via the Tools menu to access them as read-only virtual drives using Explorer itself.

EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Workstation also introduces P2V copy and P2V recovery functions for those operating with virtual environments. These two features make it possible for users to migrate physical hard drives — including operating systems — to a virtual machine with the minimum of fuss.

EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Free is available now as a free-for-personal-use download for PCs running Windows XP or later. Users can purchase the Home version with more features for $29. EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Workstation is also available as a free trial download for PCs running Windows XP or later — including Windows Server editions — with the full version currently available for $39. Upgrades from previous versions are also available.

Photo Credit: Andy Harbin/Shutterstock

A blue whale scientist. A mobile finance entrepreneur. A DIY neuroscientist. A comedian. A sound artist. This year’s class of TED Fellows brings together trailblazers in a wide variety of fields from locations all around the globe. The TED Fellows program is getting ready to choose its new class — so they’re looking for 20 unusual thinkers at work on fascinating ideas to join the program for TED2014 in Vancouver, Canada, March 17-21. TED Fellows not only attend the conference but take part in a slew of pre-conference workshops to amplify their work and careers, including training in public speaking, leading up to a short pre-conference TED Talk. (Like these.)

Applications for TED2014 Fellowships are open from now through June 21. Apply here »

So what’s it like to be a TED Fellow? As guitarist Usman Riaz says, “These are the most creative minds in the world.” Coral reef biologist Kristen Marhaver adds, “The TED Fellows program rewards people who take risks and try to change things with no guarantee they’ll change.”

This Friday, an asteroid nearly three kilometers wide is going to pass by the Earth-Moon system. The fly-by is harmless — at its closest, the asteroid will be about 15 times farther from us than the Earth is from the Moon — but to mark the event, the White House will host the second in a series of "We the Geeks" Google+ Hangouts to talk asteroids with Bill Nye the Science Guy, former astronaut Ed Lu, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, and more.

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Earlier today we told you about how ASUS was teasing us in preparation for Computex 2013, and now it seems as though it’s Acer’s turn. The video teases two new tablets, both under green cloth, which can “do more than just use apps and surf the web.” You can speculate all you want on what you think these new devices may be, but we’ll just have to wait until next week for official confirmation. Check out the video after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come comment on this article: Acer teases us with Computex 2013 video, event set for next week

Conversocial said on Tuesday that it has closed $4.4 million in a Series A2 funding round. The lead investor was UK-based Octopus Investments. The funding will be used for product development, hiring personnel, and expanding Conversocial’s North American presence. Conversocial’s total funding raised to date is over $7 million. Headquartered in New York and London, Conversocial is a social customer service provider.

PRESS RELEASE

London/New York (PRWEB) May 28, 2013
Conversocial, the leader in social customer service, today announced that it has completed its Series A2 funding round. Octopus Investments leads the round, which includes a $3.2 million investment, in addition to $1.2 million from a previous convertible note, bringing the total round to $4.4 million. The investment will go primarily towards product development, hiring key talent, and building Conversocial’s North American presence. This brings Conversocial’s total funding raised to over $7 million.
“Leading companies are quickly realizing that the importance of social customer service demands dedicated software like Conversocial. For a company to deliver the best possible social customer experience, social marketing or listening software simply doesn’t cut it,” said Joshua March, CEO of Conversocial. “The new investment allows us to innovate even faster to take social into the contact center, and meet the fast growing market demand.”
The round will help Conversocial continue its focus on product development, a commitment that is also demonstrated by today’s announcement of two key platform upgrades: Real Time Management Dashboard and Conversations Workflow. Both improvements address the inherent need for brands to have up-to-the-minute tools and efficient workflow processes to address and manage the high-volume of customer interactions via social media channels. These new platform enhancements will directly bolster the efficacy of social customer service teams using Conversocial.
“Working with Conversocial has provided us with the essential infrastructure to manage real-time inquiries from our customers and prevent any social media crises, and has given us the bandwidth to more aggressively pursue opportunities to engage with customers proactively,” said David Tull, Customer Engagement Manager at JackThreads. “With more of our customers using social media on smartphones, tablets, and laptops to communicate with us, it’s critical that we work with the latest technology to meet our customers where they live, and right now they live online. Conversocial allows our social customer service teams to operate with an efficiency and accuracy that we haven’t had before.”
Conversocial’s revenue has tripled over the past 12 months, and internal projections show that this rate of growth will continue over the coming year. This revenue growth has been fueled by a doubling of Conversocial’s customer base, with the addition of leading brands across industries including: American Greetings, Barclaycard, GoDaddy, Hertz, JackThreads, and Sephora.
Earlier this year, Conversocial was chosen by Gartner as one of five “Cool Vendors” in the CRM Customer Service and Social Report, 2013.
Commenting on the investment Alliott Cole, Principal on the Ventures team at Octopus , said: “We’re thrilled to be working with the team at Conversocial as they continue to grow their brand, technology development and US presence. Joshua March is building a really talented team, which is developing a service that meets head on the challenges that retailers and other organizations now face in responding to and interacting with customers through social media. We look forward to helping the team build on the success it has achieved to date.”
Real Time Management Dashboard
Your customers reaching out over social channels expect responses in real time — or close to it. Managers need a tool that can allow them to instantly spot new issues as they emerge on public social channels, and track them to coordinate a response before a social media crisis erupts. The Real Time Management Dashboard enables team leaders to turn insight to action by showing them the status of their social channels, as well as health reports on how effectively their social customer service team is operating.
Conversations Workflow
Unlike traditional customer service software designed to handle private one-to-one conversations between an agent and a consumer, the new Conversations workflow is designed to allow social customer service agents to handle multiple conversations going across private, public and different social channels – in real time. Conversocial customer JackThreads reports that using Conversocial allows them to handle 10x more social interactions than they could before switching to the platform.
About Conversocial
Headquartered in New York and London, Conversocial continues to expand into the American market, having processed more than 300 million customer service interactions on social media and being deployed in more than 20 countries worldwide. Companies and organizations such as American Greetings, Barclaycard, Charity USA, Groupon, Hertz, Net-A-Porter, Ogilvy, Sephora, Tesco, The University of Phoenix, Tupperware, Waitrose, and Vitalicious are using Conversocial’s Software-as-a-Service to manage the flow of customer service enquiries and discussions on Facebook and Twitter.
For more information contact: Anna Drennan, Anna(at)Conversocial(dot)com or Michael Cecil, 212-362-1307, Michael (at)Thunder11(dot) com.
About Octopus Investments
Founded in 2000, Octopus is one of the UK’s fastest growing investment management companies. We currently manage £3 billion assets on behalf of 50,000 customers.
The Ventures team at Octopus are straight talking human investors that back talented people rather than specific sectors. We focus on identifying fast growth businesses, which can scale explosively to create, transform or dominate an industry. We can invest from £250,000 to £5 million and prefer to partner teams based in the UK.
The work of our Ventures team is supported by access to the Octopus Venture Partners, a network of approximately 100 outstanding business leaders, entrepreneurs and private investors providing an invaluable wealth of expertise and resource for our portfolio companies, as well as investing on a deal-by-deal basis alongside Octopus venture funds. This blend of knowledge and skill has allowed us to help many great companies across several sectors thrive in recent years including Zoopla; Graze.com; SwiftKey; and, Secret Escapes.

The post Conversocial Closes $4.4 Mln in Series A2 Funding appeared first on peHUB.

Author Gabe Zichermann recently stopped by the Googleplex to discuss his latest book, “Gamification Revolution.” Google has made the talk available on YouTube:

“Gamification: It’s the hottest new strategy in business, and for good reason–it’s helping leading companies create unprecedented engagement with customers and employees,” Google says in the video description. “Gamification uses the latest innovations from game design, loyalty programs, and behavioraleconomics to help you cut through the noise and transform your organization into a lean, mean machine ready to fight the battle for user attention and loyalty.”

The book itself is available on Google’s own Google Play.

More recent “At Google” talks here.

Lots of opportunities coming up today. I learned about the following from the MHTA newsletter…

The Anita Borg Institute is seeking applications for high school students to attend the October 2-5 Grace Hopper Celebration here in Minneapolis.  40 high school students will be selected to attend this prestigious event as part of the GenConnext program.

They are inviting 40 high school students from the Minneapolis area to participate in GHC 2013. Here are the details…

• Dates: October 2-5, 2013.
• Location: Minneapolis Convention Center

What will you do at the event?

• Experience being part of Career Fair that features organizations like Google, • Facebook, Cisco, Microsoft, HP, University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvey Mudd, and many more.
• Attend one of the largest Poster sessions featuring research work from over • 150 undergraduate & graduate students.
• Connect with women mentors and other high school students who share your • tech interests.
• Be inspired by attending sessions, enjoy a delicious lunch and possibly attend • the Friday evening celebration.
• Learn what you need to do to prepare for a technology career through a • panel of experts.
• Participate in a code-a-thon to benefit humanity or be engaged in some • hands‑on skill Gaming Workshop.

Apply to participate

Complete the simple and easy online application. Visit: http://gracehopper.org/2013/conference/grace-hopper-genconnext-program/.

Please note: The application deadline is June 30, 2013.